Now your consciousness has been relegated to the margins for much of the 20th century,
at least in the sciences, because as a couple of things, we put it on 45,
all the research in the last 20 years of cognitive neuroscience demonstrate that very little of what occurs in the brain is actually conscious.
Opening up a whole new area of investigation, which has been very fruitful for for dialogue between the humanities scholars in the sciences.
And and our first speaker, it is one of the scholars who pioneered this field,
and he's Professor Lars Ward, distinguished professor of psychiatry, neurosciences and psychology at UCSD.
And he has published over 490 papers on the matter and established empirically that the human memory system is comprised of two separate systems,
the conscious memory system and the unconscious memory system.
His landmark paper, Memory and the Hippocampus a synthesis from findings with rats, monkeys and humans.
It's been cited nearly 3000 times.
He's former president of the Society for Neuroscience and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He has won many awards and honours, the last of which is the Golden Rookie Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience, which was last year.
So today I present to you Professor Larry Squire on conscious and unconscious memory systems of the mammalian brain.
Thanks very much. Well, what I'll try to do today is to introduce you to some of the concepts and the categories
that frame our current understanding about the structure and organisation of memory.
And I'll try to focus particularly on how the biological distinction between conscious
and unconscious memory became a prominent topic for study in the neurosciences.
And I'll try to describe what it is that we've learned. Well, memory is a large topic.
It's based on the fundamental fact that the experiences we have can modify the nervous system so that
later on our mental life and our behaviour can be different as a result of what happened in the past.
This image comes from the Greek island of Santorini and with its charming name, Memories Hotel,
which perhaps suggests nostalgia and perhaps intimacy and reminds us that memory is
personal and evocative and intertwined with emotion and a fundamental part of what we are.
Well, the neuroscience of memory is concerned with questions about structure,
and that means psychological categories as well as neuroanatomy structure, organisation and mechanism.
We're perceived on many levels from molecular and cellular questions about the nature of synaptic
change to the more systems level questions that I'll be addressing today about what is memory?
Is it one thing or many things? What are the brain structures that support memory operations?
Do they carry out in the service of memory? Well, let me put the matter in perspective by first considering memory as an extension of perception.
So we call this a simplified diagram of the primary visual system, which is from work with non-human primates.
Each of these boxes represents a separate processing unit for visual or visual spatial information.
Each of these boxes would contain on the order of 10 million to 100 million neurones.
Now information from the external world first reaches the cortex at the back of the brain.
An area of V1 moving over here now and from very V1, information moves forward into both in series and in parallel along two separate pathways.
Some felt sometimes called the ventral pathway and the dorsal pathway.
The ventral pathway reaches its culmination in what is called area T in the inferred temporal cortex,
where representations are achieved about visual object quality that what an object is, its orientation, its size and its colour.
For example, along the dorsal pathway, information reaches its pinnacle in the parietal cortex,
where information is represented about where objects are in space and what the computations are needed,
what computations are needed to reach out and get to places in space.
Well, from there, connections move forward to a number of different target areas, for example,
to the frontal lobe for the purposes of converting perception into action to the amygdala.
And I've shown here for the purposes of converting,
connecting perception to emotion and other subcortical targets, including the striatum and the pons.
But for today will be concentrating on the connections between these areas,
for these perceptual areas and these areas down here which lie in the medial surface of the temporal
lobe and which accomplishes the task of converting or transforming perception into memory.
So, for example, if one damages or removes any of these areas up here, one produces a particular kind of visual spatial deficit.
But if one removes that area down here, one produces what we call a memory impairment.
Now, the modern era of this problem can be said to have begun in 1957,
when Brendan Milner at McGill University described the profound effects on memory of a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection,
which was carried out as a frankly experimental procedure to relieve severe epilepsy in a patient who famously became known as H.M.
I make mention that Brenda milner just turned 96 this summer.
She just was in Oslo a few months ago to receive a cavalry prize, and she goes to her laboratory every day still at McGill University.
This drawing shows the location of the hippocampus and the amygdala and the adjacent cortex that was removed in patient H.M. Bilaterally.
At the time, it wasn't known what damage within this large geographical territory was responsible for H.M. Severe Memory Impairment,
and was rather thought that the hippocampus itself was the important structure,
mainly because we knew more about the hippocampus and the other structures that were involved.
But the identity of the important structures and especially the fact that the cortex adjacent to the hippocampus is important.
This became gradually understood during the 1980s following the successful
development of an animal model of human memory impairment in the non-human primate.
Here we see a ventral surface of the monkey brain to the front of the brain on the left, the back of the brain on the left.
And what you're seeing here are the what became the candidate areas that were important for memory,
areas that were removed from H.M. but they were candidate structures for understanding his memory impairment.
We don't see the hippocampus, which itself which is buried beneath the surface in this posterior location here, or the amygdala which is buried here.
What we are seeing is the interrupted cortex, which is of interest,
because the entorhinal cortex originates the major afferent projections into the hippocampus.
And these structures here, the parallel cortex in the pair of hippocampal cortex,
which originate two thirds of the cortical input into the internal cortex.
So this whole area can be thought of as one of the targeted zones or one of the one
of the target objectives of projections that come from wide areas of neocortex,
which are involved in vision and other kinds of processing and ultimately the storage of long term memory.
Now, once the animal model was in place, it became a solvable problem for cumulative science to work out the answer to the question
of what are the important structures for memory and how do we understand memory impairment?
And this is a topic that we took on in San Diego and was also worked on heavily by Michigan.
And I actually took about 12 years. But in the end, we could describe what we found in three simple declarative sentences.
And here you've seen a schematic of this region of the brain.
The hippocampus region can be divided into the car fields and the civic limb complex and the dentate gyrus.
And these other areas that I just mentioned in the three declarative sentences go like this first,
that the hippocampus itself is critical and damage limited of the hippocampus can
can can produce an easily detectable and clinically significant memory impairment.
Secondly, the amygdala, which was a candidate structure, is important for other things, but not important for understanding of memory impairment.
And third, what was new and what even required some new neuroanatomy was the discovery that these structures here again,
Toronto parietal and hippocampus cortices which lie adjacent to anatomically connected to the hippocampus, that these structures are also important.
And these structures together with the hippocampus comprise what we now refer to as the medial temporal lobe memory system.
And here we see this system illustrated in the three species that have been most prominent in this tradition of work the human brain,
the monkey brain and the rodent brain, which can also be a proxy for the mouse brain.
And all the one has to remember, it has to simply memorise the fact that the number enclosure,
the terminology is a little bit different in the rat than in the human, in the monkey.
And that is that the areas that are referred to as hippocampal cortex here in
the human in the monkey is referred to as post renal cortex in the rat brain.
Well, damage to this entire system here profoundly affects memory, essentially eliminates the capacity for memory.
What you're looking at here is a horizontally oriented that is a horizontally oriented MRI scan, a structural scan of a patient.
We had a chance to study for a long time a patient known as EPI,
who became profoundly amnesic in 1992 at the age of 70, following a bout of viral encephalitis.
What you're seeing here is the front of the brain at the top of the back of the brain at the bottom here.
And what you're seeing in white is the abnormal tissue.
And what's essentially happened is that this virus carved out the medial temporal lobe memory system.
