Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids that rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are stored only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. John Sutton juxtaposes historical and contemporary debates to show that psychology can attend to culture, complexity, self, and history.