Volatility of Human Memory

prostoalex writes "Scientific Americans looks into the human brain, trying to figure out why some events just tend to stick in our memories forever, while the others are gone: "How does a gene "know" when to strengthen a synapse permanently and when to let a fleeting moment fade unrecorded? And how do the proteins encoded by the gene "know" which of thousands of synapses to strengthen? The same questions have implications for understanding fetal brain development, a time when the brain is deciding which synaptic connections to keep and which to discard. In studying that phenomenon, my lab came up with an intriguing solution to one of these mysteries of memory.""

Comments

poor /. synaptic function

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this article explain the dupes on /. ??

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[grub]

No, but this does.

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[ackthpt]

Does this article explain the dupes on /. ??

Maybe, but I'm sure it explains WOM - Write Only Memory.

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, Slashdot editors are such pussies, they wouldn't touch it. I doubt they even drink. It's a ll cheetos, redbull and beating off to anime.

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd think that the brain strengthens the synapses that were used most frequently. It's why you can't remember what you had for breakfast yesterday, but you do remember getting laid before breakfast, because you thought about the memory of getting laid more often than you did the nasty runny eggs at the cheap motel.

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[SpaceLifeForm]

What was the question again?

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[secretsquirel]

Party at my house! 6 kegs of kool-aid and dragonball Z on the big screen!

Re:poor /. synaptic function

[Anonymous Coward]

The only poor synaptic function I'm noticing is the author of this article, who seems to have conveniently forgotten to give credit to several labs who have already looked into the same calcium-activated pathways leading to LTP. Not to mention, plenty of experiments out there are being performed in vivo, rather than stimulating brain sections.

But I'll give this article kudos for giving a decent overview of the current favorite theory of long term memory. I hope somebody's synapses were usefully strengthened by it.

P.S. Anybody who wants to look at some early experiments with CREB, check out Seymour Benzer's work on flies. Just wait till you see what he labeled CREB-deficient mutants. And you thought scientists only made confusing acronym titles for their discoveries.

This is kinda interesting

[gtrubetskoy]

From the recently noted on slashdot Edge poll What do You believe is true even though you cannot prove it, I remember this bit by Terrence Sejnowski caught my attention (I'm pasting it here cause I can't figure out how to link to that specific part of the page):

How do we remember the past? There are many answers to this question, depending on whether you are an historian, artist or scientist. As a scientist I have wanted to know where in the brain memories are stored and how they are storedthe genetic and neural mechanisms. Although neuroscientists have made tremendous progress in uncovering neural mechanisms for learning, I believe, but cannot prove, that we are all looking in the wrong place for long-term memory.

I have been puzzled by my ability to remember my childhood, despite the fact that most of the molecules in my body today are not the same ones I had as a childin particular, the molecules that make up my brain are constantly turning over, being replaced with newly minted molecules. Perhaps memories only seem to be stable. Rehearsal strengthens memories, and can even alter them. However, I have detailed memories of specific places where I lived 50 years ago that I doubt I ever rehearsed but can be easily verified, so the stability of long-term memories is a real problem.

Textbooks in neuroscience, including one that I coauthored, say that memories are stored at synapses between neurons in the brain, of which there are many. In neural network models of memory, information can be stored by selectively altering the strengths of the synapses, and "spike-time dependent plasticity" at synapses in the cerebral cortex has been found with these properties. This is a hot area of research, but all we need to know here is that patterns of neural activity can indeed modify a lot of molecular machinery inside a neuron.

If memories are stored as changes to molecules inside cells, which are constantly being replaced, how can a memory remain stable over 50 years? My hunch is that everyone is looking in the wrong place: that the substrate of really old memories is located not inside cells, but outside cells, in the extracellular space. The space between cells is not empty, but filled with a matrix of tough material that is difficult to dissolve and turns over very slowly if at all. The extracellular matrix connects cells and maintains the shape of the cell mass. This is why scars on your body haven't changed much after decades of slougare contained in the endoskeleton that connects cells to each other. The intracellular machinery holds memories temporarily and decides what to permanently store in the matrix, perhaps while you are sleeping. It might be possible someday to stain this memory endoskeleton and see what memories look like.what makes you a unique individualhing off skin cells.

My intuition is based on a set of classic experiments on the neuromuscular junction between a motor neuron and a muscle cell, a giant synapse that activates the muscle. The specialized extracellular matrix at the neuromuscular junction, called the basal lamina, consists of proteoglycans, glycoproteins, including collagen, and adhesion molecules such as laminin and fibronectin. If the nerve that activates a muscle is crushed, the nerve fiber grows back to the junction and forms a specialized nerve terminal ending. This occurs even if the muscle cell is also killed. The memory of the contact is preserved by the basal lamina at the junction. Similar material exists at synapses in the brain, which could permanently maintain overall connectivity despite the coming and going of molecules inside neurons.

How could we prove that the extracellular matrix really is responsible for long-term memories? One way to disprove it would be to disrupt the extracellular matrix and see if the memories remain. This can be done with enzymes or by knocking out one or more key molecules with techniques from molecular genetics. If I am right, then all of your memories

Re:This is kinda interesting

[sillybilly]

That's bullshit. You do not need constancy of material/molecules to keep a memory - in a sense you can exchange a building brick by brick, one at a time, with new bricks, and maintain your building like new, for millenia. Of course nobody does this kind of maintenance to buildings, but that's how your body works. Your whole body constantly exchanges molecules, and that doesn't mean that your liver forgets how to function, or your heart forgets how to beat, or your synapses forget the stuff they are supposed to remember.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[FleaPlus]

That's bullshit.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. Terry Sejnowski is probably one of the most prominent neuroscientists alive today, and generally knows what he's talking about.

You do not need constancy of material/molecules to keep a memory - in a sense you can exchange a building brick by brick, one at a time, with new bricks, and maintain your building like new, for millenia.

This is true, and undoubtedly works well for short-term and medium-term memories. However, all of this exchange takes energy, and if there's a more energy efficient way of doing things (such as, perhaps, storing memories in the extracellular matrix), evolution would tend to select in favor of it.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[SoCalEd]

Ah. Um. This one goes to eleven...

Re:This is kinda interesting

[nucal]

The idea that the extracellular matrix might control neuron plasticity is not all that far fetched - there are many studies showing that cell function is controlled by the extracellular environment.

Another aspect to consider is that diseases such as Alzheimers are associated with the accumulation of misfolded proteins (plaques) in the extracellular environment. Although the prevailing idea is that these plaques might be toxic or the residue of dead cells, it's not impossible to think that plaques could also "de-program" neurons by altering the normal extracellular environment.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[CastrTroy]

Your heart will beat regardless of whether or not it's hooked up to your nervous system. All it needs is a supply of nutrients and oxygen.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Memories are rehearsed, whether we like it or not, when we sleep. And, no, your memories of your childhood are not the same ones you had then. Tough being a pebble in a stream, but that's life.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[kupojsin]

or even perhaps that the plaque obscures the accessing of existing memories
?

Re:This is kinda interesting

[greg_barton]

However, all of this exchange takes energy, and if there's a more energy efficient way of doing things (such as, perhaps, storing memories in the extracellular matrix), evolution would tend to select in favor of it.

Not necessarily so. Just because process A is more energy efficient than process B does not mean that process A will be more likely selected for. Evolution is not hill climbing. In fact, evolution tends to create the opposite effect. Organisms become more complex (and usually less efficient) over time. If evolution tended to select for efficiency over other factors then entropy would be winning, not losing. Wouldn't that suck? :)

Re:This is kinda interesting

[CmdrTookah]

Knocking out all the extracellular matrix will knock out memory like knocking out all cement will disrupt the highway system. Is cement the "key" to our transportation system? NO, but its one part that works in the greater system. We traveled before we had cement. Among other countless features found in memory cortex, you need specialized long term neurons, long term glia, vasculature and the ex-cell matrix to all work harmoniously to maintain memories long term. In Alzheimers you lose even the long term memories and what you see is a decrease in neuron number as well as disruption of accessory cells (glia/vasculature) and disruption of the ex-cell matrix. The hallmark being neuronal dropout.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[Tlosk]

While I belive Sejnowski is absolutely correct that there's probably a lot worth investigating in the extracellular material, one possibility is that very long term memories are illusory.

Rarely are these long term memories of the same quality as very recent memories, and I don't just mean of strength, but that they are qualitatively different. That you no longer have access to what one might call witness memory, where if someone asks you questions about the event you can search the myriad details of the event to find the answer.

Given that the bulk of our early memories are lost over time, what's special about that handful of memories that we do hold onto and that are veridical? I suspect that most of this subset of retained memories are not the original memories but rather memories of the memories.

Personally, when I go over the longest memories I still hold onto, they are almost all experiences that I at some point either told someone else about, thought about, or had cause to remember at some point in the past. Each time you do this the memory is copied to other areas (whatever those might be, we still don't have a good grasp on this). And most of a given memory that I now have owes its features to the nature of the account I gave earlier.

For example say someone remembers the experience of riding on their grandmother's lap on a train when he goes to visit her at the age of three. Shortly after that he will have all sorts of specific stored information relating to that particular event. If the event is never revisited it will likely be almost entirely lost, but if several years later he tells someone else about the experience, a memory of the event recounted still many years further down the road would depend heavily on what exactly the person shared during that earlier recounting. That is, the person is no longer remembering the event, but rather recalling the earlier recounting.

Oh if you're cued well enough you can remember all sorts of things from way back, but they are so fragmentary that it's probably just the distributed nature of memory that saves them from complete loss most of the time. There will always be a few bits and pieces floating around in there.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

one possibility is that very long term memories are illusory.

I don't think that theory will stand up to scrutiny.

For example, I got to know somebody recently that grew up in the same area as me, with many mutual friends. These are people I haven't seen or thought about in well over a decade. Lots of the things she recounted I remembered, but they aren't the kind of things I have talked about or even thought about in the many years that have passed.

You can't explain this type of phenomenon without actual long-term memory, and I'm guessing I'm not rare in being able to point to specific memories that are counterexamples to your theory.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

... yea? Well tell that to the guy who has to think about every heart beat or thinks he'll die..

Re:This is kinda interesting

[danila]

What evidence is there that molecules leave their places in the brain? Sure, huge parts of our bodies are constantly rebuilt, but I see no reason to believe that all molecules are short-lived. For example, the DNA in a cell, which is not dividing, is not being rebuilt and is quite stable. The same is probably true for most other organic molecules - unless there is a compelling reason for them to be destroyed (such as to be rebuilt to avoid accumulating damage), they generally remain stable.

I am not a neuroscientist, though, so what do I know.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the fragmentation you speak of when trying to recall something is due to the mechanism that summons up the memory.

It would be nice to think that every detail is "there" somewhere, but we cannot retrieve all the details because the mechanism for doing so is insufficiently robust.

In terms of our own evolution, the ability to summon up the details of what happened 50 years ago is probably not going to make humans a more successful species. But, it doesn't mean those details aren't "there", it's just that we haven't evolved the ability to extract them.

There are people who claim that things like hypnosis can help a person to remember the license plate number (e.g.) of the getaway car they observed during a robbery. Maybe things like hypnosis can help with the retrieval of the details that are stored "there", but which the ordinary mechanism fails to summon because it doesn't work well enough.

This is an interesting topic.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[flosofl]

Doesn't it also need some type of nueral-electrical stimulus to get it to contract? Muscle just doesn't contract/relax on its own. It needs some sort of external stimulus.

