The capacity for correlated semantic memories in the cortex

Abstract

1. Introduction 1. Introduction 2. Results 3. Discussion: a new... References One of the most fascinating aspects of the human brain is its ability to ascribe significance to and recognize meaning in objects and events, and more generally to make sense of the world. Semantic memory, comprising our acquired knowledge about the world, can be imagined to reflect, in its statistical structure, the complex, distributed, policentric structure of the neocortex where it resides. In contrast, the relatively much simpler network structure of the hippocampus, in particular of its CA3 field, where episodic memories have long been thought to be at least initially represented by unique patterns of neural activity, may lead to the limited set of outcomes of episodic memory retrieval: either the pattern is retrieved, or not. In the first case, retrieval, subjects reme ...