International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

The often used analogy of computers memory with memory as a function of the brain is very misleading, as strongly emphasized by H.von FOERSTER in many of his papers (1981).

This author pointed out that, "Unfortunately, some anthropomorphically inclined quipsters have dubbed the storage system "memory", and henceforth, some naive psychologists – and, alas, some neurophysiologists – who believed the engineers to know what they were talking about, kept looking for analogues of magnetic tapes, dics, cores and drums within the nervous system" (Quoted by K.L. WILSON, 1979, p.31).

This is of course a quite demonstrative example of abuse of metaphor and even unwarranted analogy.

A computer's so-called "memory" is in effect a data storage device, which contains records, "… also the name properly given… in the pre-semantic confusion times… to those thin black disks which play back the music recorded on them" (1981, p.236). Data simply occupy some room on a hard disk or on a diskette. A datum can be searched for and found in a specific place, while the brain has no very specific places where "something" would be stored. It rather seems to be more of an organized, modifiable, but altogether autopoietic network of subnetworks.