The experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) is an information model for the mind. The ERR is simpler than, but superior to, the computational models of the mind popular in today's neuroscience and cognitive science, the "software in the brain hardware."

Although we agree that the mind is, like software, immaterial information, we think that man is not a machine, the brain is not a computer, and the mind is not storing and processing digital information.

The ERR may give us deep insight into the problem of "meaning," the so-called "binding problem," as well as David Chalmers' "hard problem" of consciousness.

Our ERR mind model grows out of the biological question of what sort of "mind" would provide the greatest survival value for the lowest (or the first) organisms that evolved mind-like capabilities.

We propose that a minimal primitive mind would need only to "play back" past experiences that resemble any part of current experience. Remembering past experiences has obvious relevance (survival value) for an organism. But beyond survival value, the ERR touches on the philosophical problem of "meaning." We suggest the epistemological "meaning" of information perceived may be found in the past experiences that are reproduced by the ERR, when stimulated by a new perception that resembles past experiences in some way.

The ERR model is an extension of neuroscientist Donald Hebb's famous insight that "neurons that fire together wire together." Our experience recorder and reproducer ERR model simply assumes that " neurons that have been wired together in the past will fire together in the future (reproducing all or part of relevant past experiences)."

The ERR explains where the information is stored in the brain. It is in the many neurons that have been wired together (in a Hebbian assembly). The stored information does not get "recalled" or "retrieved" from "memory" (as computers do) to create a "representation" that can be viewed (indeed, who would look at it?). It just needs to be re-activated. We can more accurately call the reproduction a "re-presentation."

Our hypothesis is that when wired-together neurons fire again because a new experience has something in common (and there might be multiple Hebbian assemblies sharing those newly firing neurons, creating William James' "blooming, buzzing confusion" of alternative possibilities, one of which will get the mind's "attention" and "focus"); since each Hebbian assembly is connected to multiple regions in the neocortex, e.g., visual, auditory, olfactory, somatosensory cortices, and to multiple nuclei in the sub-cortical basal ganglia, like the hippocampus and amygdala.

Very simply, everything going on in the original experience appears to the mind to be happening again, perhaps weakened compared to the original, as David Hume feared for his "impressions."  The mind is "seeing" the original experience, not because the brain has produced a visual representation or display for the conscious observer to look at. The brain/mind is also "feeling" the original experience, seeing it in color, solving Chalmers' "hard problem" of the subjective qualia.

The stored information does not get "recalled" to appear as a duplicate of the information somewhere else in the mind, as computational neuroscientists know that a digital computer must do.

The ERR is simply reproducing or "re-presenting" the original experience in all parts of the mind connected by the original neural assembly. This solves the "binding problem"  and the "unification of experience," because the information stored is distributed throughout the Hebbian assembly to all the same brain elements its neurons were originally connected to.

The ERR is a presentation or re-presentation to the conscious mind, not a representation on a screen as in the "theater of consciousness" in Bernard Baars' "Global Workspace Theory" or on the "blackboard" model of Herbert Simon and Allen Newell .

The ERR model is also based on Eric Kandel's memory model for long-term potentiation in the neocortical synapses. Short-term memory must have a much faster storage mechanism. While permanent storage in the neocortex is slow, we shall see that ERR re-activation is very fast, and it does not fade as does short-term working memory.

We propose that the ERR reproduces the entire complex of past sensations experienced, together with the emotional response to the original experience (pleasure, pain, fear, etc.). Playback of past experiences may be stimulated by anything in the current experience that resembles something in the past experiences, in the five dimensions of the senses (sound, sight, touch, smell, and taste).

The ERR therefore explains how feelings or emotions are connected with new experiences based on similar past experiences, solving the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.