Slashdot Mirror
Researchers May Have Discovered How Memories Are Encoded In the Brain
Zothecula writes "While it's generally accepted that memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains, the exact process has never been entirely understood. Strengthened synaptic connections between neurons definitely have something to do with it, although the synaptic membranes involved are constantly degrading and being replaced – this seems to be somewhat at odds with the fact that some memories can last for a person's lifetime. Now, a team of scientists believe that they may have figured out what's going on. Their findings could have huge implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer's."
by tiny Gnomes, with silver hammers.
This is known, even by the most obtuse of my Aunts.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If memories are stored in meat...how come we still have them in the afterlife?
but then they slept on it and forgot
If the tiniest amount of storage is on molecular level, the total capacity of "memory" of a person is HUGE.
No summary? meh
I dig how the title for this article, at least, sounds as though researchers stumbled across a working hypothesis...as though scientific hypotheses are hit upon like a rock in the road.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
A memory can theoretically remain longer than synaptic connections. If a memory is important enough you memorize it again when you remember it, and store it in a different location. Doing this from time to time can help bypass the duration limit.
I can't understand this unless it's presented as a car analogy.
Pick one
a) therapy, erasing bad memories
b) therapy, implanting good memories
c) health, perserving function
d) personal, perserving cherished memories
e) learning
f) porn
Place your bets!!
I can not say it any better than a commenter on the Gizmag article already has, and I quote:
1. This article says nothing about how CaMKII/tubulin interactions help form memories and the whole Alzheimer’s therapy thing is 99% speculation and total bs.
2. If this was big news, it wouldn’t be published in PloS, it would be in a more prestigious journal like nature or something
-- comment Ben Murphy-Baum
If you want to read something intelligent about "memory storage theory", here's a better article--from Brown University, November 14, 2006.
Pull-quote:
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Daily events are minted into memories in the hippocampus, one of the oldest parts of the brain. For long-term storage, scientists believe that memories move to the neocortex, or "new bark," the gray matter covering the hippocampus. This transfer process occurs during sleep, especially during deep, dreamless sleep.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
I took a look at the paper in case I managed to understand something, and came across this:
Whoa. If that research is correct then that's really amazing.
My parents and their friends were sitting around at our wedding table, all arguing on when the mass-suicide of Jim Jones' cult happened. "It was 1982, I think." "No, it was '81." I said, "No, it was '78." Dad looked it up and found that yup, I was right. "But you were only two years old! Did you look it up recently??"
"No, it's just the way it felt in time."
I can recall things from waaaay back into infancy (you can't believe the blackmail material I have on Mom, and what she doesn't WANT me to remember, lol), but go on, ask me what I had for breakfast. All you'll get is a blank, stupid stare. Hell, I forgot to hit 'post' when I first tried posting this comment here, only hitting 'preview' then wandering off to other places. Always doing that.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
“This could open up amazing new possibilities of dealing with memory loss problems, interfacing our brains with hybrid devices to augment and 'refresh' our memories,” said Tuszynski. “More importantly, it could lead to new therapeutic and preventive ways of dealing with neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and dementia, whose incidence is growing very rapidly these days.”
Not to mention "the black shakes".
But I don't think we'll see anything useful come from this research, because everybody knows that socialist medicine (like they have in Canada) is second rate. To really come up with a profitable, er... effective cure, you need capitalism involved.
How much will it cost me to remember being an invincible secret agent on Mars??
This transfer process occurs during sleep, especially during deep, dreamless sleep.
Hmm... so the fact that I A) seldom ever dream, and B) suffer from C.R.S. Syndrome, may possibly be related?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"While it's generally accepted that memories are stored somewhere"
Does anyone believe otherwise?
Well, the religious types will tell you there is also a backup copy stored somewhere, somehow in the cloud, literally.
So really, the ability to encode bitwise functions and boolean logic in chemicals in the brain has absolutely nothing to do with how the brain *actually* functions.
It's been obvious to me that we store memories in tiny little flash drives embedded in our brain. Sometimes they go bad, and then we get getstuckget stuck and files don'tloadloadloadfilesystemcorrupt
Drugs: don't do 'em, kids.