The amygdala is gone, although that wasn't relevant to his memory impairment.
The hippocampus is entirely on the impair, on the cortex is entirely gone,
and the pair of hippocampal cortex is damaged about 50% of its rostral aspect.
The DP is so amnesic that he doesn't have the insight and never had the insight that he has amnesia
because he never was able to develop a new understanding of himself as a result of his memory problem.
A few years ago, he and his family volunteered to participate in the Scientific American
Frontiers of Science television program hosted by the American actor Alan Alda.
So I have an opportunity to play you a short about a three minute clip that will give you,
I think, a nice sense of what this profound amnesia looks like.
And what you'll see is, for example, the distinction between an intact short term memory and an impaired long term memory.
You'll see the fact that his personality and intellectual ability and perceptual ability
are there and that his amnesia occurs against a background of rather intact personality,
perception and intellectual abilities. BP can also copy complex drawings, mainly as no difficulty repeating back at least of words.
In this case, dog, raccoon,
lion and parent who are right through one day but even has a little sleight of hand along the way, which they have to move.
Oh, really? Well, then we did tell them to leave rather.
Really, which is when the testing of these kinds of skills, advanced genes, laptop computer goal and the ability to over the years.
Why is it all just wonderful?
We're really proud of the services of the Council of European Research work right down to this.
Just wanted to know what should be a structural right.
But it's now that something odd about behaviour becomes apparent.
Pretty sure it's time to try the whole structure there.
Oh, you may believe it. When I was six foot six with a six foot rock.
And now we're going down to the printed circuit.
So he's not aware that he's told this three or four times that he used to being the electronics that a computer used to fill the room.
Now he can say that he's just not aware that you said that several times.
You know, these stories again and again.
We've heard these stories before, and we'll hear these stories again and read you some words about 15 minutes ago,
four of them or word you never really knew.
Four words? No, I didn't pull them all.
I read you for Animal and I want you to tell me. Yes.
If you think the animal was on the list. I read you about 15 minutes ago or.
No, if it was not on the left. Yes.
Yes. How sure are you? I feel very sure.
No. Raccoon? No.
No. You're out.
Yes, I'm sure you can. Sure.
Sure. Beautiful. Okay. Ryan?
No. Okay. Do you remember drawing something from you for that?
You tried something about 10 minutes ago.
No, I'm sorry. They don't have a lights back up.
I might mention this points out the fallacy of small samples. Because we're really true that you answered every single question wrong.
It would mean that you have a lot of information about the list, but I can tell you an informal experiment.
He always scores exactly a chance, of course, scores randomly on on Tesla and tests like that,
what we call the lesion was a large lesion involving the whole medial temporal lobe.
Lesion limit of the hippocampus itself has a much less severe effect on memory.
And now I'm showing you a finely organised or coronal section of the structural MRI
of a of a patient on the right that we had a chance to study for a number of years.
He became amnesic, mildly and modestly amnesic in 1984 as a result of respiratory distress.
So if you look over on the left, that of a matched and matched age, matched a healthy individual, you can see the temporal lobe here.
You can follow it around its external surface into its medial surface, where you can see the hippocampus lodged in the third ventricle.
You can see the extent to which it fills the ventricle.
You can even see some grey and white matter named via anatomical tracts within the hippocampus itself.
If you catch the eye over to the right, I think even with an untrained eye,
you can appreciate the fact that lamb's hippocampus is abnormally small about 45% of its normal size on formal measurement.
It's a trophy. And in fact, when William died in 1990 of a carcinoma and we carried out a detailed neuropathological study of the brain,
we could determine that, in fact, this reduction corresponded to a loss of all the cells in the hippocampus.
So I might just I just say that to mention with if one hears about a 45% reduction in volume of the structure,
one should immediately assume that 55% of it is is operating normally.
So let's compare these two levels of severity in epi and elm.
This is a well known neuropsychological test where a subject is asked to copy this nonsense figure.
And then some minutes later, 10 minutes later, without forewarning, the subject is invited to reconstruct it from memory.
So here you see very nice copies of both, both patients and the control subject.
Here you see the reproduction of the control did very good job.
It's not as hard as it sounds because they've spent all these minutes reconstructing it, drawing that in the first place.
Here you see elms reproduction, which is although it certainly has a resemblance to the target,
it's outside of the range of what a healthy individual would produce. And here you see epi as on the film you saw he didn't even remember.
He made a drawing a few minutes ago and he declined to make any kind of a guess.
So building on this tradition,
what I'd like to do then is to briefly illustrate three key ideas based on work with with humans and non-human primates.
The first is that memory is not a single faculty of the mind.
There are different kinds of memory supported by different brain systems,
and the major distinction has to be drawn between our capacity for conscious, declarative memory.
And by there I mean facts and events, declarative memory on the one hand, and unconscious non declarative memory on the other hand,
where performance changes as a result of experience and in that sense deserves a term memory.
But we're performance changes without even requiring any conscious memory content.
And on many occasions even the awareness that memory is being used.
And here I'm talking about things like skills and habits, and I'll be illustrating some of these by my example in a moment.
Secondly, in the context of multiple memory systems, I would describe how one memory system can sometimes substitute for another.
But the result, the cognitive product is very different depending on which system is used.
Some tasks that you and I learned declaratively quickly with a supportive, declarative,
conscious memory by memorising these tasks can also be learned gradually.
That is non declaratively, entirely outside of awareness and without any involvement or any contribution from the medial temporal lobe.
And third, and even more briefly,
I mentioned that the medial temporal lobe structures that we're speaking about here have a temporary role in the formation and maintenance of memory,
an idea that we best understand for the hippocampus itself. It's very remote.
Memory, including spatial memory, are intact after medial temporal lobe damage,
which means that the medial temporal lobe is not the ultimate repository of memory,
and memories are stored in a distributed fashion,
a neocortex and correspondence with the areas that are needed to process information to be in the first place.
Well, a striking finding about the organisation of memory was that the same patients that we're
discussing here are the same patients who are so profoundly impaired of conventional memory tests.
These patients are nonetheless fully intact at certain kinds of tasks that
assess the effects of experience on behaviour and that are our memory tasks.
The first example of this came.
From Brenda milner herself in this famous experiment done in 1962, in which h m to her surprise and everybody else's surprise,
h m was able to trace the contours, trace the outline of a double contoured star in a mirror, and he learned to do that over time.
You know, the first you make mistakes that every time you make a corner, but you get better at it.
And he did better on the first day, better on even still better on the second day and nearly perfectly on the third day,
even though on each day he had no memory that he had done the task before.
Colin Blakemore from Oxford University in his popular book Mechanics of Mind I suppose.
Well, that's maybe meant that motor skills are special and motor skills are down here in
the cerebellum and everything else is of one piece and that's up here in the cortex.
And that's kind of how we all thought about it for some time.
But then in 1980, we were able to show that these same amnesic patients are able to learn not just motor skills,
but perceptual skills like learning to read, mirror, reverse, predict, throw difficult the first time through.
And one can take as long as 60 or 70 seconds to get all three of them.
But eventually one gets better and one gets better and better with hypnotic apocalypse and functional.
And it turned out that amnesic patients learn this task at a completely normal
rate and can remember that skill completely at a normal level three months later,
despite in many cases not remembering having done the task before.
