Chapter 1
1Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1988).
2Minsky, The Society of Mind, 20.
3Minsky, The Society of Mind, 326.
4Translated from Obras completas de Platón, vol. 5 (Madrid: Edición Patricio de Azcárate, 1871).
5Translated from Meditaciones metafísicas con objeciones y respuestas, sexta Meditación (Madrid: Edición de Vidal Peña, Alfaguara, 1977).
6For more information about Phineas Gage, see, for example, Malcolm Macmillan, “Phineas Gage—Unraveling the Myth,” The Psychologist 21 (2008): 828–831.
7H.M. was studied for thirty years by the Canadian psychologist Brenda Milner. For more information, see the first scientific report Milner wrote together with Scoville about H.M.: William Scoville and Brenda Milner, “Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesion,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 20 (1957): 11–21.
8Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, New York: Hutchinson, 1949).
9Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul (New York: Scribner, 1994).
10Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
11For more information about the algorithm, see Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, no. 2 (2012): 1097–1105.
12For a compilation of the performances of different algorithms in the last few years and how they compare with human performance, see Olga Russakovsky et al., “ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge,” International Journal of Computer Vision 115, no. 3 (2015): 211–252.
13For more information, see Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, “Deep Learning,” Nature 521, no. 7553 (2015): 436–444.
14LeCun et al., “Deep Learning.”
15Christof Koch, “How the Computer Beat the Go Master,” Scientific American, March 19, 2016.
16David Silver et al., “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search,” Nature 529, no. 7587 (2016): 484–489.
17Asimov’s Rules of Robotics appeared in his 1942 short story “Runaround,” which was included in his I, Robot collection published in 1950.
Chapter 2
1David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
2Semir Zeki, “Parallel Processing, Asynchronous Perception, and a Distributed System of Consciousness in Vision,” The Neuroscientist 4, no. 5 (1998): 365–372.
3Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993), 37.
4Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “The Problem of Consciousness,” Scientific American 267, no. 3 (1992): 152–159. Crick and Koch’s article was republished in the same journal in 2002.
5For more information, see Randolph Blake and Nikos K. Logothetis, “Visual Competition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, no. 1 (2002): 13–21.
6For more information see, for example, Nikos K. Logothetis, “Single Units and Conscious Vision,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences (1998): 1801–1818.
7For more information see, for example, Larry R. Squire and Stuart Zola-Morgan, “The Medial Temporal Lobe Memory System,” Science 253, no. 5026 (1991): 1380–1386.
8For more information about the electrodes, the process involved in recording neurons, and further technical details see, for example, Hernan G. Rey, Matias J. Ison, Carlos Pedreira, Antonio Valentin, Gonzalo Alarcon, Richard Selway, Mark P. Richardson, and Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Single-Cell Recordings in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe,” Journal of Anatomy 227, no. 4 (2015): 394–408.
9Others who participated in these experiments include Gabriel Kreiman, Leila Reddy, Alexander Kraskov, Florian Mormann, Christof Koch, and Itzhak Fried (the neurosurgeon who established these types of recordings at UCLA).
10Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Leila Reddy, Gabriel Kreiman, Christof Koch, and Itzhak Fried, “Invariant Visual Representation by Single Neurons in the Human Brain,” Nature 435, no. 7045 (2005): 1102–1107.
11For more examples, see Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Alexander Kraskov, Christof Koch, and Itzhak Fried, “Explicit Encoding of Multimodal Percepts by Single Neurons in the Human Brain,” Current Biology 19, no. 15 (2009): 1308–1313.
12For a summary of the results we obtained with these neurons, see Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Concept Cells: The Building Blocks of Declarative Memory Functions,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, no. 8 (2012): 587–597.
13The results of this experiment are described in Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Roy Mukamel, Eve A. Isham, Raphael Malach, and Itzhak Fried, “Human Single-Neuron Responses at the Threshold of Conscious Recognition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 9 (2008): 3599–3604.
