people not only have a life story, but they can remember and tell, or better: they produce remembering and telling. This form of memory allows them space-time travel into the past in which life episodes are made present: the self of the past, his feelings and thoughts at that time, the relations of places and other people. That These episodes not having been necessary, as they are reminded, is as important as the constitutive forget. Also bring the stories of their own stories into the cultural patterns of highly diverse range game.
Although we share simple forms of memory in animals, but the episodic-autobiographical memory is likely to include what is constitutive of the specifically human form of accelerated cultural evolution. Accordingly, it is hard to separate the natural components of this memory system of the social and cultural influences clean. In other words: The development of this memory system, with the Phase of the child's language acquisition using them should be guided by the entanglement of biological predisposition and social or cultural backgrounds well in mind. From this assumption is based on the interdisciplinary approach to the study of autobiographical memory, the trace of the neurophysiologist Hans Markowitsch (Bielefeld) and the social psychologist Harald Welzer (Essen / Witten-Herdecke) for several years with a research group and recently at a meeting at the Essen Institute for Advanced Institute for discussion.
This "biosocial" Access to account is that the natural history of the emergence of a human individual (and his brain) from the beginning a the interaction with others (and their brains) is. The brain development is itself influenced by social interactions, and these interactions take place in a culturally translated by co-evolutionary environment. With that the interdisciplinary approach to Markowitsch and Welzer also the sense of avoiding a hard disciplinary line of brain research, namely the inevitable methodological limitation to the individual brain.
The findings of brain researchers will be from this perspective a detail of a broader picture in which organic state pictures, psycho-social stages of development and cultural contexts related to each other. Free interviews and standardized tests detect the psychological and cultural dimensions of autobiographical recollection after, during the imaging procedure shows that neural networks are activated when people remember certain events.
fact that the autobiographical memory works differently depending on age, is this not in itself a very surprising result. But charm and promise of the interdisciplinary access depend not least on the matching of such phenomenological results with the neural activity patterns that provide the images from the scanner, you should from the new heuristics and hypotheses to be generated.
That the interpretation of images but a struggle with many In determinations and open questions about the mechanisms of storage and retrieval is more complex memories, demonstrated some of the contributions of the Essen meeting, which were received on the neural basis of autobiographical memory. David Rubin (Duke) presented evidence to support of his approach to the view that autobiographical memory system as an integration instance basal processing units - the sensory systems, emotion, language - which each have their own mechanisms of encoding, storage and retrieval, and contribute with different weights to episodic remembering can.
Taking Andrew Mayes (Manchester) Review of competing neurobiological models of autobiographical Memory system for the indication lights, the handle to such a fast reduction strategy. But such a split into separate modules does not change the fact that one has to deal in the case of autobiographical memory with a high-level phenomenon, the conceptualization is far from easy. That, under these conditions at all different neural networks reasonably differ significantly from each other and assigned to individual memory types can be, it must be almost amazed - even if the central hypotheses have wide latitude.
Up to Bradd Shore (Atlanta) stimulating and entertaining discussion of the way how American middle-class families establish their family memories, was the binding force of such hypotheses, however not extend. And Anja Lemke (Frankfurt) flush memory of the famous beginning of the autobiographical writings of Michel Leiris - the invocation of the entry into the world of language led as a case of a child's paradise of immediacy rather in that region of the basics, before Harald Welzer with had warned look for better interdisciplinary cooperation.
For the pragmatic maxims, that summed up the experience with a Welzer from the social and natural scientists assembled research team were: no major issues Provide never talk about basics, do not raise deep conceptual problems. The "big questions" aimed not least to the relevant brain tendency of some researchers to charge philosophical problems. What to see is that the humanities are not hidden from the insight that is on the mind to make first waiver, wants him to move to different scientific cultures across his body.
