New Study Finds People Remember More Than They Think 172
An anonymous reader writes "A new study has shown that people subconsciously retain information about things they've seen even if they can't consciously remember. From the article: 'Luis Martinez of CSIC- Miguel Hernandez University in Spain and his team "read minds" with the Princess Card Trick, an act invented by magician Henry Hardin in 1905. Participants in the study mentally picked out a playing card from a group of six cards, which then disappeared. When a second group of cards appeared, the researchers had amazingly figured out which card a person had in mind and removed it. Very few people caught the trick: All of the cards in the second set were different, not just the card that people had chosen. This trick is well-known to confuse the masses, even via the Internet a magician's sleight of hand can make it seem as though he/she legitimately "read your mind" A few moments after viewing the two panels of cards, volunteers were asked which of two new cards was present in the first set of cards. None of the volunteers could actually recall which card was present. Despite claiming that they had no idea, when they were forced to choose, people got the right answer around 80 percent of the time. “People say they don’t know, but they do,” Martinez said. “The information is still there, and we can use it unconsciously if we are forced to.”'"
"Selective" Memory (Score:5, Funny)
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The new Doctor Bob?
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obviously the same guy.
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I'm trying to wrap my head around the fact we remember more than we think ... Isn't memories a form of thinking ... Therefore you can't remember more than you think because thinking is the act of recalling the memory you've thought of?
Re:"Selective" Memory (Score:4, Insightful)
Put it this way: you remember some things by thinking. Other things you remember by intuition/instinct. You remember summarized results, rather than the all the individual addends. Sort of like a bloom filter. [wikipedia.org]
Learning to trust your instincts can definitely improve your ability to do things speedily without having to look up all the details about how to do it, and some people don't use enough of this capacity. It's a double-edged sword though -- the trouble comes when you get too comfortable with your instincts and start following spurious random background noise.
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That might explain part of PTSD. Soldiers learn to avoid "dangerous" situations which make sense in a occupation or combat context - a large area full of civilians with lots of cover for a potential attacker, for instance. They see people get killed because they weren't paying attention in a marketplace in the Middle East. Then, they get home to a what we could all call a vastly safer place but they still have their internal warning bells going off.
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Being a martial arts teacher, this is the basis to our training. Repetitive training of movement is retraining the autonomic nervous system, stimulus (aggressive postures from an opponent) triggers an instinctive response (defense).
The concept behind this is that the delay made by conscious thinking becomes a problem / liability to your capability to defend yourself, your unconscious self circumvents the delay, sort of like UDMA between your HDD and RAM, if you have to pass the data via the CPU it causes a
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This doesn't surprise me at all. God chooses for us what we can and can't remember, and it is through His will that our memories come to us in the time we need them most.
Yours in Christ,
Jake
Leave them kids alone pastor-pedo.
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Guys, I think he's being serious.
My friends have selective memory (Score:5, Funny)
They remember me when they need a ride to and from the airport, but they can't remember to pay me back the money they've borrowed.
Re:My friends have selective memory (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, now with this study, now you can be certain - these 'friends' are just assholes :)
What you do is, next time they call you from the airport, tell them you are coming, but don't. When they call you later all worked up, say: oh, I forgot. Will be right there.
Don't show up again.
That solves both of your problems.
The 'friend' and money problem and whatever else, I forgot.
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better yet, pick them up start driving and then say your gas tank is empty.
And say you have no money. (you have money)
Re:My friends have selective memory (Score:5, Funny)
Spanish proverb (Score:5, Insightful)
They remember me when they need a ride to and from the airport, but they can't remember to pay me back the money they've borrowed.
"Ante el vicio de pedir, la virtud de no dar."
My English try: "When asking becomes a vice, not giving becomes a virtue."
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There is more than one way to translate it. Yours is correct, but it can also imply that asking is always a vice, and not giving always a virtue.
Opposite for me (Score:3)
I think more than I remember...
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Yeah yeah yeah (Score:3, Funny)
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The EPA? ;)
Are they really remembering? (Score:2)
Are they really remembering?