14The results of this experiment are described in: Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Alexander Kraskov, Florian Mormann, Itzhak Fried, and Christof Koch, “Single-Cell Responses to Face Adaptation in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe,” Neuron 84, no. 2 (2014): 363–369.
15Chapter four in Borges and Memory (cited in chapter one) is devoted to a description of H.M. The first report about the H.M. case is by William Scoville and Brenda Milner, “Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesion,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 20, no. 1 (1957): 11–21.
A concise description of his contribution to science is given in Larry R. Squire, “The Legacy of Patient H. M. for Neuroscience,” Neuron 61, no. 1 (2009): 6–9.
16This is what we could call perceptual and contextual awareness. For more information, see:
•Joaquin Navajas, Hernan G. Rey, and Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Perceptual and Contextual Awareness: Methodological Considerations in the Search for the Neural Correlates of Consciousness,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 959.
•Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Neuronal Codes for Visual Perception and Memory,” Neuropsychologia 83 (2016): 227–241.
17Turing proposed his famous test in Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–460.
18For more information, see www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/home.htm
19Rashid’s demonstration can be seen on YouTube, where it has more than a million views: “Speech Recognition Breakthrough for the Spoken, Translated Word.” Posted by Microsoft Research, November 8, 2012. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-nlQqFCKg
20For a critical discussion, see Searle’s original article and the following commentary by different authors in John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–457.
Chapter 3
1Michel de Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond (Translated from Apología de Raimundo Sabunde), 386, 388.
2René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, V (1637).
3Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
4Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
5Plutarch, Moralia 973c–e; Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
6For an informational discussion on the experiments done on jays, see V. Morell, “Nicky and the Jays,” Science 315, no. 5815 (2007): 1074–1075. And for a more detailed and technical discussion, see Uri Grodzinski and Nicola S. Clayton, “Problems Faced by Food-Caching Corvids and the Evolution of Cognitive Solutions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 365 (2010): 977–987.
7This work’s results were published in Christopher Krupenye et al., “Great Apes Anticipate That Other Individuals Will Act According to False Beliefs,” Science 354, no. 6308 (2016): 110–114.
8For a detailed analysis of various deceitful behaviors in higher primates, see Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten, “Cognitive Evolution in Primates: Evidence from Tactical Deception,” Man 27, no. 3 (1992): 609–627.
9For more details see, for example, Gordon Gallup, Jr., “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition,” Science 167, no. 3912 (1970): 86–87.
10For more details on these and other experiments with monkeys see, for example, chapter four of José Luis Díaz, La conciencia viviente (Fondo de Culture Económica, 2007), or chapter five of Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986).
11John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book II, Ch. 11, Sec. 10), 1689.
12See, for example, Pavel M. Itskov, Ekaterina Vinnik, and Mathew E. Diamond, “Hippocampal Representation of Touch-Guided Behavior in Rats: Persistent and Independent Traces of Stimulus and Reward Location,” PLOS One 6, no. 1 (2011): e16462.
Chapter 4
1René Descartes, Meditations (First Meditation) (cited in chapter one).
2For a detailed description on the subject see, for example, Anthony Kenny, A Brief History of Western Philosophy (New Jersey: Wiley, 1998); Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge Classics, [1946] 2004); John Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 1956). The online version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also offers a detailed and clear description of idealism.
3C. Daniel Salzman, Kenneth H. Britten, and William T. Newsome, “Cortical Microstimulation Influences Perceptual Judgement of Motion Direction,” Nature 346, no. 6280 (1990): 174–177.
4Seyed-Reza Afraz, Roozbeh Kiani, and Hossein Esteky, “Microstimulation of Inferotemporal Cortex Influences Face Categorization,” Nature 442, no. 7103 (2006): 692–695.
5Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
6For more details, see: Itzhak Fried et al., “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter,” Nature 391, no. 6668 (1998): 650.
7Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993), 4.
8For a more detailed and quantitative description on how much we see, see chapter two of The Forgetting Machine (cited in chapter two). Chapter three in that book also describes the processes implemented by the brain to process visual information based on unconscious inferences.
