Engrams

Trying to visualize the thoughts and memories in the brain.

We humans (and other animals) posses the amazing ability of experiencing and remembering things along with higher modes of cognition like thoughts, ideas and feelings.

The name Engram has been given to denote the physical location and mechanisms required to process and store these bits of information. The theory seems sound, there are places in our brains where the aforementioned information is stored (where else would they be) but accessing them is still not possible, at least not directly. We make do with our communication skills to convey what we experience and know internally. The best next thing could be to take a peek inside the brain as it is working with information, but that has proven to be quite invasive and so far lacks the resolution needed to make sense of the data ( see Neuroimaging ), so we are left with the next next best thing, we can model parts of the brain artificially, create analogs and see how they experience things, the end product would be an artificial engram and that’s what we are after here.

Note: This is an excerpt/draft on a book section I've been working on part 2 of Conscious Artificial Intelligence. 
Why is this important ? Current AIs borrow and combine elements from Neuroscience, Statistics and other fields, the end result are specialized tools and systems that while effective at certain tasks generalize poorly, our human trait in contrast is that we generalize easily, understanding engrams then could give us a better chance at creating new AIs. There is also value in answering the questions of how, where and when we store information.

The big picture

We experience the environment in real time, a never ending influx of images, sounds and other types of information; we are mostly and blissfully unaware that our brain is doing a lot of processing all the time discarding most information and being selective about what gets stored, to complicate matters we don’t store information in a database of films or photos ( let’s stick with vision for now ), we seem to store sparse, distributed and invariant representations of the information we encounter. Beyond this immediate experience we can revisit the past and experience both old and new things…