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."

Comments

They are etched

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

by tiny Gnomes, with silver hammers.

This is known, even by the most obtuse of my Aunts.

Re:They are etched

[sexconker]

by tiny Gnomes, with silver hammers.

This is known, even by the most obtuse of my Aunts.

It is known, Khaleesi.

Re:They are etched

[cfalcon]

It is known.

religious implications?

[Anonymous Coward]

If memories are stored in meat...how come we still have them in the afterlife?

Re:religious implications?

[Quartus486]

Can't answer for other religions, but this is what the Bible says:

Ecclesiastes 9 (New International Version)

  5 For the living know that they will die,
      but the dead know nothing;
they have no further reward,
      and even their name is forgotten.

10 Whatever your hand finds to do,
do it with all your might, for in the realm
of the dead, where you are going,
there is neither working nor planning
nor knowledge nor wisdom.

Re:religious implications?

[agm]

What afterlife?

Re:religious implications?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Well, isn't that a cheery little missive? Tell me again what the appeal of this religion is? Is it the central zombie figure? The ritual cannibalism? The dramatic "death from above" episodes?

Re:religious implications?

[Sperbels]

This seems to contradict the happy little picture of heaven that priests paint.

Re:religious implications?

[Joce640k]

St. Peter has all your life written down in his book.

Re:religious implications?

[SilverTab]

I think it's the happy ending.

Re:religious implications?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Which apparently, you won't remember.

Re:religious implications?

[kanweg]

Yes, here you can read up on that.
http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php

Bert

Re:religious implications?

[Cazekiel]

It's the excuse to use child labor for their spaghetti dinners. Good Christ, they worked us like dogs.

Re:religious implications?

[CanHasDIY]

If memories are stored in meat...how come we still have them in the afterlife?

I doubt anyone but a dead man would know whether or not memories carry into the afterlife... and he ain't talking.

Re:religious implications?

[Anonymous Coward]

They tied you to a sled and made you pull it across the tundra? Or were you forced to chase rabbits? Or both?

Re:religious implications?

[TheCarp]

I thought the upside was in not having to admit that your parents abused you by giving you an obviously fabricated and useless model for how the world works. At least, thats what I assumed other people must see in it.

Re:religious implications?

[asher09]

Throughout the OT & NT, "the realm (place/assembly) of the dead" always refers to the place where the condemned will end up and not the saints (those who are justified by faith in God). The place that the saints end up with is referred to as heaven / the land of the living / the dwelling place of the Most High / Paradise / New Jerusalem, etc, but not "the realm of the dead".
Moreover, Ecclesiastes was written by Solomon when he was "backsliding" (ie falling away from the faith). So he was being cynical about life and not hopeful about future with God. It's easy to take verses out of context and come up with non-Christian ideas from the book of Ecclesiastes for this reason.

Re:religious implications?

[gregor-e]

I've been dead. It's just like being asleep, only without the dreams.

Re:religious implications?

[Charliemopps]

Well, assuming you mean the christian afterlife, you die... and are very really dead, just as atheists believe. The afterlife awaits the rapture, when God will raise the dead to sit with him in heaven. So technically, you'd take your resurrected body and its memories with you into heaven.

Re:religious implications?

[Dog-Cow]

"For this reason"? Really? I would have thought that it was because it was written hundreds of years prior to the first Christian, by a king who followed a different religion.

The entire "OT", as the thieves of the TaNaCH call it, is filled with non-Christian ideas.

Re:religious implications?

[Empiric]

There is a strong argument that the possibility of eternal life was first provided to humanity by Jesus, as a significant part of what made his teaching quite revelatory within the context of Judaism. It's well codified in the positions of most Protestant beliefs: sin means everyone has fallen short of the glory of God, hence when you die, you aren't entitled to eternal life, and don't get it. Previous to Jesus, that would have been the (at least near-term) end of the story, as he was crucified as universal atonement and that alone makes it possible to modify that outcome.

So, in fact, though you seem to be an odd candidate for a fundamentalist, the progressive nature of man's knowledge and circumstances over time must be taken into account beyond simple reading of words found anywhere in the bible in any context. It is, in brief, quite non-surprising to an informed student of Christianity that the Old Testament makes such statements.

