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The Mystery of How Memories Form Just Got Less Mysterious
I use the word 'engram' to denote this permanent change wrought by a stimulus; the sum of such engrams in an organism may be called its 'engram-store,' among which we must distinguish inherited and from acquired engrams." —Richard Wolfgang Semon (Engraphic Action of Stimuli on the Individual, 1921)Ninety-nine years ago, a "little known but influential" memory researcher from Germany, Richard Wolfgang Semon (1859-1918), who first described the concept of a 'memory engram,' had his catchphrase posthumously immortalized in a 1921 paper, "Engraphic Action of Stimuli on the Individual." Semon was a zoologist and evolutionary biologist who had a hunch that 'memory traces' (engrams) were encoded into the nervous system and speculated that some