Stephen Downes

"An engram is a unit of cognitive information imprinted in a physical substance, theorized to be the means by which memories are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain or other biological tissue, in response to external stimuli." From where I sit, the engram is a purely theoretical unit and unnecessary in any account of learning (and hence, learning technology), but there is a sense to be made here if the idea of specific physical configurations responding to (or 'recognizing') specific physical input. The concept of the engram is supposed to stand for the semantic content this capacity to recognize represents. What's interesting is that engrams of simple conditioning are associated with specific physical regions of the brain (such as the lateral interpositus nucleus (LIP)) while more complex representations are largely distributed in the brain. So - simple conditioning appears 'natural' while complex representations appear 'learned'. Image: Science Direct.