So we can see if this finding in terms of a distinction initially between what we call declarative in procedural
knowledge and we likened it to the goal rails distinction in 1947 between knowing how and knowing that.
But it turned out that this concept still wasn't really large enough to encompass the
number of things that turned out to be outside the province of the medial temporal lobe.
And I think examples of and examples of non declarative memory.
So next, I want to introduce you to a still another phenomenon called known as priming.
Priming refers to an improvement in the ability to identify or process a stimulus as a result of a recent encounter with the same or related stimulus.
Now, that may sound like another way of talking about memory,
but I'll try to convince you that this is a very different kind of phenomenon altogether from regular memory,
when what is improved is the process of a process of an item.
We call it perceptual priming. And what is improved is access to the meaning of an item and its associates.
We call it conceptual priming. And I'm going to give you an example from conceptual priming.
So this is this simple task as the subject first studies of about 14 common English words.
And then after about 10 minutes, we're outside the region where somebody could simply be rehearsing the words overt, overtly.
One is given free association tests, one. One says, What's the first word that comes to mind when you hear the word canvas?
What's the first word that comes to mind when you hear the word strap? Well, there's about a 10% baseline effect.
That is, there's about a 10% chance that you say the word anyway, even if you didn't study it recently.
But if you did a study of recently, there's now about a 25% chance that the word you pop out will be that word.
And here's control subjects, normal subjects, healthy, certainly showing this 15% advantage,
that's 15% above baseline, about a 25% chance of saying the word.
What was extraordinarily is that patients with profound amnesia, including EPI, that you met.
So this effect at full strength in hippocampal patients also do a pretty good job at showing this phenomenon.
And yet when you do it, when you perform a parallel test of recognition memory, that is a test of familiarity where you again, you see 14 words.
But now the question is you're shown a series of 28 words.
Some are old wounds, some are new ones. And you're invited to make a judgement as to whether the words were or were not in the list,
because that's a trivial task for healthy subjects get better than 90% correct.
But the patients with amnesia are impaired on that. In fact, EPI.
This is Eppes data here.
He scored no better than if he had flipped a coin to determine his answer, although he performed it fully intact on the priming test.
So this is telling is the prime.
It is completely independent phenomenon from the phenomenon of recognition, memory or conventional declarative, declarative memory.
I'm going to also illustrate the same basic idea and work with non-human primates.
In order to do that, I do, I'm going to introduce you to two famous tasks that were used in this kind of work.
This task is known as trial unique, delayed, not measured as sample success or familiarity is the test of recognition judgements.
What happens in this task is that beginning on the first phase of the trial, the animal confronts what we call a junk object.
The animal displaces the object to obtain a raising reward, thereby guaranteeing the animal's attention to the object.
And then, after a variable delay, the screen comes down. The objects are rearranged.
After a delay, as long as 10 minutes or 40 minutes, the animal sees what's shown here.
The new object. The new object, and an old object and delay not matching the sample than with the splices, the new object to obtain a reward,
thereby indicating to the experiment of the animal, remembers the old and no less interesting object.
So that's a test of recognition, memory, the same kind of thing one could do in humans.
Now let's consider a second task. A test of motor skill learning.
Here the animal confronts a tube of metal to a lifesaver,
has been threaded onto the tube and the animal has the opportunity to slide the candy along the tube negotiated not in return,
and then remove it and eat it as a candid reward. And one simply scores how long it takes the animal to do that.
So let's look at the data for monkeys with normal monkeys,
monkeys with hippocampal lesions like patient limb and monkeys with large medial temporal lobe lesions like patient epi.
So here on the left, you see the results for the recognition memory task with delays that range from 8 seconds to 10 minutes.
As you see in the normal monkeys. There's some forgetting across that delay, as you would expect.
Hippocampal animals show a modest degree of amnesia and modest degree of forgetfulness.
And immediately below, monkeys show a profound forgetfulness so that after 10 minutes,
they're performing by flipping a coin to determine which object they're going to choose.
On the other hand, over here with skill learning, giving these animals six trials a day across eight days,
initially all the monkeys learn the task at exactly the same rate, and one or two months later is one month later on two different trials.
The monkeys are performing the skill at a high level.
So what that's telling us is that the same monkeys who can't remember the identity of an object after 10 minutes are fully intact.
They're showing day to day improvement and are learning across across a period of eight days.
So what this all takes us to is this kind of a sketch of how many of us think about long term memory at this point.
We divide long term memory into two major categories declarative memory and non declarative memory.
So declarative memory is our memory for facts and events. Declarative memory is what we mean by the term memory when we use it in everyday language.
It refers to our remember. I remember what we had for breakfast this morning and what we did a year ago.
And the facts, the facts of our knowledge about the world and the specific events that we've experienced in the world.
And these this capacity depends on the integrity of the medial temporal lobe and brother and sister
structures in the dying stuff along the thalamus and hypothalamus that I'm not speaking about today,
not declarative memory is not a single thing.
It's an umbrella term to encompass a whole variety of ways in which behaviour can change as a result of experience.
It includes skills and habits which have a critical dependence on this right.
And this the caudate nucleus and the attachment, the phenomenon of priming that we spoke about in perceptual learning,
which seem to be intrinsic to the neocortex, simple classical conditioning which can be divided into two parts the condition of emotional responses,
which in real life might mean something like the development of a phobia across time or in the laboratory for conditioning,
dependence on the amygdala, the conditioning of skeletal responses in real life,
that might be something like driving a motorcycle to a stop sign and negotiating the clutch from the brakes in association
with each other in a laboratory that's usually thought of related to idling conditioning and non associative learning,
which is a phenomenon like habituation and sensitisation that are well developed in invertebrate animals,
that haven't yet invented the hippocampus but have a well demonstrated ability to change their behaviour
as a role of experience in animals like the ecclesia or software that is the sea slug and the fruit fly.
When I see all these terms, I'm always reminded of the quip that comes from Wilhelm Feld Berg,
who was a psycho pharmacologist working in Britain with the great scientist Bernard Katzman.
FELBER said There are some scientists who would rather use another scientist's toothbrush than use this terminology.
And what I'd like to say is that the psychology that mature to the point where it can depend
a lot on biology to make its classification so it matters less what terms one uses up here,
because we know the brain structures and we know the systems that support these different kinds of behaviours.
So the idea of course is that all these systems work in parallel work at the same time.
So we consider the hypothetical example of a young child of ten, let's say, who was knocked over by a large dog.
And then we could say, well, at the age of 25, at least two different things have happened.
One is that the individual may remember the incident, and to the extent that the person remembers the incident,
one is calling on the integrity of the medial temporal lobe structures to remember this particular autobiographical event.
But the second thing may have happened is the person may be afraid of dogs.
And to the person, to the extent that the person is afraid of dogs, one is calling on the amygdala.
And the point at the point, of course, is that that fear of dogs is not experienced as a memory.
It's experience is a part of a piece of personality, an aptitude, a disposition, a way of behaving.
So declarative memory is expressed through recollection. And on the clarity of memory, there's an expressive performance.
Now, one of the reasons it took a long time to work this out is there are tasks that humans learn as declared of knowledge by memorising essentially,
but but tasks that animals and even monkeys will learn on declaratively.