9For more information, see my previously cited essay on “Magic and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Current Biology 26, no. 10 (2016): R387–R407.
10For a more detailed description of these results, see chapter five of Frederic Bartlett’s Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932). Chapter seven also describes similar results with other stories.
11Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions (cited in chapter three).
Chapter 5
1Charlie Dunbar Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1925), 71.
2For more information, see Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32, no. 127 (1982): 127–136.
3Nagel describes this idea in Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450.
4Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1993), 398–401.
5Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 441–448.
6For a more detailed description of these algorithms, see Rodrigo Quian Quiroga and Stefano Panzeri, “Extracting Information from Neural Populations: Information Theory and Decoding Approaches,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, no. 3 (2009): 173–185.
7Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Leila Reddy, Christof Koch, and Itzhak Fried, “Decoding Visual Inputs from Multiple Neurons in the Human Temporal Lobe,” Journal of Neurophysiology 98, no. 4 (2007): 1997–2007.
8For more information, see Moran Cerf et al., “On-line, Voluntary Control of Human Temporal Lobe Neurons,” Nature 467, no. 7319 (2010): 1104–1108.
9Adrian M. Owen et al., “Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State,” Science 313, no. 5792 (2006): 1402.
10Martin M. Monti et al., “Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness,” The New England Journal of Medicine 362, no. 7 (2010): 579–589.
11These results are described in Uri Hasson et al., “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision,” Science 303, no. 5664 (2004): 1634–1640.
12James V. Haxby et al., “Distributed and Overlapping Representations of Faces and Objects in Ventral Temporal Cortex,” Science 293, no. 5539 (2001): 2425–2430.
13The analysis method developed by Haxby and his colleagues has given way to endless scientific works in the last few years. For a review of these works see, for example, John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees, “Decoding Mental States from Brain Activity in Humans,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, no. 7 (2006): 523–534. For a more detailed description of the methods, see John-Dylan Haynes, “A Primer on Pattern-Based Approaches to fMRI: Principles, Pitfalls, and Perspectives,” Neuron 87, no. 2 (2015): 257–270.
14See, for example, Kendrick N. Kay et al., “Identifying Natural Images from Human Brain Activity,” Nature 452, no. 7185 (2008): 352–355.
15For more details, see Shinji Nishimoto et al., “Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies,” Current Biology 21, no. 19 (2011): 1641–1646.
16Kathleen M. O’Craven and Nancy Kanwisher, “Mental Imagery of Faces and Places Activates Corresponding Stimulus-Specific Brain Regions,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12, no. 6 (2000): 1013–1023.
17T. Horikawa et al., “Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep,” Science 340, no. 6132 (2013): 639–642.
18Doris Y. Tsao et al., “A Cortical Region Consisting Entirely of Face-Selective Cells,” Science 311, no. 5761 (2006): 670–674.
19Winrich A. Freiwald and Doris Y. Tsao, “Functional Compartmentalization and Viewpoint Generalization Within the Macaque Face-Processing System,” Science 330, no. 6005 (2010): 845–851.
20Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao, “The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain,” Cell 169, no. 6 (2017): 1013–1028. For a short description of these results and their implications, see Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “How Do We Recognize a Face?” Cell 169, no. 6 (2017): 975–977.
Chapter 6
1F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory, trans. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1902), 4.
2Benjamin Libet et al., “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act,” Brain 106, no. 3 (1983): 623–642.
3For a critical discussion of Libet’s experiment, see Benjamin Libet, “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8, no. 4 (1985): 528–566.
4Itzhak Fried et al., “Functional Organization of Human Supplementary Motor Cortex Studied by Electrical Stimulation,” The Journal of Neuroscience 11, no. 11 (1991): 3656–3666.
5Joaquim P. Brasil-Neto et al., “Focal Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Response Bias in a Forced-Choice Task,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 55, no. 10 (1992): 964–966.
6Sergio Della Sala, a neurologist specializing in alien hand syndrome, often refers to Cortázar and Peter Sellers in his publications. See, for example, Sergio Della Sala, “The Anarchic Hand,” The Psychologist 18, no. 10 (2005): 606–609.