Well, that's good news, but what I want to know is...can they find my confounded car keys!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Although I don't know that much about the biochemistry that the Gizmag is talking about, and I can't criticize that, the sentence that contains "memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains but the exact process has never been entirely understood." is suspicious - almost as if the author has actually no interest in what so ever in the subject. You are right, we do know approximately where the memories are stored. These neocortex parts+hippocampuses are called temporal lobes, left for abstract information, and right for spatial, contextual and events information and it has been established for quite a long time that they are specialized in long term memory.
"..in the 1930s whe Wilder Penfield observed that his concious epileptic patients would occasionally report "flashbacks" while the superior or upper lateral surfaces of their temporal cortices were electrically stimulated."- Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations Into Brain Function By Stanley Finger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_lobe
"Now, a team of scientists believe that they may have figured out what's going on. Their findings could have huge implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer's."
This statement is utterly absurd, but the authors of the PLoS article appear to have done some important work here. I'm not a physicist and can't evaluate the quality of the modeling and measurement, but assuming that is all legitimate (and I have no reason to doubt it), then their findings could prove useful to furthering theories on memory formation and stability. Basically they found a series of potential mechanisms by which activated CAMKII (via synaptic activity) can interface with microtubules to update their phosphorylation states. In what I would consider heavy speculation, they suggest that these phosphorylation states, along with the structural and electrostatic properties of microtubules, can produce and modulate information processing along/within the microtubules.
Keeping Occam's Razor in mind, to me it would be simpler if these interactions simply increase or decrease microtubule stability, and possibly affect shape to promote dendritic bifurcation versus elongation or retraction. Not to say some kind of information processing can't be happening in the microtubules, but we already have some pretty good theories regarding information processing in dendrites based on membrane voltage propagation. With changes in microtubule phosphorylation state there is also the possibility of making cross-linking tighter or looser, making it possible to fit in more or fewer microtubules and change a dendrite's diameter. All of these changes are important for signal processing, but by impacting the propagation properties of the membrane rather than through the microtubules directly. I base these comments on other research that have found changes in dendrite morphology and physiology concurrent with synaptic plasticity. One must always keep in mind though that anything as complex as memory is going to rely on multiple mechanisms. Any claim that "the mechanism for X" has been found is always hyperbole.
I would say that some of that speculation, as well as the fact that this is all highly theoretical (no experimental work) are the major reasons this wasn't published in a journal like Nature or Science. Still PLoS Computational Biology often has some very good and important articles.
Wait, so the human body does nightly backups? That is awesome.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
this brings us many steps closer to Total Recall!
Two weeks... two weeks... two weeks.... two weeks...
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-memories-encoded-brains.html
Q&A with the researcher. Bit more detail than GizMag.
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002421
The paper (gizmag links to it too)
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I suspected it all along ....
please excuse my apathy
Other tech "THEY" have:
http://www.thehiddenevil.com/
Welcome to the world of a Ti.
i can only hope they come up with a way to copy one's memories within my lifetime. i'd imagine religious nuts would be up in arms about people's minds being transferred/copied into a computer or eventually an engineered body though.
>> For long-term storage, scientists believe that memories move to the neocortex, or "new bark," the gray matter covering the hippocampus. This transfer process occurs during sleep, especially during deep, dreamless sleep.
I'm not sure I agree because this is a MUCH different case for me. I had Congenital Rubella Syndrome and I now I cope with a "Learning Disability". My short term memory is shot and I have a extremely hard time remembering short term tasks (please don't ask me to write everything I do down so I don't forget, that's completely pointless). Growing up was very difficult because most people don't understand why I can't recall something from 2 minutes ago, which makes memorizing nearly impossible by the way.
My long term memory is astounding. I surprise many people with stories, events, and information stored in long term memory with amazing detail but getting it there is sometimes a challenge. As I've gotten older the act of writing something down with a unique graphical style is enough to get it into my long term memory. Luckily I studied programming at a very young age and now I consider myself a very good programmer (I'm not Linus Torvalds).
I just hope it isn't encoded in WMV or something, or we'll all end up paying royalties for the images in our heads.
What they've actually proposed is a mechanism for how memories are stored, not how they're encoded. The question is, how can memories be so stable if they're made up of synaptic connections that are constantly changing? These authors have proposed an answer, a molecular description of a much more stable link between two neurons that could form and then remain fixed for years. If they're right, it's a very important advance. But encoding is a completely different question: how does a particular memory get represented as a set of those connections. This work says nothing about that.
