Self Comes to Mind

integrated representation of a cohesive perceptual experience would no longer be functional. Normal recall would collapse because the same cells that support integrated perception also support integrated memory records.
    Alas for the health of the traditional view, this prediction is not borne out by the reality of neuropsychological findings. The highlights of this dissenting reality are as follows. Patients with damage to the anterior brain regions—frontal and temporal—report normal perception and display only selective deficits in the recall and recognition of unique objects and events.
    The patients may describe in great detail the contents of a picture they are shown, describe the picture correctly, as being that of a party (birthday, wedding), and yet fail to recognize that it was their own party. Anterior damage compromises neither the integrated perception of the whole scene nor the interpretation of its meaning. Nor does it compromise perception of the numerous objects that comprise the picture and the retrieval of their meaning—people, chairs, tables, birthday cake, candles, festive attire, and so forth. Anterior damage permits the integrated view and the view of the parts. It takes an entirely different placement of damage to compromise the access to the separable memory components, those that correspond to varied objects or to features of objects, such as color or movement. Such access is compromised, but only by damage involving sectors of the cerebral cortex positioned farther back in the brain, near the main sensory and motor regions.
    In conclusion, damage to the integrative, associative cortices does not preclude integrated perception, or recall of the parts that constitute a set, or recall of the meaning of nonunique sets of objects and features. Such damage makes one specific and major dent in the recall process: it precludes the recall of uniqueness and specificity of objects and scenes . A unique birthday party continues to be a birthday party, but it is no longer someone’s specific birthday party, complete with place and date line. Only damage to the mind-making early sensory cortices and their surrounds precludes recall of the information that once was processed by those cortices and recorded nearby.
A Brief Aside on Kinds of Memory
     
    The distinctions we can make among different types of memory relate not only to the subject matter that is the focus of recall, but also to the range of circumstances surrounding that focus, as represented in a particular recall situation. In this light, several traditional labels commonly applied to memories (generic versus unique, semantic versus episodic) do not capture the wealth of the phenomenon. For instance, if I am asked about a particular house where I once lived, either through a verbal prompt or through a photograph, I am likely to recall a wealth of memoranda related to my personal experiences of that house; this includes the reconstruction of sensorimotor patterns of varied modality and type, such that even personal feelings may be reenacted. If, instead, I am asked to evoke the general concept of house, I may well recall the same unique house, in my mind’s eye, and then go about articulating the generic concept of house. In those circumstances, however, the nature of the question alters the course of the recollection process. The purpose of the second request probably inhibits the evocation of the rich personal details that were so prominent in the previous one. Rather than a personal remembrance, I will simply process a set of facts that satisfy my need of the moment, which is to define house .
    The distinction between the first and the second examples resides with the degree of complexity in the recollection process. That complexity can be measured by the number and variety of items recalled in connection with a particular target or event. In other words, the larger the sensorimotor context that is reenacted relative to a particular entity or event, the greater the complexity . The memory of unique entities and events, namely, those that are both unique and personal, requires high-complexity contexts. We can glean a hierarchical progression of complexity here: unique-personal entities and events require the highest complexity; unique-nonpersonal entities and events are next; nonunique entities and events require least.
    For practical purposes, it is useful to say that a given term is recalled at one of the above levels—nonunique or