Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield - Memory and the Equipotentiality Debate
3 important questions on Physiologists of Mind: Brain Scientists from Gall to Penfield - Memory and the Equipotentiality Debate
What general finding did Shepherd Ivory Franz discover out about the memory of something that animals learned?
His innovation was to combine ablation with animal training. If the memories for the learned responses were localized in specific small regions of the cortex, then only those ablations involving those particular regions should have affected the responses. Franz’s study, however, found localization only of a highly general sort, in that lesions of the frontal cortex caused the responses to be lost, while lesions elsewhere did not.
Which finding of Franz led to his distrust in the strong localization theory, and to recall and respect Flourens's theory?
Even more significant, it seemed to Franz, was the fact that the frontally ablated animals were sometimes able to relearn the escape response quite easily and quickly. Obviously then, if the removed regions had been somehow responsible for the original learning, altogether different brain parts were able to perform highly similar functions in the relearning. This finding led Franz to distrust the strong localization theory, and to recall and respect Flourens’s old dictum that the brain functions as a relatively undifferentiated whole.
What kind of explanation does the redundancy hypothesis offer for where memories lies in the cortex?
The so-called redundancy hypothesis offers a related explanation, suggesting that each individual memory gets stored in several locations throughout the cortex, with the number increasing as the memory becomes better established and more widely associated with other memories. Ablation of an isolated brain area would be expected to remove some but not all of the traces of any particular memory.
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