As an aside, doesn't the main nerve (can't remember name and too lazy to Google) that carries the impulse to the heart generate a 60Hz pulse. I remember reading that was why so many (low voltage) electrocution deaths in the US were due more to heart failure rather than tissue and burn damage.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[jav1231]

While the body may indeed use the "replacement brick" method, our memories are often skewed. Perhaps this is why. Maybe we don't remember the details as thoroughly now as we did 10 days after an event simply because our bodies had to "refresh" our ram. A thought.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[tricorn]

What do you mean, evolution isn't hill climbing? Yes, organisms tend to become more complex, but not at a cost in efficiency. If it isn't more efficient (at survival), it won't last. It may be more inefficient in some ways, but the efficiency with respect to survival will always tend to increase.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[sphariss]

I recently found a box of slides taken during one of our trips to Disneyland (I would have been 2, 4, or 6 at the time). There are pictures of old attractions no longer in existence (Mule train, canoe ride, Badlands train ride) that I can remember clearly. At first I thought that maybe I was just attaching memories to the pictures, but other memories surfaced and I sought out old pictures that my parents had kept that confirmed my memories. Talking to my mother, I recounted three diffrent events that she was able to confirm happened much as I rememberd them.
Now I suppose it is possible that we where feeding off of each others memories, but, combined with the photo evidence, I feel that they where real memories that had not been reinforced in the past. Indeed, it seemed as we went over each picture, the events of the trips became more clear. We never where able to seperate which of the three trips each memory happened, but a remarkable "rememberence" took place. It was almost like the machanism for recalling the memories was fine tuning itself. I think that the memories are in there, at least most of them (a summary of our lives perhaps).
I also think that memories, or at least a poor copy of them are transfered across the generations, to become part of our generational awareness. our mindset, values, even actuall knowlage of how things work is passed from our ancestors, thru us, to our future.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[superflippy]

Oh if you're cued well enough you can remember all sorts of things from way back, but they are so fragmentary that it's probably just the distributed nature of memory that saves them from complete loss most of the time. There will always be a few bits and pieces floating around in there.
Several times, when visiting my hometown, I've run into people I went to school with back in middle school (almost 20 years ago, now), people I haven't seen or thought about since then. Upon seeing these people, I've blurted out "Hi, so-and-so!" because their names just leap unbidden to my mind and I'm so surprised I can remember exactly who they are that my brain/mouth filter breaks down.

Of course, they don't really seem to know who I am at first, or kind of pretend to remember me when I say that we went to such-and-such school together. But I've always found it odd that I suddenly remember first and last names of people I haven't thought of in years when I see their faces. (And I'm not one of those people who's good at remembering names at meetings or parties, either.) In the database of my mind, faces must be the keys I use to access certain stored info about people.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[greg_barton]

What do you mean, evolution isn't hill climbing?

It's an AI technique for search. linky Basically, the technique is to always try to minimize the error in some function. My point is that evolution does not do this when it comes to energy efficiency.

If it isn't more efficient (at survival), it won't last.

Again, not necessarily. An inefficient process may be more adaptive than an efficient one. An inefficient process will probably have more overlapping, redundant steps than a more efficient one. That would make it more fault tolerant and more able to handle changing environmental conditions.

Let's take the story of two organisims, a squirrel and a grasshopper. Say they both depend on a single nutrient for survival. The squirrel takes eight steps to get it and use it, and the grasshopper takes four. Some of these steps are internal (metabolic) and others external (behavioral). The squirrel gathers two kinds of food to get the nutrient, the grasshopper one. You'd think that, in a closed system, the grasshopper would win, right? It can get and metabolise the nutrient faster and more efficiently, right?

Not necessarily. :) The grasshopper's one food could disappear, leaving it SOL. The squirrel may depend on the same food, but it has a backup.

The grasshopper could dominate in retrieving all foods containing the nutrient, but because of the squirrel's more complex (and thus more adaptive) digestive system, it could just eat grasshoppers. :)

See? There are many more possibilities. Extreme efficiency eliminates complexity (and thus possibilities), and can be maladptive because of that.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[tricorn]

Sorry, I know what hill climbing is, I was asking how evolution isn't hill climbing. It is a prototypical hill climbing process, which is why sometimes it gets stuck in a dead end top-of-the-hill local maximum.

In your examples, you only address one aspect of efficiency. Efficiency always has to be evaluated in the context of SURVIVAL (actually, reproduction, which is survival of offspring). Some aspects of the grasshopper might be more efficient in your example, but if it leads to the grasshopper being "SOL", then it wasn't efficient, by definition.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[greg_barton]

...then it wasn't efficient, by definition

Your definition of efficiency is too broad. You're basically equating efficiency with survivability. I'm defining efficiency the way it's used in the English language: the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it. While you could argue that a system that fails is not efficient because all energy put into it would be lost, that would make the word "efficient" cover too many meanings, rendering it meaningless.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[sjames]

Doesn't it also need some type of nueral-electrical stimulus to get it to contract?

The heart has that mechanism built right in. When that fails, you have to get a pacemaker.

Heart transplants would be more problematic if nerve connections were needed for basic functionality since nerves take a while to regenerate after being severed (if they regenerate at all).

Re:This is kinda interesting

[FleaPlus]

Indeed. I worded my post rather sloppily. If all else is equal, energy efficiency will tend to be selected for. If all else isn't equal, energy efficiency will have to be balanced against other things.

Re:This is kinda interesting

[greg_barton]

If all else is equal, energy efficiency will tend to be selected for.

I still don't believe this is the case. It's either A) never actually the case that "all else is equal" is possible, even in principal, or B) not true even if all else could be equal. Otherwise, like I said before, entropy would have already won and we wouldn't even exist to pontificate about it.

Evolution is inseperable from complexity. That makes it hard to study, and difficult for classical science to wrap itself around it at the moment. Not that we shouldn't ever try to isolate factors and make those kinds of assertions about evolution, it's just that, at this point of our understanding of it, those assertions are simply impossible to verify. That's why I use the word "believe" in my first statement above. :)

Uh... sorry...

[hadesan]

Forgot what I was about to type...

Re:Uh... sorry...

[Muhammar]

...maybe something about memory volatility and distilled spirits?

Yeah, my lab came to the same conclusions...

[gardyloo]

... but then -- OOH! Shiny!

Implications for Slashdot Editors

[mr_don't]

When scientists figure out how this process works, we should start a fund to genetically enhance the memories of the Slashdot editors, in order to prevent DUPES

Re:Implications for Slashdot Editors

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd only help if the /. editors read /. or the article they're (re)posting in the first place.

This reminds me of...

[astebbin]

...Dory the fish, who suffered from the same condition as HM in the Scientific Americ...Ameri... umm...

Sorry... have we met?

Re:This reminds me of...

[FiReaNGeL]

P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney!

Re:This reminds me of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Marijuana affects the memory.

Re:This reminds me of...

[Victor Antolini]

Only short term memory

Re:This reminds me of...

[name773]

is your screen name related to a book by salinger?

Re:This reminds me of...

[Victor Antolini]

I don't think so, it's my real name. I'm curious, what book is that?

Re:This reminds me of...

[Victor Antolini]

Nevermind, I'm a dumbass, Google just told me :P

Re:This reminds me of...

[TheShadowHawk]

Wow! What did you type into the google engine to get back "Victor.. you are a dumbass!"?

;)

Re:This reminds me of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google always tells me I smell funny.

Re:This reminds me of...

[mopower70]

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:HpmcGNJ7besJ: www.youbeenx.com/profile.php%3Fx%3Djelly_bird+%22V ictor..+you+are+a+dumbass%22&hl=en

Oblig.

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, what?

Pain for me

[purduephotog]

I remember back to when I was only 2 years old- I had had surgery on ... well, we'll call it a sensitive part of the body.

Now I don't remember the surgery, and I don't remember the antics I pulled at showing nurses why I was in the hospital... but I *do* remember the first time I had to goto the bathroom after surgery.

That memory is so seared into my brain I can even recall I was high enough to look out a window over the cityscape, and that there was a bricked church in the background and the window had blinds (the black slatted ones) on it.

And I remember so much so terribly much pain I don't know how I survived it.

My parents tell me that after that brief moment of screaming I was OK... and I don't remember anything else of that event save for that moment.

And just for comparison (of a little kid) I've had 18 kidney stones... I have a good memory for pain. But that memory makes me cringe and shiver every time I have it.

Re:Pain for me

[savagedome]

Well at least they didin't send you to school right away.

A teacher noticed that a little boy at the back of the class was squirming around, scratching his crotch and not paying attention. She went back to find out what was going on. He was quite embarrassed and whispered that he had just recently been circumcised and he was quite itchy. The teacher told him go down to the principal's office, phone his mother, and ask her what he should do about it. He did it and he returned to the classroom, where he sat down in his seat.

Suddenly, there was a commotion at the back of the room. She went back to investigate only to find him sitting at his desk with his penis hanging out. "I thought I told you to call your mom!" she screamed. "I did," he said, "And she told me that if I could stick it out till noon, she'd come and pick me up from school ..."

Re:Pain for me

[softparade]

While my grandfather was going through some old rubbish in the garage he found an old photo album that was my dads. In the album are photos of my Dad while in Vietnam. When we showed it to him he couldn't remember who made the album or many of the people in the photos. Given it was more than 30 years ago, but its weird how such events can be forgotten.

Re:Pain for me

[rbarreira]

Pain usually wants to be forgotten by the brain... And everyone is different, which might explain why your dad "forgot" (I'm sure he knows it deep inside even if he thinks he doesn't), and the grand-parent poster remembers his experience.

Re:Pain for me

[MBCook]

I had an operation when I was about 2 years old also. I remember (and will never forget) when I complained when my parrents bumped me when it hurt (which was the discover of the pain causing it). I remember being in the hospital bed. I also remember that they wouldn't let me leave either untill I could walk by myself (since I was mostly in the bed since the operation). I also (vaguely) remember being put to sleep before the operation.

I only remember one thing before that (my parrents painting the hallway), and a handfull after that but before I was 5 or so.

I have a TERRIBLE memory for many other things (especially names), but some things (even seemingly so insignificant) I remember. Very odd.

Of course memory it's self is odd. We don't remember things like we tend to think we do. It's not like a photograph or a movie. The brain remembers the things in the scene, and what they did, and recreates the pictures from that. Things we don't remember (like maybe exactly what someone was wearing) our brain makes up (maybe based on the thing the person wore most or clothes from another memory).

Re:Pain for me

[MBCook]

That's true, and I've heard it before. Many people remember traumatic events, and they remember that they WERE in pain, but they often don't remember the pain, or despite it's severity they don't "expiriance it" when they remember it.

This is very often true of pregnancy. I've been told (being a 21 year old guy, I'll never really know) that while childbirth is painful for humans (duh), women don't tend to remember it after childbirth. This is supposedly a genetic trait becuase otherwise women wouldn't be likely to have a second child, which could be bad for our species.

Memory is facinating.

Re:Pain for me

[Illserve]

That's precisely wrong.

Your brain, built around the need to survive, certainly does not want to forget about pain. It wants to remember pain, and more importantly what caused it.

Because if everything else about pain is working correctly, pain is a good indication that we've done or encountered something that is bad for us.

Sounds like you've been reading too many books about recovered memories. That pile of crockery has destroyed more lives than it has helped.

Re:Pain for me

[MBCook]

Actually, you're both right and wrong. See my sibling post to yours for some more info.

There is some pain that is important to remember. It's VITAL to remember. This is stuff like knives are dangerous (learn this after a cut), a stove is hot (ouch!), it hurts having people piled on you (making it hard to breath), etc. All these things are important to remember for your survival. If you forgot that putting your hand on a stove hurt, how many times would you do that during your life? This is important stuff, so this comment's parrent is right.

At the same time there are things that are painfull that need to be forgotten. Some (like childbirth, mentioned in my other comment) could be a BIG problem if they were remembered. Others (highly traumatic events, abuse, serious car wrecks when you're bleeding on the pavement, etc) could prevent you from functioning if you remembered them. These things should, must, be forgotten to live a normal life. These things are fewer, and more likely to be emotional or abuse related.

As for "recovered memories", I agree completely. They are bogus, and very dangerous. There are some good books out there about the falacy's and dangers of recovered memories.

Re:Pain for me

[Illserve]

I think this is anthropomorphosizing the bits of the brain a bit.

There may be special cases, such as childbirth, in which mechanisms kick in to prevent harmful memories, but I don't buy this protective mechanism for big-bads, like car accidents

I think people don't remember big-bads because their brains are swelling from the impact trauma and certain parts, such as the hippocampus, stop working well enough to encode memory. Hence, people have missing parts of their memory near the time of trauma not because pain needs to be forgotten, but because our encoder was flaking out as a result of the trauma.

Re:Pain for me

[rbarreira]

Actually I haven't read any book about recovered memories.

All I've said is easy and proven psychology...

Re:Pain for me

[rbarreira]

I think this is anthropomorphosizing the bits of the brain a bit.

