they regulate body temperature, heart rate, respiration rate and the like. Finally, behind the brain stem, and still underneath the cerebrum, lies the cerebellum. This is the control area for the body’s balance, posture and coordination.

While the basic components that form the various processing elements of the brain, that is the vast number of neurons, are very similar, the brain is not a single, generic neural network that develops functionality as the body grows and matures. However, the neocortex of the brain establishes distinct areas of auditory, visual, somatic, frontal, motor and other facilities that result in the same functionality showing up in the same areas of the brain for virtually every person. Moreover, each of these areas presents a remarkably similar, sophisticated local architecture. This functional orientation is an evolutionary artifact based on the DNA blueprint that has evolved through the ages. It likely derives from two distinct mechanisms, one structural and one chemical. First, the growth of every brain proceeds in the same general order. This results in neuron-to-neuron connections that follow a very similar pattern in all individuals. Not every neuron can connect to every other neuron; nor can every sensory input be directly connected to every neuron. Consequently, the various areas are predestined through construction to be associated with certain functionality. The other mechanism, the chemical one, derives from the specific neurotransmitters that are active within various neurons. It is through the neurotransmitters that different neural networks, the organic analog to electrical circuits, can develop from a single physical layout.

Within the human mind, memories are the stored results of sensory input received from throughout the body, along with the analysis and actions undertaken by the body in response to that input. Given the appropriate stimulus, stored memories can be accessed and information gleaned from them to some level of detail of the original input stimuli, analysis and response. The processing of these memory stimuli by various areas of the brain and nervous system can proceed, and resulting control or other cognitive actions can be taken as a result of the stimuli. When we recall memories, they tend to present themselves as reproductions of our original sensory input, generally with a degraded level of specificity. If a given activity induces stress, either through reflexive reactions to events or due to cognition induced profundity, then a memory might be enhanced. Consider that most of us can remember detailed aspects of our physical situation when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon or when we first heard that John Lennon had been shot; or perhaps “the day the music died.” For Generation X, the death of Kurt Cobain evoked a similar emphasis; even our contextual exclamation points are context sensitive.

The concept of memory is well established in the brain, through experiments matching the intuition that we all have that there are different domains of memories with variable capabilities of retention. Identifying the memory of a person with that of a computer seems reasonable from a general perspective, although it is clear that some constructs of human memories are much more efficient than any computer memory ever devised for certain operations, such as recognition. This apparently derives from structural properties such as neuron channels which offer significant parallel processing facilities that computers have yet to exploit with anywhere near the same level of efficiency.

Memory is a collection of mechanisms and processes through which sensori-motor experiences can be stored for subsequent retrieval. The parallels between human memory and computer memory are significant. Thomas K. Landauer, a research scientist at Bell Communications Research in the 1980’s, suggested that human memory is a “novel telephone channel that conveys information from the past to the future.” Memory is a central feature of cognition. The chain of causality that connects the two facilities is not well understood at the present time. However, it would not be unexpected if they are both different facets of the same thing. We will consider some

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