ABSTRACT: The Sleep Elaboration-Awake Pruning (SEAP) theory of memory: long term memories grow in complexity during sleep and undergo selection while awake. Clinical, psychopharmacological and creative implications.
Charlton BG, Andras P.
Med Hypotheses. 2009 Jul;73(1):1-4. Epub 2009 Apr 5. 
Long term memory (LTM) systems need to be adaptive such that they enhance an organism's reproductive fitness and self-reproducing in order to maintain their complexity of communications over time in the face of entropic loss of information. Traditional 'representation-consolidation' accounts conceptualize memory adaptiveness as due to memories being 'representations' of the environment, and the longevity of memories as due to 'consolidation' processes. The assumption is that memory representations are formed while an animal is awake and interacting with the environment, and these memories are consolidated mainly while the animal is asleep. So the traditional view of memory is 'instructionist' and assumes that information is transferred from the environment into the brain. By contrast, we see memories as arising endogenously within the brain's LTM system mainly during sleep, to create complex but probably maladaptive memories which are then simplified ('pruned') and selected during the awake period. When awake the LTM system is brought into a more intense interaction with past and present experience. Ours is therefore a 'selectionist' account of memory, and could be termed the Sleep Elaboration-Awake Pruning (or SEAP) theory.
Read the full abstract here.
No comments:
Post a Comment