The ability to consciously remember past experiences existed before there were humans. About 5 million years ago the common ancestor of chimps and humans had memories that were just as vibrant as those experienced by you and me. As humans evolved during the past 5 million years, they became sophisticated in their ability to think about the nature of their ability to remember the past.

At some point during the past 5 million years, apes evolved that were able to speak. It may be that bipedal locomotion was an important part of the evolution of spoken language. I suspect that the first bipedal apes of about 4 million years ago began to have a simple form of spoken language. Other speculation places the origin of human language in much more recent times (go here for more on language), but in any case, I suspect that the earliest ape languages would have allowed its users to distinguish between three types of topics: remembered memories, statements about present experience, and imaginings of the future.

What would have been some of the first things to say about memory? There are a few practical issues that the first ape philosophers may have tried to express in words. Does anyone doubt the ownership of their memories? Are some memories invaders, attempts by evil spirits to take over one's soul? We recognize the limitations of our memories. Sometimes we forget. Some memories are fragmentary. How can you tell if you forgot something important?

One of the themes that is woven into the Story of Memory is the effect of drugs on memory. The physiological mechanisms of memory involve small chemical substances that pass signals between brain cells. Chemicals can be eaten, inhaled, absorbed through the skin. The brain is protected by a special boundary layer, so that not all chemicals can easily leave the blood and reach the brain cells that produce memories. Some chemicals are able to get into the synapses of the brain and alter the normal function of a mind. Primates have intimate experience with psyco-active chemicals that can be found in living organisms. We can speculate that one of the first uses of fire may have been to aid in the self-administration of mind-altering chemicals that are inside plants, such as THC. It seems appropriate that one of the most famous humanoid fossils, Lucy, was named after LSD, a potent hallucinogen. Are hallucinations just memories or are they messages from beyond our own minds? Such a question was surely asked by the earliest humans. (more drugs)

By comparing one's memories with those of other people, you can quickly begin to map out how reliable memories of past experiences are. After a little experience comparing each other's statements such as, "I remember Old Sam" and "I forgot who said that" our ancestors would probably have done what most of us do: take our memories for granted and get on with life.

Although most people usually take memory for granted, it is also true that people recognize the importance of memories. One reason for this is that our brains allow us to FIDDLE with some of our memories. Many of our memories come to us automatically, but we do have the ability to try to remember important things and to try to recall the specifics of things that we know we should be able to remember. I have no doubt that some animals lack the ability to consciously twiddle with their memories. For those animals, memory is ONLY automatic; take it or leave it. In human evolution there has been an amazing commitment of mental power towards fiddling with memories. This survival strategy is potentially dangerous. If memories are not very useful, then all the fiddling that we do with them could become a big waste of time and energy.

It is also true that we recognize the importance of memory in making us US. People often say that we are our memories. This is true on the individual level as well as on the species level. Our culturally-derived knowledge provides us with important memories that are handed from generation to generation in a way that is not possible for other animals.

 Beyond the basic practical issues related to memory are some trickier problems:
Just exactly WHAT are memories?
What are they made of? How do they originate?
Where are they kept when they are "out of mind"?
How do they return to our awareness when they are needed?
How do memories relate to perception and imagination?

From the perspective of the 20th century, it is easy for us to see that early humans did not have the means to answer such tricky questions about memory. We now know that memories are made possible by a special type of brain chemistry. This knowledge about the nature of memory has been hard won, it is not knowledge that can be obtained by a "naked brain" (think of "naked eye"). The special tools of modern science such as microscopes are required in order for anyone to know how memories really work. Early humans could no more understand memory than they could understand black holes.

However, unlike the situation for black holes, in the case of memory we have constant personal access to memory as a mental phenomenon. Nobody cared about black holes until they were forced upon a few physicists and astronomers in this century (still 1999 as I type this). Even the earliest humans were able to speculate about the nature of memory. Memory is fundamental to what humans are, we cannot simply take it for granted ALL the time. Thus, we have a very long human history of attempts to understand memory before the tools required to do so were available. Should we now simply abandon all of the errors of our past speculations about the nature of memory and move on into the future relying only on the modern understanding of memory that is being forged by the tools of modern science?

Such an abandonment of the past is favored by the shock troops who are in the trenches doing the scientific discovery work. The rush of scientific research cannot be slowed by concern with the quaint error of the past. Unfortunately, we are in danger of finally arriving at an understanding of memory, but that understanding will only be accessible to the small minority of scientists who have been trained to abandon the old Myths of Memory that still infect the minds of most people.

