4. Memory and Transmission
4.1 MEMORY IN THE BRAINThe single most well-known person in the history of the neuroscientific study
of memory was not a scholar but a patient: Henry Gustav Molaison
(1926–2008), known from the literature as H.M. (Squire & Kandel, 1999,
pp. 11–14; Carey, 2008; Eichenbaum, 2012, pp. 87–92).^1 In 1953, in an attempt
to relieve his severe epilepsy, a part of H.M.’s brain was removed, including his
hippocampus (see section 3.2). From the day of his operation, H.M. forgot
new events as soon as they happened. Whenever psychologist Brenda Miller
entered his room for the forty years during which they worked together,
H.M. failed to recognize her. As years went on, he could not recognize himself
on a photo, because he was not able to make memories of his own changing
appearance. At the same time, he did not lose his memories from the time well
before the operation and retained his other cognitive abilities. In order to
remember new pieces of information (such as numbers or words) he per-
formed various mental manipulations, but he eventually forgot them after a
few minutes. His favorite pastime was to solve difficult crossword puzzles.
Remarkably, although he was unable to memorize events or faces, he was
able to learn new skills, such as drawing afigure by looking at its reflection
in a mirror.
Cognitive psychologists traditionally distinguish three stages involved in
learning and memory: encoding, storage,andretrieval (Eysenck, 2004,
p. 291). First, we create a memory trace of information that we perceive
(encoding); second, we store it in memory, which can involve different
amounts of time for different memories (storage); and third, we can later
recover and extract information from memory (retrieval). Different types of
amnesia (memory loss) are connectedto different stages of learning and
(^1) This chapter is a substantially revised version of I. Czachesz,“Rethinking Biblical Trans-
mission: Insights from the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory,”In I. Czachesz and R. Uro
(Eds.),Mind, Morality and Magic: Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies(pp. 43–61).
Durham: Acumen, 2013. I thank Routledge for granting me permission to use the paper.