Haven't you heard of Mr. Sigmund Freud?? Repression of memories into the subconscious and things like that??

That was what I was talking about when I was trying to find an explanation to the other poster's dad forgetting about his war times... And yes, those repressed memories actually hurt us, but not as much as if they were in our most conscient part. That's why psychiatrists exist :)

Re:Pain for me

[Illserve]

Haven't you heard of Mr. Sigmund Freud?? Repression of memories into the subconscious and things like that??

It has been quite awhile since Freud was considered by the scientific body at large to be correct about anything.

And yes, I've heard of repression of memories. Fortunately, most of the scientific community is coming around to the opinion that they are bullshit before more innocent people have their lives ruined by self-aggrandizing memory recovery experts who brainwash people into putting their fathers and uncles into jail for a hefty paycheck.

I'm not saying child abuse doesn't happen, I'm saying that when it does, people tend to remember it.

Re:Pain for me

[zx75]

I had very similar sugery, except I was significantly older at the time, probably about 7 or 8. And I can remember exactly what the tile that was used for the floor and half-way up the walls looked like, what I said immediatly after, and even parts of the walk beforehand. Everything else is a complete blank.

The same goes for the 4 times I've separated my left knee, I remember each moment as if it had happened yesterday, and the rather memorable pain that it caused.

Personally I think it has something to do with the rush of emotion that helps cement an event in memory of really 'big' things. Pain especially works wonders in being able to remember something.

Re:Pain for me

[Wescotte]

Pain usually wants to be forgotten by the brain... And everyone is different, which might explain why your dad "forgot" (I'm sure he knows it deep inside even if he thinks he doesn't), and the grand-parent poster remembers his experience

I would believe it to be the opposite.. Remembering more details about how/why/what caused the pain could be a great benifit to preventing the same pain in the future.

Re:Pain for me

[rich3rd]

It has been quite awhile since Freud was considered by the scientific body at large to be correct about anything.

Would you care to be more specific, rather than simply referring to "the scientific body at large" in a summary dismissal? There was a time when I would have agreed with you about Freud, back when I was all into Maslow, Skinner and Jung, but recently a friend of mine, who just got her Master's degree in the subject, informed me that many of the fundamental theories of psychoanalysis that Freud pioneered have been expanded upon by modern researchers and are indeed still quite well-respected in the field of psychology. And here I always thought he was just a coke-head who liked to screw his female patients...

Re:Pain for me

[elbobo]

I'm not sure I'm understanding you right. You're saying you think there's no such thing as repressed memories? I can't see that anyone could argue such a thing in the face of all the counter evidence.

I, for one, know for absolute certain that repressed memories exist. I suffered a very traumatic and gory accident when I was 13. I have vivid memories of the details right up to and right after the event, but have absolutely no memory of the moment of the accident. I know for certain that I would have seen it with my eyes, and would have felt it, but yet I have no recollection of seeing it or feeling it.

I can reasonably safely assume that I had recollection of the event immediately afterwards, as I recall immediately looking to the part of my body where it happened. So my mind must have blanked the event out sometime shortly after that.

Repressed memories exist. I imagine it's to do with the mind blocking out events which are so traumatic that we wouldn't be able to cope with reliving them in thought.

Oh, for the record, my accident was having one of my legs sliced repeatedly by a boat propeller. It's the kind of thing you'd think you'd remember.

Re:Pain for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have time to find a reference for you, but recall discussions of short term/long term memory. If you lose consciousness, your brain can't convert a short term memory into a long term memory, this process means that most accident victims can't remember the details past a particular point.

Re:Pain for me

[elbobo]

Where did I state that I lost consciousness? I did not.

Re:Pain for me

[Pooua]

I, for one, know for absolute certain that repressed memories exist.

By way of introduction, I am not so certain.

I suffered a very traumatic and gory accident when I was 13.

I have experienced several intense, painful and traumatic accidents.

I have vivid memories of the details right up to and right after the event, but have absolutely no memory of the moment of the accident.

Do you remember a loud noise, which seemed to drown out everything around you?

I know for certain that I would have seen it with my eyes, and would have felt it, but yet I have no recollection of seeing it or feeling it.

It is likely you would have been looking at it. You might not have felt it, as pain takes some time to set in, especially if it is extreme pain. You may not have had enough time to have felt the event as it happened (sensory overload).

I can reasonably safely assume that I had recollection of the event immediately afterwards, as I recall immediately looking to the part of my body where it happened.

So you knew about the event, but can we be certain that you were conscious of the event as it happened? I don't believe that would be the case. I say this, based on my own experiences with sensory overload. Suppose that at the same time that this event was happening to you, your emotional state was sending very strong signals to your brain. It is possible that your emotions would swamp the other signals. You would lose the information in a white out.

So my mind must have blanked the event out sometime shortly after that.

I speculate that you only had a short-term memory of the event, which rapidly faded.

Repressed memories exist. I imagine it's to do with the mind blocking out events which are so traumatic that we wouldn't be able to cope with reliving them in thought.

If your memory were repressed, it would be a memory that something is inhibiting. My theory is that whatever memory you might have of the event is only a very weak signal, because your awareness of the event was limited, and hardly recorded.

Oh, for the record, my accident was having one of my legs sliced repeatedly by a boat propeller. It's the kind of thing you'd think you'd remember.

I think it depends on your state of mind at the time.

When I was about 15 years old, I was riding a moped down the right-hand side of a highway out in the country. I decided that I had to make a left turn ahead of some approaching traffic. As I made the turn, I heard car tires screeching on pavement behind me. I knew what was happening. I remember hearing the pitch of the screeching drop, as if the tires were sliding through gravel, instead of on pavement. I attribute this to a change in my sense of time (this has happened to me on several other occassions, particularly when I am in danger). I remember many little details from that point that could not have taken more than a few milliseconds to transpire. I looked down, and saw the front of the car (travelling somewhere around 40 mph by then) about 3 feet from my left leg. I was able to look up, plan a course of evasive action, and begin to tighten the muscles in my right arm as I attempted to turn the steering handles of the moped. I remember the muscles in my arm tightening. Then, I found myself in another world. I have three memories of what happened, but they are all like a dream-state or an alternate universe. In two of the dreams, I was aware of my body being in mid-air on its back. In one dream, I actually looked at my body floating in the air, as I watched it from the side of the road. According to a witness, I was unconcious for about 15 minutes, following my landing on the hood of the car as it continued across to the far side of the highway. When I awoke, I was standing on the ground on the other side of the highway from where I had been when I was struck by the car, across 3 lanes. Through all that, I was doing my best to stay mentally

Re:Pain for me

[elbobo]

Do you remember a loud noise, which seemed to drown out everything around you?

I was underwater. No loud noise.

It is likely you would have been looking at it. You might not have felt it, as pain takes some time to set in, especially if it is extreme pain. You may not have had enough time to have felt the event as it happened (sensory overload).

I was 100% definitely looking at it, because I saw the propeller coming towards me, right up to the moment before contact. I didn't say I would have felt pain, I said I would have felt it.

My theory is that whatever memory you might have of the event is only a very weak signal, because your awareness of the event was limited, and hardly recorded.

No. Everything recalled in the seconds previous to and after the event are incredibly strong memories. The contact itself, I have no visual or sensual memory of at all. It's been blacked out. It was recorded, probably in excruciating detail, then removed.

At no time was I unconscious. I exchanged shouted words with someone from the boat, seconds after I resurfaced. them: "Hey! It's alright!" me: [looks into water] "No. Everything's not alright".

I didn't lose consciousness soon after, during, or at all that day. Every detail of the day is recorded in stark, unforgettable detail, except for the gory moment of contact, that I was looking directly at. It was blacked out.

Re:Pain for me

[Lord Kano]

I can still remember the first time I ever got kicked in the nuts.

I was watching a Kung-Fu movie at my great grandparent's house, my cousing and I were trying to mimic the moves of the guys in the movie. Well, he did it a bit too enthusiastically and nailed me right in the balls.

I spend the next 20 minutes crying and so did he because my great grandmother spanked him. This was over 25 years ago and I remember it like it was last week. Yet, I can never remember when my GF tells me we have some function to attend next week.

LK

Re:Pain for me

[Lemmy Caution]

Psychology isn't neuroscience or cognitive science. It exists in a sort of in-between land between science and personal narrative and philosophy.

Even for the things Freud may be right about, he will be right about them without it being a scientific insight: his method was essentially one of introspection and aggregated self-report. That he has so much traction even today says more about his insight than about his methods. And should be considered an entertaining coincidence, rather than a real scientific theory subject to verification or falsification. Outside of the humanities, he's an historical figure.

Re:Pain for me

[alzoron]

Don't worry, even though you're only 21 now, in a few years you'll be able to experience the beauty of pregnancy.

Re:Pain for me

[Anonymous Coward]

There seem to be at least three classes of triggers for memories, and different mechanisms for each.

The first one is that in general, strong emotions and also pain act as triggers for remembering something. That is, many memories - not all - have an 'emotion tag' with them. Apparently this relates to learning to survive. The emotion drives the brain to form a memory of the circumstance. For circumstances involving pain that does not drive us into unconsciousness, memories get formed and are accessible to the conscious mind; they serve us well by helping us avoid circumstances that are anti-survival. "Do not touch hot stoves" "Do not jump off the roof with an umbrella". And in the future we pause before rash acts.

A second class involves immense damage. Agonizing pain from bodily damage generates a strong emotion. However, there appears to be some kind of overload/cutout mechanism such that when the body pain is intense enough, the preprocessors around the mind operate and completely cut off the sensory input. Sometimes the shock of the input is strong enough to cause cessation of consciousness. A weak shock may cause unconsciousness, but that may be through circulatory effects rather than brain function. Fainting, for example, and the cause is remembered. Not so with some strong shocks which seem to disrupt the normal memory-formation mechanisms. Under this circumstance, either memories are not formed or any memory that does get formed may not be consciously accessible later.

A key to understanding is to note that the memories driven by moderate physical or emotional pain to be formed can be called up to some extent by thinking of the emotion with which they were assocated. For those memories, the data is retrieved by using the type of pain as the primary index then somehow the brain finds memories related to that index key. Pain of rejection - you remember being dumped. Pain of embarrassment - you remember the time you vomited on the dean's shoes.

A third class of memories is those not necessarily associated with strong emotions, but rather with simple logical learning. These are not retrieved through emotion as the primary key but instead by associative chains related to topics, i.e., intellectual knowledge not emotional-tagged data.

Re:Pain for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Research with other mammals has shown that when infants experience extreme pain, the brain re-organizes to deal with the pain. This neuroplasticity is more pronounced with younger infants or with increased amounts of pain.

The clear understading in the medical community today is that infants feel pain in the same way adults do. This has caused a complete change in neonatal and prenatal surgery that was often done without anesthetic.

Circumcision (a.k.a Male Genital Mutilation) has been associated with increased pain response during future vaccinations (even 6 months later).

There is no excuse for causing pain in non-consenting babies for any procedure that isn't medically necessary.

Re:Pain for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with your point. But I think that there is more than psychological causes in this subject.

I recall reading in some medical magazine that this effect (lack of memory) were caused by the massive release of adrenaline and cortisol in the stressful event. And that these hormones damages memory, and even impair neurons. Have you ever heard that people after a coronary bypass cirurgy became "different"?

Re:Pain for me

[altaic]

All of this is extremely interesting, but I don't find much of it convincing. I mean, how are you so certain you didn't shut your eyes? Shutting one's eyes in anticipation of trauma is a pretty standard reaction.

Re:Pain for me

[elbobo]

Even if I shut my eyes, I would still recall the event. I simply have no memory of that moment in time. It's like watching a video and noticing that a few seconds have been cut out. The flow of the video either side is continuous, but those few seconds are completely gone.

I don't see why people find this so incredibly difficult to believe. It's quite straight forward, and repressed memories actually aren't considered to be an imaginary concept, like the earlier poster made out. They're quite common, and I have a personal example of one of the starkest varieties of them.

Just because some children have fabricated memories whilst under hypnosis, suddenly every case of repressed memories must be bunk? What bullshit.

Re:Pain for me

[Pooua]

Even if I shut my eyes, I would still recall the event. I simply have no memory of that moment in time. It's like watching a video and noticing that a few seconds have been cut out. The flow of the video either side is continuous, but those few seconds are completely gone.