Or are they just making the same choice twice?
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Memory is a field that can do with a lot more research, obviously.
There is also this controversial issue of recalling memories under hypnosis. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it is possible to recall memories while hypnotised, but there is also the risk of implanting memories.
The Mythbusters tackled this issue some time ago, and in their test (which afaict was done pretty soundly - at least they always try to do this type of experiments in a scientifically sound manner and with the help of exper
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Repressed or hidden memories are a physical impossibility based on the understanding we presently have of memory. In order for such memories to exist they would have to be disconnected from the network of neurons that encompass our entire life's memory. Which would require a completely knew mechanism for memory that hasn't yet been discovered. The current understanding is that the more connections a memory has the stronger it is and the more likely it is to be recalled. In order for something to be represse
Re:Are they really remembering? (Score:5, Insightful)
Repressed or hidden memories are a physical impossibility based on the understanding we presently have of memory.
Yet many people tend to completely forget things, only to recall it later.
Recent example, of one of the US president hopefuls: "the government departments that I want to close are a, b, and euhm..." and a while later he remembered it again.
The memory was obviously still there, yet for a while couldn't be recovered. I have similar experiences myself, you surely have too. Like standing in front of an ATM and drawing a blank on your decade-old PIN code... try an hour later and it's back no problem. Why was that memory suddenly gone? How come later it's back again?
This sounds to me like "hidden memories" that need some kind of trigger to recover. And as you rightfully remark, impossible based on our current understanding of the workings of the brain. It's so mighty complex, our understanding of how it works is probably just the very beginning.
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Sometimes, when something like that happens, it is your subconscious mind trying to get your attention, and tell you that whatever it is that you are trying to do that requires that particular memory right then is, from his point of view, a really, really bad idea.
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Brain farts are not the same as repressed memories. What you describe is very shortly forgotten knowledge, and you still know you know it. A repressed memory is something you can not even remember ever knowing at any point.
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I can also think of several other really spectacular incidents that seemed life-altering in the moment, but which I'd soon f
I completely Agree (Score:2)
Radiolab - Falling (Score:5, Interesting)
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The "time stands still" experience you get from near death experiences is because later you can consciously remember far more than normal.
So, what makes your brain kick into that mode? Just adrenaline? Can we reduce this to pill form, so I can take it during meetings to help pay attention?
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An unfortunate fact of memory (Score:3)
Recent examples contrary to TFA (Score:2)
Three recent examplea to the contrary come to mind. Perry fumbled with the third department he'd shut down, correct? I just want to make sure we are talking about the same thing before I say yes or no. Herman Cain had a memory lapse on Libya, and definitely didn't remember more than we thought. The third case, no that was a different one. Sorry, got all this stuff twirling in my head. What was TFA about again?
Good thing too (Score:2)
If my brain is only 80% sure that a remembered fact is accurate, I'm glad the result is "I don't know" when I try to remember it. People don't "remember more than they think", but the brain apparently stores a lot of junk that doesn't meet it's built-in (or trained) criteria for proper remembrance. Big surprise there...
What would be interesting is to see how the level of certainty needed to remember something changes over time and whether it is actually something that is taught or inherently built into the
Donald Rumsfeld already said (Score:2)
The problem is... (Score:2)
They say more than they remember...
I don't get the exercise (Score:2)
Unsurprising result... (Score:2)
Most people do many other things more than they think. In fact, thinking is probably one of those activities people do least.
Recall vs. Recognition (Score:3, Informative)
A good book on the topic... (Score:3)
Re:Pretty useless (Score:5, Insightful)
He did, He evolved some of us into computer makers, administrators, and software writers. the rest that didn't evolve we call users, sucks to be them.
Re:Pretty useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Take into account your dreams. How many of your dreams feature the most mundane, forgettable events you experienced that day? Do you believe that your psyche would delve into chaos if every little ass-wiping thoughout your life were constantly percolating to the surface of your conscious mind?
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It's possible that you have much more stored in your brain than you realize. Could you imagine the chaos in your head if it were to provide you with all of your brain's knowledge and wisdom on-demand?
