..in pre-frontal cortical working memory. That’s the claim in this video. The information that is stored is unique to the goal, or prospective action. He goes on to say that the structure of WM is largely the same as that of LTM, such that a sensory stimulus to be retained in WM activates an LTM history, with all the associations of that stimulus. That looks like Proust to me, not teleology. The wispiness of the P-world as the present resonates with the past. Intriguingly, he links the cortical dynamics of WM to the perception/action cycle. That’s very Gibsonian in character.  But the  terms of the neuroscientist are becoming increasingly  odd-sounding to me.   Memory , as conceived here, is all in the brain.  If we view it instead as a resonance, or fit, between a neural dynamic and an environment, then the constrained environment in which typical WM tasks such as delayed-match-to-sample are done looks instead like an amplification of the neural pattern,  obtained by omitting, or clamping, the other halfof the equation.  I’m still working on my own vocabulary here, but ‘memory’ is certainly an area in which the received vocabulary appears to me to be in need of a severe overhaul.

His view of memory is unfortunately very old-fashioned. He sees it as something in the brain, with the role of the stimulus down played to that of a cue, or trigger, and thereby missing its character as a co-pattern, as structured as the neuronal response. The fit. He does object that memory is not local, and that any localist account must fail.

I am typically very iffy about this kind of “knowledge”. In looking into the brain for everything, I feel that a big mistake is being made. The high level terms used to describe our parts are all wonky. There’s executive functions, fer crying out loud. The neuroscience, with its description of cellular activity is fine. It’s building the bridges to things that describe us that’s off. Trouble is, if that is so, and neuroscientists are called upon to pronounce, science can mislead us. Ethical problems arise. Defining madness, or humanness, for example.