So, it is not my purpose here to simply tell the story of how scientific investigation of the human brain is finally solving the mystery of memory. It is my purpose here to relate the entire Epic History of Memory in such a way that everyone can plainly see how the old pervasive Myths of Memory are twisted and misleading and how we can all begin the task of replacing them with a Modern Myth of Memory. The issue here is memetic engineering, a tough situation that we face by which we must have OUT WITH THE OLD and IN WITH THE NEW.

After thousands of years of failed attempts to explain memory, our entire culture is infected with bogus ideas and mistaken concepts. There is no simple surgical transplant procedure by which all of our old mistaken ideas about memory and the human mind can be cleanly sliced out and replaced by the brand new understanding of memory that science is producing. It is going to take some hard work to integrate into society the final correct answers to the mysterious questions of memory. But if we can clearly see how our past mistakes were made then replacing them with new understanding will be easier.

There is another good reason for pursuing an historical analysis of memory. The task of completing a scientific analysis of memory and the human mind is not yet complete. There is still work to be done. Understanding the human mind and how it is made possible by memory is a very hard problem, far harder than any faced by human's before. Unfortunately, human efforts to understand memory and mind have become fragmented. This is natural; when confronting a tough problem it makes good sense to try as many different methods to solve it as you can think of. We make progress by splitting big problems into many little problems that are each easier to solve. However, eventually you have to gather together all of the separate efforts into a coherent whole and make the final push to a unified and coherent understanding of the problem at hand.

The problem is that all of the specialists who are studying their particular piece of the puzzle of memory have forgotten how to talk to each other. Interdisciplinary activity is increasing, but it needs to be pushed to its logical conclusion. I hope that these web pages dealing with the history of memory can serve to promote progress within an interdisciplinary study of memory and mind.

What are some of the difficult problems that we face in trying to integrate our scientific understanding of memory into society at large? Our memories are meaningful to is in fundamental ways. All human societies have grown up with the idea that humans have immortal souls that can carry memories or other mental functions into some sort of after-life. We have been crafted by our evolutionary history to have mental selves that function efficiently to promote our survival by assuming that they are masters of their own fate through the agency of Free Will. Until these fundamental human realities can be made compatible with our modern scientific explanations of memory and mind, our task of "understanding" of memory and the human mind will not be complete. 

Now, most people are Realists and do not often worry about the possibility that they are just imagining their lives. However, for thousands of years philosophically-oriented Realists were plagued by doubts. It was not until the 1800's that a coherent theory of biological evolution was discovered and Realists could finally see that it is due to billions of years of evolutionary design that we really CAN trust our hunches and have faith in an external physical reality beyond pure ideas trapped in your mind. Philosophers like Dan Dennett have begun the task of explaining the impact of evolutionary thinking on our understanding of mind, but this task will be worked on more within these web pages.

Given the long history of nervous Realists and the nagging possibility of Idealism, Western thought has been seriously contaminated by some rather bizarre ideas. Western culture is infected by the memetic echoes of a strange Realism/Idealism hybrid known as Plato's theory of Ideal Forms. According to Plato, the human mind is capable of obtaining knowledge of Ideal Forms by means of "correct thoughts" and mental discipline. According to Plato, what cannot be trusted is our senses, while the only thing which we should trust in and attempt to come to know is the extra-sensory world of Ideal Forms. It will be a major part of the unfolding of the history of memory to show how Plato's Ideal Forms have completely contaminated Western thinking, making it very difficult for us to really understand memory and the human mind. However, Platonic thinking would never have been a persistent bundle of memes unless there were some useful elements in it. The most important of these is the idea of an algorithm, but rather than being the fundamental ontological reality, algorithms must be recognized as being human constructs.

A strong alternative to Platonic "realism" was not formulated until the arrival of modern science in the 1600's. This is not to deny that there were materialistic philosophies even in Plato's time, but the tools required to make the observations that can justify a materialistic view of reality did not exist until the modern age. The philosophical movement that arose in response to science and that provided an alternative to Plato became known as Empiricism. Empiricism was a movement towards complete faith in the power of personal human experiences to provide us with a solid foundation for knowledge.

The idea that our memories and knowledge are generated by perception and personal experiences did not lead Empiricists to stop centering their attention on conscious thought processes and organized reasoning. However, the fact that most brain activity is unconscious was mostly ignored until the past century. The story of the discovery of the unconscious and implicit memories is a major part of the history of memory that we will have to explore. If anyone is interested in the story of how these issues became explicit in my mind, go here.

We have a big job ahead of us, where should we start? I have constructed a map, a game called Memoropoly. The Memoropoly game allows us to see how the study of memory has been fragmented into about a dozen specialized subdisciplines. Go to Memoropoly.