How is experience stored in the brain? What happens to the record of experience when specific brain structures are damaged? Is there one kind of memory or many? Newly developed technology and new experimental findings are providing the beginnings ofa sketch of how the brain accomplishes learning and memory.
Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.
Larry Squire received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the Department of Psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine, San Diego (UCSD). Currently, he is Professor of Psychiatry at USCD and Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Diego. His interests are in the organization of memory and its neurological foundations. He and his research group study neurological disorders of human memory and the anatomy of memory in monkeys. He has published 150 scientific articles and a book Memory and Brain. He is Secretary of the Society for Neuroscience and Editor of the journal Behavioural Neuroscience.