Further, one should note that it can be quite true that certain things are characteristic of the nature of being dead, so long as one is dead, and it is specifically the possibility of "ceasing to be dead" that Christianity proposes--and this does not mean a preceding assertion about the nature of being dead, applying so long as one is dead, is contradicted.

tl;dr: These quotes are not characteristic of conclusions drawn from the overall content and thematic direction of the bible, and do not suffice as a contradiction, either. Sorry if your hope and demand for your "natural deselection", and resulting irrelevance, is impeded by this post. I'll make it up with your associates, afterward.

Re:religious implications?

[Empiric]

The "meat" is just a substrate for the information and state--if you've ever successfully installed Linux on a flash drive, and later booted it up on another body... I mean, computer... the religious concepts shouldn't pose too much of a metaphysical dilemma for you.

Re:religious implications?

[Empiric]

If you can be on Slashdot and somehow still not get that correlation isn't causality, sure.

Re:religious implications?

[geminidomino]

This silly religion advocates creationism by a powerful (possibly nurturing) being

Nope, not nurturing. An omniscient and nurturing creator is contradictory to observable human behavior patterns. Even if you try the old "free will" dodge, said creator would, by definition, know that said free will would be exercised in the most evil, self-serving ways possible, before we were ever created.

No, if such a creator were to exist, it would have to be incompetent at best, or outright sadistic at worst.

Re:religious implications?

[azcoyote]

It's a contradiction if you read the Bible from a fundamentalist perspective that assumes that (1) all verses of the Bible have one meaning and (2) there is no development of understanding in the Bible. This is not how Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or many Protestants read the Bible. It has never been unrecognized that throughout the Old Testament the afterlife is not understood in the way that it comes to be understood in the New Testament, and there is a development of theology even between the various books (especially, for example, on the role of Satan). The dominant idea of the afterlife in the Old Testament is what is called Sheol, which is essentially like the Hades of Homer (back when Greek religion had no equivalent to heaven). The dead are simply dead, gone, and Sheol is just a name given to the nothingness of oblivion. Between the Old and New Testaments, the Israelite (Jewish) understanding of the afterlife developed so that many started to believe in Hell, Heaven, and in a Resurrection at the end of the world, where either the good would rise back to their bodies or both good and evil will rise back to their bodies, the good to eternal bliss and the evil to eternal suffering. Jesus came at a time when this view was dominant, though not universally accepted, and the New Testament promotes the latter view, that good and evil will rise at the Resurrection. This is still the Catholic and Orthodox (Eastern) Christian view. Traditionally it is also believed that prior to the coming of Christ, the souls of the saints of old were held in a state of in-between-ness (but not suffering) which was Sheol or Hell, and when Christ died he descended into Hell and opened up Heaven for these souls. In short, no priest would consider Ecclesiastes' claim to be contradictory, because the true meaning is not fully revealed until the coming of Christ, when the lack of knowledge comes to be understood as the existential blindness of the damned.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

One of the appeals is hope. Without it, there is no hope after this life, and little during it.

Of course, Ecclesiastes is Israelite wisdom literature--it was not written from a Christian perspective, because Christianity didn't exist yet. The Israelites didn't have a concept of the afterlife the way Christians do (they didn't even recognize the Messiah when he came). It doesn't make sense to use Ecclesiastes to attack Christianity. Nevertheless, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes is quite valid and rational today.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

You're using your own, narrow definitions of nuture, competence, and sadism. Competence depends entirely on one's goal. If one's goal is robots, then forced compliance is obviously the proper methodology. But if one's goal is independent entities who choose, of their own free will, to love, to do right and good, then one must allow choice--and if evil were not allowed to exist, there would be no choice to make.

For example, if a human parent wants his children to develop competence, wisdom, and discretion, would it be wise for him to shelter his children from anything remotely evil or bad, and force his children to do only good things? or would it be wise to supervise and guide them while allowing them to make their own decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them? The former is robotic and naieve, while the latter is indeed nurturing. Would a bird nurture its young by keeping them in the nest, or by pushing them out so they learn to fly?

