Saturday, September 30, 2006

The mysteries of memory...

This is a republish of my post on the 19th September:

All these doth that great receptacle of memory, with its many and indescribable departments, receive, to be recalled and brought forth when required; each, entering by its own door, is hid up in it. And yet the things themselves do not enter it, but only the images of the things perceived are there ready at hand for thought to, recall.” St. Augustine, 398 A.D., "The Confessions of St. Augustine", Book 10, Chapter 8, paragraph 13.

I came across this quote when looking for a broad definition of memory I could reference to. The whole chapter is good, but these two sentences sum up for me what memory does. Although this was written more than 16 centuries ago, it is still very relevant to the current state of the art in memory research, at least from my point of view. As a quote on memory, I haven't found better yet, and it was the perfect way to start my first year report!

Hello (again...)

My name is Paul, and I am a PhD student at the University of Reading, UK, and am part of the Cybernetics Intelligence Research Group (CIRG). Very briefly, my research is concerned with the examination of memory, or more specifically, working memory as the interface between memory and cognition. My extended interests cover far more than this though. I hope to more completely describe my work and interests over the next few posts.

I started this blog on the 18th of September this year, with the intention of making notes on my work, and comments on the work of others which I have come across - essentially a means of throwing ideas at myself, and a way of making my notes accessible wherever I go. If anyone else happened across them and happened to take an interest (and provide comments!), then that would be welcome a bonus.

However, I started on a bad note - whining about instant tea. So, this is my attempt to get back on track. For those unlucky few who have come across this blog before: apologies, all the rubbish that was here before has now been deleted. One thing I must mention first of all. My main motivation in reverting back to my original intention for this blog is a blog called "Developing Intelligence" http://develintel.blogspot.com/. This I would have to recommend to anyone - the paper reviews are interesting, and it provides good links to other sources. This is the aim for my blog - albeit with more personal thoughts on relation to my research from time to time.