7For a description of these cases see, for example, D. H. Geschwind et al., “Alien Hand Syndrome: Interhemispheric Motor Disconnection Due to a Lesion in the Midbody of the Corpus Callosum,” Neurology 45, no. 4 (1995): 802–808; and Gary Goldberg, Nathaniel H. Mayer, and Joseph U. Toglia, “Medial Frontal Cortex Infarction and the Alien Hand Sign,” Archives of Neurology 38, no. 11 (1981): 683–686.
8Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel M. Wolpert, and Christopher D. Frith, “Abnormalities in the Awareness of Action,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 6 (2002): 237–242.
9P. K. McGuire, R. M. Murray, G. M. S. Shah,, “Increased Blood Flow in Broca’s Area During Auditory Hallucinations in Schizophrenia,” Lancet 342, no. 8873 (1993): 705–706.
10Sean Spence, “Free Will in the Light of Neuropsychiatry,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3, no. 2 (1996): 75–90.
11Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Christopher D. Frith, and Daniel M. Wolpert, “Spatio-Temporal Prediction Modulates the Perception of Self-Produced Stimuli,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11, no. 5 (1999): 551–559.
12These results are described in Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (2008): 49–54.
13Jim Fallon’s search to explain if he was in effect a psychopath is the plot of his book The Psychopath Inside (New York: Penguin Group, 2013).
14Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s in Charge? (London: Robinson, 2012).
15For more information on these cases and statistics, see the May 23, 2016, report “Machine Bias” on the ProPublica portal.
16Petter Johansson et al., “Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task,” Science 310, no. 5745 (2005): 116–119.
17This study is described in Lars Hall et al., “How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter Intentions,” PLOS One 8, no. 4 (2013): e60554.
Chapter 7
1For more information, see:
•Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, “Actions from Thoughts,” Nature 409, no. 6818 (2001): 403–407.
•John P. Donoghue, “Bridging the Brain to the World: A Perspective on Neural Interface Systems,” Neuron 60, no. 3 (2008): 511–521.
•Bijan Pesaran, Sam Musallam, and Richard A. Andersen, “Cognitive Neural Prosthetics,” Current Biology 16, no. 3 (2006): R77–R80.
2See, for example, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Lawrence H. Snyder, P. Aaron Batista, He Cui, and Richard A. Andersen, “Movement Intention Is Better Predicted Than Attention in the Posterior Parietal Cortex,” Journal of Neuroscience 26, no. 13 (2006): 3615–3620.
3In this case, neural recordings were taken from the motor cortex. For more details, see Meel Velliste et al., “Cortical Control of a Prosthetic Arm for Self-Feeding,” Nature 453, no. 7198 (2008): 1098–1101.
4Among others, an article in the New York Times, “Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own,” published May 29, 2008.
5For more information, see Leigh R. Hochberg et al., “Reach and Grasp by People with Tetraplegia Using a Neurally Controlled Robotic Arm,” Nature 485, no. 7398 (2012): 372–375; and Tyson Aflalo et al., “Decoding Motor Imagery from the Posterior Parietal Cortex of a Tetraplegic Human,” Science 348, no. 6237 (2015): 906–910.
6For more information, see Hochberg et al., “Reach and Grasp by People with Tetraplegia Using a Neurally Controlled Robotic Arm”; Aflalo et al., “Decoding Motor Imagery from the Posterior Parietal Cortex of a Tetraplegic Human.”
7For more information, see Beata Jarosiewicz et al., “Functional Network Reorganization During Learning in a Brain-Computer Interface Paradigm,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of USA 105, no. 49 (2008): 19486–19491.
8Plutarch, Parallel Lives, “Life of Theseus,” XXIII, 1.
9John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXVII, sec. 15 (1689).
10Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen, “Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See,” Nature 391, no. 6669 (1998): 756.
