438 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



continuous strip of cinematographic film, a strip that includes the 

 "waking record from childhood onward. 



One must assume that the right and the left temporal lobes give 

 similar service in this regard and that the memory record is duplicated 

 on the two sides since removal of a large part of one lobe does not 

 usually interfere with a man's capacity to recollect or to recognize 

 the things seen before. 



Presumably these patterns are no more than pathways of perma- 

 nent facilitation through preexisting connections of many branching 

 nerve cells. When the electrode is applied the current seems to 

 follow again this pathway, slowly, steadily, while all other neigh- 

 boring pathways are somehow closed by the influence of some all- 

 or-nothing principle. 



There is other evidence that such detailed patterns of previous 

 experience are preserved within the brain. Take an example from 

 what must be your own experience, as it has been mine. Let us 

 assume that you have not seen a friend for many years. Once you 

 knew him well, but now, after 10 or 20 years, you cannot picture 

 him and certainly you could not paint his picture. 



But suppose you come upon him unexpectedly. As he turns and 

 looks at you and smiles there is a sense of familiarity. Suddenly 

 you recognize your former friend. But even as you focus your 

 attention upon him you realize he is altered in little ways. There 

 is a difference between this moving, talking, laughing individual 

 and the record of him that is preserved in great detail in your own 

 brain, the record you could not have conjured up a moment before. 



Now you see new lines in his face, an altered stoop to the shoulder, 

 a strange slowness of movement. The voice is the same perhaps and 

 the eye seems to twinkle with the same old understanding. You 

 probably clap him on the back and tell him (for his own good) that 

 he has "not changed a bit." But even as you shook his hand you 

 had felt another alteration for you perceived that the joints had 

 thickened. 



You feel the necessity of calling him by name. That requires a 

 separate physiological act, for the mechanism of speech and the 

 whole process of summoning words that are appropriate to the con- 

 tent of new thought, bear only a distant relationship to those aspects 

 of memory included in our present discussion. 



It is obvious that you have preserved the records of the way your 

 friend walked and talked and smiled during a long succession of 

 interviews. Wlien you met him again you reopened the old "file," 

 rediscovering and reviving its contents. These are not portraits 

 of still life; they are strips of action, each one as long as the periods 

 of time during which you focused your attention upon him. 



