Brain Cells Observed Summoning a Memory

Anti-Globalism writes "Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it."

Careful!

Knowing how a memory is stored and how the brain can recreate it might lead to some crazy new technologies in the future, such as being able to load gigabytes of data into your brain by using energy to manipulate the brain into "remembering" things that were never there. Of course, it could lead to some extremely scary scenarios, like messing with people's heads by putting things in there that aren't supposed to be. I hope the scientists are being really, really careful on this one!

Re:Careful!

Maybe you are onto something there. Perhaps it would be appropriate punishment to take the memories from the people affected by their crimes and cram them into the criminals head so that he personally experience the impact of what he's done. At the same time you would have to replace any positive aspects of personal gain or gratifaction that he received. The next time he considers commiting a crime, he'll have a lot more to think about...

What the article actually says...

To summarize the article, researchers have determined that the neurons which are fired when an event is experienced are the same neurons that are fired when it is remembered. That's all it says. It does not say that our experiences and memories don't independently exist, just that they correlate with neural activity.

Article Text

September 5, 2008
For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving
By BENEDICT CAREY

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them.

"This is what I would call a foundational finding," said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. "I cannot think of any recent study that's comparable.

"It's a really central piece of the memory puzzle and an important step in helping us fill in the detail of what exactly is happening when the brain performs this mental time travel" of summoning past experiences.

The new study moved beyond most previous memory research in that it focused not on recognition or recollection of specific symbols but on free recall â" whatever popped into people's heads when, in this case, they were asked to remember short film clips they had just seen.

This ability to richly reconstitute past experience often quickly deteriorates in people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, and it is fundamental to so-called episodic memory â" the catalog of vignettes that together form our remembered past.

In the study, a team of American and Israeli researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy. The electrode implants are standard procedure in such cases, allowing doctors to pinpoint the location of the mini-storms of brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.

The patients watched a series of 5- to 10-second film clips, some from popular television shows like "Seinfeld" and others depicting animals or landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person; the recorded neurons were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue deep in the brain known to be critical to forming memories.

In each person, the researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one film clip; many of them also responded weakly to others.

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report "what comes to mind." The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one â" say, a clip of Homer Simpson â" the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

"It's astounding to see this in a single trial; the phenomenon is strong, and we were listening in the right place," said the senior author, Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Tel Aviv.

His co-authors were Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Michal Harel and Rafael Malach of

The article will be more low-key

This is the kind of claim you make in the NY Times or another public media outlet: while it might happen, because sometimes people do stupid things, I doubt the actual research article will go so far as to say anything so far-fetched.

While it makes logical sense (memory, so far as it is located any single place, does seem to be strongly linked to the deeper, distinct organs within the brain, like the hippocampus), there is no actual way to "know" what exactly is going on: this is a quasi-experimental design, at best, and at most all they can reliably say is "Similiar structures in the brain responded in a similar way during recall of an event compared with how they behaved during the observation of the event itself." For example, it has been shown in some studies that areas in the occipital area of the brain (which has been strongly linked to vision) "light up" when a subject is asked to describe a previously viewed visual stimulus: however, researchers in these studies make no claims to such being evidence of an observed activation of a memory, which is essentially the claim being made here. Typically, the most they will offer in such studies is that the brain may be "spoofed" into thinking it is viewing the same stimulus again, thus activating certain, similiar function. Logically, both the visual research and this phenomena certainly sound like memory: but logic isn't science, nor is something true because it makes logical sense. Newtonian mechanics make logical sense, but good luck building a model of the universe as successful as one provided by quantum/relativistic physics, which often times make utterly no logical sense.

This is one of the key problems in any kind of study concerning phenomena which are part and parcel of the conscious mind/brain: being that we do not experience the subject's perceptions ourselves, and since consciousness is so singular and personal, we might never be able to say with any clear confidence what we are observing in the brain. However, kudos to the researchers. At the very least they've examined a function (whatever it is) within the brain that is an utter pain in the ass to study.

Awesome innovation! ;

We're one step closer to a "Forget your first sexual encounter" pill.

Re:Awesome innovation! ;

We're one step closer to a "Forget your first sexual encounter" pill.

