1 March 2024
Samuel Gershman
Department of Psychology
Harvard University
Over the last half century, there has been a remarkable convergence on the idea that memories are stored at synapses. I will argue that this is only part of the story. A more complete story commands us to recognize the radical ubiquity of memory in living systems, including free-living unicellular organisms and many kinds of non-neural cells. Memory existed from the moment life began; in a sense it is built into the logic of life. Its molecular mechanisms are therefore likely to be ancient in origin, and a number of clues are already available. Computational considerations help us organize these clues into a theory of the division of labor and interaction between cell-intrinsic and synaptic storage mechanisms. From this new starting point, I will explore how we can make sense of many strange and puzzling phenomena: the transfer of memory between organisms, the survival of memory after radical synaptic remodeling (even decapitation!), the transience of amnesia following protein synthesis inhibition, the ability of unicellular organisms to learn, among others.