BIO SCI 38 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Karl Lashley, American Psychologist, Cerebral Cortex
10 Jan 2020
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The american psychologist karl lashley (1890-1959) spent over 3 decades trying to localize memory engrams, largely to no avail. Published the landmark paper, in search of the engram in 1950. Performed experiments in rats using brain lesions (knife cuts) to try to localize regions of the neocortex that stored memory engrams. Failed to find any specific brain regions critical for the maze tasks he was employing. Instead showed that the extent of cortical damage correlated with memory impairment. Proposed that the memory engram was distributed throughout the cortex and that the cortex functioned via mass action and equipotentiality . By 1950, lashley had distilled his research into two theories: The principle of "mass action" stated that the cerebral cortex acts as one as a whole in many types of learning. Different areas of the brain participate in learning, and the memory traces are dispersed over the entire cortex.