11For more information, see H. Henrik Ehrsson, “The Experimental Induction of Out-of-Body Experiences,” Science 317, no. 5841 (2007): 1048; and Ed Yong, “Master of Illusion,” Nature 480, no. 7376 (2011): 168–170.
12Marco Capogrosso et al., “A Brain-Spine Interface Alleviating Gait Deficits After Spinal Cord Injury in Primates,” Nature 539, no. 7628 (2016): 284–288.
13Andrew Jackson, “Spinal-Cord Injury: Neural Interfaces Take Another Step Forward,” Nature 539, no. 7628 (2016): 177–178.
14C. Ethier et al., “Restoration of Grasp Following Paralysis Through Brain-Controlled Stimulation of Muscles,” Nature 485, no. 7398 (2012): 368–371.
15Chad E. Bouton et al., “Restoring Cortical Control of Functional Movement in a Human with Quadriplegia,” Nature 533, no. 7602 (2016): 247–250.
16Miguel Pais-Vieira et al., “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information,” Scientific Reports 3 (2013): 1319.
17For more information, see:
•J. O. Mills, A. Jalil, and P. E. Stanga, “Electronic Retinal Implants and Artificial Vision: Journey and Present,” Eye 31, no. 10 (2017): 1383–1398.
•James D. Weiland and Mark S. Humayun, “Retinal Prosthesis,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 61, no. 5 (2014): 1412–1424.
•Eberhart Zrenner, “Will Retinal Implants Restore Vision?” Science 295, no. 5557 (2002): 1022–1025.
18See, for example, James J. Jun et al., “Fully Integrated Silicon Probes for High-Density Recording of Neural Activity,” Nature 551, no. 7679 (2017): 232–236.
19Paul Bach-y-Rita et al., “Vision Substitution by Tactile Image Projection,” Nature 221, no. 5184 (1969): 963–964.
20Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Facts of Perception,” Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). For a detailed description on this subject, see chapter three of my earlier book The Forgetting Machine (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2017).
21Martin Hilbert and Priscilla López, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,” Science 322, no. 6025 (2011): 60–65.
Chapter 8
1From Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones [Fictions] (Buenes Aires: Editorial Sur, 1944).
2These cases are described in A. Szücs et al., “Misleading Hallucinations in Unrecognized Narcolepsy,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 108, no. 4 (2003): 314–317; and Erin Wamsley et al., “Delusional Confusion of Dreaming and Reality in Narcolepsy,” Sleep 37, no. 2 (2014): 419–422.
3Wamsley et al., “Delusional Confusion of Dreaming and Reality in Narcolepsy.
4Translated from Meditaciones metafísicas con objeciones y respuestas, sexta Meditación (Madrid: Edición de Vidal Peña, Alfaguara, 1977).
5Thomas Hobbes, “The Third Objections” (response to Descartes’s Meditations), 1641/42.
6William H. Moorcroft, Understanding Sleep and Dreaming (New York: Springer, 2013), 7.8.
7Miguel Pais-Vieira et al., “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information,” Scientific Reports 3 (2013): 1319.
8Deirdre Barrett, “The ‘Committee of Sleep’: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving,” Dreaming 3, no. 2 (1993): 115–122. See also: Robert Stickgold et al., “Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normal and Amnesics,” Science 290, no. 5490 (2000): 350–353.
9Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1900), see chapter seven.
10These are the censorship mechanisms that were missing in Phineas Gage after his frontal lobe injury, creating a radical change in his personality (see chapter one). In line with this evidence, during sleep the activity of the frontal lobe drastically drops. See, for example, Robert Stickgold et al., “Sleep, Learning, and Dreams: Off-line Memory Reprocessing,” Science 294, no. 5544 (2001): 1052–1057.
11For a discussion on this subject and the potential errors in psychoanalysis see, for example, Giuliana A. L. Mazzoni and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “When Dreams Become Reality,” Consciousness and Cognition 5, no. 27 (1996): 442–462.
12Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, “Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Mobility and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep,” Science 118, no. 3062 (1953): 273–274.
13Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep (London: Penguin, 2018).
