Memory's Voice: Deciphering the Mind-Brain Code - Softcover

Alkon, Daniel L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060984236 ISBN 13: 9780060984236

Publisher: Perennial, 1994

Synopsis

One of America's leading brain researchers conducts a dazzling exploration of the brain and its ability to remember. "A rich telling of the search for how the brain remembers, one of the most exciting stories now unfolding in the scientific world."--Psychology Today. Photos and drawings.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In his 25-year search for memory sites in the brain, Alkon has been driven by a personal motive. His friend Michelle, brutally beaten by her father as a child, succumbed to schizophrenia and then committed suicide. How, Aikon wondered, does trauma exert its hold on the human psyche? In this interesting if overwritten scientific odyssey, the author, a brain researcher and doctor affiliated with the National Institutes of Health and with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., reports that he mapped learning networks in snails and built a computer-based artificial network capable of memory storage and pattern recognition. His intriguing thesis is that a traumatic experience, like a familiar sensory pattern, uses the brain to complete and reproduce itself. He further speculates that psychological dependence and addiction are rooted in the physiology of conditioning. Illustrated.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The hunt for a memory storage "site" in the brain is the subject of this engrossing scientific memoir. Alkon, chief of the Neural Systems Lab at the National Institutes of Health, describes in often elegant prose his search to explain human memory and learning in biological terms. Sea snails that were conditioned (a la Pavlov) to associate light with rotation helped to demonstrate Alkon's hypothesis that human memory is an associative process. Further painstaking research revealed memory records at the cellular level--with enormous implications for the treatment of psychological dysfunction. Alkon has also been able to apply the design of neural networks to artificial intelligence systems. This fascinating blend of neurobiology and psychology is appropriate for popular science collections.
- Laurie Bartolini, Lincoln Lib., Springfield, Ill.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Perennial
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060984236
• ISBN 13: 9780060984236
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304