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How does memory figure into consciousness?
The basic building block of all cognition is the memory we have. We have sensory impressions coming in and they leave traces which we can then reactivate in the form of cognitions and reassemble in all sorts of complicated ways, including coming up with new ideas. But the basic fabric of cognition is memory traces. The cortex is this vast storehouse of representations. So when I said earlier that cognition is not intrinsically conscious, that’s just saying that memories are, for the most part, latent. You couldn’t possibly be conscious of all of those billions of bits of information you have imbibed during your lifetime. So what is conscious is drawn up from this vast storehouse of long-term memory into short-term working memory. The conscious bit is just a tiny fragment of what’s there.
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You say the function of memory is to predict our future needs. And the hippocampus, which we typically regard as the brain’s memory center, is used for imagining the future as well as storing information about the past.
The only point of learning from past events is to better predict future events. That’s the whole point of memory. It’s not just a library where we file away everything that’s happened to us. And the reason why we need to keep a record of what’s happened in the past is so that we can use it as a basis for predicting the future. And yes, the hippocampus is every bit as much for imagining the future as remembering the past. You might say it’s remembering the future.
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Today, oxygen makes up around 21 per cent of Earth’s atmosphere. Its oxygen-rich nature is ideal for large and complex organisms, like humans, that require the gas to survive. But early in Earth’s history, oxygen levels were much lower – and they are likely to be low again in the distant future.
Kazumi Ozaki at Toho University in Funabashi, Japan, and Chris Reinhard at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta modelled Earth’s climatic, biological and geological systems to predict how atmospheric conditions on Earth will change.
The researchers say that Earth’s atmosphere will maintain high levels of oxygen for the next billion years before dramatically returning to low levels reminiscent of those that existed prior to what is known as the Great Oxidation Event of about 2.4 billion years ago.
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