You're thinking within a box of presuppositions that's handed to you by the increasingly atheistic society. You're looking through tinted lenses, while perhaps not even aware that you're wearing glasses. If you can begin to recognize these self-imposed limitations, you can begin to outgrow them. If you try thinking outside them, whole new avenues of thought present themselves. Don't let society tell you what to believe or what's possible. Take a step back, examine all the evidence for yourself, and make up your own mind.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

Hey Don,

Here's a response, but I'll try to restrain my knee.

First, let me briefly address the presupposition that the Catholic church is supposed to be the ultimate in Christian leadership. It's so sad that the Catholic church has tainted the name of Christianity throughout history. I hope you can look past their misdeeds. In the same way that not all Muslims are in favor of murdering non-Muslims, not all Christians in agreement with the Catholic church. In fact, the Catholic church has abused Scripture to create and perpetuate its own power. The Bible does not teach Catholicism or the hierarchy of the Catholic church. In other words, Catholicism != Christianity, and Christianity != Catholicism.

Second, you raise some insightful questions about the biblical text, oral transmission, and scribal manipulation. However, you don't seem to be aware of some of the answers to these questions. The fact is that the New Testament is the most widely-attested ancient document in existence. There are more manuscript fragments than any other ancient document--over 5,000. Many people have devoted years to the study of them, and the evidence shows that we can reconstruct about 95% of the NT with certainty--and the parts of which we can't be as certain are not doctrinally relevant. So we can be quite sure that we have what the NT authors originally wrote.

Regarding oral transmission, oral and form criticism is by nature limited to presuppositions that cannot be proven. While it can be useful, it cannot be conclusive, and cannot be used to disprove anything. Sadly, many people do just this. For example, the Jesus Seminar based its conclusions on it--but their final methodology was to sit down and vote with colored beads, based only upon each member's personal opinion--and of course, the members were chosen by the project's organizers. The entire project was flawed and a farce--but if you leave out the flaws, it sounds like a convincing argument against the Bible's authenticity. People like Bart Ehrmann mislead people in this way all the time.

It's good that you believe in God . I can tell that you're quite angry with him. Fair enough. Life on this earth stinks a lot of the time. We don't have all the answers to why things are the way they are, why things happen, etc. You're right: it's your life, and you can do what you want, and you can suffer the consequences, both here and in eternity. But it would be very sad if you went your whole life here misunderstanding who God is because of people who have twisted Scripture for their own gain. I don't think God created us as entertainment for himself. If he did, he must be sorely disappointed, because he doesn't enjoy watching the horrible things that people do every day. He has emotions and feelings just like we do--after all, he created us in his image. Instead of entertainment, what if God wanted people to love, and to love him? The thing about love is, it can't be forced. (And I don't just mean romantic love--I mean the kind of love exemplified in Christ laying down his life.) If love isn't a choice of free will, it's not love. And if a choice must be made, there must be an alternative to choose. Of course, the alternative to goodness and love is evil.

If the presupposition is that God doesn't mind or enjoys watching evil, bad things, then it's natural to conclude that he doesn't exist or that he's no better than anyone on this earth, and therefore not worth following or listening to. But there are alternatives to that presupposition. I encourage you to think outside the box that the atheistic society today hands you. Examine all the evidence for yourself--from all the different angles, Christian and non-Christian--and come to your own conclusions.

Re:religious implications?

[Quirkz]

For example, if a human parent wants his children to develop competence, wisdom, and discretion, would it be wise for him to shelter his children from anything remotely evil or bad, and force his children to do only good things? or would it be wise to supervise and guide them while allowing them to make their own decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them? The former is robotic and naieve, while the latter is indeed nurturing. Would a bird nurture its young by keeping them in the nest, or by pushing them out so they learn to fly?

