Return to note 7 Enactionism extends the linguistic theory of connectionism, specifically the “bi-directional associative memory (BAM) model”
(p. 374), which according to Warren Tryon (1998) fulfills all the explanatory requirements established in 1990 by Jones and Barlow and Brewin et al.
(1996) for the biological mechanisms of posttraumatic stress disorder. The BAM model of connectionism, as explained by Tryon, proposes an associative model for memory formation in which stimuli are associated with responses, other stimuli, and responses with other responses thereby forming “memories of associations by modifying connection weights that are analogs of synaptic connections between pairs of simulated neurons”
(p. 375). Two properties of this model of connectionism important to the discussion of enactionism and PTSD, are that a) memories are stored across the whole network, across all synapses, and “nondestructively on top of”
and connected to each other, and b) “each member of an associate pair is sufficient stimulus to recall its partner,”
even to the extent that a “complete memory can be returned given a partial stimulus”
(also known as the “pattern completion property”) (p. 375). In other words, connectionism proposes a network theory of memory formation in which patterns of synaptic or neural connections that recur repeatedly are reinforced or ‘remembered,’ whereas patterns of connections that do not recur are not reinforced or ‘not remembered.’
Return to note 8 Interestingly, Freud also posited that most of what humans know was implicit knowledge, but his theories provided no biological mechanism for that implicit knowledge that could be investigated empirically. Enactionism and parallel-distributed processing theories of memory, such as connectionism, suggest biological mechanisms for implicit knowledge and they are being investigated empirically today.
Return to note 9 By the phrase “sense-carrying,” I here intend to correlate directly for the reader of this paper the common linguistic notions of the cognitive “making sense” or “to sense” with the biological sensory data collected by our sensory organs.