Is the memory of touching always disguised by senses that forget where they come from? Creating distancethrough a mastery that constitutes the object as a monument built in place of the subject’s disappearance.The memory of touching? The most insistent and the most difficult to enter into memory. The one that entailsreturning to a commitment whose beginning and end cannot be recovered.Memory of the flesh, where that which has not yet been written is inscribed, laid down? That which has a place,has (...) taken place, but has no language. The felt, which expresses itself for the first time. Declares itself to theother in silence.One must remember this and hope that the other remembers. Lodge it in a memory that serves as its bedand its nest, while waiting for the other to understand. Make a cradle for him inside and out while leaving himfree, and keep oneself in the memory of the strength that revealed itself, that acted. (Irigaray, 215–16). (shrink)

We are sympathetic to most of what Glenberg says in his target article, but we consider it common wisdom rather than something radically new. Others have argued persuasively against the idea of abstraction in cognition, for example. On the other hand, Hebbian connectionism cannot get along without the idea of association, at least at the neural level.

(1) Non-projectable properties as opposed to the clamping of projectable properties play a primary role in triggering and guiding human action. (2) Embodiment in language-mediated memories should be qualified: (a) Language imposes a radical discretization on body constraints (second-order embodiment). (b) Metaphors rely on second-order embodiment. (c) Language users sometimes suspend embodiment.

Most cognitive scientists are committed to some version of representationalism, the view that intelligent behavior is caused by internal processes that involve computations over representations. Phenomenologists, however, argue that certain types of intelligent behavior, engaged coping skills, are nonrepresentational. Recent neuroscientific work on multiple memory systems indicates that while many types of intelligent behavior are representational, the types of intelligent behavior cited by phenomenologists are indeed nonrepresentational. This neuroscientific research thus vindicates a key phenomenological claim about the nature of intelligent (...) behaviour. It also provides a framework for the ongoing reconciliation of cognitive science and phenomenology. (shrink)

I address the commentators' calls for clarification of theoretical terms, discussion of similarities to other proposals, and extension of the ideas. In doing so, I keep the focus on the purpose of memory: enabling the organism to make sense of its environment so that it can take action appropriate to constraints resulting from the physical, personal, social, and cultural situations.

Standard models of cognition are built from abstract, amodal, arbitrary symbols, and the meanings of those symbols are given solely by their interrelations. The target article (Glenberg 1997t) argues that these models must be inadequate because meaning cannot arise from relations among abstract symbols. For cognitive representations to be meaningful they must, at the least, be grounded; but abstract symbols are difficult, if not impossible, to ground. As an alternative, the target article developed a framework in which representations are grounded (...) in perception and action, and hence are embodied. Recent work (Glenberg & Robertson 1999; 2000; Glenberg & Kaschak 2002; Kaschak & Glenberg 2000) extends this framework to language. (shrink)

A concert pianist the second author videotaped herself learning J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto Presto , and commented on the problems she encountered as she practised. Approximately two years later the pianist wrote out the first page of the score from memory. The pianist's verbal reports indicated that in the early sessions she identified and memorised the formal structure of the piece, and in the later sessions she practised using this organisation to retrieve the memory cues that controlled her playing. The (...) practice and recall data supported this account. Both were organised by the formal structure of the music. Practice segments were more likely to start and stop at boundaries of the formal structure than at other locations, and recall was higher for the beginnings of sections than for later portions. Like other forms of expert memory, pianistic memory appears to be based on use of a highly practised retrieval scheme which permits rapid retrieval of information from long-term memory. (shrink)

An action-oriented theory of embodied memory is favorable for many reasons, but it will not provide a quick yet clean solution to the grounding problem in the way Glenberg (1997t) envisages. Although structural mapping via analogical representations may be an adequate mechanism of cognitive representation, it will not suffice to explain representation as such.

This paper surveys the impact on neuropsychology of Wittgenstein's elucidations of memory. Wittgenstein discredited the storage and imprint models of memory, dissolved the conceptual link between memory and mental images or representations and, upholding the context-sensitivity of memory, made room for a family resemblance concept of memory, where remembering can also amount to doing or saying something. While neuropsychology is still generally under the spell of archival and physiological notions of memory, Wittgenstein's reconceptions can be seen at work in its (...) leading-edge practitioners. However, neuroscientists, generally, are finding memory difficult to demarcate from other cognitive and noncognitive processes, and I suggest this is largely due to their considering automatic responses as part of memory, termed nondeclarative or implicit memory. Taking my lead from Wittgenstein's On Certainty, I argue that there is only remembering where there is also some kind of mnemonic effort or attention, and, therefore, that so-called implicit memory is not memory at all, but a basic, noncognitive certainty. (shrink)

Women’s embodied memories of “Dangerous Breasts”, generated as part of a wider collective memory project on women’s breasts, Iconstruct women as always at risk of our bodies turning against us. We trace through memory stories how we inscribe our bodies as “dangerous” through practices involving silence, fear, surveillance and diagnosis. We examine how regimes directed at the prevention and treatment of breast cancer serve, in our memories, to increase anxiety and distance us from our bodies and any sense of agency.

This commentary examines Glenberg's characterization of “suppression” in light of negative priming and related phenomena. After offering a radically different slant on suppression, an attempt is made to weave this alternative version into Glenberg's provocative discussion of embodied memories.

A great deal of effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to developing consciousness artificially (A small selection of the many authors writing in this area includes: Cotterill (J Conscious Stud 2:290–311, 1995 , 1998 ), Haikonen ( 2003 ), Aleksander and Dunmall (J Conscious Stud 10:7–18, 2003 ), Sloman ( 2004 , 2005 ), Aleksander ( 2005 ), Holland and Knight ( 2006 ), and Chella and Manzotti ( 2007 )), and yet a similar amount of effort has (...) gone in to demonstrating the infeasibility of the whole enterprise (Most notably: Dreyfus ( 1972/1979 , 1992 , 1998 ), Searle ( 1980 ), Harnad (J Conscious Stud 10:67–75, 2003 ), and Sternberg ( 2007 ), but there are a great many others). My concern in this paper is to steer some navigable channel between the two positions, laying out the necessary pre-conditions for consciousness in an artificial system, and concentrating on what needs to hold for the system to perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment. By adopting a thick notion of embodiment—one that is bound up with the concepts of the lived body and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980 ; Varela et al. 2003 ; and Ziemke 2003 , 2007a , J Conscious Stud 14(7):167–179, 2007b )—I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within an embodied distributed system that possesses a richly affective musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its tactile-kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies pertaining to habitual practices, and an anticipatory enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities the system would remain unconscious, unaware of itself embodied within a world. Finally, and following on from Damasio’s ( 1991 , 1994 , 1999 , 2003 ) claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism’s core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making and subsequent survival. My position, as presented here, remains agnostic about whether or not the creation of artificial consciousness is an attainable goal. (shrink)

in Jeremy McKenna (ed), At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book in the series Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis).

for Lambros Malafouris and Carl Knappett (eds), Material Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach (Springer, late 2007).

Matthew Walker's model overcomes the unrefined classical concept of consolidation as a unitary process. Presently still confined in its scope to selective data mainly referring to procedural motor learning, the model nonetheless provides a valuable starting point for further refinements, which would be required for a more comprehensive account of different types and aspects of human memory consolidation.