Page 51 - Use Your Memory

THE HISTORY OF MEMORY
time, including Cicero in the first century BC and Quintilian in the
first century AD, accepted without question the Wax Tablet
Hypothesis of memory and did little further work on the subject.
Their major and extremely important contributions were in the
development of memory systems. They were the first to introduce
the idea of a Link System and a Room System, both of which will
be described in later chapters.

The Influence of the Christian Church
The next major contributor to memory theory was the great
physician Galen in the second century AD. He located and
delineated various anatomical and physiological structures and
made further investigations into the function and structure of the
nervous system. Like the later Greeks, he assumed that memory
and mental processes were part of the lower order of animal
spirits. He thought that these spirits were manufactured in the
sides of the brain and that, consequently, memory was seated
there. Galen thought that air was sucked into the brain and mixed
with the vital spirits. This mixture produced animal spirits that
were pushed down through the nervous system, enabling humans
to experience sensation.
Galen's ideas on memory were rapidly accepted and condoned
by the church, which at this time was beginning to exert a great
influence. His ideas became doctrine, and as a result little pro-
gress was made in the field for 1500 years. These intellectual
strictures stifled some of the greatest minds that philosophy and
science have produced. In the fourth century AD St Augustine
accepted the church's idea that memory was a function of the soul
and that the soul was located in the brain. He never expanded on
the anatomical aspects of these ideas.
From the time of St Augustine until the seventeenth century
there were almost no significant developments, and even in the
seventeenth century new ideas were restricted by doctrine. Even
so great a thinker as Descartes accepted Galen's basic ideas,
although he thought that animal spirits were sent from the pineal
gland on special courses through the brain until they came to the
part where memory could be triggered. The more clear-cut these
courses, the more readily, he thought, would they open when
animal spirits travelled through them. It was in this way that he
explained the improvement of memory and the development of
what are known as memory traces. A memory trace is a physical
change in the nervous system that was not present before learning.
The trace enables us to recall.

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