[0]Memory and the Computational Brain, C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King
You can read the main thesis here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/978144431049...
Human language is like that, full of ambiguity, of implicit baggage.
If you feel "memory" means a recording of an event, or a photo book, then faced with the discovery that brains actually don't work like that you may want to state "neurons don't store memories!".
Are you claiming there is a large subset of neurologists how do not believe in long-term potentiation and other plasticity processes driving long-term retention of memoranda? If so, could you please show me to these crowds?
Long-term potentiality is not the point of disagreement. The disagreement is that individual memories are not recalled, as they are not stored, per se. The idea is that neurons acclimate to inputs, so that when we "recall" them we are not retrieving a "memory" from a storage location but instead are being activated in a way that allows us to preform a learned action.
I imagine those marble/cardboard diagrams of logic gates, where the cardboard flap will be left in a particular position after a marble has passed. In this way you can add numbers by dropping marbles into the appropriate input slots. Yet in this way, one could not derive prior calculations, as it does not store this information anywhere.
Book: [0]Memory and the Computational Brain, C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King
You can read the main thesis here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/978144431049...
Review: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262093114_Man_as_Ma...
Also please take all my comments with a grain of salt. I am not expert, I'm just trying to restate what I've read and understood.
The claim as I understand it is that there is no “memory” at all. What we experience as memories are simply input parameters that signal our brain to begin a particular function. In the way a neural net does not “remember” the training data but carries out what it “learned” anyway. I have problems explaining this idea as I think it is full of holes and would require some fundamental changes in how we think about feedback structures (I mean this neurologically as well as mathematical/computational).
Either way if most people don’t doubt memory storage in neurons then they are very quite about it. I’ve rarely ever read an argument for memory storage mechanisms in the brain. A good reason for this is simply the question: Where is it then? Neurons individually can’t really provide this sort of expansive data storage. And what they seem to be able to account for is too little and too widely spaced apart. Interestingly this spacing also provides a counter argument against the complex processing that would be required if there wasn’t a memory mechanism.
Personally I think the dismissal of memory comes with a lot of hubris attached, as well as a total lack of understanding information theory. Information theory itself seems to be popularly bemoaned by neuroscientist as well. But it’s hard to see the alternative and is a bit paradoxical since the only way I can seem to understand the “no memory” claim is by using a computer neural net metaphor.