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First Images of Memories Being Made

Posted by timothy on from the from-the-brain-side-that-is dept.

TheSync writes Eurekalert reports that researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill and UCLA have captured the first image of protein translation that underlies long-term memory formation. A fluorescent protein showed the increased local protein synthesis during memory formation, which requires cooperation between the pre and post-synaptic compartments of the two neurons that meet at the synapse."

19 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Boooooring by elloGov · · Score: 2, Funny

    Memories are so much cooler than their images

  2. One Step Closer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We're one step closer to finally having computers analyze our neural pathways, and thus answer the ages-old question: Where the hell are my damn car keys?

    1. Re:One Step Closer by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Certainly analyzing memories would be a necessary part of downloading your personality into a computer, a mainstay of science fiction (take Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars as an example where it is used to great effect) and the loony but inspiring outlook of Ray "the singularity is near!" Kurzweil. I wonder if consciousness can be separated from a body of memories. If a copy of me does not have certain memories, is it still me?

    2. Re:One Step Closer by MozeeToby · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Is an amnesiac still the same person? I guess you could argue that they subconsciously still have their memories but I would say its a valid comparison. For that matter, as time goes on what you do and don't remember is constantly changing. Events that were key in making you who you are today are often forgotten about years later.

      I would say that events and memories shape your personality but the personality itself is separate. That being said, if a memory is continuously a part of you, such that you think about it everyday, then that memory is still affecting your personality every time you think about it. Taking that memory away could rapidly lead to a significantly different personality. Imagine soldiers suffering from PTSD and how much their personality would change if you could simply remove the dramatic memories.

    3. Re:One Step Closer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Aren't you running up against the most persistently reinforced memory we have?

      I am me all the time. Whether I remember where I got a particular quirk or not is irrelevant to the fact that I pretty much always remember I have it. In this light, personality is a habit reinforced by repetition.

      To change personality you'd have to change both the source lesson, if it's still remembered at all, and the memory of the habit of that personality. It may not necessarily be more difficult but it's more complicated than simply erasing the memory of a discrete event from the past.

    4. Re:One Step Closer by RichardJenkins · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If a copy of me does not have certain memories, is it still me?

      I don't think so. If it's a copy of you then (to me at least) it's not you by definition.

      It's really tricky to think of a solid explanation of what 'I' am. I think if I were going to have a stab at a partial definition I'd define a person as some sort of extremely complex shape in space-time: if you take a three-dimensional cross section of a person at a specific point in time, you'd see what we know from out of every day experience - a really complexly ordered collection of matter. If you then look at a cross-section at neighbouring point of time, the order of the collection will have changed, and some new matter is included in it, and some matter has been discarded from it. If we imagine some mind boggling complex array of rules governing what changes to the collection are permitted between one point in time and another in order for that collection to still be considered a person at the other point in time, then we can consider conception and death as the two points in time where the collection changes in a way not permitted by those rules.

      So, you have a segment of time made up of a myriad of discrete points, and at each a unique collection of matter in a particular order. If you examine the deltas between this collection from point-to-point in time, you will find them to obey specific rules (of course, without defining those rules a person can really be anything so this little diversion gets us nowhere - still if you've managed to read all the way down to here you're probably just as high as I am, or at least wish you were).

  3. A few things are clear by JoshuaZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    0ur understanding of how brains and memory function is rapidly improving. This follows on the heals of for example the engineering of smart mice a few years back http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q3/0902-smart.htm. We are likely not very far from the point where we will have a good enough understanding of such abilities to be able to safely incorporate them into human embryos. Ethical questions that a few years ago that were being primarily addressed by pot heads need to be seriously examined. I, for one, see nothing wrong with genetically improving the human population, especially my own children when I eventually have them, but these discussions need to occur. Also, work like this is interesting for another reason: It is yet another nail in the coffin of mind-body dualism. At this point, I'm surprised the coffin can handle the weight given how many nails are in it, yet most humans seem to still be strong dualists.

    1. Re:A few things are clear by JoshuaZ · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But is already a problem with education and nutrition. Better education and better nutrition give the children of the well-off massive advantages. We don't try to solve that by forcing people to give their kids a mediocre education.

      Moreover, if we do engage in serious genetic engineering many of the alleles will be alleles already in the human population. So the ability for people to claim that one is better than another simply by genetics will be a danger purely from letting our research into genetics continue even if we don't allow genetic engineering.

    2. Re:A few things are clear by narcc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you are going to make that sort of claim, you are going to need to define what you mean by dualism, since bears little resemblance to the classical meaning of the term.

      This is why I think you need to learn a bit more about the problem. Dualism in it's many forms (as they apply to philosophy of mind) are well defined. It isn't necessary that I redefine dualism for you, only that you learn a bit more about it.

      As for Penrose -- Again, I think you may want to actually read his books instead of just about them on some blog. You should also re-read my last post -- where you realize that I was only interested in his arguments against the mind being a product of a classical system. (The arguments he makes are not his own, but they're well written and in support of John Searle.) Yes, I agree that his quantum brain ideas are rubbish, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the present discussion.

      While I'm on the subject of Penrose, you claim that "but much of his work has serious problems" You don't know much about Penrose! He's the worlds most respected (living) mathematician and the worlds top mathematical physicist. He's also not the first well-respected scientist to drop the ball (and suffer serious criticism) when discussing consciousness. (Francis Crick, for embarrassed himself with the mess that was "The astonishing hypothesis")

      There is much still to learn.

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    3. Re:A few things are clear by JoshuaZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is why I think you need to learn a bit more about the problem. Dualism in it's many forms (as they apply to philosophy of mind) are well defined. It isn't necessary that I redefine dualism for you, only that you learn a bit more about it.

