Over the past century, humankind has made tremendous progress in many areas of science, including genetics and computer science. However, until now, the inner essence of the human "I" remains a mystery, and scientists are unable to reveal the secrets of human memory, despite the high development of medicine and related areas of human knowledge. Where is the memory? How does modern science answer this question?
Recently, there is more and more information about research in psychology, neuroscience, neurobiology and other fields that study the functions of the human brain and confirm that a person's memory is not entirely within the human brain.
Three cases can be considered as confirmation of this fact. One of our friends went through clinical death during the operation. After coming out of a coma, she did not remember anything about herself or about the reality around her due to the cessation of oxygen supply to the brain for a while. It seemed that the memory was lost forever. However, after a long treatment and with the help of the family, memory functions recovered. Where was the memory stored when the nerve cells were damaged?
The second case has been reported in several medical articles recently. Experiments were carried out to study memory under hypnosis. It has long been known that under hypnosis a person can remember such details and details that he has completely forgotten. One of the subjects recalled that, being in the uterine state, he felt that they wanted to kill him. Later, from a conversation with his mother, he found out that during pregnancy she thought about an abortion, but then dropped this thought. Where was the memory in the embryo if its brain had not yet formed?
Wolf Messing, whose performance I was fortunate enough to see, had the ability to recall events that occurred before his birth, and could also predict the future. So he saw that the Second World War would end in May 1945 with the defeat of fascism. He warned Vasily Stalin not to fly by plane to compete with a sports team, but to travel by train. Indeed, the plane crashed and everyone died. How do images of real events appear in the human brain, of which he is not a witness?
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come to the conclusion that human memory is capable of storing much more information than previously thought. The basis for this conclusion was the experiment put by scientists on "memorization".
Until now, science has not established which part of the brain is responsible for memory. Academician L. Polezhaev claims that the brain of a newborn baby contains 100 billion nerve cells - neurons. Their number remains unchanged throughout a person's life, and as intelligence develops, the number of connections between neurons increases. From our five senses, hundreds of millions of signals are sent to the brain every moment, thanks to which images of the surrounding reality are formed inside the brain. If we carry out mathematical calculations based on the number of signals received and the number of brain cells and their connections, and calculate how many events in time (in hours, days or months) can fit in our memory, the result is stunning. It turns out that memory can store events that happened in a person's life,only for a few months and no more.
It can be assumed that human memory is recorded at the molecular level, not at the cellular level. However, there is no evidence of this. Or is memory outside the physical human brain? Some scientists (Rupert Sheldrake) believe that memory is stored in some kind of energy field that we cannot feel. The possibilities of modern science also do not allow either to confirm or exclude this. Probably, only reaching a higher level of knowledge will reveal the secret of human memory.
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Mikhail Petrushko