Self-Organized Short-Term Memories

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a nonlinear dynamical system with many degrees of freedom can form transient short-term memories of impulse sequences, with memory duration increasing as system complexity grows, supported by laboratory experiments.

Contribution

It reveals the existence of transient short-term memories in high-dimensional nonlinear systems and shows how memory duration scales with system size.

Findings

Memory duration increases with degrees of freedom

Transient memories are observable in laboratory experiments

System coarsens and forgets impulses over time

Abstract

We report short-term memory formation in a nonlinear dynamical system with many degrees of freedom. The system ``remembers'' a sequence of impulses for a transient period, but it coarsens and eventually ``forgets'' nearly all of them. The memory duration increases as the number of degrees of freedom in the system increases. We demonstrate the existence of these transient memories in a laboratory experiment.