Editorial Review:
Even as you read these words, a tiny portion of your brain is physically changing. New connections are being sprouted -- a circuit that will create a stab of recognition if you encounter the words again. That is one of the theories of memory presented in this intriguing and splendidly readable book, which distills three researchers' inquiries into the processes that enable us to recognize a face that has aged ten years or remember a melody for decades. Ranging from experiments performed on the "wetware" of the brain to attempts to re-create human cognition in computers, In the Palaces of Memory is science writing at its most exciting.
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A necessarily tangential treatment of the promised subject  2008-06-10
This book is not so much an exposition on memory as an account of the academic fracas among scientists approaching--but by no means reaching--answers to several key questions about brain dynamics and consciousness.
Part 1 (Mucking around in the Wetware) is largely a discussion of whether or not learning causes physical changes in the brain, how these changes might be caused, and how they might be identified and understood. Its many amino acids, protein molecules, and enzymes make it rather claustrophobic and dull reading, at the end of which no real answers can be proffered, since the scientists still have a long way to go. The central theme here seems to be not so much memory as, "brain dynamics at the molecular level".
Part 2 (The Memory Machine) describes two rival methods of creating model brains: neural networks and A.I. programs, and how these might provide insight into human brain dynamics and memory. But the scientists have a long way to go here too, and thus no solid conclusions can be drawn. The central theme here seems to be not so much memory as, "replicating the brain dynamics involved in learning in a non-biological substrate."
For the reader, the end result of all these incomplete preliminaries to a full understanding of memory is a big, fat "To be continued..." that is tantalizing but also a little disappointing. All this is as it should be, since Johnson is giving an account of a science still very much in its infancy.
And yet, Amazon ask: What would you have wanted to know before you purchased the product?
This: the gaping blanks in the scientific picture are not titivated with the cultural treatment of the theme of memory I was half-expecting. After all, there's a lot of spice that could have been added to this rather bland broth: Funes the Memorious by Borges; the invention of the loci method of mnemonics by Simonides of Ceos from which method Johnson seems to have borrowed his title; mnenomics generally; James' essay on TOT experiences; what Augustine had to say about memory; even the clinical accounts of hyperthymesia, amnesia, synaesthesia.
But then again, this is not literature. It's science, and science is not under any obligation to make satisfying reading.
Net Talk , Society of the Mind (iRobot) , Nestor , presynaptic memory models, postsynaptic memory models  2007-06-15
Hopfield student, Terry Sejnowski created an invention that could learn to read. The network had a input layer that read the letters, a middle layer which generated the phonemes, and an output layer. Each neural was connect to eighteen thousand synapses. The weights on the synapses were adjusted according to the back-progragation error routine. NetTalk went through the babbling stage, after a half day pronounced a thousand words, and by the end of the week, it pronounced twenty thousand words. "Unlike an A.I. programmer, Sejnowski didn't start with symbols as the primitive units, the letters and phonemes that would be manipulated according to rules." Rules like long e, in she and he were generalized by the strength of units in the middle layer.
Minsky: 1. The biggest problem with neural networks is scaling: "There is no reason to thing that a small network capable of learning a fairly easy task could be scaled up to solve the kinds of harder problems that brains do." 2. Many of the new NN take tens of thousands of trails to learn a simple skill, like recognizing a small number of objects. 3. If NN scale exponentially, so that multiplying the size of the body of material to be learned by a factor of n, meant raising the processing time to the nth power. Learning something difficult might take longer than the universe would exist. 4. Perceptron was not written to kill NN. The field had already died. Minsky and Papert were explaining why. Minsky listen to NetTalk and said he couldn't understand many of the words it said. 5. Minsky embraced both the NN and Symbolic agent programming model of the brain, "society of the mind". The agents interact in a complex cooperative hierarchial system where agents communicated with other agents simulating intelligent behavior. High level agents control low level agents. Conditional, if-then-do rules active agents to return a positive or negative result. The world of sensation was defined as: sensation -> reception -> recognition -> cognition. The brain received an input from one of the five senses. The sensory input activates various processes from connected agents. A polyneme signals different agencies (color, shape, or texture agencies) too turn on process in their agencies Agents interaction can be diagrammed into deterministic asynchronous finites states and used by robots. "How do you make a management structure in which some of them are good at learning how to manage how other learn?" That is what the brain is. The brain has 300 kinds of neural networks, and some specialize for the controlling the input and outputs of others. Other NN specialize in retaining memories. 6. Perceptrons is about how you'd use a lot of different types of neural nets to make something smart.
