Seven Ambiguities in Explaining the Human Memory System in the Principles of Neural Science Book

Memory is probably one of the most complex human cognitive functions, and in many years, thousands of studies have helped us better recognize this brain function. Professor Kandel and his colleagues have written one of the reference textbooks in neuroscience, which has also elaborated on the memory function. In this book, I encountered several ambiguities while explaining the memory system. Here, I share those points, either to find an answer to them or to let them be a suggestion for our future works. Professor Kandel has spent most of his meritorious lifetime studying the memory system; however, the brain is extremely complex, and as a result, we still have many years to comprehensively understand the neural mechanisms of brain functions. HIGHLIGHTS: The human memory system is not yet well identified. Imaging studies are not able to locate the memory storage sites of the brain. Current theories cannot explain the huge amount of memory storage in the brain. Episodic memories of animals should be different with a human episodic memory? PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY: The human memory system is very complex, and we still have many questions on that. One of the questions is about the location of episodic memory storage in humans. Is that really happening in the brain? One other question is about studying the episodic memory in animals: do they really have an episodic memory similar to the humans? Prof. Kandel in his very valuable book has explained the memory system; however, many ambiguities are still unsolved. For example, the neuroimaging methods are nearly never able to speak of the site of memory “storage” in the brain, whereas many of their results are used as evidence for identifying the location of memory storage in the brain. Also, the hippocampus is emphasized to be responsible for the storage of episodic memories in animals, whereas a human whore hippocampus is resected is still able to retrieve his memories from before the surgery. As a result, we speculate that, despite all the very precious findings of Prof. Kandel, we still have to work in this field to reveal its mysteries.