Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory > Status Update

"The point is that cognitive psychology (including human brain mapping) is not neuroscience, as it does not investigate the mechanisms of the functioning brain." - the limitations of brain mapping have been obvious all through the book, but is it is also not obviously psychology either.

"As illustrated in numerous scientific findings reveiwed in this box, each cognitive process is mediated by many brain regions, and these brain regions are activated at different times and interact with one another." - does this imply the 'cognitive processes' are complex collections of brain actions, more like programs than the instructions of a programing language?

"Arrows illustrate connections between regions and direction of information flow" - the most sophisticated modeling of memory so far in the book. They are the results of animal vivisection, based of the principle that humans have the same brain proceeses - which might be an argument for not doing these experiments in the first place.

"Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment patients shift from pattern separation to pattern completion...in the real world this might mean aMCI patients having a high rate of false memories to new related items" - pattern separation vs pattern completion are types of behaviour under experimental conditions, not unfortunately things that brains do.

"These striking similarities in paradigms, cognitive processes and brain regions suggest that working memory is simply another label for imagery" - what about words? My working memory is primarily auditory, and I 'hear' not 'see' it's contents.

"The term retinotopic map refers to activations in early visual regions where adjacent locations in the visual field are mapped onto adjacent locations on the cortext (which is the way that the visual field maps onto the retina of each eye" - to what level of detail? The retina consists of individual rod and cone cells can we map them to individual neurons?

"...individual participant results assess whether the exact same brain regions are associated with different two different cognitive processes, while analyzing separate groups of participants blurs activations such as might appear similar when they are actually distinct." - the location of the process is visible, but the internal structure underlying the process is invisible?

"[Another way for scientists] to increase their chance of success is to try and find evidence that contradicts a commonly held view" - poor Neurology, not only it is painfully difficult to go forward, some of its practitioners are determined to go backwards.

"Participants have free will and they often do unexpected things" - particularly ironic in this context, their 'freedom' is merely our ignorance of how their brain's function is determined. The more we know about the brain, the less 'free' they would appear.

"The classic view is that the reduction is the magnitude of brain activity reflects more fluent or efficient processing for repeated events. Such reductions in brain activity occur whether or not the event is processed consciously..." - so learning can be passive, and attention helps, but how so: makes learning quicker, improves retention, makes stuff stick that otherwise wouldn't?