REM and EM

Radical Embodied Memory (REM) and Ecological Memory (EM) are ideas I have been working on for the past 9 years through my work at Humboldt Universität, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and Heidelberg Universität. The basic idea is that memory is always a verb and a matter of communication.

The basic ideas presented here are: 1.that cognition is continuous with navigation (which means navigation itself can be understood as pre-reflective cognition); 2. that taking this seriously changes our understanding of landscape in ways that require non-binary vocabularies (i.e. using terms like 'mental' and 'physical' as dichotomies is no longer a productive strategy); and 3. the orientation and methods of cognitive neuroscience could be optimised by an ecological approach which looks at scales of complexity rather than stimulus-response and metricizes the experiment itself so it becomes part of the data and analysis. 4) that memory is best understood as remembering, as an embodied communicative act between other and encounter, including when that encounter is one’s own self or body 5) that this happens in nested ways in all encounters