Memory's Voice: Deciphering the Brain-Mind Code

Drawing on his own research in treating neurological and psychiatric disorders, as well as on the work of other scientists, a noted scientist outlines the search for the biological basis of memory

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.

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.