Researchers May Have Discovered How Memories Are Encoded In the Brain 185
Zothecula writes "While it's generally accepted that memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains, the exact process has never been entirely understood. Strengthened synaptic connections between neurons definitely have something to do with it, although the synaptic membranes involved are constantly degrading and being replaced – this seems to be somewhat at odds with the fact that some memories can last for a person's lifetime. Now, a team of scientists believe that they may have figured out what's going on. Their findings could have huge implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer's."
They are etched (Score:5, Funny)
by tiny Gnomes, with silver hammers.
This is known, even by the most obtuse of my Aunts.
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by tiny Gnomes, with silver hammers.
This is known, even by the most obtuse of my Aunts.
It is known, Khaleesi.
religious implications? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:religious implications? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't answer for other religions, but this is what the Bible says:
Ecclesiastes 9 (New International Version)
5 For the living know that they will die,
but the dead know nothing;
they have no further reward,
and even their name is forgotten.
10 Whatever your hand finds to do,
do it with all your might, for in the realm
of the dead, where you are going,
there is neither working nor planning
nor knowledge nor wisdom.
Re:religious implications? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, isn't that a cheery little missive? Tell me again what the appeal of this religion is? Is it the central zombie figure? The ritual cannibalism? The dramatic "death from above" episodes?
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I thought the upside was in not having to admit that your parents abused you by giving you an obviously fabricated and useless model for how the world works. At least, thats what I assumed other people must see in it.
Re:religious implications? (Score:4, Interesting)
Moreover, Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon when he was "backsliding" (ie falling away from the faith). So he was being cynical about life and not hopeful about future with God. It's easy to take verses out of context and come up with non-Christian ideas from the book of Ecclesiastes for this reason.
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"For this reason"? Really? I would have thought that it was because it was written hundreds of years prior to the first Christian, by a king who followed a different religion.
The entire "OT", as the thieves of the TaNaCH call it, is filled with non-Christian ideas.
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One of the appeals is hope. Without it, there is no hope after this life, and little during it.
Of course, Ecclesiastes is Israelite wisdom literature--it was not written from a Christian perspective, because Christianity didn't exist yet. The Israelites didn't have a concept of the afterlife the way Christians do (they didn't even recognize the Messiah when he came). It doesn't make sense to use Ecclesiastes to attack Christianity. Nevertheless, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is quite valid and rational tod
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Once you say "the Bible is the word of God except for x, y and z" you might as well just admit that it's all fiction/metaphor/whatever and therefore to be considered in the same way you would a novel, rather than a piece of history..
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Well, let's be clear up front: the Bible is certainly a piece of history, whether one believes it's inspired or not. The two issues are not the same.
I'd like to draw your attention to a serious issue that many people today take for granted. Notice that you referred to a novel. It is a fundamental mistake to apply contemporary literary genres to ancient texts like the Bible. The biblical writers had no concept of novels, or of modern historiography. Their idea of recording and reporting history was very
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Which apparently, you won't remember.
Re:religious implications? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, here you can read up on that.
http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php [jhuger.com]
Bert
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This silly religion advocates creationism by a powerful (possibly nurturing) being
Nope, not nurturing. An omniscient and nurturing creator is contradictory to observable human behavior patterns. Even if you try the old "free will" dodge, said creator would, by definition, know that said free will would be exercised in the most evil, self-serving ways possible, before we were ever created.
No, if such a creator were to exist, it would have to be incompetent at best, or outright sadistic at worst.
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You're using your own, narrow definitions of nuture, competence, and sadism. Competence depends entirely on one's goal. If one's goal is robots, then forced compliance is obviously the proper methodology. But if one's goal is independent entities who choose, of their own free will, to love, to do right and good, then one must allow choice--and if evil were not allowed to exist, there would be no choice to make.
For example, if a human parent wants his children to develop competence, wisdom, and discretion
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For example, if a human parent wants his children to develop competence, wisdom, and discretion, would it be wise for him to shelter his children from anything remotely evil or bad, and force his children to do only good things? or would it be wise to supervise and guide them while allowing them to make their own decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them? The former is robotic and naieve, while the latter is indeed nurturing. Would a bird nurture its young by keeping them in the nest, or by pushing them out so they learn to fly?
I agree entirely with your point that a nurturing parent is better than strict control. What I don't understand is how anyone would say that the monotheistic God is being a nurturing parent. At best God is an absentee parent (invisible, intangible) and has left the children to be raised by other children, hoping unspoken wisdom and guidance will be passed along properly by the kids. I don't call that nurturing at all.