And I'll give you an example of that from another task is rather well known in the literature.
And this is known as the concurrent eight pairs discrimination task.
What happens in this task simply is that there are eight pairs eventually to be learned, each pairs presenter one at a time.
One of the object is designated as correct, and of course to the left, the right position of the objects is reversed is random.
So and subjects have to learn which object is correct in each of the pairs.
Typically, 40 trials are given in a day, so each topic pairs present in five times.
So if your intuition is like mine, if you were given this task to learn, you simply try to memorise what the answer is for each task.
And that's in fact how humans do that task. Here's an example from earlier work with control subjects learning the task
rather easily over a period of a few days and even remembered it a month later.
Whereas a missing patient struggle to learn is a mixed group of patients not as
profound as epi learning a little and then and forgetting a lot all across time.
So it was with some surprise when we discover that monkeys with hippocampal lesions or even medial temporal lesions learn this task.
Normally here the data for normal monkeys learning the same task.
They take almost 500 trials to learn it, and monkeys with hippocampal lesions learn the task in the same number of trials.
However, when the lesion moves dorsally to still also include the chaotic nucleus, which is thought to be important for habit learning.
Then the animals were impaired and others went on later to show that lesions limited to the nucleus itself caused an impairment in this task.
So this raises the question then what can patients with her found amnesia like if he can,
patients with profound amnesia who have no capacity for declarative memory,
could they a task acquire a task like this through gradual trial and error, learning through what we might term have it learning?
If so, is unconscious knowledge acquired? And what does it mean to acquire unconscious knowledge?
Or does the knowledge have different doesn't always have different properties in declarative memory?
Or are we so governed by particular strategies that one memory system cannot really
substitute for another as if each system has its own domain or perhaps habit?
Memory is not so was not so strongly developed in humans as it is in monkeys or rats.
Or perhaps we always need a little bit of declarative memory to gut our performance so
that it wouldn't be possible without declarative memory to learn these kinds of things.
So we asked this question of a patient epi and a very similar patient known as GP.
So patients who were tested on the task and here's control subject learning to learn the task is a very simple task.
And of course they show good performance even on day one because as I said, there's 40 trials in only eight pairs.
So by the time the pairs are coming around again on the first day, they're already remembering what they saw before.
And they and they and by three days are performing perfectly.
Now, one of the features of declarative memory is that the collective memory is flexible, as you might add to it.
I mean, once you learn something, you can do it with your hand, you can do it with your foot, you can talk about it, you can write about it.
It's flexible knowledge. In order to bring that into the laboratory, we asked the subjects to perform the same task in a different way.
We put the 16 objects in this in a pile in the middle of the table and said, Please sort the objects into correct pile, an incorrect pile.
Well, if you've memorised which one is the correct, that's a trivial exercise for a healthy subject.
And they did it perfectly. And then, of course, when we reconstitute the test in its original way, again, they're perfect.
So we asked this question of patient epi, first of all. And we tested him on twice a week on non-consecutive days over a period of time.
And every day we asked him at the beginning of the day, we've been here many times, what are we going to do?
And if he never was able to say anything better than, well, we're going to have a conversation, we're going to talk,
and then we would pull out the objects and he would ask them again, will we use these objects?
What do we do with the objects?
And he never did anything more clear than saying, Well, we'll talk about what their function is and what they're used for and what they are.
So we began to give the test to EPI.
In epee, although quite gradually and over time improved his performance to nearly perfectly across 18 weeks 36 sessions.
Until until we perform perfectly. And then we did the flexibility test to ask him, you know, what he what did he know about what he knew?
We put the 16 objects in the middle of the table and we tape record of every session.
And then we remember that when we put the object the middle of the middle of the table, he said, Oh, my goodness.
And then he tried to sort them and he didn't even put the same number of objects in each pile and couldn't do the task at all.
Then when he reconstituted the task in his original way, he was perfect.
And then because one likes to be had to have data hit,
hit over the head with data rather than be a protagonist for the data that we did the same thing 17 days later.
And again, he failed when the task and performed perfectly when reconstitute the task.
There's an interesting anecdote about his performance when he was performing.
Well, I have to tell you a little more about how you do the task. It's the obviously the obvious replace in front of him.
And all he's asked to do is to pick the correct object and what he means.
He makes a selection by picking the object up and turning it over to see if the word correct is written on the bottom.
So he's going along picking up the object, is that correct? And then the next one comes up and is correct and is correct.
And he says, How am I doing this?
And Jennifer said to him, Well, are you doing it because you remember from previous trials, which are because correct in which object is incorrect?
And he said, No, no, it just goes from here, pointing to his head to there pointing to the table.
So that seems to be the best we can do. And talking about our habits. We also then tested the second patient that I mentioned also.
He also learned the task in this case over a period of 14 weeks.
We don't have an account with this early little splurge here, this little bump.
But then he was very gradual and when we gave GP the sorting task,
he also was completely disabled by it but performed well and we reconstituted it in 17
kilometres again and 17 days later again we see poor performance and then a good performance.
So these results tell us then that humans have a robust capacity for gradual trial and error learning that can
operate outside of awareness for what was learned and independently of the medial temporal lobe structures.
So humans would learn this rapidly as declarative memory, but it can also be acquired more slowly.
And in that case it's rigidly organised, it's unaware of learning, and it's quite different from declarative memory in its characteristics.
So just briefly now, I'm going to turn to our final topic, which is the topic of remote memory,
or we call it retrograde amnesia, which I'll explain in a second.
So this is Theodore Revo, the French philosopher and psychologist who in 1881,
in his book La Maladie de la Mémoire of Diseases of Memory, he described the characteristics of memory impairment.
And Ribeau is fascinated by the phenomenon of retrograde amnesia,
which refers to the fact that when patients develop a desire not only to develop a failure of the learning capacity,
which we call integrative amnesia, but they also typically develop some retrograde amnesia.
They lose some memories for the time before that of events that occurred and things that were learned before they became a music.
And what we're noticed was that when that happens, it's the new memories that are the more recent members that are affected more than motor memories.
That is a remote part of the new parish before the old.
And this, in fact, became known in the literature as Rebus Law.
We've done a lot of studies of this phenomenon, and I'm just going to give you one tiny example based on Epps memory,
because you saw his anterograde amnesia, you saw how impaired he was and acquiring new information.
We also we query deeply about his memories for his childhood environment.
EPP grew up in the Castro Valley Hayward area of the East Bay across from San Francisco, but moved away as a young man hasn't lived there since.
And on the map here in this formal test that I'm going to give you just a little bit of a little bit of data,
a little bit of information about on this map, we located a number of places that anybody who grew up there would know about.
This is just a small part of the map. This, for example, is the Castro Valley Grammar School.
This is the Bret Hart School. This is the the Hayward Theatre.
And this is the Hayward High School. So we asked EPA in a formal way how he would get from one place from his home to one of these places.
We asked him how he would get from one place to another.
We asked him how you get from one place to another when the main street, he just uses the block.
He had to find an alternate route. And we also asked him to stand in certain locations.
Imagine himself pointing in a certain direction and point to another location.
For example, he would say, Your point. You're standing in front of a bank facing South Point to the Bay Bridge,
and he would make a point of movement, but I'm not going to show you all the data for that.
