Redundancy in the Nervous System as Substrate for Consciousness: Relation to the Anatomy and Chemistry of Remembering

Abstract

My task in this chapter is to relate the conscious experience of remembering to the physical and chemical mechanisms of brain cells involved in memory formation. No one will deny, to be sure, that such an enterprise is ultimately necessary. It is, however, clear that with currently available information the best that can be accomplished is to lay the groundwork for, or to outline the various directions of an approach to this problem. The present effort, then, is an attempt to bridge the gap, by providing a specific, testable neurobiological mechanism of consciousness that may be applied at each level of analysis involved in the study of the chemistry of memory.

One day, when we lived in Kent, I was carving a sculpture in the open air, and someone came up to me and said, “What do you do all this for—such hard work and what use is it?” I could have told him that it’s the growing use of our senses for non-practical and unimmediate purposes which makes us different from animals—that to a cow a clump of green grass and buttercups is something to eat, not to contemplate. But, he walked away.

(Henry Moore, cited in Müller, 1976, p. 53)

This manuscript was prepared while the author was at the Institute of Pharmacology in Zürich and was supported by “THE ROCHE FOUNDATION for Scientific Exchange and Biomedical Collaboration with Switzerland.” I wish to thank Dr. Joseph Huston for helpful discussion. I am grateful to Ellen Routtenberg and Betty Wells for assistance in preparing the manuscript.