Maybe it is a supressed memory? Maybe it is sensory overload? I don't pretend to know. But, I do leave the possibility open.

I don't see why people find this so incredibly difficult to believe. It's quite straight forward, and repressed memories actually aren't considered to be an imaginary concept, like the earlier poster made out. They're quite common, and I have a personal example of one of the starkest varieties of them.

One point in the supressed memory concept is that your subconscious retains the memory. Contrary to your earlier statement, a supressed memory is not erased; only, your conscious self does not recall the memory. So, if this is a supressed memory, it is still roaming around in your mind, and you won't really be able to heal until it is resolved. That's the theory as I understand it. It is also the reason that people are so eager to restore suppressed memories.

Re:Pain for me

[elbobo]

One point in the supressed memory concept is that your subconscious retains the memory. Contrary to your earlier statement, a supressed memory is not erased; only, your conscious self does not recall the memory. So, if this is a supressed memory, it is still roaming around in your mind, and you won't really be able to heal until it is resolved. That's the theory as I understand it. It is also the reason that people are so eager to restore suppressed memories.

I think that's somewhat to do with the politicising of repressed memories. I'm quite happy to leave mine hidden. My life is just fine with it buried away, never to be remembered. Sure, it's hurt my relationships with boats and boat propellers, but I can deal with those not in my life, thanks very much :)

Women memory

[MPHellwig]

Ok when there done finding out how men's memory work they could proceed with women's memory, thats a truly amazing piece of hardware.

Re:Women memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Men forget but never forgive
Women forgive but never forget.

Re:Women memory

[Jesus 2.0]

Spoken like a Slashdot nerd who has never actually encountered a real woman.

More accurately:

Men forget but never forgive.
Women pretend to forgive but neither forgive nor forget.

Re:Women memory

[game kid]

And people modded the parent Flamebait because...?

Heck, if (notice the if) I was a woman I'd appreciate the compliment. Us guys always forget the car keys, the school assignments, this week's magazines...

At least I remembered to admit it.

Re:Women memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Holla.

Oops..

[ackthpt]

Dang. I had the perfect post, but forgot what it was just after hitting Reply..

I hate when that happens.

On another note... when I was 13 years old I was walking around the house for about 20 minutes trying to find the screw driver I just had, where the heck could it have gone, I just ... had ... it ... in ... my ... hand. It was still there and at that point I knew what lay ahead for me in life.

Re:Oops..

[gardyloo]

What -- you're now a slashdot editor?

Re:Oops..

[ackthpt]

What -- you're now a slashdot editor?

You're asking me? We're both in trouble.

I have great memory, just lousy recall.

Re:Oops..

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

> when I was 13 years old I was walking around the house for about 20 minutes trying to find the screw driver I just had,

20 minutes?

When I was 31 I spent a good half an hour wandering around the house trying to find my glasses. Suddenly I found them on a table, put them on, and immediately thought "great, now I can find... wait, what was I looking for?"

I spent another ten minutes looking around before I remembered what I was doing.

At that point I said "you know, I should just go back to using drugs. Clearly I'm not meant to cope with reality."

Re:Oops..

[waffleman]

Hah! Been there, done that (more than once).

My absolute favorite, however, is checking to see if I locked the door to my apartment. Lots of times, I'm preoccupied and in a rush when I'm leaving the apartment, and only remember to check whether I locked the door by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs. So back up I go, check the door, go back down. And what do you know? By the time I get back downstairs again, I can't remember whether I actually did the check when I was up. Argh, I might have forgotten! So back up I go again. Actually this rarely happens, but when it does, I can go for several cycles. It's maddening.

Re:Oops..

[Heidistein]

Rule to learn:

When you are exhousted: Your door is locked.

Re:Oops..

[ackthpt]

It's maddening.

Ah, but think of the fringe benefit of all the exercise you get!

Re:Oops..

[Vacindak]

I totally did the exact same thing with my Rubik's Cube once. I was trying to find the darn thing because I wanted to show a friend of mine how fast I could solve it. Took me entirely too long to figure out why he was laughing at me. I still can't break 1 minute though. :-(

Does this shed any more light on coding solutions?

[Sowelu]

I've been tracking the periphery of AI for quite a while. Even though directly emulating the human brain is probably not the best solution for artificial intelligence, has this research opened any new doors lately?

At last...

[teneighty]

... I can erase goatse and tubgirl from my memory.

Re:At last...

[RGTAsheron]

You could... but you know that the next time one of us posted it you'd be bitten by curiosity again. :P

Re:At last...

[Anonymous Coward]

TROLL ALERT! "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!"

Catch 22

[DrKyle]

If we can figure out what proteins need to be expressed to convert short term to long term memory and somehow in the future find some sort of drug that ups the expression of that gene we will still have a problem with what do you do when every memory is a lasting one? Do ou need to know the plate# of every car you drove by on the way home or the order of the commercials when watching Oprah? I think if we mess with the number of long term memories we make we may also lose the selectivity which is so important in making sure the brain isn't cluttered with irrelevant memories and we strengthen only important ones.

Increase the signal to noise ratio of my memory, then w're in business.

Re:Catch 22

[incom]

It'd be great for learning though if they can make a 2 hour treatment or something.

Re:Catch 22

[nEoN nOoDlE]

Call me crazy, but I'd love to have the ability to remember every license plate number and commercial order on tv. Some people already have such photographic memories (to some extent). I think even with the capacity to recall every little detail, doesn't mean that the big details will go into the background. We will still have the ability to categorize those memories as we do now, but instead of the small ones getting lost in the ether, we will be able to recall them at will. I think if the contents of everything we've ever read and done is logged permanently in our brain for easy recollection, we would be infinitely more intelligent, and would be able to link concepts that we've read about years ago with newly learned ones with a lot greater ease.

Re:Catch 22

[karnal]

Alright.

You're CRAZY!!!

Re:Catch 22

[Anonymous Coward]

Very clever.

There is a case of some russian guy who remembered nearly everything. essentially his mind became cluttered. It was difficult to focus on one memory because of all the more-abundant distracting memories. Remebering a phone number would be difficult because there are so many phone numbers and so many names, keeping them all straight is difficult.

Secondly, there is likely a cost to more memories besides this. More memories likely implies stronger synapses, which are more susceptible to excitotoxicity (read single neurons working yourself to death). There was a famous "smart mouse" made by overexpressing a signaling receptor that is associated with learning. There is a form that decreases expression with age (at least in rodents). If you just make the cortex and or hippocampus (i forget which or if it is both) express this protein in higher amounts, the mice learn faster. The question from the audience following a presentation of this from the principal investigator was, why doesn't Nature just keep the expression high? Everyone would be smarter. Would they wear out, so to speak, or would strokes or hypoxia become more lethal? The point is there is likely a cost, which is why these are in balance. We still have a lot to learn however.

Re:Catch 22

[sahonen]

I think having such a detailed memory would slow down the recollection of individual memories. Think trying to query a large database versus a small database. Your brain would have more things to search through before it got to the one memory it's looking for.

Re:Catch 22

[TiredGamer]

There's a bigger difference between relational databases on computers and memories in the human brain. When you recall a memory, you are actually rebuilding a state of thought from extant data. There's a tremendous amount of interlinking going on and it's done seemingly in parallel and with no regard for the way parallelism is done in computers. In short, having a photographic memory does not degrade or slow one's ability to recall. In fact many with photographic memories seem to have better recall.

Re:Catch 22

[The Creator]

There was a show on tv about a man who remembered everything, his problem was that he understood almost nothing. He could remember all details about an event, but had no idea about how or why something had happened.

It seems that the lack of need of association results in none being created, resulting in data rather than knolage being built.

GB /\ MP3 /\ Brain Power

[rabeldable]

Put me on the mailing list for when they figure out how to store mp3's in my brain. I'd like to free up a few hard drives.

Re:GB /\ MP3 /\ Brain Power

[Weaselmancer]

You sure that's a good idea?

Whoa. ;^)

Re:GB /\ MP3 /\ Brain Power

[ikkonoishi]

Personally I want to dump a few songs out of my memory. Especially when they are stuck on replay for a long time.

Data storage

[DOS-5]

As far as I can tell, there is no perfect storage medium. The media that computers use to store data on are prone to failure and happen to model this type of deterioration - some data decays and becomes unusable over time while others are preserved. The main adavantage that we have is that that data in our brains last a lot longer than data on a hard drive.

And as long as we're talking about "memory stick"..

Re:Data storage

[nikai]

Our brain is subject to such deterioration just the same.

In my experience the human brain is capable of completely forgetting the PIN number of an ATM card, after having typed that PIN hundreds of times.
It's also capable of forgetting root passwords, also having typed them several hundreds of times.

If you really want to remember something, don't trust yourself. Make a backup.

Re:Data storage

[laughingcoyote]

However, there seems to be another difference...

Data on a hard drive, until the hard drive -does- begin to malfunction, is stored perfectly. That is, if I type a paragraph (or an entire book), save it, come back a year later, and reopen that file, then provided that the hard drive is functioning properly, that book will be pulled right back up, word-for-word. While the brain might remember the -idea- of the book, then chances are, if you are asked to repeat, word for word, the third paragraph on page 287, you will not be able to do so, even five minutes after reading it.

Of course, the ability to condense, interpret, and distill the important points out of information is what makes humans superior to computers. But there's something to be said for having a medium (paper and pen, computer, camera, whatever) that can store something exactly, and pull it up to refresh your memory (which likely still has the outline and highlights of important subjects, but may be missing the details) when the need be.

Also, whatever the brain may do, it doesn't always seem to work flawlessly at distinguishing important from unimportant. I have quite a few things pop into my head, at various times, some from when I was as young as 2. These things weren't really important to me even then, and sure in the hell aren't now. But they stay around. Now on the other hand, I'm sure my boss told me to do something, but I just can't remember what it might've been...

Re:Data storage

[Anonymous Coward]

When I really want to remeber something, I just shove a usb thumb drive up my ass.

Re:Data storage

[mpn14tech]

There are also different ways a memory gets associated. Quite often I can not describe to someone how to do something on the computer until I actually sit down and let my fingers go through the motions. A very strange sensation to say the least.

So it is possible you may not be able to immediately tell someone your PIN number without actually( or in your imagination) going through the process of typing it in.

Re:Data storage

[Jaysyn]

It's a defense mechanisim to keep you from working/spending money.

Jaysyn

Re:Data storage

[Jaysyn]

Stay off /.?

Jaysyn

Re:Data storage

[Vombatus]

I'm sure my boss told me to do something, but I just can't remember what it might've been...

Might it have been something like "stop stuffing around on /. and get back to work"?

Re:Data storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I always try to make a backup. The problem is, as my wife continually reminds me, that I can't remember where I put it.

Re:Data storage

[CmdrGravy]

I actually can't remember my pin but I can remember the pattern I move my finger in to type it in. Obviously I can work out from that what it is very quickly but it's the pattern I am remembering and not the number.

demon haunted world

[tsioc]

anyone ever read Demon Haunted World? great book, ever since I read it I've been wondering about memory myself. It's amazing how easy it is to create false memories that you can't tell are false.

Human memory

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

I don't know when I realized this, but the human mind is like the internet. everything you could ever want to know is probably in there, but you need google to find it all and every search eventually leads to something sex-related.

Re:Human memory

[illest503]

Extending the analogy...

If you buy and smoke some marijauna, odds are that both your cache and your cookies will be either depleted or gone.

Re:Human memory

[maxwell demon]

Actually, it's deactivating your firewall, and all that malware from the unconscious enters your consciousness.

Pure will

[debrain]

I've remembered things because I've said to myself "I will remember this moment." One of them was when driving a Previa from up the north-east US seaboard, while eating a bag of doritos. Another was as an infant, choosing to drink milk after hearing my mother say that I wouldn't.

I think the level of consciousness a moment has affects our capacity to (and interest in) remembering them. But this can be a function of pure will.

Mind you, there is no telling how many of these willed memories have been forgotten. None, that I can recall. :-)

Re:Pure will

[ZeroExistenZ]

This reminds me of a moment I was in some sort of philosophical conversation.

