20070129
Should a batch of input spark emotional ignition, the limbic system routes the hot arrival to the storage lockers of cognition - the cooling vaults of memory. But not all storage lockers are the same. There are two radically different sorts of memory storerooms in the human brain.
The first are antique caches inherited from the animals who came before mankind. They handle visceral memories, things we can't express and yet remain after they're through: the potent feeling of joy or agony; or our learning to perform a feat of derring-do - ice skating through a triple twirl, shooting a wave, detecting a luscious, deeply buried root or hammering the tough shell of a nut so that it yields its fruit. These muscle- and emotion memories are slid to the amygdala, arch sorter of such thing, which slings its parcels to a safekeeping net of axons called the striatum. Extra information is packed away in the motor and sensory corridors, the cerebellum, and a widespread nervous system so out of our control that its very name - autonomic - comes from its autonomy, its stubborn independence from our sense of a conscious "me". A wide variety of animals practice wordless habit stashing. It's the core of imitative learning and of body memory. The result is the behavioral meme, a skill or a strong inkling well beyond the realm of human thought. [..]
Broca's area, the brain enhancement possessed 2 million years ago by the Homo habilis known as KNM-ER 1470, helped create entirely new forms of data cabinets, those which house verbal memories. Verbal memes, the kind we can convey by speech, the kind that our storytelling consciousness can spin into debates, myths, tall tales, complaint, or the instructions with which we teach, take a different route to memory. They slide back to the curved prongs of the hippocampus which flip them forward to the cortexes of the temporal lobes, accessible to manipulators like Broca's area and to two other verbal twiddlers which emerged in early Homo habilis - the supramarginal and angular gyri. These are some of the processors which piece together data fro our inner voices and our blathering tongues. They are the brain devices from which verbal memes are wrung.
- Howard Bloom: Threading a new tapestry
2. Library
Defining the library. In a second exercise some precedent organizations are studied and the program is defined. We refrain for a moment from the existential question of the library - namely that of its role in a global neural network - and probe instances in an evolution of built memory organization. We read plans and sections of prominent libraries, and, beyond typologies, we find organizational models. We test these models outside of man-made constructs, under water that is. Only then do we continue to speculate about the program that can be plugged into these organizations.
.: Jonas 2:00 PM
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