I agree entirely with your point that a nurturing parent is better than strict control. What I don't understand is how anyone would say that the monotheistic God is being a nurturing parent. At best God is an absentee parent (invisible, intangible) and has left the children to be raised by other children, hoping unspoken wisdom and guidance will be passed along properly by the kids. I don't call that nurturing at all.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

I understand what you mean. I wish I had a hotline to heaven so I could have direct, two-way conversations with God.

There are a few other factors that you didn't mention. If one believes that the Bible is the word of God, then he hasn't simply left us at the mercy of whatever is passed on from person to person. Instead, he's preserved in written form what he wants us to be able to know and refer to, regardless of what other people say or think. We can each study and interpret it for ourselves. Indeed, his wisdom and guidance isn't unspoken--it's available.

Secondly, if one is a Christian, God's promised to give us his spirit as a counselor, as an advocate, to guide us and strengthen us. I don't claim to know exactly how that works. Some people do, but as it's written in Scripture, we must test such claims against Scripture itself.

Finally, there's a presupposition that, since we can't directly see God working, and can't prove that any specific thing was caused by God, God doesn't intervene--that he's not active in the world. But if one believes that he is all-powerful and all-knowing, then it's perfectly reasonable to think that we wouldn't be able to see or know when he's doing things. Indeed, if he created the entire universe and everything in it, he's so much higher than us in every way--so who are we to say what he should do, or how he should do it? If he sees literally everything, down to the smallest detail, then what we perceive as absent or not nurturing might very well be nurturing in the big picture.

We as humans are so limited in our perceptions and knowledge, yet God's given us the ability to think and reason and know good from evil, like him. So we often place our own limitations upon him and try to judge him by them. And then, of course, he doesn't make sense. But if he himself created us, then he's outside and above all of our limitations. If we humbly recognize that, our perspective can radically change. Suddenly God isn't limited by what we would do or what makes sense to us. He can see and do things that we'll never be aware of, and he can even accomplish his purposes in spite of our own.

Re:religious implications?

[geminidomino]

Sorry, no. That's just another (quite verbose) "free will" dodge.
Your "human parents" analogy falls flat on one big point: human parents are not omniscient. But since said creator supposedly is, it would have known full well that we would not "develop competence, wisdom, and discretion." A better human parent analogy would be that a given pair of humans know that if they ever have offspring, he will kill 50,000 people by the time he is 30.

It's not "an increasingly atheistic society" that puts creation on the same level as if some celestial Michael Vick had created an entirely new breed of beast with a limitless imagination for ways to make their own species completely miserable.

As an omniscient being, said creator would have known before even drawing up the first plan, what the outcome would be. Just saying "well, I'm bored, so I'm going to do it anyway" is not exactly a praiseworthy decision. It's trolling.

Re:religious implications?

[tehcyder]

Fine by me, but if you want to jettison all the inconvenient bits of the Old Testament why should anyone have any faith in what's left?

Once you say "the Bible is the word of God except for x, y and z" you might as well just admit that it's all fiction/metaphor/whatever and therefore to be considered in the same way you would a novel, rather than a piece of history..

Re:religious implications?

[tehcyder]

I've been dead. It's just like being asleep, only without the dreams.

Blimey we've got a zombie posting on slashdot.

Re:religious implications?

[tehcyder]

The "meat" is just a substrate for the information and state--if you've ever successfully installed Linux on a flash drive, and later booted it up on another body... I mean, computer... the religious concepts shouldn't pose too much of a metaphysical dilemma for you.

So you're saying heaven is filled with millions of USB thumb drives? That is one of the least interesting visions of the afterlife I've eer come across.

Re:religious implications?

[Empiric]

Very ergonomically designed, and responsive, too.

Oh wait. Were still doing analogy.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

Well, let's be clear up front: the Bible is certainly a piece of history, whether one believes it's inspired or not. The two issues are not the same.