Rather, I thought maybe even more interesting to hear him do this on film.
So again, I'm going to play you a short excerpt from this same film that you saw before about your house on the way to the Hayward Theatre,
where they would leave the house and turn to the right boulevard and do a work in the middle of La Oak.
And if you didn't go down to Eighth Street, if you instead took, you could take another community Centre River through right into the public library.
They would come back from your house with the same thing, go down Main Street and there's a you have to go to the left to turn the corner.
I don't think it would seem that would be the last thing I want to talk to you about is the neighbourhood that we're in now.
Q How about any of the streets around here?
Can you tell me any of the street names in the neighbourhood?
You. No, I have not.
Talk about the telephone. Yeah. What are you going to do about that?
Well, I know we can't throw a party, but that you are born and raised right here, I have to say.
No, I'm sorry. You know, I enjoy the world.
Your area right here, the. So one doesn't have to claim that EPP Group member is fully intact to appreciate the dramatic difference between his
inability to learn new spatial locations and his frantic ability to recall the details of his childhood environment.
So this shows us then directly that the medial temporal lobe structures,
including the hippocampus that are important for new spatial learning, are not similarly important for accessing the past.
So the last slide I'll show you, just to summarise again back to Neuroanatomy,
which I like to say is the foundational discipline for cognitive neuroscience.
Here you can see again these medial temporal lobe structures that we've been talking about,
the hippocampus itself and the dentate gyrus and the speculum and the adjacent cortices, the entorhinal parietal and hippocampal cortices.
This is what we again call a simplified diagram of the cortical areas of projecting into the medial temporal lobe.
The robustness of the projections corresponds to the thickness of the lines.
So you can see that there's a number of cortical areas that may have a set of targets the the the medial temporal lobe memory system.
And so what I've told you is that there are, though, multiple memory systems.
This represents the operation of one memory system, the declarative memory.
But these cortical structures interact with also with the amygdala and with the striatum in support of other kinds of memory,
like habit, memory, fear, memory, skilful memory, and so on.
And secondly, I told you that the clarity of memory is a conscious form of memory,
and that some of the tasks that we can learn consciously in declarative,
it can also be learned unconsciously and not declaratively,
but through a different system and with a different result and a different cognitive product.
And third, I told you that these medial temporal lobe structures don't appear to be the permanent repositories
of memories because patients like EPI have intact ability to access their remote paths.
And so it's this interaction between the medial temporal lobe and neocortex that makes that possible
through a process that we don't understand very well is referred to as consolidation or reorganisation,
so that memories that are initially in the neocortex become permanently stored
in the neocortex through the help of the medial temporal lobe structures.
So I'll just say, if you're interested in following any of the software looking into it further,
I can point you to the book that I had the privilege of writing with Eric Kandel,
and then I'll just say through that to remind us that work like I've described to you is not done alone,
but done with a team of people and undergraduate volunteers, graduate students, postdoctoral fellow and research assistants.
And here we all are standing outside of our laboratory in Southern California in some unknown season.
And I'm thank you very much. So we will take questions.
Now, unless there are specific questions for clarification for this talk, we will have a joint discussion after final thought.
So if you have any questions were asked about this, Larry, but if not, we will not stop until we get the drinks.
Thank you. So we'll just start introducing Simon straightaway.
I mean, to respond to a call like this from a literary point of view, it must be a daunting task.
But as anybody came to Simon's talk last time on 5 seconds, I'll never will know.
Simon is no fun. Is it that you talk a little French in some of the footage?
He's interested in 2016, said the first impression changes his mind is French speaking primarily.
He's just completed a modest, mostly white scene with the mind, and he has a blog called Adventures on the Bookshelf that you make up.
So, Simon, thank you for also just a good presence, right.
I shall just distract yourselves with the handouts while I finish setting up my i.t.
Oh, sorry. Easy. It's.
So this is a response to Larry looking at unconscious memory from post to the present and searching for
how the model that Larry has been laying out for us might be useful to people in the arts and humanities.
If you ask what unconscious memory has generally meant to people in the arts,
the term has been part of our critical discourse for the better part of a century.
But in all of that time it's largely been understood in psychoanalytic terms.
When we've used the term memory, we've understood it as a capital with a capital sorry,
as declarative memory generally of an event personally experienced and the unconscious.
We've often understood with a capital U as the Freudian feels chamber of the mind into which
is consigned everything the conscious mind finds to shameful or traumatic to contemplate,
including memories of painful past experiences. They're isolated from the conscious mind.
Unconscious material, Freud says, proliferates in the dark, as it were, and takes on extreme forms of expression,
manifesting itself in coded dream images, slips and neurotic feelings and behaviours such as phobias or repetition.
Compulsion. This is a model of unconscious memory that has served literary critics well,
as we often follow in Freud's own footsteps where literature is concerned.
For example, Freud's analysis of Ethyl Hoffman's as Ant-Man reads the story as an illustration of the return of the repressed,
where the adult protagonist of the story is haunted by a demonic figure who
resembles the man he blamed for his father's violent death many years before.
And for Freud, the apparent supernatural elements of this tale can be rationalised as the unconscious memory of the
protagonist's childhood trauma manifesting in his consciousness in the form of paranoid delusions.
Now Freud's division of the non-conscious mind into a pre conscious storeroom into which we can delve at will where you see dreams, states,
recent experiences and a sealed unconscious guarded by sensory gatekeepers has
become rather less plausible over the course of the century since it was proposed.
There's widespread scepticism, too, about the process of repression by which memories are rendered unconscious and through which,
according to Freud, the unconscious is brought into being in the first place.
But if we choose not to abide by the psychoanalytic definition of unconscious memory,
then the phrase is suddenly in danger of becoming tautological for our purposes.
If you don't have Freud's distinction between conscious and unconscious, then in one sense it's true that all your memories are unconscious,
with the exception of the one that you're thinking about right now, this minute.
And as we've just seen, modern cognitive neuroscience proposes a new typology of memory, hopefully sense to me by Larry.
This is Larry's own diagram, a new typology of memory which avoids this difficulty.
So on the one hand, as we've had, you have declarative memory of stored representations that you knew heard the fact,
you know, the experience you had, which can be recalled explicitly to consciousness.
And on the other hand, you have this collection of systems which may not be related in the brain, which are given the umbrella label,
non declarative memory, all of which involve a lasting imprint on mind and behaviour from something experienced,
but an imprint which doesn't take the form of words or images or other sense
impressions that we can recall to mind and which we conventionally call memories.
These non declarative memories include, as we've heard, the skills and habits of procedural memory priming and perceptual learning conditioning
and the habituation and sensitisation that make up non associative learning.
So like psychoanalysis,
the cognitive model device memories up into those which are at least theoretically accessible to consciousness and those which are not.
However, everything that psychoanalysis understands as memory is now all lumped together in the declarative
category as memories that can be calls to mind whether or not you're presently able to do it.
And in the other category, we have a new kind of unconscious memory, which is qualitatively incompatible with conscious representation.
So what I'd like to do today. With the help of Larry's diagram,
is take a look without psychoanalytic spectacles at how memory and the unconscious are associated in modern European literature.
I want to see whether the model of unconscious memory as non declarative memory
offers a useful way to analyse the representation of memory in literature.
