driving a familiar route in my car today got me thinking about memory--i
was wondering if anyone had thoughts/theories/experiments on the following:
what kind of neural mechanisms might be responsible for remebering a
sequence of events. for example, as a drummer, i learn lots of songs,
when i actually play a song i know well, the act of playing one measure
leads easily to the act of playing (remembering) the next measure.
whereas if i were to try to recall one particular measure of music with
no reference to the rest of the song it would be much more difficult.
i imagine the same is for dancers--one step in practicing is to learn an
individual
part of a dance, but another step is learning how the individual steps
flow together in real time.
so it seems like as a network fires to initiate a complex sequence (one
measur of music, or one part of a dance) this triggers another network to
initiate
the next sequence and so forth. this probably requires cues from other
areas like the auditory cortex to anticipate what comes next in the
music. so would this type of memory be primarily "stored" in the
hippocampus, cerebellum, pma, basal ganglia, etc, or distributed across
the whole cortex?
any one care?
-neal prakash