If you can't retrieve it, what exactly does "stored" mean?
Re:Pretty useless (Score:5, Funny)
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Basically, you're running a FAT12 file system in your heads. Easily corrupted, with no maintenance, no metadata, nothing. The files are still there, but you can't access them. What they are saying is, people should upgrade to a modern file system. Ext4, Reiser4, LTFS, or maybe HAMMER.
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Some people do upgrade to a modern filesystem, what do you think gets people on death row?
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On the other hand, fat12 has /far/ better undelete capibilities than, say, EXT4. So it's not a total loss...
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It can be retrieved, you just need the right input senquence.
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Do you believe that your psyche would delve into chaos if every little ass-wiping thoughout your life were constantly percolating to the surface of your conscious mind?
Me? No.
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While the human brain has many advantages over computers (at least right now), memory is not one of them. The human brain is pathetic in that regard. Why doesn't the god of evolution make us evolve to fix this?
Perhaps it is in the not suddenly remembering everything connected at once, rating it in relevance/importance which prevents us being paralyzed constantly and allowed to make decisions as simple as turning left, right or going straight. Make choices on little to no information is likely an important asset.
When I was in college I thought I was doing poorly in a chemistry class and considered dropping it so I could focus on other classes. I gave chemistry one last chance, sat down and decided to write down
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I see that all the time at work. The problem is that unlike a computer our memory isn't a binary affair, we can half or quarter know things whereas a computer will either have a file or not. There will occasionally be semi-corrupted files, but those are basically junk. The human brain can make use of those half correct memories to reconstruct ones that are reasonable within some degree of accuracy.
Which isn't really surprising as we can't just assert whenever our memory doesn't agree with the memory of an a
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not suddenly remembering everything connected at once
Why remember everything at once rather than what you choose to remember?
rating it in relevance/importance
How does that work?
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And also,
That summary was way too long, when I got to the end I had already forgotten what it was all about.
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Claimer (opposite of disclaimer): I am a trained hypnotist, with a grounding in hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read, ... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
The trick is recalling it. The subconscious mind manages recall, and, if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to serve that memory up, he won't. He may believe/know th
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Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read, ... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
I doubt that, just taking the massive raw amount of data we process from the nervous system it'd be completely absurd to store it all, even for the brain. We're doing a massive amount of fuzzy deduplication, like if you tell a person under hypnosis to say how that apple pie tasted like I think you're getting a generic memory of apple pies, not really that unique pie. Unless there was something particularly good/bad amount it, in which case it could have modifiers. Just because the brain doesn't throw a Null
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Or in other words, we have memories that we forgot we had? Or is more like, we have the memories, but we forgot where we put them?
This is no surprise to me at all. Can't tell you how many times I've started out a conversation with "it's really fuzzy but here's this little thing I remember" and by the end of the discussion the whole thing has come back to me. In some cases it might be my brain filling in gaps by making things up, as people are definitely inclined to do, but I know there are plenty of cases where I can verify it's proper recall of real events/facts.
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Yes, it's news to me.
In my studies I've read that people often remember more than what actually happened. And the further away in time from the event, the less accurate their memory gets, and the greater their confidence in the memory grows.
This jives with my personal experience. If I recall correctly.
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Yes, it's news to me.
In my studies I've read that people often remember more than what actually happened. And the further away in time from the event, the less accurate their memory gets, and the greater their confidence in the memory grows.
This jives with my personal experience. If I recall correctly.
It's probably at some peak in confidence that they then try running for public office, on the belief enough other people think like they do.
Re:should be (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still trying to figure out how they do the trick.
How do they pick the right card again?
I wish they would do a study on what a vodka and grapefruit juice after a long day does to my cognitive abilities.
Can someone please explain the trick to me? Is he picking the right card, or a card that looks like the right card? I mean, if you showed me six cards and I pick one and then you show me a different six cards, I'm going to remember what my card looked like, unless all twelve cards are very similar.