I'd like to draw your attention to a serious issue that many people today take for granted. Notice that you referred to a novel. It is a fundamental mistake to apply contemporary literary genres to ancient texts like the Bible. The biblical writers had no concept of novels, or of modern historiography. Their idea of recording and reporting history was very different than ours today. When we judge their work by our rules, by our methods, we fail to understand the authors' purpose, and we miss their point entirely. As a brief example, it's a fundamental error to try to interpret Genesis in a scientific manner, because the writers of Genesis had no concept of science. It was not their purpose to record a scientific account of Creation, nor to provide an account in line with modern historical methods. If we try to force the text into such a mold, we utterly fail to understand the text's real meaning. As an analogy, it would be like judging a work of historical fiction by the standards of serious historical writing and research. The former is meant primarily to entertain, but the latter is meant to record and inform in (hopefully) an impartial manner. If we judge a movie set in the past by how accurate it is to the last detail, we miss the point of the movie entirely.

Finally, the question of genre is often neglected entirely. There are several different genres in the OT, such as narrative, history, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, and law. It's not about jettisoning parts of the OT--it's about interpreting them accurately and understanding how they fit into the overall message of the Bible. The fact that Ecclesiastes doesn't anticipate the coming of Christ and the revelations about eternal life doesn't undermine itself or Christianity. It simply calls for a proper understanding of the text's purpose and meaning.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

When I mentioned developing competence, wisdom, and discretion, I was not referring to humanity as a whole. Obviously, our race as a whole falls far short, and always will. I was referring to individuals, and that's a very different issue.

I agree with you that the Creator knew full well that people would sin and do evil things and cause misery for others. So then we move on to the question of why he created us, or why he created us with free will. Perhaps you suggest that he should not have permitted us free will, that he should not have permitted evil to exist. That's a question that could be debated for a long time, and it always will be. But the problem arises when we default to applying human motives and limitations to a being that, if he created the entire universe and everything in it, has no such limitations. Boredom? "Trolling"? An omnipotent, omnisicent creator could be so far above such concepts that it's ludicrous to assume that those ideas are relevant.

Humans typically don't like the unknown. We want to know what's in our future, how we got here, etc. Uncertainty tends to cause insecurity. So by limiting God to our own experiences and limitations, we make our concept of him more understandable. But it's a fallacy. None of us can create a universe from nothing. It doesn't make sense to think of the creator of Everything as being as limited as we are. It calls for humility. If we want to understand who God really is, we must understand him on his terms, not ours. Of course, this presupposes a belief in God. But even if one doesn't believe in God, one of the abilities we humans do have is to consider things from many difference perspectives, even ones we don't agree with.

Re:religious implications?

[geminidomino]

You make a great many assertions about a being which, by your own arguments, is unknowable. How, exactly, is that? How do you know it's "above" any concept, or that its motives were NOT to be entertained by the suffering of all life, like a child with a magnifying glass and access to an anthill? After all, if it is, indeed, all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfect, then obviously everything that has been created is exactly to spec. And that makes any sentient mind ostensibly behind said creation downright sociopathic.

One look around the universe provides ample support for that accusation. An omnipotent and omniscient being creates a universe where everything from atoms to stars all fall prey to entropy and die, creates creatures that exist only to destroy themselves in the most brutal ways possible, and occasionally lets the odd ELE wipe everything out for the lulz.

Re:religious implications?

[Physician]

The truth is that the doctrine of the eternal soul is a heresy that unfortunately worked its way into Christianity. The Bible says that only God hath immortality. The soul that sinneth dies. What Solomon was speaking of is the time period existing from death until the resurrection. It's not until Christ returns that the righteous are raised to eternal life as it states in I Thessalonians 4:16, 17. It's the same belief as held by Martha, the sister of Lazarus as found in John 11:23, 24. Jesus referred to the period Solomon speaks of as "sleep" for He told his disciples He was going to awake Lazarus out of sleep which would be nonsensical if Lazarus was conscious in the afterlife.

Re:religious implications?

[gottabeme]

If you believe that God provided the Bible, and that he sent Christ, then God is knowable through those revelations--as much as he wants us to know.

My point is this: if one believes that God did create the entire universe (!), then he's obviously so much more powerful and knowledgable than we are, that it's silly to assume that such limited, primitive ideas as boredom and "trolling" apply to such a being. If we could instantaneously comprehend every particle in the entire universe and manipulate them if we so chose, we would be so vastly higher and more powerful than we are, that I find it difficult to believe that boredom and "trolling" would be relevant ideas. Perhaps you disagree.