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I understand what you mean. I wish I had a hotline to heaven so I could have direct, two-way conversations with God.
There are a few other factors that you didn't mention. If one believes that the Bible is the word of God, then he hasn't simply left us at the mercy of whatever is passed on from person to person. Instead, he's preserved in written form what he wants us to be able to know and refer to, regardless of what other people say or think. We can each study and interpret it for ourselves. Indeed,
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Sorry, no. That's just another (quite verbose) "free will" dodge.
Your "human parents" analogy falls flat on one big point: human parents are not omniscient. But since said creator supposedly is, it would have known full well that we would not "develop competence, wisdom, and discretion." A better human parent analogy would be that a given pair of humans know that if they ever have offspring, he will kill 50,000 people by the time he is 30.
It's not "an increasingly atheistic society" that puts creation on t
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You make a great many assertions about a being which, by your own arguments, is unknowable. How, exactly, is that? How do you know it's "above" any concept, or that its motives were NOT to be entertained by the suffering of all life, like a child with a magnifying glass and access to an anthill? After all, if it is, indeed, all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfect, then obviously everything that has been created is exactly to spec. And that makes any sentient mind ostensibly behind said creation downright soc
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Hey Don,
Here's a response, but I'll try to restrain my knee.
First, let me briefly address the presupposition that the Catholic church is supposed to be the ultimate in Christian leadership. It's so sad that the Catholic church has tainted the name of Christianity throughout history. I hope you can look past their misdeeds. In the same way that not all Muslims are in favor of murdering non-Muslims, not all Christians in agreement with the Catholic church. In fact, the Catholic church has abused Scripture
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That's good poetry.
The King James Version of the Bible is indeed one of the great works of English Literature. That says nothing at all about how true or accurate it is, and even less about how good a guide to existence it provides.
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What afterlife?
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St. Peter has all your life written down in his book.
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If memories are stored in meat...how come we still have them in the afterlife?
I doubt anyone but a dead man would know whether or not memories carry into the afterlife... and he ain't talking.
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I've been dead. It's just like being asleep, only without the dreams.
Blimey we've got a zombie posting on slashdot.
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The "meat" is just a substrate for the information and state--if you've ever successfully installed Linux on a flash drive, and later booted it up on another body... I mean, computer... the religious concepts shouldn't pose too much of a metaphysical dilemma for you.
So you're saying heaven is filled with millions of USB thumb drives? That is one of the least interesting visions of the afterlife I've eer come across.
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Very ergonomically designed, and responsive, too.
Oh wait. Were still doing analogy.
They solved it (Score:4, Funny)
but then they slept on it and forgot
Capacity (Score:2)
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I think the estimates are somewhere are in the petabytes in magnitude (best exact figure I can find is 2.5 petabytes, in Scientific America a few years ago). So yes, quite a lot. But as the summary says, the process isn't fully understood.
bad title/summary (Score:2)
I dig how the title for this article, at least, sounds as though researchers stumbled across a working hypothesis...as though scientific hypotheses are hit upon like a rock in the road.
A memory doesn't have to stay at the same place (Score:3)
A memory can theoretically remain longer than synaptic connections. If a memory is important enough you memorize it again when you remember it, and store it in a different location. Doing this from time to time can help bypass the duration limit.
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Short term memory seems to be electrical and long-term chemical. This article seems to support this hypothesis, showing the connection between statically-charged connections between molecules within the synaptic structure.
Whether the location of the electrically-bonded connections changes or not, the chemistry will reconstruct the electrical charges of the original memory. more or less.
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PTSD treatments include re-living the memory with small changes, like being aware that you are in a safe environment. You remember, modifying the memory and putting it back changed. A few courses later, the memory is not as strong, or doesn't trigger PTSD for some other reason.
Memory is hardly a secure, safe storage mechanism. It's almost quantum - doing anything to it can change it. Or you can remember things that never happened.
So yeah, you can bypass the duration limit, but at the risk of data loss.
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True, I'm pretty sure that those memories that "last for a lifetime" have deteriorated severely, and bear little resemblance to the original one.
first application will be .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick one
a) therapy, erasing bad memories
b) therapy, implanting good memories
c) health, perserving function
d) personal, perserving cherished memories
e) learning
f) porn
Place your bets!!
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e) learning
I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip where a robot doctor implants grey matter into Calvin's brain. "Well, there's grades 1-12. Now go have 12 years of fun."
The more complex our world becomes, the less opportunities kids have to be kids.
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I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip where a robot doctor implants grey matter into Calvin's brain. "Well, there's grades 1-12. Now go have 12 years of fun."
