"John H" <john at faraway>:
> Sounds like Gerald Edelman's ideas, look him up, the ideas have some sense,
> he argues that embryonically immune and neural systems arise out of the same
> cell plates, two principal memory systems in nature etc etc ....
Thanks for telling me about Gerald Edelman. I just read his recent essay
"Building a Picture of the Brain" (2001) where he explained his Theory of
Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), or Neural Darwinism, first proposed in
1976. Im quite convinced that he is correct!!
In summary, he said:
1) "connectivity at the level of synapses is established by somatic
selection during an individual's ongoing development".
2) "this selectional process is constrained by value signals that
arise as a result of the activity of ascending systems in the brain,
an activity that is continually modified by successful output".
[ascending systems, eg: locus coeruleus, raphe nucleus, cholinergic
nuclei]
3) the various maps of the brain are correlated by massively parallel
reciprocal connections, leading to higher-order selection.
4) memory is an emergent property of these processes.
---------------
I think his theory implies that there is no such thing as "memory
consolidation", though Edelman did not explicitly state that.
Also I am interested in the details of the value systems, and i
think REM sleep might be the generator of random connections.