Oh crap, now I'm going to have to either go read the article or just call it a day and go to sleep. The wife's already in bed reading and it's 28 degrees here in Chicago, and the bed and wife are more beckoning than the article. Add this to the list of things I will probably never know.
Re:should be (Score:5, Informative)
Can someone please explain the trick to me? Is he picking the right card, or a card that looks like the right card? I mean, if you showed me six cards and I pick one and then you show me a different six cards, I'm going to remember what my card looked like, unless all twelve cards are very similar.
The trick is that the magician, without ever knowing which card you picked, seems to have "magically" taken it out and replaced it with a different card. It relies on the fact that you won't remember the 5 cards you didn't pick, or else you'd notice that all of them were replaced.
However, the point of this study was determining whether you unconsciously did remember which cards were in the first set, even though you could only consciously remember the one you had chosen.
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So, you mean instead of the magician picking out the single card that the sucker picked, he shows him all six cards and the mark just thinks his card is in there?
If I pick one out of 5 cards, and the magician pulls out the same car
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I too found the description confusing as hell, and your attempts at clarifying it were hardly better (no offense). Let me try and see if I got this right:
1) magician shows 6 cards, you pick one
2) magician replaces his 5 cards in the hand with 5 different ones, all of which he knows what they are
3) you put the card back
4) since the magician knows the new 5 cards, he can easily see which one is not one of the ones he replaced.
I'm guessing this must be it, but why someone wouldn't just outright say so and inst
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Thank you, now I understand. And I could of course have googled the answer myself, if I'd have thought of that.
In any case, let me say that that tricks is extremely lame. Oh well.
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I just want to know how changing the deck lets the magician pick out the right card at the end
The magician never shows you the card you picked. He shows you the 4 cards you didn't pick.
So the trick works as follows:
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Thank you, friend.
I was reduced to tears last night trying to figure this out.
I should never try to think when I'm really tired.
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I want to know if the incorrect of the two cards is from the second deck, or a completely new card.
And if it's a totally new card, then it would be a totally new face, so I don't get how this study replicating this trick with people's faces is such a big deal unless they use face p
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Flash? Hell, there was a static HTML version that got sent out years ago.
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Even if that were true, 10 Hz over a super-cluster of 120 billion neurons is an effective speed of 1.2 THz.
Re:nanoseconds (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, found it. Neurons operate at 200 Hz, [ualberta.ca] not 10. That gives a brain speed of 24 THz.
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Re:nanoseconds (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the brain is analogous to a multicore processor, except that it's more complicated. You can think multiple things at once providing they don't need to make simultaneous use of the same structures. Where the brain really shines is that it has structures that have evolved to very efficiently handle certain types of information.
Also, the brain doesn't have to route a message across the entire brain the way that a processor generally does a signal across the chip, and so some things can and do happen more quickly than others.
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You can think multiple things at once providing they don't need to make simultaneous use of the same structures.
That's seems like an assumption to me. Why couldn't two patterns of neural activity coexist in the same neurons (like superpositions of waves, and no I don't mean quantum mechanics)?
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That's been pretty thoroughly established. It's probably something that you've been observed yourself. Sort of like if you're trying to count and somebody starts yelling out random numbers. Likewise, it's doubtful that you can read a book while listening to somebody without losing comprehension of one or the other.
Any supersitioning of waves in that respect would require an amazing amount of error correction and for the reasons I've already pointed out that's not the case. We can do one thing with a structu
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Yes, the brain is analogous to a multicore processor
No. It's so different you can't even draw an analogy between them. Animal brains are neural sub-symbolic systems with nothing in common with von neumann architecture.
Any comparison is utterly meaningless.
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Right and my post is where it all breaks down, right? If you're going to post something like that you really ought to address it to the person that's trying to compare the two in the first place.
And no, claiming that they have nothing in common is bullshit. Just like the brain you can't use a portion of the processor to do more than one thing at the same time. Whether that includes the entire chip, unit or core is going to depend greatly on the architecture, but you're not going to be using the same gates a
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Also, it's a perfectly valid comparison to make they both serve the same purpose, you make it sound like I'm comparing bats to the 1937 Yankees which have essentially nothing in common.
