Spatiotemporal patterns are structures of a kind that arise from the sensory stimuli of, say, a linguistic interaction. This involves syntactic aspects and non-syntactic aspects such as prosodic flow, and the sensory stimuli related to the motion of uttering. All of this takes place in the here and now of neuron firing and axon bundles of a present time and constitute a kind of active blackboard that is constantly subject to a variety of stimuli. However, to follow the metaphor, as we erase the blackboard, lingering shapes remain visible, and sometimes become so imbedded that even a good scrub will not remove the patterns. These can be compared to spatial patterns that are characteristic of long term memory. These structure rely mainly on the feedback of lingering attractors to sustain their pattern.
Calvin suggests that mixed memories or loss of detail may be the result of the reliance on certain patterns of distributed attractors that result from stimuli of similar but not identical sensory patterns. These attractors are distributed through axons that can extend laterally or beyond the superficial layers of the neocortex to other areas, not unlike pipelines that bypass local natural gas distribution to service area further away. Calvin makes an assumption that once the signal has traveled to a different area the attractor is reproduced remotely because the neuron cell arrangement is similar to that of the initial area. However, the distance traveled may hinder the signal, so that the now distributed attractors may have to rely on local stimuli to strengthen their common pattern. Upon reactivation the distributed attractors will provide a workspace in which the initial pattern can find a loose fit.
Since distributed attractors rely on neighbour interactions to strengthen their own pattern, it is in fact temporally divorced from the initial pattern. The resulting effects constitute memories. They can be sufficiently robust to survive certain types of seizures and coma, but the general procedures by which they are produced are also the vehicles by which memory error is introduced.