A Physical Model of Long-Term Memory and Unstable Brain Rhythm Suggested by Regeneration Processes

Abstract

The human way of concept formation or recognizing the external world is supposed to be a kind of paradigmatic recognition in which a concept is formed out of a limited number of concrete samples-paradigms-in a given class by generating all members of the class sharing certain common characters or Gestalten. At the same time, the human abiliy of deductive inference is thought to be provided by the capability of logical and arithmetic operations of our nervous system. The presence of these two complementary brain func­ tions, inductive and deductive, seems to suggest the following hypothesis: The brain is an autonomous system which not only maps an external object as a pattern of neuron firing in the cortical manifold, but automatically generates all possible patterns out of the original pattern according to certain generation rules. In the present paper a simple physical model of the brain function is suggested in which the establishment of the long-term memory by a single experience is understood as a critical regeneration of the short-term memory (a conscious and temporal reflection of the external world within the cortical association area) by the internal information (reorganized past experiences plus hereditary bias) already regis­ tered in the cortical memory storage or as a critical percolation of the short-term memory into the memory storage. In this model the unstable brain wave oscillations following the deprivation of normal sensations are explained as the spontaneous eruption of past experi­ ences into the association area with the resultant formation of a temporal and conscious in­ formation without reference to the immediate information from the external world.