Organic Memory and the Engram. From Nineteenth-Century Theories to Modern Cognitivism

Abstract

This paper takes into account a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biological description of mnestic processes: a relatively unknown paradigm labeled ‘organic memory’. Under the influence of Spencer and Haeckel, several authors (the most famous were Theodule Ribot and Richard Semon) described hereditary facts in mnemonic terms, providing an early scientific description of mnestic processes and retrieval. An outline of the relation between these ‘organic memory’ theories and the new theoretical framework about memory introduced by Endel Tulving in 1970-80 is then provided, describing the role of the ‘engram’ concept in the cognitivistic description of the retrieval processes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.