And at the same time, I want to ask the question if non declarative memory,
if these kinds of memory cannot be represented to consciousness, how can they be represented in literature?
So I basically have been on a hunt through 20th and 21st century literature looking for representations which
have something in common with the various kinds of non declarative memory that Larry's been telling us about.
So if we're going to study memory in modern European, modern European literature, we find a natural starting point in post.
And that's where I'm going to begin to divide memory into two kinds and a third different way of dividing them up.
He divides them into voluntary and involuntary memory, exemplified in the first section of student held by his adult recollections of childhood.
For much of his life, the narrator's life,
all that he can recall as the anxious wait at bedtime to see if his mother will come and give him a goodnight kiss.
This memory is highly vivid with the rest of his childhood lost on.
Here's an extract from that famous opening to the novel.
So it was that for a long time, when awakened at night, I remembered, come away again.
I saw nothing of it but this sort of luminous panel cut out from among indistinct shadows like those panels, which the glow of a Bengal light,
which in fact is a kind of firework or some electric projection,
will cut out and illuminate in a building whose other parts remain plunged into darkness.
As though his childhood holiday home had consisted only of two floors connected by a slender staircase,
and as though it had always been 7:00 in the evening, that the fact is, I could have answered anyone who asked me.
The company also also the company also included other things and existed at other hours.
But since what I recalled would have been supplied to me only by my voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence,
and since the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of it, I would never have had any desire to think about the rest of convey.
It was all really quite dead for me. Then famously the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea,
a taste which he enjoyed regularly in his childhood but crucially has never experienced in the intervening years,
provides him with a direct link back to his past, and the memory resurfaces slowly and uncertainly,
accompanied by a surge of happiness and amid marine imagery in the text as if something dislodged from the seabed and ascending to the surface.
So both the bedtime anxiety and the flood of childhood experiences that make up
the first part of this novel fit into the category of declarative memories.
And on your typology, it's worth mentioning that voluntary and involuntary memory never were a good fit for the Freudian model of memory.
Despite the numerous psychoanalytic readings the novels received, host who had no knowledge of Freud's theory effectively flips it.
The traumatic memory that psychoanalysis would have repressed into the unconscious is instead accessible at will, as if seared into the mind.
While the anodyne memories of pleasant and neutral experiences are the ones that have faded.
And incidentally, the existence of repression, I believe, remains a live question in neuroscience.
V.S. Ramachandran is one voice from neuroscience who supports its existence,
whereas a paper I came across by David as Holmes marshals together the evidence against it,
citing research findings that emotionally intense experiences were more likely to be recalled than less intense experiences,
regardless of whether they were pleasant or unpleasant, which sounds very much like Post's view.
But what of non declarative memories and post?
Interestingly, the second time the narrator some succumbs to Madeleine syndrome in the novel.
No declarative memory is forthcoming in a carriage ride with Madame de Ville, Paris, near the seaside town of Baalbek.
The narrator sees three trees in a line, and he's immediately struck with the same feeling of joy that accompanies the return of a memory.
He says. I gazed at the three trees, which I could see quite clearly, but my mind suspected they hid something on which I could have no purchase.
As our fingertips at the full stretch of our arm may from time to time barely touched but not quite grasp objects which lie just out of reach.
So one rests for a moment before trying harder with the arm outstretched in the hope of catching hold at last.
So in this passage, the narrator's focusing on what's absent the declarative memories at the sight of the trees.
Fails to conjure up. But in doing that he rather neglects what's present.
A major disturbance in his state of mind, caused by the effect of some past experience on his present,
but which doesn't declare itself explicitly to his conscious mind, he says.
There's a feeling of profound bliss that opens the episode, which is followed by a disorienting confusion of inner and outer worlds.
He says the countryside around Baalbek shifted and faulted, and I had to ask myself whether this whole outing was not some figment Baalbek,
merely a place where I might once have been in my imagination. This sense of familiarity, of déja vu, perhaps.
Although the narrator denies that the connection is necessarily anything so straightforward as having seen a similar line of trees before.
But this sense of familiarity very much fits the description of non declarative memory.
And furthermore, it serves to link together the two spheres of mental activity.
The Post explores in great detail in his novel. But he doesn't himself unify involuntary memory triggered by trees or madeleines.
And on the other hand, the process of habituation by which the unfamiliar gradually becomes familiar.
The idea of non associative learning, which you had mentioned earlier,
of which habituation and sensitisation form symmetrical parts comes as much from the study of animals as if humans.
If you place a stuffed owl in a cage full of songbirds, the birds would exhibit signs of distress.
If you do so regularly over a period of time,
the response of the songbirds will gradually diminish in intensity over time as they become habituated to the stuffed owl's presence.
Here is post telling about telling us about his narrator's own stuffed owl experience.
The narrator spending a sleepless night in his first night in a hotel room at Baalbek.
And what troubles him is the fact that the ceiling above his bed is higher than he's used to.
He says it's those parts of us, even the most insubstantial and obscure of them,
such as our attachment to the dimensions or the atmosphere of a particular room which take fright,
withhold consent and engage in rebellions which must be seen as a covert and partial, yet tangible and true mode of resistance to death.
That lengthy, desperate, daily resistance to the sporadic but non-stop dying which attends us throughout our lives,
stripping off bits of us at every moment which, if no sooner, mortified, the new cells begin to grow for a nervous disposition such as mine,
that is one in which the functioning of the intermediaries, the nerves is impaired,
so that they fail to stifle the voice of the lowliest elements of self doom and the deceased and their harrowing,
many headed lament in all its sorrow rises unmuted to the wearied ears of consciousness.
The anguish and alarm I felt when lying beneath a ceiling that was unknown and too high was
nothing but the protest of my surviving attachment to a ceiling which was known and lower.
No doubt that detachment would end and be replaced by another first death.
Then a new life would have done the dual work at the behest of habit.
So what's going on here with the talk of death here and as elsewhere, post is expounding his idea of serial selves.
So when he says resistance to death, it's the resistance. The death of one of his many selves which is dying as a new one comes to life.
So all SUVs die and new SUVs are born as metaphors for our personality changing through the course of life.
So for post, habituation consists of the death of the self for which the high ceiling is unfamiliar and anxiety inducing,
and its replacement by a new one born to whom the height of ceiling has come to seem normal.
We can see the resolute materialist host who has no truck with souls turning to biology to
explicate this mind in both a metaphorical sense with the dying and regrowing cells of the self,
but also in a literal sense in his charming Edwardian neurology of his impaired nerves.
The narrator's anxiety is caused not by a conscious comparison of the height of the hotel room ceiling with the height of the ceiling in his bedroom.
This is his bedroom ceiling, not pictured, but still less by a memory image of lying in bed at home in his mind's eye.
What first comes to consciousness is just a sense of unease, which he then has to analyse in order to find out its cause.
Equally, the comforting sense of familiarity once you've become habituated,
occurs without conscious reference to the memory of the previous experience on which this familiarity is founded.
In English modernism, too. And I'm venturing a little out of my cultural my comfort zone.
Now, as I move into English literature for the rest of the talk English modernism,
we find copious reference to the effects of non declarative memory on the conscious mind.
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse proposes a detailed account of its protagonist's
mental activity on the two days a decade apart in which its action unfolds.
