4. Professor Rosensweig’s Experiments
Professor Mark Rosensweig, a Californian psychologist and neurophysiologist, spent years studying the individual brain cell and its capacity for storage. As early as 1974 he stated that if we fed in ten new items of information every second for an entire lifetime to any normal human brain that brain would be considerably less than half full. He emphasised that memory problems have nothing to do with the capacity of the brain but rather with the self-management of that apparently limitless capacity.
5. Professor Penfield’s Experiments
Professor Wilder Penfield of Canada came across his discovery of the capacity of human memory by mistake. He was stimulating individual brain cells with tiny electrodes for the purpose of locating areas of the brain that were the cause of patients’ epilepsy.
To his amazement he found that when he stimulated certain individual brain cells, his patients were suddenly recalling experiences from their past. The patients emphasised that it was not simple memory, but that they actually were reliving the entire experience, including smells, noises, colours, movement, tastes. These experiences ranged from a few hours before the experimental session to as much as forty years earlier.
Penfield suggested that hidden within each brain cell or cluster of brain cells lies a perfect store of every event of our past and that if we could find the right stimulus we could replay the entire film.