      We both agree the term has many different meanings. So you need to tell me which definition you are using if this is going to go anywhere (that is aside from the primary issue that we both seem to agree that naive dualism fails pretty badly which was the point being made).

      As for Penrose -- Again, I think you may want to actually read his books instead of just about them on some blog. You should also re-read my last post -- where you realize that I was only interested in his arguments against the mind being a product of a classical system. (The arguments he makes are not his own, but they're well written and in support of John Searle.) Yes, I agree that his quantum brain ideas are rubbish, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the present discussion.

      Yes, you are right that the quantum issue has little to do with the matter at hand. I haven't read about Penrose on blogs. I picked up one of his books on consciousness a few years back, I think it was "The Emperor's New Mind" and my general response to most of it was either "bullshit!" or "True. So what?" Penrose has the problem that many successful people seem to have late in life where they think that their field can provide overarching explanations in other fields or that their very good idea can be generalize a lot. If there's a particular item by him you think I should read please recommend it and I'll take a look.

      While I'm on the subject of Penrose, you claim that "but much of his work has serious problems" You don't know much about Penrose! He's the worlds most respected (living) mathematician and the worlds top mathematical physicist.

      I was talking about his work with consciousness which should have been clear from context. If someone said something stupid and there's a simple other interpretation that's probably what the person meant. He is clearly very accomplished although since you bring the matter up, you vastly overstate his credentials. To say that he is the most respected living mathematician is simply false. He might be the most respected mathematician outside of the mathematical community, but that doesn't say much. And even then, I'm pretty sure that's false. Terrence Tao, Andrew Wiles, John Conway and Grigori Perelman are all more respected within the mathematical community by any reasonable metric, and I suspect that by most simple metrics one comes up with one will find that they are more respected in the general populace as well. Claiming he's the top mathematical physicist is a little more reasonable, but also very arguable. I don't however, feel completely confident in discussing that claim given that I know much less about physics than I know about math.

      He's also not the first well-respected scientist to drop the ball (and suffer serious criticism) when discussing consciousness. (Francis Crick, for embarrassed himself with the mess that was "The astonishing hypothesis")

      This doesn't just occur with consciousness. There's a general pattern of very good researchers breaking themselves against very hard problems late in life. It is very hard to tell what the underlying cause of this pattern is. But this general pattern has little to do with Penrose's work regarding consciousness. No one is claiming that his other work should be dismissed just because he's had a few wacky ideas any more than anyone would claim that PCR isn't impressive because Kary Mullis has a lot of strange ideas floating around in his head.

    4. Re:A few things are clear by jackchance · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The "normal" definition of dualism is that there is a physical universe and a metaphysical universe. Science is a method to understand the physical universe, but cannot tell us much about the metaphysical one. If consciousness is metaphysical then neuroscientists, like me, are not going to be much good at figuring it out.

      I think many people confuse physical with deterministic. There are many physical systems that are non-deterministic and I would argue that the brain is one of them. We don't yet know the source of non-determinism in the brain. But there are generally two classes of non-mutually exclusive theories.

      1) There is intrinsic noise in the brain. The human brain is kept at a balmy 37ËsC which provides for plenty of Brownian noise. (I could expand on this at length.. but i have a flight to catch soon)

      2) There is a neural circuit that acts essentially as a roulette wheel in our brain. Why, you might ask, would you have a casino in your head? Because in a competitive world predictability = death. (See this). This was more or less, the insight that John Nash had when he came up with the Nash Equilibrium, a critical contribution to game theory .

      And a quick comment on the question of who are we but our memories? It turns out that we have different kinds of memories that are stored in different parts of our brains. Some of these memories would more normally be called beliefs or strategies but are formed in a very similar way as "normal" episodic memories (like what you had for breakfast). When someone starts to lose their memories of what they had for breakfast (or whether they live, etc) we call it amnesia, and we can often still see remnants of the person (they might have the same moral compass) and they still know how gravity works, etc. When the more basic belief and rule memories start to go, we often use a different word, "dementia", to imply that the person is not acting like themselves, but rather a demented version of themselves.

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  4. Pandora's Box by cromar · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can't we all just forget about this?

  5. Pictures of Memories by Reason58 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Memories, light the corners of my mind
    Misty watercolor memories of the way we were.
    Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind
    smiles we give to one another
    for the way we were.
    Can it be that it was all so simple then
    or has time rewritten every line?
    If we had the chance to do it all again
    tell me would we? Could we?
    Memories, may be beautiful and yet
    what's too painful to remember
    we simply choose to forget
    So it's the laughter we will remember
    whenever we remember
    the way we were.

  6. Safe for now by FungusCannon · · Score: 3, Funny

    As long as they can't actually SEE memories, I'm safe.

  7. Some day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If we ever get to the point of being able to directly record what we hear and see in our minds, the production of media is going to change forever. As a musician there have been times I've "heard" an absolutely wonderful piece of music in my mind but I have no idea where to begin in reproducing the quality or timber or transcribing the technicality behind some of the instruments. It can be discouraging because as quickly as it comes it goes, being both the first and last time one listens to such a thing.

  8. I started to comment, but... by smackenzie · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...I forget what this article is about.

    Oh well. I love lamp.

  9. Sign Me Up! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm interested in a Mars vacation. Remember, I like my women slutty and I DON'T want to wake up thinking I'm agent Hauser.

  10. Imaging and resolution by Gat0r30y · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is really sweet. If you've ever looked at some of the images that researchers produce when trying to get an idea of where in a cell things are going on using GFP - this image is really clean. An AAAS webinar on the subject recently seemed to indicate that most of the improvements have come about due to how the image is processed. In any case this calls for a big congrats to the researchers.

    --
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  11. Re:Language needs more parentheses... by MyLongNickName · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is Slashdot. I am just impressed that the title was spelled correctly.

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