And the narrative is structured by memories, declarative and otherwise, which connect different points in time.
Lily Briscoe is wordlessly moved as she stands before the scene she painted ten years before,
in which Mrs. Ramsay had been framed in the drawing room window.
Mrs. Ramsay, who now ten years later, is dead. And this is what goes through Lily Briscoe's mind.
For. How could one express in words these emotions of the body express that emptiness there?
She was looking at the drawing room steps. They looked extraordinarily empty.
It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensations that went with the bear look at the steps had become
suddenly extremely unpleasant to want and not to have sent all up her body.
A hardness, a hollowness, a strain. Like most and his siblings,
Wolff does have her character develop away from this inchoate emotion towards
a conscious understanding of the comparison between the past and the present,
which has given rise to it. In fact, the sequence ends a little bit later with Lilly's exclamation thought or spoken.
Oh, Mrs. Ramsay. So she realises that it's the absence of Mrs. Ramsey which is causing that feeling.
But just as Post's narrator's conscious thought, the ceiling is too high is the result of his anxiety and not the cause of it.
So Lilly's awareness that she's unhappy because of Mrs. Ramsey's absence comes after she's experienced this emotion.
Non declarative memory appears with shorter time spans in Woolf's novel, too,
and in phenomena, we might be less inclined to label memory in the conventional sense.
Priming, as we've heard, is defined as an implicit memory effect, whereby exposure to an earlier stimulus affects response to a later one.
We see something at least similar.
I would go as far as to say to this effect on several occasions into the lighthouse where characters appear to have been primed.
A comment spoken appears to have been primed by something which happened earlier in the day, so early in the novel.
Among Mrs. Ramsay's idle daytime thoughts is a fleeting indignation about milk.
She's thinking something else, she says, she thinks to herself. Milk delivered at your door in London, positively brown with dirt.
It should be made illegal. And then she moves on to something else.
That evening at dinner, they crops up in conversation, a complaint about the state of English coffee upon which Mrs. Ramsay seizes control
of the whole gathering to deliver a milk based rant to general mocking hilarity.
Then, said Mr. Banks, there is that liquid to the English call. Coffee.
Oh, coffee, said Mrs. Ramsay. But it was much rather a question.
She was thoroughly roused, led. He could see and talked very emphatically of real butter and clean milk, speaking with warmth and eloquence.
She described the iniquity of the English dairy system and in what state milk was delivered to the door.
Now we're in Lily Briscoe's mind again, rather than Mrs. Ramsay's at this point.
So we don't actually see in the novel the mental activity that's prompted Mrs. Ramsay to come out with these words.
And it may be that a declarative memory comes to her mind. She remembers back to that moment early in the day when she was thinking about milk.
And she then makes a conscious decision to replay her earlier thoughts out loud for the benefit of the assembled guests.
But here and other similar moments in the text, it's clear that we don't need to have any conscious memory of the earlier moment for this to work.
It might simply be.
Woolf is implying that her previous indignation has left the topic of substandard English milk delivery at the forefront of her mind,
with the result that there's a ready association waiting to be made and when prompted by a similar subject, such as the inadequacy of English coffee.
And as she sits down to dinner, Mrs. Ramsay is primed for a tirade, and she receives the requisite stimulus to supply one.
Modern literature thus happily tackles mental flow phenomena at least related to habituation and priming as cognitive science describes them.
What about other forms of non declarative memory, procedural memory, perhaps the proverbial memory of how to ride a bike,
or the automatism that drives us our usual route home without any conscious effort on our part.
And there must be interesting representations of procedural memory to be found in early literature, too.
If we care to look perhaps in the well-groomed daily routine of Joyce's Leopold Bloom with his absent minded permutations around Dublin,
allowing his feet to take him past Windmill Lane down Lime Street and across Townsend Street,
while his mind remains otherwise occupied with the Hebrew alphabet and an old love affair.
Or perhaps in the ritual futile repetitions of Samuel Beckett's bike riding, stone sucking,
stepladder climbing toothbrushing, mud calling protagonists for whom habit is the great Stettner.
We can certainly see procedure or memory in a more recent text.
In McEwan's 21st century novel, 21st Century neuro novel Saturday,
which takes us moment by moment through an neurosurgeons weekend with particular
focus on the subjective experience and the neural activity that may underlie it.
Here, for instance, is the muscle memory of movement and gesture in sport, taking over from conscious decision making during a game of squash.
It's possible in a long rally to become a virtually unconscious being inhabiting the narrowest slice of the present.
Merely reacting, taking one shot at a time. Existing only to keep going.
Peron is already at that state, digging in deep when he remembers he's supposed to have a game plan.
And that's a short extract from, in fact, a very long account of game of squash, which has all kinds of references to unconscious behaviour.
And I want to move on briskly from procedural memory, though,
because there is one final facet of non declarative memory that made such a mark on 20th century literature that it demands the remaining time.
I have to examine it, and I'm talking about psychological conditioning and the three great 20th century novels of conditioning,
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984.
And Anthony Burgess is A Clockwork Orange. So conditioning in psychology is divided into classical conditioning,
exemplified by Pavlov that we have a nice example of Pavlov's dogs in which association is created between two stimuli,
such as a bell and dinner in Pavlov's experiments, with the result that the conditioned organism,
the condition dog's usual response to dinner drooling will over time become a response to the bell alone.
Classical conditioning generally works with reflex responses. It attaches an existing response to a new stimulus.
Operant conditioning. The central idea of the BEHAVIOURISM movement within 20th century psychology involves the modification of behaviour through a
system of repeated rewards and punishments consequent to actions to reinforce desired behaviour and diminish the undesired.
And that it has a slightly more, I think, difficult relationship to the idea of unconscious memory,
which involves quite a lot of of conscious activity and conscious thought as well.
So I've given you some extracts from these three novels.
I've given you quite extensive extracts, in fact, in case you're interested in looking at the context of them after.
But I'm going to just pick out the the sections in bold.
His Brave New World in this novel.
Conditioning Begun begins before consciousness has even fully developed.
Lab grown embryos are conditioned to adapt to the working environments they're destined for.
So embryonic workers who are heading for the tropics, alternate periods of high temperature with a combined dose of coolness and x rays,
future zero gravity workers are rotated in their flasks as they developing and starved of nutrients whenever the flask is the right way up.
And the result is you get tropical workers who shun cooler climes and you get rocket repair teams who are equipped,
only truly happy when they're standing on their heads.
This is not giving you here, though, is about young children, where a bunch of infants are born into a room which has flowers and books.
They crawl towards the books and then loud noises and electric shocks are used to inculcate them with an enduring aversion to books and flowers.
So here's an extract from that piece. Offer them the flowers and books again.
The nurse is obeyed. But at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily coloured images of pussy and cockatoo and baba black sheep,
the infants shrank away in horror. The volume of the howling suddenly increased, observes the director, triumphantly.
Observe books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks already in the infant mind.
These couples were compromising. They linked. And after 200 repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissoluble.
What man has joined? Nature is powerless to put asunder.
This scene is very closely modelled on the notorious Little Albert experiments carried out by John B Watson,
sometimes known as the father of behaviourism, in which a child who had demonstrated no previous fear of a white rat.