14William Dement, “The Effect of Dream Deprivation,” Science 131, no. 3415 (1960): 1705–1707.
15J. Allan Hobson and Robert W. McCarley, “The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process,” American Journal of Psychiatry 134, no. 12 (1977): 1335–1348.
16John G. Jenkins and Karl M. Dallenbach, “Obliviscence During Sleep and Waking,” American Journal of Psychology 35, no. 4 (1924): 605–612. To review the effects sleeping has on memory, see also:
•Susanne Diekelmann and Jan Born, “The Memory Function of Sleep,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2010): 114–126.
•Matthew Walker and Robert Stickgold, “Sleep-Dependent Learning and Memory Consolidation,” Neuron 44, no. 1 (2004): 121–133.
•Stickgold et al., “Sleep, Learning, and Dreams: Off-line Memory Reprocessing.”
17Olaf Lahl et al., “An Ultra Short Episode of Sleep Is Sufficient to Promote Declarative Memory Performance,” Journal of Sleep Research 17, no. 1 (2008): 3–10.
18W. Plihal and J. Born, “Effects of Early and Late Nocturnal Sleep on Declarative and Procedural Memory,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9, no. 4 (1997): 534–547.
19To review these results, see: Diekelmann and Born, “The Memory Function of Sleep.”
20Stickgold et al., “Sleep, Learning, and Dreams: Off-line Memory Reprocessing.”
21Stickgold et al., “Sleep, Learning, and Dreams . . .”
22For a more a elaborate development of this interpretation, see:
•Stickgold et al., “Sleep, Learning, and Dreams . . .”
•Matthew Walker and Robert Stickgold, “Overnight Alchemy: Sleep-Dependent Memory Evolution,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 3 (2010): 218–219.
•Walker, Why We Sleep. In his fascinating book, Walker argues that another function of dreams is processing emotions we have experienced during the day, which is crucial for developing social behaviors (see chapter ten).
Chapter 9
1Plato, Crito, 4th century BC.
2Plato, Theaetetus, sec. 34.
3Hermann Ebbinghaus, Über das Gedächtnis: Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1885).
4James L. McGaugh, “Memory—a Century of Consolidation,” Science 287, no. 5451 (2000): 248–251.
5James R. Misanin, Ralph R. Miller, and Donald J. Lewis, “Retrograde Amnesia Produced by Electroconvulsive Shock After Reactivation of a Consolidated Memory Trace,” Science 160, no. 3827 (1968): 554–555.
6Karim Nader, Glenn E. Schafe, and Joseph E. Le Doux, “Fear Memories Require Protein Synthesis in the Amygdala for Reconsolidation After Retrieval,” Nature 406, no. 6797 (2000): 722–726.
7See, for example, Karim Nader, “Memory Traces Unbound,” Trends in Neurosciences 26, no. 2 (2003): 65–72; and Karim Nader and Oliver Hardt, “A Single Standard for Memory: The Case for Reconsolidation,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, no. 3 (2009): 224–234.
8Merel Kindt, Marieke Soeter, and Bram Vervliet, “Beyond Extinction: Erasing Human Fear Responses and Preventing the Return of Fear,” Nature Neuroscience 12, no. 3 (2009): 256–258.
9To review these results, see Tom Beckers and Merel Kindt, “Memory Reconsolidation Interference as an Emerging Treatment for Emotional Disorders: Strengths, Limitations, Challenges and Opportunities,” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 13 (2017): 99–121.
10Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of Interaction Between Language and Memory,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, no. 5 (1974): 585–589.
11For more information, see Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Creating False Memories,” Scientific American 277, no. 3 (1997): 70–75; and Elizabeth F. Loftus and Jacqueline E. Pickrell, “The Formation of False Memories,” Psychiatry Annals 25, no. 12 (1995): 720–725.
12For more information, see Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Magic and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Current Biology 26, no. 10 (2016): R387–R407 (previously cited in chapter three).
13For more information, see:
•Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Itzhak Fried, and Christof Koch, “Brain Cells for Grandmother,” Scientific American 308, no. 2 (2013): 30–35.