It was about the about how meaningless a moment can appear, cause most of it will go up in thin air unless you specifically remember it.
There was a plane flying overhead, and I pointed out that plane would stop to exist in our minds. I was certain the moment that by the time we'd meet up again the upcoming week, the moment would've been lost, never to be remembered again if I wouldn't have pointed out we wouldn't remember. The loss of past concience about that moment.
Ofcourse there was protest, whereas she would've remember it for certain if it wasn't for me pointing it out.

Now, 10yrs later we still remember that moment exactly, and vividly. But I wouldn't be able to remember anything from a week before of after. (neither can she, my point exactly back then.)

Re:Pure will

[CmdrGravy]

I have done that as well, when I was 6 or 7 I was on holiday in Devon, on the beach half way up a sand dune and decided to spend a few minutes sitting in the same place and looking at the scene in front of me. The intention was to remember that for as long as possible so I put a lot of 'effort' into the remembering.

Over the years I have reminded myself of the scene and could look around it like looking at a photo but now unfortunately it has faded to the extent that although I remember the broad details any details I think I am remembering are almost certainly just being made up by my brain based on it's knowledge of what it is likely to have been like. For example I have strong recollections of sand, a steep sand dune and the grassy outcrop I was sitting on which I think is actually remembered. I know that if I had looked up the sand dune I would have seen the grassy top of the dune with little pathways going into it and behind that a heather covered hill but I can't say I actually remember seeing that since I know that is what I would have seen and I think my brain is just filling in the details for me.

There's a lot more I can't remember, what I was wearing, where our encampment was, what I had for dinner that day, what I did after this, what I was doing before this or how come I ended up on the sand dune on my own in the first place.

A few memories I would like to remember...

[djeddiej]

The first time I received a video game system (an Atari 2600, with Combat, Air Sea Battle) The first time I got wasted. The first time I won some money on a bet. The first time I had sex. The second time I had sex. The third time I had sex. How about the fourth time? And the fifth? Perhaps they will device a way to loop that memory, and perhaps stimulate the sensations of smell, sight and hearing too... Perhaps they will call it...the holodeck?

Re:A few memories I would like to remember...

[Mr.Zong]

"The first time I had sex. The second time I had sex. The third time I had sex. How about the fourth time? And the fifth?"

That reminds of me of the first time i lied on /. And the second time. And of the course the third. But the fourth? And the fifth? Those I don't remember.

Re:A few memories I would like to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

lmao, well said!

not entirely related

[pinball667]

But after reading some of the article I'm now curious - has any research been done regarding factors other than genetics being responsible for a persons capability for intellegence? IE it mentions how a fetal brain may devolope itself by canning synapsis that don't fire when they should. Perhaps using synapsis more could actually help the brain make itself better by doing away with stuff that dosn't work as well as it should?

Beer!

[Anonymous Coward]

I made such a fool of myself last night (so i'm told). Luckily for me i was too wasted to remember.

Drinking large quantities of alcohol seems to be a good solution for preventing humiliating memories from tormenting me for the rest of my life. I should probably carry a fifth of uncle Jack with me wherever I go for those frequent times when I act like a complete and utter jack ass... then I can drown out the experience before its permanently engraved into my brain.

Bad attempt at humor aside, I heard on the radio a few months back that scientists were actually working on a pill that could be given to trauma (physical and pyschological) victims to do to their memories just what alcohol does but without the ill health effects.

Re:Beer!

[CmdrTookah]

What you are looking for is a drug that induces retrograde amnesia. This will block memories from forming from events that occured just before you took the drug. NMDA receptor blockers such as PCP (Angel Dust) work well at that. At high levels alcohol also work to block NMDA receptors, thus, when you drink enough you block your memories from forming.

Two Words:

[Matey-O]

EEEEEEAAAARRRRRR WOOOOOORRRRRRMMMMM! /me: Goes off singing 'Who let the Dogs out?'

I'm sure

[Wehesheit]

theres a joke about slashdot editors, stories and memory here somewhere.

Auditory memory and distraction

[jesser]

How does a gene "know" when to strengthen a synapse permanently and when to let a fleeting moment fade unrecorded?

I'm sorry, can you repeat that?

Fake memories

[D H NG]

Sometimes our brains can be tricked into remembering things that did not happen. Elizabeth Loftus had done much research in the area of misinformation effect, which actually has legal repercussions.

Re:Fake memories

[clatonium]

we call it 'Voight-Kamph' for short.

Re:Fake memories

[Nutty_Irishman]

There is an interesting memory approach called Image streaming that deals with conjuring memories that you didn't think ever happened. The odd thing about it is that many times the things you forgot actually get remembered(and not fake memories). It makes one wonder if indeed we actually ever forgotten them at all or just misplaced them.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/6243/imstri. html

You can laugh and not believe it at all, but Image Streaming is remarkeably effective in remembering events you think you had forgoten. For you can start with an old childhood memory of a person but not remember exactly what they looked like. After a period of time streaming and describing what they looked like you can build up the image of the person that you thought you had forgotten. It's like putting together the peices of a jigsaw-puzzle. You start off with a little bit, but you slowly add peices to the puzzle. As time goes on and you see more of the puzzle you find peices that you thought you lost. Eventually, you get to see the whole puzzle.

It is also quite effective in creativity and random guessing. I was actually quite suprised at how much easier it is for me to come up with ideas or solutions that I would never have thought of before. Once you really get into it you'd be suprised how effective it actually is, and following the mental progression of images to some solution is quite remarkeable. If you don't believe me, check your local library and pick up the book and read the first few chapters. Try it for a week or two, and if you still don't believe it put it down. I bought the book more for shits and giggles between undergrad and grad but was quite suprised with the results and my creativity afterwards.

How the brain works...

[kiwioddBall]

I haven't RTFA but...

How does a synapse know whether to remember something or not... answer - it doesn't. What we remember is only related to what synapses still function, so it something breaks, we don't remember that particular piece of information.

I personally think that the source of all human illness is basically the body forgetting how to maintain itself... critical synapses failing. But what would I know?

Re:How the brain works...

[FleaPlus]

How does a synapse know whether to remember something or not... answer - it doesn't.

Well, that's not quite true. Some synapses are truely "unsupervised," strengthening when, for example, the two neurons it connects fire at the same time. Other synapses strengthen or weaken when exposed to certain chemicals, like calcium or dopamine.

I personally think that the source of all human illness is basically the body forgetting how to maintain itself... critical synapses failing.

This may be true for certain neurological diseases, but all human illness? I rather doubt that.

Re:How the brain works...

[Anonymous Coward]

not much, apparently

rtfa

Re:How the brain works...

[CmdrTookah]

ROFL - why don't you open up another can of "stuff I haven't really thought about."

Re:How the brain works...

[Lord_Breetai]

But what would I know?

Who can remember?!

What the hell are you talking about?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really.

Irony

[ozbird]

prostoalex forgot the apostrophe in "Scientific American's ...".

Re:Irony

[Punboy]

No, I think he's trying to express his false belief that Americans are Scientific.

Prudent Memories

[EdwinBoyd]

If evolution teaches us anything (no comments from the Intelligent Design category please) it's that our memory is working just fine. The memories that really stick with us and are the most vivid are the huge mistakes and successes. This is for the sole purpose of helping us deal with future situations by drawing on past experiences. So not being able to remember where your keys are when you're late for work may seem like the product of a faulty memory, the brain is simply full of more pragmatic information like 'fire burns' or 'never bet on the Steelers'.

Re:Prudent Memories

[gtkuhn]

That is how memory has always seemed to work for me. Traumatic events (weather good or bad) tend to stick.

I once read a theory that I can't find a good link to now. Is said that neoropeptides act to strengthen neurons. The strength of the memory being related to how many similar connections are made among neurons. That number being related to the concentrations of neuropeptides floating around to make the connections. And the more traumatic an event (good or bad... I'm using trauma to mean big), the more neuropeptides produced by the hypothalmus. Thus, conditioning, learning, and imprinting all work on the same principle, but vary in the number of new connections created per event.

Guess TFA kinda disagrees with that theory.

Re:Prudent Memories

[glitch23]

If evolution teaches us anything it's that scientists have no idea how to correlate evidence into useful theories. In fact, evolution gives scientists enough confidence to make them think they know what happened millions of years ago when they weren't even alive and to actually see gaping holes in fossil records but still conclude there is something at work.

The human brain and the Universe are the 2 biggest items that humans are trying to unravel and after all this time, although we are closer, we are still so far away. A creation can never be smarter than its creator, otherwise, why ever need the creator? The creation should be smart enough to create itself before it even exists. Nice paradox huh? Don't get this confused with being able to reproduce.

I guess it never occurred to you that some things like instinct go even further beyond just memory capability and show the true power behind who created the human species as well as all animal life on this world. The same chemical reactions that sustain life can not create life. Instinct is even more of a mystery than memory and both go deeper than just evolution.

Re:Prudent Memories

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm.. Evolution IS Intelligent Design!!!

Re:Prudent Memories

[CmdrGravy]

"A creation can never be smarter than its creator, otherwise, why ever need the creator? The creation should be smart enough to create itself before it even exists. Nice paradox huh?"

Paradox ? It's just rubbish. Why can a creation never be smarter than it's creator, if it was created then it would need a creator or a creation process but what that is and how smart it is is totally irrelevant to the creation process.

or, 'Potential Programmability of Human Memory'

[brian.glanz]

A leitmotif the article turns on is the potential programmability, more than the volatility, of human memory. They discuss how the older view of our memory as volatile and mysterious has been refined, as we've discovered the mechanisms for transition between short and long term memory. From the physiological to the cellular level, the idea here is a familiar one -- we know more than ever, and we're learning faster than we had before, in this case about memory and about learning.

Most intriguing are the material implications of the article -- they find memories transitioning to long term storage when information is reinforced at specific intervals and with specific techniques. This matches some experimental evidence as referred to, like the familiar ideas of studying or preparing in the same location you will test or perform in -- but, its level of specificity begs for more experimentation and refinement of memory management techniques. Learning and memory across the whole human experience can be biologically maximized if we find just the right process -- read that slippery section in x minute increments and take 10 minute brakes between 3 repetitions. Or maybe, do asdf to remember x words by rote for the next 4 hours, and do ;lkj to sufficiently remember x for a month. Without running a cord into your ear, the article is promising for its level of detail in exact ways we might approach finding best practices for our current hardware.

I'm curious generally about how soon articles like this, especially up at the Scientific American level of exposure, translate into experiments at universities (and, self-help books?). I'm tempted to modify my own learning accordingly, n/m waiting.

BG

The Subconscious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the subconscious part of the mind remember everything, whereas the conscious mind doesn't?

Re:The Subconscious?

[clatonium]

The 'Subconscious' is a wholly imaginary mind that as 'pure mind' and 'universal' remembers everything, but is mysteriously inaccessable. At least that's how it appears in Jung. The Freudian Unconscious is a more lucrative term for it, because in the Unconscious anything that is left in memory can at any time 'bubble up' into the conscious mind, but memories in the unconscious are not so much memories as they are signs devoid of meaning; so that here is a book, there a severed hand, and here your second grade school teacher, none of which have any meaning in and of themselves, but acquire it the moment they enter the conscious mind. If they do come into the conscious mind without meaning, then you are a schzophrenic. The conscious mind is not so good at 'not remembering everything' as it excels at 'tactical forgetting'.

Obliscence

[rohanl]

For a very different viewpoint, check out Sannabend's Theories at The Museum of Jurassic Technology

In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

superflies

[Gunark]

The protein you're talking about appears to be CREB (I love how 90% of slashdotters feel compelled to post their opinions without reading the f'ing article :) For a good couple of years now, we've known that transgenic fruit flies -- and recently mice, if I'm not mistaken -- engineered to over-express CREB do have strikingly improved memory... but not in the way you think. These flies don't appear to form "more" memories, instead they just learn faster. In other words long-term potentiation seems to happen with less training/effort.

What this means for us humans -- if it means anything at all -- is pretty questionable. However if you want to go out on a limb here, drugs or genetic modifications to increase CREB production could make you learn things faster, without sacrificing that important relevance filter (i.e. remembering every license plate you see or whatever).

Re:superflies

[Anonymous Coward]

Gunark, that is crap.

