Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A physical alteration thought to occur in living neural tissue in response to stimuli, posited as an explanation for memory.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A postulated physical or biochemical change in neural tissue that represents a memory.
  • noun Scientology A painful, negative mental image representing a past event.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a postulated biochemical change (presumably in neural tissue) that represents a memory

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[German Engramm : en– + Greek -gramma, -gram.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

en +‎ -gram

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Examples

Comments

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  • “The idea that experience leaves some trace in the brain goes back at least to Plato’s Theaetetus metaphor of a stamp on wax, and in 1904 the German scholar Richard Semon gave that ghostly trace a name: the engram.�?

    The New York Times, rain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory, by Benedict Carey, April 5, 2009

    April 6, 2009