On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:13:50 -0700, Paul Brandon writes: >Actually, there's no conflict between being a rat running behaviorist >and believing that the CNS (central or conceptual as the case may be)
What's that sound? Is that B.F. spinning in his grave? >is an integrated interactive system all of which is involved in any >given instance of behavior. And of course we talk a great deal >about verbally mediated behavior in all of its complexity. I may be mistaken but I think my original point has been lost: (1) Conditioning studies involving animals [insert your favorite species here] may have questionable generalizability to humans because animals do not have language or high level symbolic processing capability that would mediate their learning. Thus, the results of studies like that described in the NY Times can only be speculatively extended to humans. Especially if one is going to link human dementias to the use of a drug that blocks the formation of long-term memories. Examination of one of the relevant articles for the NYT story makes it clear that the researchers are using the term memory in a very broad way but relies heavily on associative learning mechanisms; see: http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060318&ct=1 (2) Perhaps long-term memories of conditioning are purely mediated by PKMzeta in rodents and maybe it applies to some limited cases of conditioning in humans but it is unlikely to be plausible for many/most human long-term memories. The classic "levels of processing" experimental result showing that processing a word's appearance results in poorer memory than processing its meaning is clearly a problem if one relies upon a molecular mechanism or a single neuron mechanism (the problem is similar to that for the classic "grandmother" or "yellow volkswagen" account of pattern recognition). At the very least, a neural circuit is needed and perhaps a more complex neural network is needed if one is going to rely on purely associative mechanisms in contrast to general rule and symbol architectures. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
