(Week 8) Memory: How is the process of recognition dependent upon superimposition?

“The structures which memory stores are not actual little pictures, but quasi-pictures, “representations” in the sense that the information stored cause a change in the brain that encodes or molds it in a certain way and in a particular “place” in the brain. […] What is involved in remembering is the association and recollection of previously impressed material when the original is no longer present to us. If the object should become actually present to our senses again and we can compare our mental image to it for accuracy, we are engaged in a process of recognizing rather than of remembering or recollecting.” – Models for the Memory (chapter 1)

“Superimpositional storage: memories are blended, not laid down independently once and for all, and are reconstructed rather than reproduced. […] By ‘superimpositional storage’ I mean the property that one network of units and connections may be used to store a number of representations, so long as they are sufficiently distinct to coexist without confusion.’” – John Sutton

Before I talk about superimposition, I would like to contrast the process of recognizing and remembering/recollecting. The first excerpt above explains to us that every new character we take into memory will affect all previously impressed material of similar character: in the sense that if one is to recollect in his or her head what a chair looks like, he or she will not remember a specific chair – unless it is by choice, and only possible if this specific chair is particularly distinct to all other chairs the person has encountered – but an ideal version of a chair influenced by all the various “quasi-pictures” of chairs already embedded in memory. Recollecting would be to conjure up an image of a chair without having actually present, while recognizing would be to see a chair and to recognize it is a chair when compared to all the images of the chairs (or a collective ideal image of a chair) in the mind.

            The second excerpt is my interpretation to the first part of the first excerpt. Superimposition is the way our memories try to remember and distinguish all the different shapes and sizes (etc.) of chairs someone has encountered in real life. Although, since the brain’s memory function works via connectivity of associations, the ability to distinguish between chairs is dependent upon how orthogonal one chair is to another – for two sets of chairs that are similar within the brain, it is most likely that it will be harder for the brain to distinguish between the two.

            In other words, superimpositional storage plays a huge role in recollection and recognition in that it interprets new memory traces not by its individual characteristics but with everything and anything that is a memory trace in the brain. The more similar the new trace is to any other traces already in the brain, the harder it will be to distinguish because it is presumed that the more similar the memory traces are, the higher chance that they would be processed within the same (or closely interwoven) network of units and connections (groups of neural linkages), potentially leading to distortion or error when the memory is needed to be tapped.

            Some would say that superimpositional storage has a major downside in that every memory is practically distorted the moment one recollects something for the first time, while I would argue that this is probably the reason the brain can store a practically infinite amount of memory while never running out of “disk space” like a computer would.