•Charles G. Gross, “Genealogy of the ‘Grandmother Cell,’” The Neuroscientist 8, no. 5 (2002): 512–518.
•Horace Barlow, “The Neuron Doctrine in Perception,” The Cognitive Neurosciences, edited by Michael S. Gazzaniga (Boston: MIT Press, 1994).
•Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Akakhievitch Revisited,” Physics of Life Reviews 29 (2019): 111–114.
14Jerzy Konorski, Integrative Activity of the Brain: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
15Figure adapted from Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Neuronal Codes for Visual Perception and Memory,” Neuropsychologia 83 (2016): 227–241. The neural responses in V1, IT, and the hippocampus were published in:
•David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel, “Receptive Fields of Single Neurones in the Cat’s Striate Cortex,” The Journal of Physiology 148, no. 3 (1959): 574–591.
•Charles Gross, “Single Neuron Studies of Inferior Temporal Cortex,” Neuropsychologia 46, no. 3 (2008): 841–852.
•Rodrigo Quian Quiroga et al., “Explicit Encoding of Multi-Modal Percepts by Single Neurons in the Human Brain,” Current Biology 19, no. 15 (2009): 1308–1313.
16For a study supporting this claim, see Emanuela de Falco, Matias J. Ison, Itzhak Fried, and Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Long-Term Coding of Personal and Universal Associations Underlying the Memory Web in the Human Brain,” Nature Communications 7 (2016): 13408.
17For more details, see Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Concept Cells: The Building Blocks of Declarative Memory Functions,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, no. 8 (2012): 587–597.
18Matias J. Ison, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, and Itzhak Fried, “Rapid Encoding of New Memories by Individual Neurons in the Human Brain,” Neuron 87, no. 1 (2015): 220–230.
19Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, “Concept Cells: The Building Blocks of Declarative Memory Functions.”
20For more information, see Karl Deisseroth, “Optogenetics: Controlling the Brain with Light,” Scientific American 303, no 4 (2010): 48–55; and Karl Deisseroth, “Optogenetics: 10 Years of Microbial Opsins in Neuroscience,” Nature Neuroscience 18, no. 9 (2015): 1213–1225.
21Edward S. Boyden et al., “Millisecond-Timescale, Genetically Targeted Optical Control of Neural Activity,” Nature Neuroscience 8, no. 9 (2005): 1263–1268.
22Antoine R. Adamantidis et al., “Neural Substrates of Awakening Probed with Optogenetic Control of Hypocretin Neurons,” Nature 450, no. 7168 (2007): 420–424.
23Xu Liu et al., “Optogenetic Stimulation of a Hippocampal Engram Activates Fear Memory Recall,” Nature 484, no. 7394 (2012): 381–385.
24Steve Ramirez et al., “Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus,” Science 341, no. 6144 (2013): 387–391.
25To review these results, see Kay M. Tye and Karl Deisseroth, “Optogenetic Investigation of Neural Circuits Underlying Brain Disease in Animal Models,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 13, no. 4 (2012): 251–266.
Chapter 10
1See, for example, R. C. Merkle, “The Technical Feasibility of Cryonics,” Medical Hypotheses 39, no. 1 (1992): 6–16; and Ole Martin Moen, “The Case for Cryonics,” Journal of Medical Ethics 41, no. 8 (2015): 677–681.
2R. K. Andjus and J. E. Lovelock, “Reanimation of Rats from Body Temperatures between 0 and 1°C by Microwave Diathermy,” The Journal of Physiology 128, no. 3 (1955): 541–546.
3Robert L. McIntyre and Gregory M. Fahy, “Aldehyde-Stablilized Cryopreservation,” Cryobiology 71, no. 3 (2015): 448–458.
4Star Trek, “The Enemy Within,” aired in 1966 and featured the fiendish Kirk replica.
5“Second Chances” from Star Trek: The Next Generation, season six, episode twenty-four (aired in 1993).
6Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), chapter ten.
7Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 502.
8Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 418 (cited in chapter two).