I had heard, 15+ years ago (visiting neuroscience exhibits somewhere), about experiments involving people who, due to brain damage, can no longer form new memories. And Wiki agrees with what I remember hearing about some cases: that, although they couldn’t remember any new events, if you had them practice a skill, they would get good at it, and on future occasions would remain good at it (despite not remembering having learned it). I’d heard that an exception was that they couldn’t get good at Tetris.
Takeaway: “Memory” is not a uniform thing, and things that disrupt memory don’t necessarily disrupt all of it. So beware of that in any such testing. In fact, given some technique that purportedly blocks memory formation, “Exactly what memory does it block?” is a primary thing to investigate.
There was an era in a scientific community where they were interested in the “kinds of learning and memory that could happen in de-corticated animals” and they sort of homed in on the basal ganglia (which, to a first approximation “implements habits” (including bad ones like tooth grinding)) as the locus of this “ability to learn despite the absence of stuff you’d think was necessary for your naive theory of first-order subjectively-vivid learning”.
(The cerebellum also probably has some “learning contribution” specifically for fine motor skills, but it is somewhat selectively disrupted just by alcohol: hence the stumbling and slurring. I don’t know if anyone yet has a clean theory for how the cerebellum’s full update loop works. I learned about alcohol/cerebellum interactions because I once taught a friend to juggle at a party, and she learned it, but apparently only because she was drunk. She lost the skill when sober.)
I had heard, 15+ years ago (visiting neuroscience exhibits somewhere), about experiments involving people who, due to brain damage, can no longer form new memories. And Wiki agrees with what I remember hearing about some cases: that, although they couldn’t remember any new events, if you had them practice a skill, they would get good at it, and on future occasions would remain good at it (despite not remembering having learned it). I’d heard that an exception was that they couldn’t get good at Tetris.
Takeaway: “Memory” is not a uniform thing, and things that disrupt memory don’t necessarily disrupt all of it. So beware of that in any such testing. In fact, given some technique that purportedly blocks memory formation, “Exactly what memory does it block?” is a primary thing to investigate.
There was an era in a scientific community where they were interested in the “kinds of learning and memory that could happen in de-corticated animals” and they sort of homed in on the basal ganglia (which, to a first approximation “implements habits” (including bad ones like tooth grinding)) as the locus of this “ability to learn despite the absence of stuff you’d think was necessary for your naive theory of first-order subjectively-vivid learning”.
(The cerebellum also probably has some “learning contribution” specifically for fine motor skills, but it is somewhat selectively disrupted just by alcohol: hence the stumbling and slurring. I don’t know if anyone yet has a clean theory for how the cerebellum’s full update loop works. I learned about alcohol/cerebellum interactions because I once taught a friend to juggle at a party, and she learned it, but apparently only because she was drunk. She lost the skill when sober.)