SO, WHAT IS AN ENGRAM?
Prior to developing the system, my fascination with the brain’s capacity to retain information led me to read a number of books on the subject of human memory. Intuitively I knew that something must happen in the brain itself to underlie the existence of knowledge. And it seemed quite logical that in order to recall information at some later time, the brain must somehow file or store it. For centuries, scientists and philosophers had considered what must happen in the brain in order for the permanent store of memory to develop. Early pioneers in the fields of learning and memory thought that the brain was like a hot wax tablet and that memories would register on its surface like a stamp or a seal. That “stamp,” it was thought, was the permanent imprint on the brain that would underlie human memory. And it was this stamp that came to be known as the engram, a term coined by Richard Semon 1904. These early theories helped to explain the workings of memory and have long influenced the sci
