Memory Molecule Identified 97
Reader Ostracus informs us of research led by Michael Ehlers of Duke University that has identified a molecule, myosin Vb (five-b), that seems to be a critical component in the formation of memory. "A major puzzle for neurobiologists is how the brain can modify one... synapse at a time in a brain cell and not affect the thousands of other connections nearby. Plasticity, the ability of the brain to precisely rearrange the connections between its nerve cells, is the framework for learning and forming memories ... The discovery of a molecule that moves new receptors to the synapse so that the neuron... can respond more strongly helps to explain several observations about [brain] plasticity ... [The researchers] found that the myosin Vb molecule in hippocampal neurons responded to a flow of calcium ions from the synaptic space by popping up and into action. One end of the myosin is attached to meshlike actin filaments so it can 'walk' to the end of the nerve cells where receptors are. On its other end, it tows an endosome, a packet that contains new receptors. 'These endosomes are like little memories waiting to happen,' Ehlers said."
Re:Problems with the headline (Score:1, Interesting)
Applications and deeper questions (Score:3, Interesting)
On a more serious note...
"We all know"---I really ought to find an article that backs me up on this, but I've heard it enough times from random sources so it must be true---we all know that breast milk is very good for babies.
I'm wondering whether there's a large amount of calcium in breast milk, and whether that influences the babies' ability to form memories. The summary doesn't say whether the calcium acts as a "mere" catalyst or is used up in the process; but in any case, I'd guess that more is good.
[I also really should check whether calcium crosses the blood-brain barrier]
We can also contemplate applications. Is "forward amnesia"* caused by calcium not being where it needs to be in large enough amounts? Can we wrap calcium in a road map that guides it there and cures the amnesia?
* forward amnesia: the kind where you remember everything up to the point where you got it, but don't form new memories after that very well or at all. As opposed to retrograde amnesia, where you remember well after the point where you got it, but poorly or not at all what happened before it.
Google can probably give me answers, but I can't remember how to use it. I haven't had my milk today :)
Re:Sound rough (Score:5, Interesting)
I see here a possible method of improving AI. If we can indeed model synthetic neurons to perform in a similar way, we might have the key to designing more efficient captcha breaking systems.
Re:The further this research goes... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not tragic at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
As we get older, couldn't we just adopt a social system that makes us older instead of, you know, dying? Killing off the elderly is a pretty ham-handed solution.
Unless you're just trying to rationalize the inevitable, in which case your sentiment is total garbage.
Re:Sound rough (Score:4, Interesting)
Google on "artificial neural network" and read a few of the 600,000 hits that you will find. ANN theory is as old as digital computers. Commercial ANN applications have been growing in number and sophistication for over 10 years, e.g,, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and other speech recognition software, Caere OmniPage and other OCR packages.
What TFA is about is reporting the discovery of a key part of the mechanism that changes the weighting factors in a neuron in a biological neural net. Of itself, I doubt that this will trigger any insights on how to improve ANNs: the frankenmeisters already know how to do that with the neurones they work with. But this does open the door for further research by biologists into wetware neural net mechanisms, and that could lead to some interesting things.
Re:It's not tragic at all? (Score:3, Interesting)