Page 50 - Use Your Memory

USE YOUR MEMORY
aspect of the same process. As will become clear later, many
people now feel that memory and forgetting are two quite
different processes. Shortly after Plato, Zeno the Stoic slightly
modified Plato's ideas, suggesting that sensations actually 'wrote'
impressions on the wax tablet. Like the Greeks before him, when
Zeno referred to the mind and its memory, he did not place it in
any particular organ or section of the body. To him as to the
Greeks, 'mind' was a very unclear concept.
The first man to introduce a more scientific terminology was
Aristotle, in the late fourth century BC. He maintained that the
language previously used was not adequate to explain the physical
aspects of memory. In applying his new language Aristotle
attributed to the heart most of the functions that we now attribute
to the brain. Part of the heart's function, he realised, was con-
cerned with the blood, and he felt that memory was based on the
blood's movements. He thought that forgetting was the result of a
gradual slowing down of these movements. Aristotle made
another important contribution to the subject of memory when he
introduced his laws of association of ideas. The concept of
association of ideas and images is now known to be of major
importance to memory. Throughout this book this concept will be
discussed and applied.
In the third century BC, Herophilus introduced 'vital' and
'animal' spirits to the discussion. He thought that the vital, or
'higher order', spirits produced the 'lower order' animal spirits,
which included the memory, the brain and the nervous system. All
of these he thought to be secondary in importance to the heart. It is
interesting to note that one reason advanced by Herophilus for
man's superiority over animals was the large number of creases in
his brain. (These creases are now known as the convolutions of
the cortex.) Herophilus, however, offered no reason for his con-
clusion. It was not until the nineteenth century, more than 2000
years later, that the real importance of the cortex was discovered.
The Greeks, then, were the first to seek a physical as opposed to
a spiritual basis for memory; they developed scientific concepts
and a language structure that helped the development of these
concepts; and they contributed the Wax Tablet Hypothesis, which
suggested that memory and forgetting were opposite aspects of
the same process.
The Romans
The theoretical contributions by the Romans to our knowledge of
memory were surprisingly minimal. The major thinkers of their
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