CREB is a transcription factor, it ups the levels of other genes probably involved in the short to long term memory formation (consolidation). Increasing CREB probably gives you more synapse-strengthening proteins without necessarily being directly involved in the process of synaptic remodeling. It requires all the other proteins as well.

There are likely many other transcription factors as well, each fine tuning the relative and absolute levels of the proteins invovled.

It is likely there isn't a single gene involved in consolidation and that cytoskeletal, signal transduction, neurotransmitter receptors, trafficking proteins and a whole host of other protein groups are involved.

> The protein you're talking about appears to be CREB (I love how 90% of slashdotters feel compelled to post their opinions without reading the f'ing article :)

CREB hasn't been shown to be sufficient for consolidation, only correlated between its expression and learning rates, but even this is likely a simplification. (I love how 90% of slashdotters feel compelled to post their opinions without knowing what they are talking about :)
Oh, and 90% of all statistics are false.

Re:superflies

[Joe Tie.]

Your comment on using drugs or genetic modification to change offspring reminded me of something I'd not heard about in a while. Anyone recall a article mentioned here about giving supplemental choline to pregnant rats, and the verification that the neurons in the hipocampus seemed to be greatly improved over what would be expected in normal offspring? Did they ever get around to testing them to see just how their abnormal brain development translated into day to day function?

My wife has this figured out already

[IronChef]

If I don't remember something, she thinks it's simply because it isn't important to me.

I have tried to explain the innermost workings of the male mind to her many times, but she just does not understand that we have a very small and flaky birthday/anniversary/shoe size database.

Re:My wife has this figured out already

[IWorkForMorons]

I have tried to explain the innermost workings of the male mind to her many times...

Well...that was your second mistake...

Re:My wife has this figured out already

[Anonymous Coward]

she thinks it's simply because it isn't important to me

And she's right.

we have a very small and flaky birthday/anniversary/shoe size database

Especially when we do things like this:

insert into funny_sports_memories(person, action) values ('Randy Moss', 'Fake mooning audience after touchdown.');

ERROR, TABLE SPACE FULL

** dammit!! **

truncate table assorted_wife_facts drop storage;

insert into funny_sports_memories(person, action) values ('Randy Moss', 'Fake mooning audience after touchdown.');

** that's more like it! **

ohhhh boy

[CAIMLAS]

I can just see the shit hitting the fan in the abortion/pro-life debate now. This will have quite a few implications which quite a few people in this discussion will likely continue to ignore, though, I fear.

Uh Oh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here comes trouble... :-(

Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[kaladorn]

Hmmm. This doesn't exactly explain how one can, with crystal clarity, remember absolutely useless bits of information when not being able to retain information that is far more important to ones success in life. For instance, one can forget ones fiance's birthday or the day you got engaged or little things like Valentine's day, while remembering the gram molecular weight of ethanol or the exact number of Tribbles sat on by James T. Kirk.... so I'm not sure that evolution has strictly wired us for efficiency.

The truth is evolution is a coarse brush. In order for something to offer a significant chance of being genetically propagated, it has to offer a sizeable benefit (25%+ if I recall my conversation with one of the world's better population modellers working for CSIRO). Less than that and it will tend to get lost in the noise.

So I'm sure that memory setup the way it has been (to forget some pains, to remember others) has been something we've grown into, but I'm also sure some element of it prevades almost every intelligent animal as well. I bet our cat has that same setup (well, there is the claim they may in fact remember nothing, but I know too well this is just propaganda...). But I wouldn't say the system was yet 'fully optimized' for being able to deal with future events.

The fact is, there probably is no fully optimized configuration, given an infinite range of possible future events. So we're probably in that fuzzy zone of mostly useful in most situations, which is right where we should be (that is to say though I disagree with the particulars of the comment, I agree with the general conclusion).

Sure, we can probably enhance memory via drugs or nanos eventually for certain things. Handy, perhaps an advantage. We may be able to help blot out trauma (a pill, for instance, for a recent victim of physical trauma so the trauma does not become the stuff of recurrent nightmare but fades from their memory over time). So these applications would have some use. But giving everyone an eidetic memory might not be either a good idea nor terribly feasible.

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[gnovos]

well, there is the claim they may in fact remember nothing, but I know too well this is just propaganda...

Just out of curiosity, who is claiming this? Ican prove pretty well that my cat can remember something traumatic that happened only once even months later (she got a surpise shower while playing with the knobs in the bathroom, and now freaks out if you bring her anywhere near the knobs).

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[Fringex]

I just can't bow down to the idea that gene's encode my memories. Personally I believe it is a matter of importance.

For instance, one can forget ones fiance's birthday or the day you got engaged or little things like Valentine's day, while remembering the gram molecular weight of ethanol or the exact number of Tribbles sat on by James T. Kirk.... so I'm not sure that evolution has strictly wired us for efficiency.

You sound like a guy and lets face it. Be dead honest, do you really care about the day you got engaged or Valentines day? I sure as heck don't. Only reason I remember the day I got engaged is due the fact that it is the day my parents got married. No real guy cares about that lovey dovey engagement crap.

However, Tribbles and ethanol obviously carry a significant importance to you that you wanna remember it.

I took computer programming a few times and honestly I can barely remember how to write an If/than/else loop. Ask me a question about EQ and dammit I will recite the whole story line.

I personally think that some of us feel slightly embaressed for remembering trivial things like tribbles and ogres. However it is what you are into and what makes you happy.

To me memories that last a life time that you can remember every detail to are the ones that impacted, what Freud would call, our ID personality type the most.

I got in a car wreck a year ago, nasty accident. I can remember every single detail as clear as it happened. However, I can barely piece together the day I asked my fiance to marry me. Is it the fact that I don't love her? Oh god no. It is the fact that while one was a life changing event. The other was a severe life threatening event that scarred my ID to no end. ID is about what you want and need right then and there. What I wanted was survival.

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[Anonymous Coward]

An 'If/than/else loop?

I don't remember ever encountering such a programming construct.

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[maxwell demon]

Actually this only proofs that it has learned that those knobs are dangerous. It doesn't proof that it remembers the event. (To make it clear: I do think that cats and other animals are able to remember). You cannot tell from that behaviour if, assuming your cat could speak, it would say: "I fear those knobs; I don't know why but I'm absolutely sure they are dangerous" (i.e. it developed a "knobphobia"), or if it would say "I fear those knobs because the last time I was playing with them I got a shocking water shower!"

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[CmdrGravy]

IF tuesday IS louder THAN frogs OR ELSE at least as wet as despair

Loop

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[HugeFatty]

Something that I've observed for myself is that there are two types of remembering, sort of. One is being able to recall something ("Valentine's day is February 14th"). The other is being able to recall something at certain times ("I better get some flowers because Valentine's day is coming up").

I say this because I have a really easy time learning new things and remembering fun facts and such. I'm one of those people you hated at school because I would get the top score on the tests without studying (OK, I did really suck at Diff. Eq.). I could just remember the stuff that the professor talked about. But I have a much harder time remembering stuff at predefined times. You know, stuff like "I have to get a birthday card by Sept. 21st" or "I have to take out the garbage tonight."

To me, the main difference seems to be that one of them is like a search of my brain for the necessary information, and the other is like an alarm that should remind me to do something when certain conditions are met.

OK, enough rambling. The point is, I think there's two kinds of remembering. That doesn't make it true. It's just what I've come up with from examining my own situation.

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[kaladorn]

Sorry, that one small part was spoken tongue-in-cheek based on the fact cats sometimes won't let on they notice *anything* around them that they choose to ignore. I am quite sure cats do remember things. I'm not sure how good their memory is (I think a dogs might be superior), but I am sure they can recall things like smells, friends, what the sound of an opening can means, etc. Or at least they can form behaviour patterns off of these things, which seems to suggest recall.

Re:Yeah... ish.... but what about.... Trivia?

[kaladorn]

Two points: First, I literally mean that I can recall absolutely useless facts... and *not* ones that are important to me, just ones that happened, for some chaotic reason, to stick in my head. Now, you might try the unproven assumption fallacy by trying to reason that these were important to me, but with the particular things I'm thinking of, I fail to see how. So I submit that one sometimes does remember utterly unimportant details very accurately. Second, remembering things that prevent my @$$ from getting kicked (such as anniversaries, etc) is non-trivial and actually matters. Not in and of itself, but because the consequences of not remembering are significant. Ergo they do matter because they matter to someone who will give you grief if you forget. So, yes, you can fail to remember these things too and they still matter.

Brain Candy

[shakparl]

All this discussion about memories and their recall gets me thinking of the hilarious Kids in the Hall Movie _Brain Candy_, where the unscrupulous CEO of a huge pharmaceutical company rushes a not-fully-researched "happy" drug to the market, only to find out the hard way that it's far too effective at its function: to repeat your happiest memory over and over and over indefinitely.

I gather that, with more research in this direction of neuroscience regarding long-term memories, this might actually become somewhat of a reality soon, although the movie itself seemed more directed at the anti-depressant craze hitting the public at the time.

On a non-neuroscience tangent, there is an extended mental exercise that I've seen discussed in several "new-age" type of books dealing with reincarnation and increasing of one's awareness of one's purpose in life by simply going back through your memories in sequential steps, e.g. "ok, what was I doing before that... then what before that" and so on. It's not infallible, but it certainly increased introspection into my own life. Also, I was able to confirm the venue of my first memory, the farthest back I could go, with my father - a buddhist temple on the top of the hill we lived on the side of, where kids would also play.

Of course, many of my memories were not just visual, but also olfactory, kinesthetic etc. Very constructive if you have some sabbatical time!

Obligatory google scholar link for more info

[FleaPlus]

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=creb +memory&btnG=Search

Is there anything new here?

[Glowing Fish]

This article is a rehash of basic neuronal theory (known for at least a 100 years ago), and slightly less basic information on Long Term Potentiation (which has been known about since the early 70s, although they have been discovering more in recent years); followed by some guesses at how the calcium influx triggers genetic change, because "genetics" is the trendy branch of Biology that is familiar from the cover of Time.

What we don't know is where and how Long Term memories are stored. We know that they are formed through synaptic input in the limbic system. Presumably, they are then passed to somewhere in the cortex. Why? How? Where? That is what we don't know.

BTW, it is quite easy to do your own experiments on LTP. Although they can be a bit dangerous.

Re:Is there anything new here?

[CmdrTookah]

I thought it was a good primer for the educated masses. I'm sorry it doesn't meet your lofty standards. I'm sure you know where to go for that cutting edge research.

*cough* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=P ubMed/ *cough*

Intracellular signaling pathways might be a little complicated for the general SciAm reader. But everyone has seen some genetics, I guess it was on the cover of TIME not to long ago.

Re:Is there anything new here?

[tehdaemon]

I thought that the 'new' stuff was that a neuron essentially does FFT like signal processing on its output to determine which genes to activate, not the input at the synapses. IANA neuroligist, so correct me if I am wrong here.

"What we don't know is where and how Long Term memories are stored."

Probably because it depends on the specific patterns and connections of neurons in the brain and not in the neurons themselves, (there is no one neuron that stores what I got on my 5th birthday) and we have no tools to follow the signals through the whole network on a neuron-by-neuron basis. Or in other words we cannot trace through the brain signals the way we can trace through a computer program - debugging style.

I am curious if it would be possible to set up some kind of simulation of simple neural nets using neurons that work like real ones do - so we could trace the signals! - and if anything is likely to be learned. Any thoughts?

P.S. This may be a rehash of basic theory, but a fair bit of it was theory that I did not know - and it helped me put together many of the pieces that I did know into something that made sense! Great article!

Re:Is there anything new here?

[mOdQuArK!]

What we don't know is where and how Long Term memories are stored.

Why do they have to be stored in a localized portion of the brain? Wouldn't it be more likely that they would be stored & interconnected through large chunks of the brain, which might not be located in the exact same spaces between different people?

I've already studied this ..

[Anonymous Coward]

How does a gene "know" when to strengthen a synapse permanently and when to let a fleeting moment fade unrecorded?

When it is fed too much beer.

superflies-Paying Attention.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The protein you're talking about appears to be CREB (I love how 90% of slashdotters feel compelled to post their opinions without reading the f'ing article :)"

I read the article and basically the difference between what's long term and what's short is paying attention. Weither that's paying attention because your interested, or paying attention because your life could depend on it isn't mentioned.