To give an analogy, they've described the magnetic domains on a hard disk. They haven't described how JPEG transforms images into patterns of bits.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
As appealing as it it, there is possibly one major flaw in the entire idea. I can recall memories almost instantaneously. I don't believe reading microtubles can be done instantaneously since it involves large scale protein unbinding/binding events and phosphorylation/dephosphorylation. I think electrical firing patterns is a more realistic way that memories are preserved.
It uses crantab
Task Mangler
Jeez, I once refilled the laser printer toner with coffee, and tried to microwave cous-cous without using water. A college friend once put the kettle on without filling it (it exploded).
There is always putting down newspaper over wet varnish to stop people leaving footprints on the varnish.
My favorite is charging up a car battery and turning on the ignition before removing the cables.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
There are no "backups" of your brain. There may be neural redundancy, but effectively no 1 to 1 backups. No, if anything this is equivalent to flushing RAM to disk.
Life is not for the lazy.
it's called dope for a reason.
Exit-interview memory-wipe. Minor collateral damage is just the price of getting the job in the first place, and hey, everyone is doing it.
or maybe,
g) protecting the RIAA's IP. You're only allowed to remember the music for as long as you pay the licensing fees.
Not sure which scares me more.
g) Protecting the value of a university education. You're only allowed to remember it for as long as you pay the ongoing recertification co$t.
If I streamed data by modulating a laser off a distant target (the moon), then streamed the reflected signal, I could 'store' around 1 light second of data, without it ever having a 'where' (within the reference frame of a solar system, for the pedants).
My retrieval latency would be 1/utilization; so if I only used 0.1% of the available capacity, it would be 1ms; and my redundancy would be capacity/utilization.
From the actual scientific article:
...this suggests sets of six CaMKII kinase domains phosphorylate hexagonal MT lattice neighborhoods collectively, e.g. conveying synaptic information as ordered arrays of six "bits", and thus "bytes", with 64 to 5,281 possible bit states per CaMKII-MT byte...
In long-term potentiation (LTP), a cellular and molecular model for memory, post-synaptic calcium ion (Ca2+) flux activates the hexagonal Ca2+-calmodulin dependent kinase II (CaMKII), a dodacameric holoenzyme containing 2 hexagonal sets of 6 kinase domains. Each kinase domain can either phosphorylate substrate proteins, or not (i.e. encoding one bit). Thus each set of extended CaMKII kinases can potentially encode synaptic Ca2+ information via phosphorylation as ordered arrays of binary "bits"...
The research in question is about the exact process on a molecular level. We may know which cells
or synapses are affected, but we don't know much if anything about the chemistry of that process. These
simulation studies suggest an intriguing possibility
So if I've understood the article correctly and done my math right, this places a lower limit of 26 exabytes on the information storage capacity of the brain?
Well, that's good news, but what I want to know is...can they find my confounded car keys!
They're in your jacket pocket where you put them while you were carrying that cup.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Stuart Hameroff is an organizer of this conference, which I'm sure this research was timed for release just before. Stuart has long been an advocate of a theory he developed with Roger Penrose in which the microtubules are the brain's interface with the quantum.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
wow, now I can format my brain
Some systems are more efficiently encoded as trinary but binary is typically efficient enough. The most efficient is something like 2.717... Digit encoding IIRC. Wikipedia has the terms and the proofs if you search for trinary and dig a bit.
Anon cuz i modded.
There are no "backups" of your brain. There may be neural redundancy, but effectively no 1 to 1 backups. No, if anything this is equivalent to flushing RAM to disk
The way I see it, the backup is more like RAM to thumbdrive (FlashRAM)
As for the ROM feature, the one that controls heartbeat, breathing and such, is locate in the limbic system area, situated at top of the brain stem, which includes the medulla and pons
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
those brain butchers?
Have gnu, will travel.
Even better if it's outside the Designer Shoe Warehouse Shoe Warehouse
The Spirit that inhabits your body, that is the recording medium. When you die, you take all those memories and everything you've learned with you. It's really quite simple. The spirit is the recording medium, and the the human brain is the spiritual to physical interface adapter.