You also are operating from a presupposition that a perfect being would necessarily choose to create a perfect creation. What if that is not the case? I believe that God created us and the universe in such a way that we may choose whether to follow him or not, because he wants people who love out of their own free will--otherwise it's not love, but robots. Such a choice could not exist without an alternative, so imperfection must be allowed to exist. That much, at least, is a logical conclusion, given the presupposition that he created us that we might choose to love.

There are also three other presuppositions you're working from:

1) that entropy and death are necessarily bad things. What if they're neither good nor bad, simply neutral?

2) That creatures exist "only to destroy themselves in the most brutal ways possible." That is clearly a fallacy--it's not logical at all. I don't know about you, but I've never destroyed myself or anyone else. The human-race-as-a-whole perspective is only one perspective--consider also the individual one.

3) That such a creator would be entertained by such events, or that he created for the purpose of entertainment. I'm not arguing that he necessarily did not, because I can't prove that to you if you don't believe in the Bible. My point is that one shouldn't assume that such an infinitely powerful being would have the same purposes and weaknesses that we humans have. To me, such infinite power and knowledge--we can't even comprehend what it would take to single-handedly create the everything in the universe from nothing--would make such things more likely to be irrelevant.

Really, such anthropomorphic beliefs are like Greek and Roman mythology, or Hinduism, or animism in general, in which the gods are only slightly above humans, and suffer such needs as hunger, sex, sleep, and boredom. If you ask me, those are beliefs that are primitive and irrational, because it's not logical that such a supremely powerful being would have such limitations.

Re:religious implications?

[Physician]

There is no eternal hell. The wicked suffer the "second death" as it clearly states in Revelation. "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." Revelation 20:14,15. God isn't keeping anyone around just to torture them forever. "Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire," says the LORD Almighty. "Not a root or a branch will be left to them." Malachi 4:1. They will be stubble, not living on and on to be tortured.

Re:religious implications?

[geminidomino]

If you believe that God provided the Bible, and that he sent Christ, then God is knowable through those revelations--as much as he wants us to know.

Self-referential and pointless. Even if it did "provide" the bible, you are only knowing not only "as much" but only "what" it wants you to know, even if it's outright false. Think propaganda or PR fluff. And read on below before claiming that it is "beyond" such things.

You also are operating from a presupposition that a perfect being would necessarily choose to create a perfect creation. What if that is not the case?

You're operating from a misunderstanding of what I said. It's clear that creation is far from perfect. That's the crux of my entire point, in fact. By your own definitions, an "all-knowing and all-powerful supreme being" knew before the universe was created, exactly what would happen in every place at every moment from t=0 (universe comes into being) until t=Ud (it ceases to exist).

Going by, admittedly, the limited view of the small speck of the universe to which I'm privy to the goings-on, to have gone ahead with it shows a level of sadism that borders on sociopathy. You're talking about a supreme being that not only seems to enjoy pulling the wings off flies, but making the flies sentient and having them pull their own wings off.

That's bad enough, but it gets to become a REALLY screwed up state of affairs when said flies worship it.

If you ask me, [Greek, Roman, and Hindu] beliefs are beliefs that are primitive and irrational, because it's not logical that such a supremely powerful being would have such limitations.

That's a mighty big rock to be throwing around inside that glass house of yours.

Re:religious implications?

[asher09]

Jesus' comments on hell:

"If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having two hands, to go to hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.' And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame, rather than having two feet, to be cast into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.' And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes, to be cast into hell fire— where 'THEIR WORM DOES NOT DIE AND THE FIRE IS NOT QUENCHED.'"

(Mark 9:43-48 NKJV)
His emphasis: the condemned people's worm will not die (there is no more death! per Revelation 20) and their fire will not be quenched. ie they will suffer for eternity.

Jesus' teaching on hell:

"Then his master, after he had called him, said to him, 'You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?' And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him."