The more complex our world becomes, the less opportunities kids have to be kids
Too true. Except unfortunately they will just up the minimum requirement to be 24 years or more worth of education in those 12 years.
At least it will prepare them for corporate life, where HR demands 10 years experience with a software package that has only existed for 4 years before they will hire you.
With any luck, by then they will have expanded the day to have more hours in it, and then the whole cycle can start anew!
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This is a problem these days with basic biological research and probably all basic research: people are taking a short-term, "what can we do with it"
Recall Recall (Score:2)
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Wait, what's the difference between b & f?
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(g) The government will use this to perform extra-advanced interrogations on everyone who might know about terror, drug sales and distribution, and on women who report an ambiguous rape so that they can have an abortion in the few states that keep a rape exception in the next few years.
My mind is blown (Score:5, Interesting)
I took a look at the paper in case I managed to understand something, and came across this:
Whoa. If that research is correct then that's really amazing.
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I, for one, welcome our new logic overlords.
O wait, that's us!
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This research implies that long term storage is digital and has the ability to be manipulated by logic constructs familiar to at least some of us who work with computers and similar machines. That's an interesting statement. Their hypothesis centers on a protein that works on tubulin (a common structural protein that makes, wait for it, tubes) and that this represents the 'logic framework' for memory storage.
Aside from the 'it's full of tubes' attempt at humor, it's a striking hypothesis and probably wron
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Great, I await your refutation of this paper. I'm sure it'll be interesting to read.
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I'm not sure you're talking to me, but:
1. Nobody has found logic gating in neurons at this level. There is a lot of spiking and thresholds, but logic gates at that level? You can build logic gates with Lego, but that doesn't mean that every Lego structure should be understood as such.
2. Having a logic gate isn't helping one bit to tell us how memory is organized. We have logic circuits. In computers. We cannot emulate our memory in a computer. Therefore identifying circuits that could make our brain work as
Where's PharmaKom when you need 'em? (Score:2)
“This could open up amazing new possibilities of dealing with memory loss problems, interfacing our brains with hybrid devices to augment and 'refresh' our memories,” said Tuszynski. “More importantly, it could lead to new therapeutic and preventive ways of dealing with neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia, whose incidence is growing very rapidly these days.”
Not to mention "the black shakes".
But I don't think we'll see anything useful come from this research, because everybody knows that socialist medicine (like they have in Canada) is second rate. To really come up with a profitable, er... effective cure, you need capitalism involved.
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I find it funny how people defending capitalism have had to fall back on the same argument as used in favor of communism - "True x-ism has never existed, so you can't say it has failed".
Get your ass to Mars. (Score:4, Funny)
How much will it cost me to remember being an invincible secret agent on Mars??
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How much will it cost me to remember being an invincible secret agent on Mars??
<pedantic>That's nothing, I want to remember how I saved Mankind from an alien invasion while I was a kid. Just by being kind to them.</pedantic>
Cloud Storage (Score:5, Funny)
Well, the religious types will tell you there is also a backup copy stored somewhere, somehow in the cloud, literally.
It's clearly flash memory (Score:2)
It's been obvious to me that we store memories in tiny little flash drives embedded in our brain. Sometimes they go bad, and then we get getstuckget stuck and files don'tloadloadloadfilesystemcorrupt
Drugs: don't do 'em, kids.
Useful? (Score:2)
Well, that's good news, but what I want to know is...can they find my confounded car keys!
Important work, but clearly being oversold (Score:5, Informative)
"Now, a team of scientists believe that they may have figured out what's going on. Their findings could have huge implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer's."
This statement is utterly absurd, but the authors of the PLoS article appear to have done some important work here. I'm not a physicist and can't evaluate the quality of the modeling and measurement, but assuming that is all legitimate (and I have no reason to doubt it), then their findings could prove useful to furthering theories on memory formation and stability. Basically they found a series of potential mechanisms by which activated CAMKII (via synaptic activity) can interface with microtubules to update their phosphorylation states. In what I would consider heavy speculation, they suggest that these phosphorylation states, along with the structural and electrostatic properties of microtubules, can produce and modulate information processing along/within the microtubules.
Keeping Occam's Razor in mind, to me it would be simpler if these interactions simply increase or decrease microtubule stability, and possibly affect shape to promote dendritic bifurcation versus elongation or retraction. Not to say some kind of information processing can't be happening in the microtubules, but we already have some pretty good theories regarding information processing in dendrites based on membrane voltage propagation. With changes in microtubule phosphorylation state there is also the possibility of making cross-linking tighter or looser, making it possible to fit in more or fewer microtubules and change a dendrite's diameter. All of these changes are important for signal processing, but by impacting the propagation properties of the membrane rather than through the microtubules directly. I base these comments on other research that have found changes in dendrite morphology and physiology concurrent with synaptic plasticity. One must always keep in mind though that anything as complex as memory is going to rely on multiple mechanisms. Any claim that "the mechanism for X" has been found is always hyperbole.
