On Wednesday, November 13, Professor C. Randy Gallistel gave a talk hosted by Barnard’s Cognitive Sciences department. This was the last of a series of three speakers as a part of their Cognitive Science Symposium.

We, as humans, do not truly comprehend the complexity of our own brains. In his talk, Professor Gallistel endeavored to make his points that the brian and the methods of memory storage that we learn are oversimplified and “do not make sense”.

To begin the talk, the head of Barnard’s Cognitive Science Department, Professor Ann Senghas, welcomed everybody and handed the mic over to Professor Brendan Fleig-Goldstein, who briefly introduced Professor Gallistel. 

Gallistel is a Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University who has greatly contributed to cognitive science and neuroscience. According to Professor Fleig-Goldstein, Professor Gallistel is “one of the founders of the field” of cognitive sciences. He then announced that Professor Gallistel will be joining him next semester in teaching Intro to Cognitive Sciences at Barnard. 

Professor Gallistel started by discussing the commonly learned synaptic theory of memory, or the idea that memories are stored in the brain through changes in synaptic connections (the connections between the ends of neurons). He immediately intrigued the audience by decisively debunking and almost ridiculing this theory, saying that “it can’t possibly be true, it doesn’t make any sense.” 

Professor Gallistel argues in his talk that we need a new story about how memory is stored because the synaptic theory of memory is a  conceptual failure and an empirical failure that “doesn’t account for anything we know about associative learning.” He also made the points that molecular information storage is many orders of magnitude more compact, energy efficient, and faster than storing the information in the synapses.

Frederick Johannson’s PhD thesis results are strong evidence in favor of Professor Gallistel’s argument. Johannson’s main findings are that the interval between the conditional stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus is computed in time and stored inside the Purkinje cell in the cerebellar cortex, which is used to control the gap between the two stimuli. The Purkinje cell is a type of neuron found in the cerebellar cortex (an area of the brain responsible for processing information to produce motor output). 

In the experiment that Professor Gallistel discussed, Johannson et al, put an electrode on a Purkinje cell. By stimulating the climbing fiber of that cell a number of times at a specific interval, the cell would stop firing and fire again at the interval it had learned. Gallistel asserts that the only possible thing that could make the cell resume its firing is the memory of the time interval it had learned.

Above all, Professor Gallistel emphasized the complexity and brilliance of the brain. He argued that it is time to move past the simplistic picture of a neuron that was created by Charles Scott Sherrington back in 1906 (a version of which is below). Gallistel acknowledges Sherrington’s immense contributions to the field of neuroscience, but declares that his picture of the neuron is “absurdly out of date.” According to Gallistel, in this picture the “inside of the cell is drawn as a soup” but in reality, there is the nucleus, ribosomes, and other organelles that are not accounted for by this picture.  

Professor Gallistel concluded by comparing brains to the internet and positing that it is time for a “new picture” of cognitive science, in which neurons are servers and exchange results of their latest computations through axons and synapses. He argued that the brain is an incredibly powerful computer, since each nucleus can carry 750 MB of information, and the brain contains billions of neurons. 

Professor Gallistel’s obvious enthusiasm for the subject kept the entire audience engaged and eager to hear more. He offered an extremely compelling and fascinating argument. This was the last speaker in Barnard’s Cognitive Science Symposium, but the department is committed to making new information and ideas such as this accessible and will host events like this in the future. 

This talk was part of Barnard’s Cognitive Science Symposium.

Header via Bwarchives

Structure of a Neuron Diagram via Healthline