If brain regions were highly interconnected, and the brain’s functions distributed and integrated one with another, then damage to any one area would produce a global impairment, blurred across multiple faculties and affecting all of mental life. The notion that the study of brain injury can elucidate the organization of memory was itself a matter for empirical inquiry. Memory is affected but only as part of a more fundamental defect in a specific kind of information processing. Today, aphasia is considered a deficit of language, and agnosia a deficit of visual perception. And he viewed aphasia and agnosia as disorders of memory, wherein (in aphasia, for example) patients have lost their memory for words or memory for the movements needed to produce words. For example, in his classic treatment of memory disorders, Ribot (1881) considered amnesias due to neurological injury together with amnesias due to psychological trauma. One needs only to sample nineteenth-century writings to recognize how differently memory was viewed then and now. Even the question of which cognitive operations reflect memory and which depend on other faculties has a long history of empirical work and discussion. What is memory? Is it one thing or many? What are the concepts and categories that guide our current understanding of how memory works and that underlie the classification of its disorders? It is sometimes not appreciated that the concepts and categories used in current discussions of memory are not fixed and were not easily established. This tradition of research has continued to prove fruitful and has yielded a broad range of fundamental information about the structure and organization of memory. In the earliest systematic writings about human memory, it was already appreciated that the study of memory impairment can provide valuable insights into the structure and organization of normal function ( Ribot 1881, Winslow 1861).
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