Essentially, those neurons are nothing more than your hard drive cable. The scientists can see the data traveling down the cable, then they can see the data traveling back, then they wonder... 'hmm, how on EARTH does this cable store so much data?' It would all be so much easier to understand if they would just acknowledge the existence of a hard drive.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I went past TFA at Gizmod to the source. They have a follow on paper, headed by the University of Alberta, and in conjunction with the University of Arizona, Harvard University, and Boston University, where they propose a molecular mechanism of Alzheimer's disease progression (coming in a soon to be released paper). I think I smell a Nobel Prize somewhere.
That cheesy song that you can't get out of your head... that's right... FOREVER!
The memorization job during night is more like a reprocessing of the short term pattern matching, or optimization.
Let imagine you saw a calico cat during the day:
Your short term memory barely stored the information patterns nearly as :
1 - Surrounding environment (time, location, current occupation)
2 - Encounter with a wandering animal.
3 - The known cat of your neighbor.
4 - An uncommon variety calico.
During the night you reprocess optimize/compress the following pattern information as:
1 - related and share the same pattern memory as: your usual work commute
2 - related and share common animal encounters,
3 - share the already memorized recognition pattern of your neighbor's cat.
4 - share your already memorized recognition pattern of calico cats.
If you sleep/dream good enough, your brain will iterate and further optimize/reduce these patterns by walking across which materialize as dreams.
Your awake activity will bring new data as patterns that will help optimize and compress older memory patterns. In the long run, it may even produce lighter or more optimized memory, merging each duplicate information with "related to". Commonly used relations will wire faster actual synaptic links.
Léa Gris
"C.R.S. Syndrome" - US. Colloquialism. Abbreviation expands to "Can't Remember Shit."
So it's basically deduping during the night.
Not offsite though. Not so awesome.
That's good poetry.
I think social networking sites are a memory archive for a lot of people.
Not only de-duping but:
- Sorting and grouping,
- Compressing patterns by combining and diffing matches,
- Replaying known scenarios (sequence patterns) that will help the sorting and classification,
- Playing challenging scenarios (as dreams) to help reveal relevance of the information itself as well as en-light unconsciously captured information (unprocessed details.
As a result, after a good night, you awake with freed short term memory and processed long term memory.
Léa Gris
Not offsite though. Not so awesome.
...
... I need a female USB plug, a knife, and a clean room. NOW!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Why does every discovery about the brain article end with 'This could lead to a new Alzheimer's treatment'? Alzheimer's is a terrible disease and the relatives of sufferers may be interested, but surely a larger segment of people looked at this article and went "I know Kung-Fu!"
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
I know I logged in for something...
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Wait, so the human body does nightly backups? That is awesome.
So all these years of late nights and benders I've been corrupting my backups?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I hope the next part will be mapping the nural connections, then I can access where I put my keys yesterday. And my wifes birthday; geez, the appicaltons I'd have for a Memory Recorder.
When he wrote his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processing could be implemented in the brain. Subsequently, Hameroff read Penrose's work, and suggested that microtubules could be suitable candidates for quantum processing, an hypothesis which remains intensely controversial. The Orch-OR theory arose from the collaboration of Penrose and Hameroff in the early 1990s. Microtubules have a well established position in conventional biology and neuroscience. Microtubules are the main component of a supportive structure within neurons known as the cytoskeleton. In addition to providing a supportive structure, the known functions of microtubules include transport of molecules including neurotransmitters bound for synapses and control of the development of the cell. Microtubules are composed of tubulin protein dimer subunits.
http://www.gizmag.com/memory-storage-theory/21900/
Tuszynski and his colleagues noted that the geometry of the CaMKII molecule was very similar to that of tubulin protein compounds. These tubulins are contained within microtubule protein structures, which in turn occupy the interiors of the brain’s neurons. They are particularly concentrated in the neurons’ axons and dendrites, which are active in the memory process. The scientists wanted to understand the interaction between CaMKII, tubulin and microtubules, so based on 3D atomic-resolution structural data for all three protein molecules, they developed highly-accurate computer models. What they discovered was that the spatial dimensions and geometry of the CaMKII and microtubule molecules allow them to fit together. Furthermore, according to the models, the microtubules and CaMKII molecules are capable of electrostatically attracting one another, so that a binding process can occur between them. This process takes place within the neurons, after they have been synaptically connected, to (in some cases) permanently store memories.
Memory, consciousness -- really, what's the difference?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
That isn't much of a pull quote. What you stated is something that's been understood for a LONG TIME. What I want to know is what is NEW that we didn't know before.
Unfortunately, too little bandwidth...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?