It’s important to have a grounding in neurotransmission, Long Term Potentiation and the neurological underpinnings of memory to get a real handle on what the articles are saying.
As I said, they’re either written for a naive reader (so a lot of the underpinings are missing) … or else an expert reader who is not knowledgable about the specific topic — in which latter case, likewise a lot of the underpinings are missing … but they’re not bad, if you do have a grasp of those underpinnings (especially the more advanced ones dealing with new developments).
Another thing you might find interesting is to look into things like corpus callostectomies. They give fascinating insights into consciousness — the early study of the patient asked what he wanted to be when he grew up is particularly eye-opening (I can’t remember what it was he said, exactly … fireman or something … but, as he said it, his hand wrote ‘astronaut’).
Take a look at the phenomenon of Blindsight too (C.f. Weiskrantz).
Also, look into the 500 millisecond delay between stimulus and conscious awareness (C.f. Libet). It takes a half second before we become consciously aware of a stimulus but, when questioned what time the stimulus occurred, we will state the correct time, even though we could not have been aware at the time; the brain is ‘aware’ of its limitation and factors it in. Our conscious life is that of a time-traveller, as it were … experiencing reality in a sequence of temporal saccades, forever jumping backwards in time to close the gap between then and now. I’ve even consciously experienced something like it myself, although, over a longer timeframe (about a second or three) … seeing a man on the other side of the street get up off the floor, where he had fallen, only for my brain to rewind reality to factor in that he hadn’t (because he was dead), so I not simply couldn’t have seen him get up but hadn’t. It just rewound and filled in the gap to account for what my brain had seen but my mind hadn’t; a very odd experience yet, simultaneously, the oddest thing about it was that it didn’t seem odd at all, but made perfect sense — I just travelled back in cognitive time and rolled the film again, fast forwarding to catch up with now (as it was then) … it made perfect sense to me that my brain should do that, it was just odd to see my brain at work as if on the outside whilst on the inside (almost an out-of-body experience).
I warn you though … once you get into neuroscience and neuropsychology, it becomes a lifelong obsession: you get all excited about new discoveries about the function of Sodium and Potassium in neurotransmission … and when you learn that the Dopamine system is not a reward system but a difference alarm system — I‘ve been doing it for thirty years and I still can’t let go of it 😉 You’ll also refuse to take an antidepressant as long as you live unless you are severely neurochemically imbalanced (and even then you won’t be entirely comfortable about it).
