Abstract
Over the last half century, neuropsychologists, cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists interested in human memory have accumulated evidence showing that there is not one general memory function but a variety of memory systems deserving distinct (but for an organism, complementary) functional entities. The first attempts to organize memory systems within a taxonomic construct are often traced back to the French philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824), who, in his book first published in 1803, distinguished mechanical memory, sensitive memory and representative memory, without, however, providing any experimental evidence in support of his view. It turns out, however, that what might be regarded as the first elaborated taxonomic proposal is 14 centuries older and is due to Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also named St Augustine, who, in Book 10 of his Confessions, by means of an introspective process that did not aim at organizing memory systems, nevertheless distinguished and commented on sensible memory, intellectual memory, memory of memories, memory of feelings and passion, and memory of forgetting. These memories were envisaged as different and complementary instances. In the current study, after a short biographical synopsis of St Augustine, we provide an outline of the philosopher’s contribution, both in terms of questions and answers, and focus on how this contribution almost perfectly fits with several viewpoints of modern psychology and neuroscience of memory about human memory functions, including the notion that episodic autobiographical memory stores events of our personal history in their what, where and when dimensions, and from there enables our mental time travel. It is not at all meant that St Augustine’s elaboration was the basis for the modern taxonomy, but just that the similarity is striking, and that the architecture of our current viewpoints about memory systems might have preexisted as an outstanding intuition in the philosopher’s mind.
Highlights
What is cognition? In its broadest sense, the term cognition refers to the mental processing of information about both the external world and ourselves
The current study focuses on one of those elaborated theoretical constructions that emerged in the course of introspective reflections
At the end of 10.14.22. [18], having carried out a thoroughly scrutiny of the recollection of different passions, St Augustine concluded that recollection of emotions stems, naturally, from experience and that the emotion that accompanies experience can be automatically stored: “And yet could we not speak of them, did we not find in our memory, the sounds of the names according the images impressed by the senses of the body, but notions of the very things themselves which we never received by any avenue of the body, but which the mind itself perceiving by the experience of its own passions, committed to the memory, or the memory of itself retained, without being committed unto it”
Summary
What is cognition? In its broadest sense, the term cognition refers to the mental processing of information about both the external world and ourselves. Augustine did not explicitly distinguish taxonomic entities in his reflections about memory, he structured his text, and subsequently reminded this view in a few lines, to make it clear that sensible memory stores only images that enter by the way of our senses, and that knowledge memory stores what we know and which exists by itself once in memory, like in science, or stores notions or notations, which result from all affections of the mind As such, he focused on what is nowadays considered conscious memory systems by several authors (e.g., [5,6,17]), and it seems that.
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