Here on slashdot, we call that "placebo".

Neo:

Neo: I know Kung-Fu.
Morpheus: Show me.
Neo: It starts at 0x21b3a5da.

Give me a practical use...

..like a device that can stimulate the area of the brain that is supposed to remember where I left my ^%&$-ing car keys!!

Memories not stored locally

I've read a number of books which discuss in detail the fact that memory is stored non-locally, in a method similar to the way a hologram stores information non-locally. The book 'The Holographic Universe' is the most recent example that I've read. It's a fascinating book - well worth a read. In fact I've read it twice now. With respect to memory, it goes on to say that in experiments with mice, researchers said they were incapable of destroying a memory of how to complete a maze by surgically removing brain tissue. The more they removed, the more foggy the memory appeared, but it never disappeared. This strongly backs the holographic storage method that the book postulates.

If these scientists think they've seen an individual brain cell recall a memory, then I think they're horribly mistaken.

Re:This is your Brain (Cell) on Drugs Ads?

I'm hoping this six pack will wipe out 3rd grade. Man I hated that Tommy Butler douche bag.

Re:Self portriat

What does a memory of what a memory being recovered look like?

I sometimes have epileptic seizures which make me spontaneously remember past events. Sometimes it causes me to recall events which may not have happened. I am literally processing garbage data.

The seizure often interferes with the recording of memory, probably because it is messing with the replay of memory at the same time, so it is difficult to report exactly what the experience consists of after the event, beyond a simple outline.

Re:Self portriat

...according to trusty old Wikipedia there's no way to distinguish between a false memory and a true one.

Sure there is, just check the revision history and talk pages.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

I just want to know when I will be able to download into my mind knowledge. I'll take an order of all the languages in the world, with a side of advanced mathematics and physics, and maybe some animal science for dessert.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

Don't forget Jujitsu and a crash course in helicopter piloting.

Anyone? Anyone?

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

Yes, muscle memory is stored in the cerebellum, not the cerebrum. That's why you don't have to "think" about it to do it.

Most of the martial arts training is about moving the information from the latter to the former.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

and several other Asian terms.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

I want it to work the other way, as a backup mechanism. Every day I get older, and a bit of my RAM seems to fizz & burn and takes away the bytes that were stored in there. I accept the irreplaceable loss of the memory but I wish I didn't forget things too. I could easily page out the least-used memories and store them safely off-site.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

Maybe he meant 'Bestiality'?

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

As far I know, not only religious people use the term "soul". Psychologists use it too, although in a a little bit different meaning as the various afterlife-guys.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

Particularly given that from a neuroscience perspective, "Mind" and "Soul" might as well be synonymous.

Actually, scientifically speaking "soul" is not synonymous to much else than "religious mumbo jumbo".

It's a redundant hypothesis that doesn't really explain anything, it doesn't provide a single experimentable prediction and it's beyond observations by definition. You might need it for your faith, but science sure as hell has no use for it.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

I think that for some people the 'soul' theory is the reason they trust religion, not the other way around.
You'll have to agree that it is a bit depressing knowing for certain that your existence is just the few years you spend 'alive' and after that it's all gone. And for some, it's too depressing.
Humans need to know they'll live on somehow, that their lives have some meaning. And if you're not famous enough to hope for historical eternal life, than soul is what you have left.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

Actually, I find the thought of simply ceasing to exist not that bad; although I seriously don't want to die (and thus are transhumanist), believing in no afterlife were you would be judged gives you a nice feeling of freedom - while religious people usually try to avoid a lot of things since they want to reach heaven (or whatever else they believe in how they will be rewarded for a life devoted to their god[s]), I act on my own moral criterias without any pressure, being free to choose what is right and what not on my own.

Though yes, I fully agree with you.

Re:I just summoned some 'memories'

Who believes that the soul stores memories, exactly?

Anyone who believes that they will meet (and remember) their deceased family members when they get to Heaven. Anyone who thinks that they will still have and/or know their own name when they get to Heaven. Anyone who believes in ghosts. So probably about 80% of Americans (that's not an attack, just an estimate).

Re:One step closer to to the upload !

Where is my mind now ?

Way out in the water. See it swimming?