I would say that some of that speculation, as well as the fact that this is all highly theoretical (no experimental work) are the major reasons this wasn't published in a journal like Nature or Science. Still PLoS Computational Biology often has some very good and important articles.
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Tubulin is a major structural protein, so manipulating it may allow you to create 'memory structures' whatever they may be. However, my reading of TFA is that it's the logic information held by the kinase by way of the degrees of phosphorylation on the molecule that actually encodes the data.
As you say, very speculative but interesting. I'm sure there are experimental systems with mutations in both the kinase and tubulins - that should offer some experimental avenues to look into this.
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Somebody, quick, mod this post Informational!!
dZ.
P.S. Thanks for the great overview and insightful perspective.
forget alzheimers treatments (Score:3)
this brings us many steps closer to Total Recall!
Two weeks... two weeks... two weeks.... two weeks...
Better article (Score:5, Informative)
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-memories-encoded-brains.html [medicalxpress.com]
Q&A with the researcher. Bit more detail than GizMag.
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002421 [ploscompbiol.org]
The paper (gizmag links to it too)
Ogg Vorbis?? (Score:2)
Memory encoding (Score:2)
I just hope it isn't encoded in WMV or something, or we'll all end up paying royalties for the images in our heads.
Bad Title (Score:5, Informative)
What they've actually proposed is a mechanism for how memories are stored, not how they're encoded. The question is, how can memories be so stable if they're made up of synaptic connections that are constantly changing? These authors have proposed an answer, a molecular description of a much more stable link between two neurons that could form and then remain fixed for years. If they're right, it's a very important advance. But encoding is a completely different question: how does a particular memory get represented as a set of those connections. This work says nothing about that.
To give an analogy, they've described the magnetic domains on a hard disk. They haven't described how JPEG transforms images into patterns of bits.
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Damn, just used up my mod points otherwise I would have modded you up.
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They've proposed that memories are stored in binary, in six bit bytes. That is at least part of the encoding.
Memory is binary coded? (Score:3)
In long-term potentiation (LTP), a cellular and molecular model for memory, post-synaptic calcium ion (Ca2+) flux activates the hexagonal Ca2+-calmodulin dependent kinase II (CaMKII), a dodacameric holoenzyme containing 2 hexagonal sets of 6 kinase domains. Each kinase domain can either phosphorylate substrate proteins, or not (i.e. encoding one bit). Thus each set of extended CaMKII kinases can potentially encode synaptic Ca2+ information via phosphorylation as ordered arrays of binary "bits"...
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I encode my memories with ROT13.
Stuart Hameroff (Score:2)
Stuart Hameroff is an organizer of this conference [arizona.edu], which I'm sure this research was timed for release just before. Stuart [quantumconsciousness.org] has long been an advocate of a theory he developed with Roger Penrose [st-andrews.ac.uk] in which the microtubules are the brain's interface with the quantum [quantumconsciousness.org].
Some people .... (Score:2)
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big endians eat little endians!
The brain does not store memories (Score:5, Funny)
The Spirit that inhabits your body, that is the recording medium. When you die, you take all those memories and everything you've learned with you. It's really quite simple. The spirit is the recording medium, and the the human brain is the spiritual to physical interface adapter.
Essentially, those neurons are nothing more than your hard drive cable. The scientists can see the data traveling down the cable, then they can see the data traveling back, then they wonder... 'hmm, how on EARTH does this cable store so much data?' It would all be so much easier to understand if they would just acknowledge the existence of a hard drive.
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This is an interesting conjectgure, but fallacious. There are probably between 80 and 120 billion bit-neurons in the human brain, and a finitely non-discrete number of synapses, all of which act as de facto logic gates/memory bits. Since the brain is constantly purging anything it finds irrelevant, and since it has mechanisms for reconstructing meaningful memories from very limited data, there's no reason to assume that this massive memory-loaded processor has to have some (essentially) off-site location fo
Re:The brain does not store memories (Score:4, Funny)
Billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connectors can not explain the miracle of memory, learning or inspiration. The higher function of the brain is to connect us with the infinite found in another dimension. There it connects with a storehouse of information and wisdom partly shared with others.
Given sufficient energy, the brain accesses this storehouse more or less efficiently and produces results that lead to intelligence and success in navigating what we perceive as the world around us.
