CORTICOCORTICAL CONNECTIONS, NONLINEAR MULTICOLUMNAR PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED NETWORKS AND MEMORY PROCESSES IN HUMANS - A REVIEW

This review outlines the knowledge gained in the last 50 years concern ing the neuroanatomy and neuro-psychophysiology of memory processes in humans. The first part traces the history of the most important findi ngs from ablations of specific cerebral structures and/or stimulations performed on numerous patients using different surgical and neurophys iological methodologies. The interpretation of these findings is discu ssed. The most recent hypotheses on the neuronal substrates likely to be involved in memory and recall processes are then presented. In part icular the concept of parallel distributed non-linear multicolumnar co rtical networks is described as well as the recent hypothesis concerni ng the chaotic oscillatory properties of these complex non-linear neur onal systems which are said to behave as chaotic deterministic attract ors.