I think that's him demonstrating.
No previous fear was conditioned into an aversion by the repeated use of a loud noise when the animal was in his presence.
I think Watson stood behind him and clanged two bits of metal together whenever the rat was there,
an aversion that the child subsequently generalised to other furry animals and even a fur coat, according to the experimenters claims.
Second piece of conditioning. Here's O'Brien.
In 1984, discussing the rationale behind the conditioning process Winston Smith is undergoing
in the Ministry of Love to convert him from thought criminal to party faithful.
We're not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission.
When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will.
We do not destroy a heretic because he resists us. So long as they resist us, we never destroy him.
We convert him. We capture his inner mind, we reshape him.
We burn all evil and all illusion out of him. We bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely heart and soul.
We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. Orwell's less explicit than the other two about the details of the process.
His protagonist undergoes to reverse his attitude towards the regime, but certainly, certainly not all of its unconscious room.
One in particular involves the conscious decision to betray Julia,
and its effectiveness in destroying the bond between them relies on the
declarative memory of this betrayal remaining forever in breach of consciousness.
But the program Winston undergoes before he reaches that point is based on the Association of Torture,
with heretical thought torture that very often bypasses consciousness and continuing after its victim has been pushed into delirium.
And lastly, his Alex and A Clockwork Orange discussing with his captors the treatment which involves injecting
him with drugs that make him feel extremely ill while simultaneously showing him images of violence.
You're making me feel ill. I'm ill. When I look at those filthy pervert films of yours.
But it's not really the films that's doing it. But I feel that if you'll stop those films, these films, I'll stop feeling ill.
Right. Said Dr. Brodsky. It's association, the oldest educational method in the world.
We can get this stuff of Ludovico because the drugs which are making you feel sick into your system in many different ways orally, for instance.
But the subcutaneous method is the best. Don't fight against it, please.
There's no point in your fighting. You can't get the better of us. You're not cured yet.
There's still a lot to be done. Only when your body reacts promptly and violently to violence.
As to a snake. Without further help from us. Without medication.
Only then. Burgess explicitly calls A Clockwork Orange a novel about brainwashing.
And he adds the interesting corollary that it's not only through the conditioning of Alex that the reader is to experience this
nascent Burgess's invented teen slang based on Russian is intended to give the readers a little taste of brainwashing for themselves.
He says not that was meant to turn Clockwork Orange into, among other things, a brainwashing primer.
You read the book or see the film,
and at the end you should find yourself in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary without effort, with surprise.
This is the way brainwashing works. There's something else, though, that sets Burgess's conditioning apart from the other two examples.
It doesn't work when Alex, he's goaded to suicide by one of his former victims.
And when he wakes in hospital after this failed suicide attempt, he finds himself to have been,
in his words, cured of the conditioning with his inhibitions towards Beethoven and ultraviolence.
Now removed Burgess's commentary on this ending counters behaviourist doctrine from the perspective of his own Christian belief.
He says, What my and Kubrick's parable tries to state is that it's preferable to have a world of violence undertaken in full awareness.
Violence chosen as an act of will than a world condition is to be good or harmless.
B.F. Skinner, who is the pupil of Watson, in fact, and came to be the most prominent advocate of behaviourism in the mid-twentieth century.
SKINNER With his ability to believe that there's something beyond freedom and dignity, wants to see the death of Autonomous Man.
He may or may not be right. But in terms of the Judeo-Christian ethic that A Clockwork Orange tries to express, he's perpetrating a gross heresy.
The wish to diminish free will is, I should think, the sin against the Holy Ghost.
So in Orwell's and Huxley's Material World and their novels, the mind is as malleable as the brain on which it's the province.
For the Catholic Burgess, though, the essence of the self lies beyond the reach of any conditioning imprint because it's in an immaterial soul.
The term behaviourist novel has got some currency in literary criticism in French studies.
It's particularly connected to the critic Claudette Mont.
Many, but when we use it, it tends to get applied to novelists like Ernest Hemingway or John Dos Passos,
who offer an exclusively external perspective on their characters without affording the reader any access to their subjectivity.
The suggestion is that external narrative perspectives we call the behaviourists out lowering of consciousness as a fit subject for scientific study,
insisting, as they did, that only observable behaviour was proper evidence for psychology.
Evidence for a link between behaviours thought and right. Between behaviour, thought and writing like Hemingway's is actually rather dubious.
Visual storytelling in the cinema seems a much more likely contender to be the important influence there.
The real behaviour is novelists of the 20th century are surely Burgess,
Orwell and Huxley with their explorations of free will overridden by an acquired response to stimulus.
While it's classical Pavlovian conditioning that falls most clearly within non declarative memory,
as the conditioned reflex is contained, created and maintained without any recourse to conscious thought.
All of these novels present their conditioning classic or operant in similar terms.
Once the lessons learned, there's no conscious recall of the teaching required to produce the effect.
Rather, it manifests in all three of these as an instinctive, visceral reaction,
seeming in some cases to the character concerned, to be more of a physical than a mental phenomenon.
So to conclude,
once we start looking for unconscious memory redefined from the psychoanalytic understanding to refer to the various forms of non declarative memory,
we find representations of it, or something very like it widely in modern Western literature.
The concept might be a relatively recent one in psychology, but it's been a major theme in European literature throughout the last century.
Habituation, priming, procedural memory and conditioning all play a role in the 20th century novel.
Sometimes there's intentional engagement on the writer's part with contemporary scientific research.
As we saw in today's newer novelists like McEwan or in the novels of Conditioning in the mid-century heyday of behaviourist psychology.
Often, though, these writers are describing subjective phenomena the anxiety of unfamiliar surroundings,
the lingering thought triggered back to life in conversation, coming from their own author's experience without any reference to formal psychology.
None of the writers before the twenties, before the 21st century refers to any of these phenomena as memory.
That term is used exclusively for declarative memory, as throughout the 20th century it was, and as largely it still is.
But while they might not have labelled these various forms of mental activity as memory, they examine their functioning closely,
and they depicted in lucid detail the subjective experience of habituation, priming, conditioning and related processes.
These representations not only offer us a record of Qualia, as David Locke just put it,
expressing how it feels for your past experience to modify your present sense without
conscious awareness of what's being remembered for us as readers and critics.
This new definition of unconscious memory allows us to draw new connections between psychological phenomena represented in literature.
Ceiling, height, anxiety, milkman irritation, squash games and total totalitarian torture all brought together for the first
time as the subjective manifestations of related kinds of mental activity.
And once we connect these phenomena through contemporary neuroscience,
we can see that in fact they're already connected thematically in the texts themselves.
Collectively, these episodes I've been discussing form the subject matter for a debate held by these 20th century writers inside their story,
worlds among the characters and outside them with their readers. A debate as to how far the conscious mind is in control.
In each of these examples, in a variety of different ways, we've seen the past act upon the present self without the subject's awareness.
Often the actions undesired, sometimes it affects a permanent change.
As readers, our attention is drawn to mental activity occurring outside consciousness involuntarily,
yet having sometimes profound effects on mood or personality.
All these texts point us towards the mind that exists beyond the sphere of conscious awareness and
throw into doubt any suggestion that the conscious mind might be the unchallenged master of the self.
Thank you for.