It would be premature at this time to introduce the idea that this storehouse is shared with brains on other worlds, but it's worth considering for those with hyper connectivity.
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As funny as this mysticism clearly sounds to some, there are theories that some human memories are stored, "in the cloud" - when they are stored socially.
I have read ( but can't now find the reference :-( ) studies where groups of people have been asked to remember details from long stories, complex scenes, collections of objects etc.
One person will be the subject of the studies, the others will be actors. The actors 'remember' details that were definitely false - a red ball being blue for example, and repo
Forget water boarding! (Score:2)
Alzheimer's (Score:2)
Why does every discovery about the brain article end with 'This could lead to a new Alzheimer's treatment'? Alzheimer's is a terrible disease and the relatives of sufferers may be interested, but surely a larger segment of people looked at this article and went "I know Kung-Fu!"
Re:Fuck GizMag (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to read something intelligent about "memory storage theory", here's [brown.edu] a better article--from Brown University, November 14, 2006.
Pull-quote:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Daily events are minted into memories in the hippocampus, one of the oldest parts of the brain. For long-term storage, scientists believe that memories move to the neocortex, or "new bark," the gray matter covering the hippocampus. This transfer process occurs during sleep, especially during deep, dreamless sleep.
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This transfer process occurs during sleep, especially during deep, dreamless sleep.
Hmm... so the fact that I A) seldom ever dream, and B) suffer from C.R.S. Syndrome, may possibly be related?
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Jeez, I once refilled the laser printer toner with coffee, and tried to microwave cous-cous without using water. A college friend once put the kettle on without filling it (it exploded).
There is always putting down newspaper over wet varnish to stop people leaving footprints on the varnish.
My favorite is charging up a car battery and turning on the ignition before removing the cables.
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"C.R.S. Syndrome" - US. Colloquialism. Abbreviation expands to "Can't Remember Shit."
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The research in question is about the exact process on a molecular level. We may know which cells
or synapses are affected, but we don't know much if anything about the chemistry of that process. These
simulation studies suggest an intriguing possibility
Re:Fuck GizMag (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, so the human body does nightly backups? That is awesome.
Re:Fuck GizMag (Score:5, Funny)
It uses crantab
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There are no "backups" of your brain. There may be neural redundancy, but effectively no 1 to 1 backups. No, if anything this is equivalent to flushing RAM to disk
The way I see it, the backup is more like RAM to thumbdrive (FlashRAM)
As for the ROM feature, the one that controls heartbeat, breathing and such, is locate in the limbic system area, situated at top of the brain stem, which includes the medulla and pons
Re:Fuck GizMag (Score:5, Interesting)
The memorization job during night is more like a reprocessing of the short term pattern matching, or optimization.
Let imagine you saw a calico cat during the day:
Your short term memory barely stored the information patterns nearly as :
1 - Surrounding environment (time, location, current occupation)
2 - Encounter with a wandering animal.
3 - The known cat of your neighbor.
4 - An uncommon variety calico.
During the night you reprocess optimize/compress the following pattern information as:
1 - related and share the same pattern memory as: your usual work commute
2 - related and share common animal encounters,
3 - share the already memorized recognition pattern of your neighbor's cat.
4 - share your already memorized recognition pattern of calico cats.
If you sleep/dream good enough, your brain will iterate and further optimize/reduce these patterns by walking across which materialize as dreams.
Your awake activity will bring new data as patterns that will help optimize and compress older memory patterns. In the long run, it may even produce lighter or more optimized memory, merging each duplicate information with "related to". Commonly used relations will wire faster actual synaptic links.
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Not only de-duping but:
- Sorting and grouping,
- Compressing patterns by combining and diffing matches,
- Replaying known scenarios (sequence patterns) that will help the sorting and classification,
- Playing challenging scenarios (as dreams) to help reveal relevance of the information itself as well as en-light unconsciously captured information (unprocessed details.
As a result, after a good night, you awake with freed short term memory and processed long term memory.
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Not offsite though. Not so awesome.
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Not offsite though. Not so awesome.
...
... I need a female USB plug, a knife, and a clean room. NOW!
there are options. (Score:2)
If I streamed data by modulating a laser off a distant target (the moon), then streamed the reflected signal, I could 'store' around 1 light second of data, without it ever having a 'where' (within the reference frame of a solar system, for the pedants).
My retrieval latency would be 1/utilization; so if I only used 0.1% of the available capacity, it would be 1ms; and my redundancy would be capacity/utilization.
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I can't understand this unless it's presented as a car analogy.
When you turn off your car engine, your odometer still remembers what mileage you've done.