No, So much no that the word 'No' doesn't even start to cover it. The only thing they have in common is that they are both made out of matter and at a very low level follow the laws of physics of this universe.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying you are an idiot. I'm just that that you have a commonly held but very wrong idea.
Re:nanoseconds (Score:4, Informative)
The brain is a machine, so reductionism works just fine. What I did not say, and needs to be taken into account, is that you cannot parallelize a process further than it can be reduced into wholly independent steps. (Interdependent steps should be split into the dependent and independent components, with suitable barrier operations to synchronize them.) Further, any parallel architecture, brain included, is subject to Amdahl's Law.
Computer hardware is capable of matching the human brain today, at least at the level of computation power. You can build a cluster of the required number of nodes, linked together via a hypercube network topology. You'd be bankrupt if you did, but you can do it. Nobody would have the faintest idea of how to program a supercomputer on that scale - you might not have noticed, but parallel programming is a highly arcane art. SIMD is about the only design anyone knows how to program on these proto-Deep Thoughts, but the brain isn't SIMD. It's MIMD. The total number of MIMD engineers out there is less than the total number of Perl 6 gurus. Put them in front of a machine with a few billion nodes and their brains will explode. It'd make a great Halloween video, but it's useless for Strong AI.
Lets say you could find a MIMD guru with the wizardry and dark arts expertise to program where angels fear to tread. Would that match the human brain? Well, still no. We don't have a specification for intelligence and you can't program Strong AI by guesswork alone. Strong AI proponents have tried and it doesn't work.
Ok, let's conjure up a specification. NOW can we match the human brain? Alan Turing proved the answer to that is yes. The brain is a Turing Complete machine, the computer is a Turing Complete machine, either can do the work of the other. You have to allow for the fact that brain cell DNA is self-modifying and that brain wiring is also self-modifying, producing an amazingly powerful and flexible system. You also have to allow for the fact that inter-neuron communication uses analogue or discrete signals, whereas computers are limited to binary, and the brain is incredibly small (reduced distances for signals). A computer with this many nodes would be multiple football stadia in size.
But, yeah, if we could solve the problem of not knowing what the hell intelligence even was, we could build an artificial brain equal to (but slower than) the human brain.
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Err what? You have this very wrong.
Maybe your 'self-modifying DNA' is malfunctioning.
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I have a copy of the research paper that claims each brain cell modifies its own genetic code independently of any other cell up to 3000 times in a lifetime. This is now established science. Each cell in your brain has a unique genome.
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If you have a copy, then a citation would be most useful for your interlocutors.
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"Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain", Nature (2011), 30/10/2011, Baille, J. K., Barnet, M. W., et al
E-mail me your e-mail address and I'll forward it to you.
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The brain is a Turing Complete machine, the computer is a Turing Complete machine, either can do the work of the other.
This assumes that the brain is a turing complete machine and nothing else. It is yet to be shown that the brain does not have any other functionality which another turing complete computer could not perform.
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Turing-complete computers can perform anything [wikipedia.org].
that is algorithmic.
What I said as a possibility: the brain is Turing complete and possibly something else undefined outside of that (e.g. something not algorithmic) . This results in another Turing Complete machine being only able to simulate a part of the brain's function.
Or, as you suggest: that the brain is not Turing Complete at all shows that claiming a Turing Complete machine could simulate it would lead to a false assumption.
I think both angles have to be demonstrated. Of course, we may
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That turns out not to be correct even in general. [news-medical.net]
Specifically for humans, retrotransposition turns out to be commonplace. [nature.com]
About 3,000 times over a lifetime commonplace. [bbc.co.uk]
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Transposons are independent parasites that manipulate DNA on their own. We don't really have evidence that the cell does anything more than tolerate them.
The Nature blog article, however, is quite something, and I'll concede the point based on it.
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If you're interested in the original paper, the authors sent me a copy. E-mail me your e-mail address and I'll forward it to you.
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Re:Get it right (Score:4, Informative)