Do we actually lose memories?

[St. Arbirix]

I'm not sure we actually lose memories. I count emotions as heuristics based on our memories, ideas that have a lot of information behind them but we can't really backtrace to figure out what is involved. Our emotions are statistical approximations based on ideas and experiences we can no longer afford to keep in conscious memory.

The appeal of the game Go to me is just that. When you've seen your 1000th game you don't remember all the patterns and sequences in all the previous games. You simply can't keep track of which opening moves lead to which outcomes. There are more moves in the game than molecules in a galaxy so it's silly to expect full recognition. What you do get though is how you felt about certain moves as you saw them. You learned to enjoy the quick attack at the opponent or the slow tactfulness that drew out an opponents mistakes. Read enough Go games and you'll begin to see what an experienced player is feeling as he makes his moves. You'll see it because you'll remember the feeling you got when that kind of move was made before. You won't have at hand a mental reference chart for what was a brutish invasion and what was sly trickery based on the specific pattern of the stones. Instead you'll have an approximation attached to a feeling which makes that move vaguely recognizable even though you've never seen it before.

Computers don't have the capacity for heuristics and pattern recognition that people do which is why a three month Go player can soundly beat any Go computer. People have a complex system of feelings which allow us to index and categorize all the experiences of our lives without ever having to remember those experiences explicitly. Go is deep enough that it will show you how someone's head is connected.

Chess is tricky. Go humbles me.

Re:Do we actually lose memories?

[Anonymous Coward]

A guy that was trying to teach me Go said that most (if not all) high level Go players remember every game they ever played. I can't remember my first game, so I won't bother playing a second one. :P

Re:Do we actually lose memories?

[Anonymous Coward]

"High level" in this case means professionals who have started playing when they were like 3-years old and have been playing tens of games every single day for more than 20 years, taught by grandmasters.

And they do not remember every single game they have ever played. They might remember many recently played games and games in the more distant past they have studied more carefully, but in no way every single game they have ever played (specially the ones played when they were beginners).

Re:Do we actually lose memories?

[m50d]

I think we must lose them, because I think my memory recently filled up. I used to be able to learn how to do things in maths or science after being shown them just once. Instant. And I'd learn a song as soon as I heard it. Now, at 17, it's gone. I know enough that I'm still a very good mathematician, but I worry that it's fading. Most striking is a poem I was learning, the rime of the ancient mariner. I learnt the first three parts in as many weeks. Now, no matter what I try, I can't seem to learn any more.

I obviously still learn some things, since I've learnt perl since this happens. But it seems harder, as if I'm having to clear out old memories to make space, and I need to rehearse things more to learn them.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

Re:Do we actually lose memories?

[St. Arbirix]

Sounds like what happens when you're using a hash table to organize your data. At first everything slides neatly into a place in the table that wasn't already occupied. After a while though, the table is getting crowded and you have to start implementing some sort of algorithm to get things into locations that'll you'll eventually be able to use.

The same idea happens with system memory. Your computer loads the program from the harddrive into main memory (RAM) and parts of that is paged into your caches using some algorithm. Now, when nothing is running on your computer and you're just giving it new commands it fills up those caches and the main memory really quickly. But after a while main memory is a jumble and the cache is mapped all over the place. It takes 1000 times longer to pull stuff from the hard drive that you need and it also takes a lot of use of certain pieces of memory before the memory manager will decide its worth keeping in main memory for faster recall and not flushing out to the hard drive.

We figured out memory hierarchies a long time ago. Newer technology has given us a difference between L1 and L2 cache, but we're still depending on the same basic idea of spreading out data between the really expensive quick memory and the dirt cheap, expansive, and incrementally slow outer levels of memory. The concept just works. There's no reason not to believe nature settled upon the same system on a vastly more complex scale. We've taken almost 100 years to get the memory hierarchy we have now and we've done over time is speed up the system and subdivide the memory levels more and more. Nature has had billions or years to give our minds all sorts of levels. It's no wonder we think most of our brain is unused. Tape backups in the basement look unused but everyone knows they're storing something.

About memory

[GIL_Dude]

Wow, I had an amazing post all worked out, but then I forgot the whole thing. I'm thinking I should RTA, but I forget where the link was...

Usage and randomness

[HarveyBirdman]

There's something to be said for rote memorization in some cases (addition and multiplication tables from 0+0 to 9x9).

The rest is probably just random. There may be no ghost in the shell at all.

Re:Usage and randomness

[Anonymous Coward]

--- Ban humanity.

I'd settle for banning humans. That should suffice to get rid of most of the stupidity.

Early memory

[hedley]

I had a eye operation(s) (4 of them before age 4).
I was given a matchbox car which had a trunk. Years later I recalled that I put the wrapper for a straw in the trunk. I found the car, opened it and there it was. Funny since I have limited memory from that period of time. I do remember the eye dr's office too from the visits there. There was a good show on TV for the Annenberg CPB education series. This one was on Psychology with Dr Zimbardo (Stanford), it was on memory, he covered the famous cases when someone paints pictures of their home village. Surprisingly, some of those artists captured their town pretty much exactly (plus minus some details). Very interesting. Also the statistic of we can remember 7 unrelated items in a list on average came up. Use of mnemonic devices was shown etc. Good program.

Re:Early memory

[prockcore]

Years later I recalled that I put the wrapper for a straw in the trunk. I found the car, opened it and there it was.

Memory is very strange. It seems to me that the very act of remembering something becomes a new memory (as it has in your case). You end up with memories of memories of memories. Some of them real, some of them were just dreams that you've remembered so often you can't tell the difference unless at one point you made a point of remembering that it was a dream.

yeah sure keep moddin' down the black man

[Anonymous Coward]

so long the little white wimmen go down on me too, it's all good!

Now...

[Lil-Bondy]

That we have discovered somewhat how it works, how do we get rid of the memories thats stay? i still have some pretty horrible images of that purple dinosaur, sometimes at night i wake up screaming "ITS FOUR, TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR!!!"

Re:Does this shed any more light on coding solutio

[Punboy]

As far as I know, we don't have any problems with memory storage in AI... its the immensely fast and optimized fuzzy-logic and pattern matching our brains do that eludes AI developers.

You think that's strange?

[mattbatten]

You think that's strange? Try remembering what you had for lunch yesterday and see how long it takes to remember.

Q: How do you confuse a pot smoker?
A: Ask them "What were we just talking about?"

OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[lhaeh]

That reminds me of the discussion on that very topic in alt.drugs.psychedelics.

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[ktulu1115]

I recall that one as well. I was slightly shocked there were as many of us as there were. Interesting story too.

How does a gene "know" when to strengthen a synapse permanently and when to let a fleeting moment fade unrecorded?

But regardless, I thought we knew one of (if not the primary) factor involved - it's proportional to the strength of the emotion tied to the memory. Anyone?

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[KillerLoop]

Sure, but what do you identify with emotion in this context? When we look at memory, we often abstract to very high levels to describe interactions as we can observe them.

Those guys seem to set up their frame of reference regarding the physical substrate, the mechanics if you will, that may physically realise memory.

If you try to reduce "emotion" in the context of physical implementation, you see... what? Probably still nerves firing (mostly located in the amygdala perhaps?). So, if my hypothesis I just pulled out of my ass holds, one facet of emotion should also be high "nerve activation". Right now I don't see a necessity that nerves doing their learn trick must absolutely know what the "content" of those firing nerves is. Be it emotion, a past memory or a verbal construct - if it's active in the term of learning, it seems to get tied in.

Maybe we should try and masturbate a bit while learning, maybe the notion of an exam will become more pleasurable. ;)

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[flumps]

Maybe we should try and masturbate a bit while learning, maybe the notion of an exam will become more pleasurable. ;)

... you may well laugh, but I spend many hours of the day rubbing my crotch whilst I'm learning stuff.


Did I just say that out loud? Oh crap.

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[flumps]

On a serious note, it seems that although I can remember events and these events bring about an appropriate emotional response, I cannot remember exactly how I felt AT THAT MOMENT IN TIME or the intensity of that feeling.

Its the same with an LSD trip I took once. I remember what happened, and it makes me laugh. But I cannot remember the feeling of being high like that, my brain just seems to have forgotten the emotions. I always find that interesting to think about...

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[Anonymous Coward]

What I can't understand, what the F have genes to do with all this? Genes "know" jack shit. They are just crude blueprints for base layout. They cannot have anything to do with something as complex as an "emotion". Coincidences exists, sure, for genetic characteristics and psychological characteristics, but that's still damn far from causation or guidance. The fine detail and higher stuff comes from brain reacting to surroundings (which gets progressively more complex after your baby age).

Give the poor genes a break. The little innocent simpletons are weeping at all the things we blame on them.

Some people seem to explain by genes what previously was explained by magic, fate, gods, whatever your superstition.

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[mrogers]

I'm not sure if it's the level of emotion so much as the level of shock - one of my early "flashbulb" memories is of the Challenger shuttle explosion, which was a very shocking experience for me but not necessarily a very emotional one.

In information theory, the amount of information an event carries depends on how unexpected it is - predictable outcomes carry little information. If the function of learning is to model an unpredictable world in order to make predictions, then it makes sense that a surprising event should be given more weight than a routine event. Of course, surprising events will often be emotional too, so maybe I'm wrong to separate the two.

I wonder if there are any experiments relating the information content (entropy) of a neuron's inputs to the strength of various factors associated with learning? Do neurons tend to adapt to ignore predictable signals?

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[TGK]

Ok... so which of the following statements would you object to.

1 - Genes provide a chemical instruction set for cellular operations
2 - Neurons are cells
3 - The brain is composed of neurons
4 - Informational organization exists in the brain in the form of connections between neurons
5 - Neurons form connections due to the interaction between their genes and the rest of the brain.
6 - Since the rest of the brain is composed of nothing more than more neurons, each of which is individualy controled by internal genetic packages, all interactions in the brain can be abstracted to genes interacting with other genes through the interfaces of the cells thoes genes control.
7 - Therefore, it is the instructions coded into our genes that "tell" the brain how to form connections between neurons, how strong those connections should be, etc.

I'm curious, if genes do not govern the formation of synaptic bonds, what does? "The Brain" is the organizatoinal structure created because those bonds exist, so to argue that it controls them is fallacy... a chicken egg problem if you will.

Re:OT: Re:poor /. synaptic function

[KillerLoop]

Me too, hence the ";)". Guess that may be part of the explanation that I generally associate learning with pleasurable terms.

"Scientific Americans "

[twoes00]

Scientific Americans? its Scientific American! Anyways, this article is very interesting, its amazing just how complex the brain is. More complex than we'll ever be to know...

Does this shed any more light on efficient memory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Partially. However there's efficient memory storage, and access issues to worry about.

Re:Yes interesting indeed!

[Stuart Poss]

A point of the original article and known from
various studies in neuroscience is that "memory" and "mental activity" can not be fully distinguished from the "architecture" of the nerves themselves. Neurons are connected via synapses on dendrites and connections are being formed and reshaped (new topologies of interconnectness. Thus, as differential activity ensues, differential connectedness and synapse development occurs concomitantly. Some neuronal paths will be selected for, while others will be selected against. Hence, "memories" may be stored as "architecture" as well as by the multiple biochemical pathways modulating the formation and "strength" of different "circuits" that ultimately "add" or "multiply" the effect of the firing patterns on the genetic machinery in the nucleus of the neuron, which are critical to the maintenance of longterm memory. It may be a fundamental mistake to assume that "memories" are individual molecules, even though many molecules ultimately are ultimately involved in their existence.

The article is interesting in that the neuron may in some respects by acting like an antenna, whose cellular/genetic machinery and morphology (architecture of dendrites and synapse topology) are designed to adaptively differentially "tune" for different action potential input/output logic via differential signal strength from relative importance of different connections, different dendrite size, and different numbers of synapses.

Perhaps this may suggest that the path to wisdom is to be found by becoming a much better "listener". Attention to subtle nuance may be far more important than our current political culture admits.

This might also go a long way towards explaining why different species have such different brains, yet brains whose underlying organization is so similar.

You want to know why some memories ..

[Anonymous Coward]

are recalled more easily than others? One word: humiliation

Imperfect memory? Yes, please...

