doesn’t it reach its limits at some point? Borges leaves that question to our imagination.

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” The reader may be led to wonder how Funes’ brain has the capacity to store all of that memory. He goes on to note that, even though Funes could remember every split second, he couldn’t classify or abstract from his memories.

The narrator is ashamed in the inexactness of his retelling: his own memory is “remote and weak,” in comparison to that of his subject, which resembles “a stammering greatness.” Unlike Funes, he says, “we all live by leaving behind” – life is impossible without forgetting. In the short story “Funes, the memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges invites us to imagine a man, Funes, who cannot forget anything. The brain, and the memory it uses, is a work in progress we are not now who we were then. We further argue that, if we accept that there is such a thing as the storage of information outside the brain – and that this organic, dynamic process can also be called “memory” – then we open the door to a very different world. Looking at natural and biological processes of incorporation can help us think of how incorporation of internal and external memory occurs in cognition. It is a relationship – where one biological or chemical process is incorporated into another, and changes both in a permanent way. Does this new definition of memory mean that everything is now a form of memory? We stress that memory still requires incorporation, that is, in corpore. In the extended definition, memory is the capacity to store and retrieve information. This definition is largely accepted in neuroscience but not explicitly stated. In this paper, we review these advances and describe an extended definition of memory. On the other hand, information technology has led many to claim that cognition is also extended, that is, memory may be stored outside of the brain.

On the one hand, molecular neurobiology has shown that memory is largely a neuro-chemical process, which includes conditioning and any form of stored experience. Recent developments in science and technology point to the need to unify, and extend, the definition of memory.

2Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom.

1Clinique de la Migraine de Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.

Gregorio Zlotnik 1* and Aaron Vansintjan 2*

Examples of encoding in psychology