Un-Scientific Thinking

Something I've never really understood is how memories get stored. Unlike a hard drive, which I can picture physically holding a static image of a thought, experience, emotion or instructions for cleaning carburetors, living neurons "holding" onto anything baffles me.

I had thought I didn't understand biological memory because I didn't understand computer memory and programming. Which wouldn't be a surprise since I've never studied it. An electron goes to the left this time and to the right that time and that is why my wedding pictures are stored on my laptop. I have never really understood how you go from electrons going this way and that way in the physical world to software.

So when I saw this brief essayfrom the Edge, something was cleared up.

Joseph Ledoux is a professor of Neuroscience at NYU and the author of The Synaptic Self. The essay was his response to the annual World Question, which the Edge sends out to big brains the world over. In 2008 they asked "What have you changed your mind about?"

Ledoux wrote that he had changed his mind about how we remember, and his essay is also a primer on thinking scientifically -

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used.

LeDoux knows from what he speaks. I don't. I can't grok what he's talking about because I can't make a picture of it in my head, but I believe him, because, well because he knows. He's an expert. He goes on:

Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader [showed] that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. [This is called] reconsolidation.

Though I'm still unaware of the details, this makes sense to me. I didn't see the data. I still don't have an inkling of the mechanism involved, and I still don't understand compilers, yet I am all too happy to abandon the explanation that doesn't make sense to me.

And that is what I wanted to explore with the title of this post, Un-Scientific Thinking. Let's take a look again at that sentence there, up above, that I just wrote: "Though I'm still unaware of the details, this makes sense to me. "

If there is a more concise statement of unscientific thinking than that sentence, I do not know of it, and my disease is our disease.

We do things not because of evidence, but because of scraps of knowledge blown in through the window by Morning Edition, Fresh Air or the Times. They mingle in the far recesses of our hippocampi with advertising and stuff our Mom told us. The cognitive contraption then gets held together by the duct tape of mental processes, the baling wire of the un-scientific mind: the inapt metaphor.

This witches brew is recalled and reconsolidated and recalled and reconsolidated again and we put the result into action in our lives. By which I mean we vote on it, or tell stories about it at dinner parties or judge scientific findings about, say, global warming. All by the half-cooked measure "Given what I know, this makes sense."

Ledoux finishes up his essay with a concise description of what scientific thinking would be.

I'm not swayed by arguments based on faith, can be moved by good logic, but am always swayed by a good experiment, even if it goes against my scientific beliefs. I might not give up on a scientific belief after one experiment, but when the evidence mounts over multiple studies, I change my mind.

I can make it a little shorter:

When evidence mounts, I change my mind

So while I still don't understand how memory works yet (which continues to make sense because I'm writing this instead of cracking open that 900 page computer science book on the floor) I do know that some guy somewhere has a new theory about it.

The question nagging me is whether that means I have learned something. Is the darkness of my ignorance any brighter or have I replaced one superstitious belief with another?