History and the Brain

History and the Brain:
The Memory Problem

Working Notes for a Joint Paper?
Elliott Shore and Paul Grobstein
October 26, 2004

The problem(s)

(to the tune of Tell Me Why
"I do believe that tradition becomes
A dangerous tool in the hands of some
It blocks new ideas like the hard red clay
And so the rain comes to wash it away"
"New findings reveal more about the malleability of memory. Not only is it possible to change details of memories for previously experienced events, but one can sometimes plant entirely false memories into the minds of unsuspecting individuals, even if the events would be highly implausible or even impossible" ... Elizabeth Loftus, Current Directions in Psychological Science 13: 145-147, 2004.
The past is a fiction created by the brain to account for its current state (on which prior events have left traces) in a way that ... Symposium on Time
can be useful for anticipating and preparing for the future ... Ulrich Neisser
The past is, in principle, non-recoverable ... (Information Working Group)

The challenge(s): What is "history"? How should it be done? What is it for?

Isn't memory real? Could Michael Jordan have done what he did without practicing?
What are "traces"? How much discretion/wiggle room to they leave in reconstruction of the past?
With addition of other observations, how much discretion/wiggle room is left in reconstruction of the past?
Can one contentedly live in the present in the face of a fundamental uncertainty about the past? memory as "springboard", evaluated by usefulness in future rather than accuracy re past
Is there a way to maintain a sense of the usefulness of memory and history without appeal to "accuracy" or "faithfulness" as an objective/criterion for quality?

A new(?) perspective on history

... Geertz

.... Collingwood and Oakshott ... "It is perhaps Oakshott's rejection of the idea that history deals with causes which most collides with received opinion. Causes ... invoke laws and thus assimilate history to science ... as ... Karl Popper [was] explicitly doing. Oakeshott, by contrast, presents historical understanding as event-making; survivals treated as evidence are assembled together so that by "touching" each other they become intelligible, a process he compared to building a dry wall". "conditional platforms of understanding" ... "no explanation could avoid being itself an invitation to further inquiry" ... "a concern with freedom was the centre of Oakshott's political philosophy" ... "each man guides himself by his own imagination"

Interesting issue: "distinguished the human world as one of agents responding to their situation as they understood it with such intelligence as they could muster" ... How much of "history" has this character? as opposed to absence of "reflection"?

story telling as a mechanism of exploration/change ... true of history as well?

depends not only on work of profound skeptics but work of "believers" as well Long Term Memory, E. Pritchard

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History and the Brain:The Memory Problem

Working Notes for a Joint Paper? Elliott Shore and Paul GrobsteinOctober 26, 2004

History and the Brain:
The Memory Problem

Working Notes for a Joint Paper?
Elliott Shore and Paul Grobstein
October 26, 2004