Electrical signals of memory and of the awareness of remembering

ABSTRACT—Learning factual information and accurately re-membering specific experiences from the past are central to human intellectual and social life. These extraordinary abilities require computations on diverse sorts of information rep-resented in the brain. Networks of neurons in the cerebral cortex are specialized for analyzing and representing such in-formation, whereas the storage of facts and events within these networks depends fundamentally on linking multiple rep-resentational fragments together. This cross-cortical linking function is disrupted in patients with amnesia. Electrical mea-sures of the brain in action, obtained while people perform feats of memory in laboratory settings, have been used to investigate the storage and retrieval of facts and episodes. Electrical signals associated with specific aspects of memory processing have been identified through research that constitutes part of a large