The Thirty-Sixth Maudsley Lecture: Memory Mechanisms of the Brain

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Abstract
The invitation to give a commemorative lecture of such importance evokes feelings of gratitude and pleasure that a body as distinguished as your own should show interest in the work of one's collaborators. This is especially so for us because the field in which we work might seem, to superficial observation, to be remote from practical interests. It has long been our hope that by study of a relatively simple animal we might be able to discover some of the fundamental features of living memory systems, which have not yielded to investigation in mammals or man. Your interest encourages us to think that we may be on the right lines and I hope that in return it may be possible to tell you at least something of the principles that underlie the coding and storing of information in the nervous system. But the brain is a very complicated instrument and the problem is far from solution. The account that I shall give will be grossly over-simplified and will probably seem to present an absurdly static picture of what we all know to be a continually active and dynamic system.