The figure and the ground of constructive brain functioning: Beyond explicit memory processes

An implicit assumption underlying many educational and psychological theories is that the brain is a memory system. Modern information processing theory, which dominates computer science, linguistics, psychology, economics, and biology, is a theory of the storage, organization, and retrieval of information. But did human intelligence evolve as the nervous system's solution to memory requirements or to some other problem (set) more inherently related to survival than memory? Taking an evolution-inspired (Edelman, 1987) biofunctional (Iran-Nejad, 1980) approach, this article argues that the human nervous system and its processes evolved in the natural environment to solve and generalize survival problems associated with what Gestalt psychologists identified as figure-ground relations in the realm of perception. It is concluded, therefore, that the brain's functional processes and their counterparts in learning can be more appropriately explained as fundamental figure-ground than memory processes.