Nestor Inc, is a leader in commercial NN technology. Nestor, Inc. is a leading provider of advanced intelligent traffic management solutions. Nestor is creating intelligent scan radars and laser based system that system can track cars, on multiple lanes, simulatenously track and measuring speeds of each car passing by. The scans are accomplished a 100 times per second.
The Biology of memory: 1. During epileptic seizures neurons fire wildly secreting a flood of glutamate. The NMDA receptors respond by letting calcium, into the cells. "Could it be that calcium activates proteases in so great a number that they begin to eat up brain cells? 2. Gary Lynch observed that NMDA receptors responded to the glutamate by opening their calcium channels. Calcium would rush into the neuron and trigger the calpain mechanism, a protease. Calpin is a destructive enzyme involved in the degeneration of muscle and nerve tissue. The APV blockage experiments of NMDA did not stop all types of rat learning. NMDA receptors are used in only certain types of learning. 3. NMDA receptor had the distinction of being both electrical and chemical. If the neuron was already in a state of arousal, the NMDA were free to react with a second rush of glutamate receptors.
Edifices: deliberate, fantasmagorical, neural 2000-01-26
"Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed, memories that can change forever the way you think about the world. [...] I'll never forgive David Lynch for his movie Erasorhead." The first two pages of In the Palaces of Memory introduce remembrance as an act not only of acquisition but of self-exposure. Memories make it possible for us to function; they may also lodge themselves in us "like a shard of glass healed inside a wound," never to be expelled. Some memories are desired and some become a part of the structure of our minds against our will.Memory's palaces, though, may be as much the edifices the theorists construct as they are the ones inside our heads. This slim volume is not only an analysis of the way memory works but also an exposé of the way memory morphs depending on who's studying it. The underlying question, as in so much of Johnson's work, is really "how a theory matches up with some kind of real world," and what the world (in this case the brain) looks like from the point of view of the brain-children, scientific or philosophical, that purport to explain it. In this book the "unruly, creative art of theory-building" occupies center stage with memory. What is remarkable about Johnson's writing is the uninhibited intimacy he seems to have with his subjects and with us, his readers, so that we can feel ourselves to be as close to the Thing, whatever it is, as he is. Johnson has granted me the delightful illusion of being nose to nose with a neuron, with Gell-Mann, with Planck's constant -- almost as though the experience were unmediated by an author. The man's a master story teller. But what comes across is also -- and here's the clincher -- a profound sense of amusement. If I'm not mistaken George Johnson is given to quiet chuckles in the dark over theoreticians and theorems. He infuses his translations of science in the making with a persistent, ironic-affectionate grin. How can we resist.
"Fascinating" -- Nature ... "Rich and Lucid" -- James Gleick 1995-12-13
"One of the last great mysteries is the one we carry inside our heads: how we remember, what we remember, why we remember. "In the Palaces of Memory" is a rich and lucid guide to this entangled and enchanting domain." -- James Gleick "Johnson has written a fascinating book, which perhaps throws as much light on how science is done and on the scientists who do it as any book since "The Double Helix" -- Stuart Sutherland, Nature "Johnson has achieved a rare blend of scientific and literary sophistication. Faithful to its complexities and controversies, the book is a fully dimensional portrait, a hologram of the field." -- Richard Mark Friedhoff, USA Today
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