[Reteo Varala]

Personally, I'd prefer a volatile memory.

There are some good things about a clear memory. Being able to recall things with a minimal amount of effort, and maybe, if it's stubborn, the easy recall of where to find it. Immediate notice of a flaw in a pattern, no matter how miniscule or unnoticeable. Noticing inconsistency in a conversation. Tracking how much money you have left.

However, it does have it's downside.

Ever hear the saying "Someday we'll look back and laugh at this?"

I'm still waiting. I still cringe over every single embarassing memory in the 30-year period that is my life. Those memories, when I recall them, are much too clear, and it feels like it just happened, despite the fact that some of those events had occurred over 20-25 years ago. Sometimes it's so strong, I feel the need to shut down, and lately, it's started to cause nervous reactions; too many things are drawing them up as I work to re-integrate myself into that thing known as "Humanity."

Thankfully, my memory, while vivid, is still selective, and I can find the mercy of forgetfulness. I don't think I could survive a photographic memory with my sanity intact.

It is said that if you recalled every single thing, it would take a strong will not to go mad. I believe it.

Memory vs. Memories

[Couzin2000]

It's interesting to read the point of view of others. That generally is the way for us to form opinions, and, well, I have my own opinion formed.

I think it's probably not so much a matter of "strengthening" a synapse to remember more clearly. I think it's more of an associative memory thing. As we all know, remembering certain things are "triggered" by events, occurences and coincidences. Certain things could be remembered during a conversation on a certain topic, for example; haven't we all played that game where someone says how bad a fall they took from their bike when that someone was young, and then we go on to say "Well, check out the fall I took..." and then go on to tell them an even worse fall? I think it's things we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, that trigger these memories into surfacing.

Part of this is associative, and we all do it. But, some events are almost omnipresent in our minds. For example, a rape victim. The victim will remember this event on the premise that so many times she's heard about how bad that could be, how intolerable a behaviour that could be for a human, and we get it drilled in our minds. When the event actually happens to her, it will trigger all these memories of hearing how bad it is all at once.

The reverse will then happen: anytime a rape victim will see a commercial on rape prevention, or a attempted rape scene in a movie, that will in turn trigger all these times that she was told that rape is bad, and the event itself. (Keep in mind here, I'm in no way saying rape is just an "event" - I do NOT condone it. We're just not discussing the moral implications here.)

Associations are made between memories and, in turn, synapses, because of all the possible interconnections they have. Based on all the similarities or closeness of incidents in our lives, we re-associate events that happen daily to old, pushed-away-to-the-side memories. That's how when you see an old friend you haven't seen in so long can "bring back" so many great memories.. and bad ones as well.

I doubt that certain events are more powerful than others, but I think they might be more potent than some, simply by all these things we associate together.

My 2 cents!

Re:Memory vs. Memories

[CmdrTookah]

Do you think that strengthening a synapse is the cellular event that coincides with associating one stimulus with another? Think of 2 fields of neurons both connected up with another field in the cerebral cortex responsible for salivation. One field is responsible for signalling the bell, the other is responsible for smelling the food. When the two fields are active at the same time they strengthen the synaps between them and the cortical field responsible for salivation. The more times you let the dog smell the food, the more he salivates. The bell is rang simultaneously, then not-so-suddenly the bell-ringing field can trigger salivation. Associative learning. Associative memory is very similar, just replace "food" with "rape" and "bell" with "dark alley" and your rape victim is associating dark allies with rape. The response, then is her memory and the fear associated with it.

Mental heart-beat

[jedwardsnz]

In light of this article, perhaps the following mental discipline may be useful:

Every ten minutes, review the important experiences of the preceding ten minutes. Also review the important events of the preceding couple of ten-minute intervals.

I guess this would be like a 'mental heart-beat', that would serve to keep your mind active and your useful memories intact.

Re:2 cents ... an philosophy

[CmdrTookah]

Totally off topic. Smoke another one.

Re:Imperfect memory? Yes, please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Smoke Marijuana, lots and lots of marijuana.

Say it Three Times

[BlackHawk-666]

Remarkably, if the same high-frequency stimulus is applied repeatedly (three times in our experiments), the synapse becomes strengthened permanently, a state called late LTP. But the stimuli cannot be repeated one after the other. Instead each stimulus burst must be spaced by sufficient intervals of inactivity (10 minutes in our experiments). And adding chemicals that block mRNA or protein synthesis to the salt solution bathing the brain slice will cause the synapse to weaken to its original strength within two to three hours. Just as in whole organisms, the cellular model of short-term memory is not dependent on the nucleus, but the long-term form of memory is.

Finally, a scientific explanation for what wicken and other mystics have know for thousands of years. Say it three times to give it power. The number three and repetition three times is a powerful concept that seems deeply imbedded in mankind.

More recent memories unravel first

[ynotds]

one possibility is that very long term memories are illusory

I know it can feel introspectively that our oldest memories are really memories of memories of memories, because certainly the ones we most often bring to mind ourselves are ones we have remembered from time to time. Yet on vacation recently I was reminded by my brother of an allergic reaction I experienced almost 40 years ago which I'm sure I had not thought about for at least 25 years, yet the memory was still there once reactivated.

More telling, visiting an elderly friend in hospital, he introduced me to the wife of the patient opposite who had stroke-related dementia. They were immigrants and he had spoken both English and another major "second" language fluently before his disability, but now can only use his birth language, which is a lonely way to exist in an English-speaking hospital.

Even my mother, who had a very slight stroke a couple of years ago, now starts many more conversations about things from her childhood than about the last third of her life in the house where she still lives reasonably independently in a community where she played a very active role for most of those years.

So I felt Sejnowski's idea sounded sensible when I first read it. However I don't see it as being inconsistent with the SciAm article linked here. To form something more permanent in the intracellular matrix around a synapse, most likely you are still going to need to start with some special protein finding its way to that particular synapse.

And we still need a credible story as to how one or several persistently strengthened synapses actually encode one of the countless details we accumulate in a life time in all their contextual detail.

Intercellular Communication

[BananaPeel]

InterCellular Communication. Is a more likely mechanism. As cells mature and differentiate they change their messaging between cells. We still do not understand most of the cellular messaging paths. Hence I would not be surprised if the current cell messaging state is simply reflected by that of its neighbouring cells or the surrounding helper cell. Hence even if the cell was destroyed a new cell would be able to establish itself into the same state.

This is something that could easily be tested in the lab.

But remember you heard it here first :-)

Witness discreditation program

[ynotds]

This kind of research is slowly undermining the legal fiction of eye witness testimony.

If in order to commit something to long term memory you need to reactivate relevant synapses after an interval measured in minutes, then the reactivation will surely be compromised by whatever rationalisation you have managed to do in the interim.

If I recall correctly, there have been controlled experiments done in which a stooge managed to readily convince witnesses that certain details of an event where quite different to what had actually happened.

So if your GF kicked you in the Nuts, you'd

[purduephotog]

remember?

Man, you are quite the brave one putting this comment out here. What if she sees it and realizes the way to make you remember functions is to threaten (or do so) kick you in the nuts.

Brave man. We slashdotters admire your willingness to give up children...

O.o

[Anonymous Coward]

return -EIFORGET;

My brain without me.

[cabazorro]

My project wound down in October. Since then I've been doing documentation and non-programming duties.

Yesterday I had to add a line to a file.
A simple unix command that a few months ago I could have spitted out like second nature...

was gone!

I walked aimlessly through the cube-maze string at blank faces trying to remember but I couldn't.

Was that a cat command? set? awk?

I asked some gurus and referred my to the >> command. Than I sat back in front of my white board and gently and swiftly the line emerged from my dry marker.

>echo "my line" >> myFile

Panick receded and was replaced with cautious optimism.

The understand the nature of volatile memory one has to read ./ for a few months, fall in Love or perhaps read Thomas Mann "Magic Mountain".

distilled spirits...

[The Creator]

Have you not herd of buffalo theory?

Deja vu

[deus980]

In my experience, memory is an association, sometimes with senses or thought processes. I often find myself attempting to trace a pecular thought or sense of deja vu, and I can usually do it, and I end up with a particular sentence or phrase that sparked a long chain of thought. Try it out with a random thought and see where you get to.

Chemical related to anxiety

[Anonymous Coward]

Without having RTFA, I;d like to put forward that a chemical or process that is associated with anxiety, and possibly elevated also by other emotions like happiness and anger is what strengthens a memory. Makes sense both in a biological and evolutionary sense. What better way to develope primal instincts than to make key emotional moments more significant memory-wise?

Non Local

[Ludo.Sanders]

I thought we already discovered that memory was non local

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Re:Non Local

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the rat was intelligent enough to back up his memory off-site.

Source

[Ludo.Sanders]

source = http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

Stuck in Classical Physics

[lperdue]

Like so many of these, the people involved are stuck in the world of classical physics and are not looking deeply enough into what may very well be a quantum phenomenon.

While it's still controversial and in an early stage of development, Mathematician/cosmologist Roger Penrose has presented some intriguing hypotheses that consciousness (and thus memory) may be quantum phenomena. His viewpoint is pretty well carried out by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.

Oh this one is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

the protiens use TCP/IP ofcourse.

Duh..

Eh, Head First Servlets & JSP already knew thi

[kalirion]

From the intro:

Your brain craves novelty. It's always searching, scanning, waiting for something unusual. It was built that way, and it helps you stay alive.

Today, you're less likely to be a tiger snack. But your brain's still looking. You just never know.

So what does your brain do with all the routine, ordinary, normal things you encounter? Everything it can to stop them from interfering with the brain's real job - recording things that matter. It doesn't bother saving the boring things; they never make it past the "this is obviously not important" filter.

How does your brain know what's important? Suppose you're out for a day hike and a tiger jumps in front of you, what happens inside your head?

Neurons fire. Emotions crank up. Chemicals surge.

And that's how your brain knows...

This must be important! Don't forget it!

But imagine you're at home, or in a library. It's a safe, warm, tiger-free zone. You're studying. Getting ready for an exam. Or trying to learn some tough technical topic your boss thinks will take a week, ten days at the most.

Just one problem. Your brain's trying to do you a big favor. It's trying to make sure that this obviously non-important content doesn't clutter up scarce resources. Resources that are better spent storing the really big things. Like tigers. Like the danger of fire. Like how you should never again snowboard in shorts.

And there's no simple way to tell your brain, "Hey brain, thank you very much, but no matter how dull this book is, and how little I'm registering on the emotional richter scale right now, I really do want you to keep this stuff around."

Re:Imperfect memory? Yes, please...

[Zerbey]

I'm still waiting. I still cringe over every single embarassing memory in the 30-year period that is my life. Those memories, when I recall them, are much too clear, and it feels like it just happened, despite the fact that some of those events had occurred over 20-25 years ago. Sometimes it's so strong, I feel the need to shut down, and lately, it's started to cause nervous reactions; too many things are drawing them up as I work to re-integrate myself into that thing known as "Humanity."


You just need to stop beating yourself up about it. If we didn't have excrutiatingly embarassing things happen to us (hell, just look at some of the ill-advised comments I've made in the past and resulting flames... :-)) we wouldn't grow as people.

I've done so many dumb things so far in my life I could spend the rest of it just hiding in a corner somewhere. I know I'm doing to do a ton more, but I also know I'll learn from then, move on, and grow.

For example, I now know that if you drink to much Archers and Coke you will get sick, and if you have floppy disks in your pocket they may just fall in the toilet with your vomit and cause a blockage. I further know that your friends don't appreciate you staggering home without cleaning the resultant mess up. :-)

There's already an ipod for that

[vijaya_chandra]

:p
iPod implant

Yes, yes, but the important thing is...

[wcrowe]

...How can we turn this into some sort of weapon?

If you erase all memory of that from your mind

[Anonymous Coward]

you won't remember to not click on goatse.cx

At which point, you'll be reminded again, and have to erase it from your memory again. And when you've erased it from your memory, you won't remember why you shouldn't click on that link...

Behold the presto infinite loop of doom!

Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, it's up in the FIRST POST!

Re:Drug Induced Amnesia

[Duck_Benway]

Does anyone know if there is a medical term, or any term at all, that is used to describe the condition of someone recovering from amnesia? Thank you for any advice. glnova@eciad.ca