(Matthew 18:32-34 NKJV)
This is a parable that teaches about heaven and hell. His point is that when God is offering such generous forgiveness to you and you refuse to forgive, you won't be forgiven and you will pay for all that you owe. In my case, the debt of punishment for my sins was paid for by Christ on the cross through His death, but in this person in the parable's case, he will have to pay for all of his sins on his own by being tortured until it's all paid. When will that be accomplished? It'll take eternity.
Furthermore, in Malachi 4:1, etc the context will tell you that God's point there is that there will not be any residual influence (root) or legacy (branch) from sinners in heaven.

They solved it

[Anonymous Coward]

but then they slept on it and forgot

Capacity

[darkob]

If the tiniest amount of storage is on molecular level, the total capacity of "memory" of a person is HUGE.

Re:Capacity

[Baloroth]

I think the estimates are somewhere are in the petabytes in magnitude (best exact figure I can find is 2.5 petabytes, in Scientific America a few years ago). So yes, quite a lot. But as the summary says, the process isn't fully understood.

bad title/summary

[ThorGod]

I dig how the title for this article, at least, sounds as though researchers stumbled across a working hypothesis...as though scientific hypotheses are hit upon like a rock in the road.

A memory doesn't have to stay at the same place

[Hentes]

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.

Re:A memory doesn't have to stay at the same place

[Anna Merikin]

Short term memory seems to be electrical and long-term chemical. This article seems to support this hypothesis, showing the connection between statically-charged connections between molecules within the synaptic structure.

Whether the location of the electrically-bonded connections changes or not, the chemistry will reconstruct the electrical charges of the original memory. more or less.

Re:A memory doesn't have to stay at the same place

[b4dc0d3r]

PTSD treatments include re-living the memory with small changes, like being aware that you are in a safe environment. You remember, modifying the memory and putting it back changed. A few courses later, the memory is not as strong, or doesn't trigger PTSD for some other reason.

Memory is hardly a secure, safe storage mechanism. It's almost quantum - doing anything to it can change it. Or you can remember things that never happened.

So yeah, you can bypass the duration limit, but at the risk of data loss. Use it or lose it, you break it you buy it.

Re:A memory doesn't have to stay at the same place

[Hentes]

True, I'm pretty sure that those memories that "last for a lifetime" have deteriorated severely, and bear little resemblance to the original one.

first application will be ....

[RichMan]

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!!

Re:first application will be ....

[EdZ]

"Your original memory will never by fully restored, there might be residual simulation; we don't have the technology yet to handle simex erasures. I'm sorry."

Re:first application will be ....

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed g) Propaganda, implanting memories favorable to a particular group.

Because if something like this were to exist, I could see opportunities to sneak in state-mandated brainwashing. Not referring to any country in particular, other than whoever decides to apply it first.

There's also h) further surveillance of peoples' lives, allowing for them to get sued when they THINK about a copyrighted piece of content.

Re:first application will be ....

[Ihmhi]

e) learning

I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip where a robot doctor implants grey matter into Calvin's brain. "Well, there's grades 1-12. Now go have 12 years of fun."

The more complex our world becomes, the less opportunities kids have to be kids.

Re:first application will be ....

[interkin3tic]

Minor pet peeve: important biological research results don't need to be pragmatic to be very important. Science asks "Why", it doesn't just ask "Knowing this, what can I get out of it?" The structure of DNA was not immediately used to cure diseases. Knowing that E=MC squared was important for reasons beyond "Great! Now we can REALLY blow up our enemies!"

This is a problem these days with basic biological research and probably all basic research: people are taking a short-term, "what can we do with it" approach. There's funding for "translational research," to make cures and treatments right now, and that's good, but funding for long-term research that has no immediate applications is suffering. Everything has to be linked to cancer or alzheimers. No one can get away with studying something just because it's how life happens and is important and may, 30 years from now, lead to something useful or not.

Knowing how our memories are stored may not be immediately or ever be useful. It doesn't have to be.

Re:first application will be ....

[artor3]

Wait, what's the difference between b & f?

Re:first application will be ....

[user flynn]

Yeah. Already invented- memory implantation mechanisms deceptively marketed as "recreational drugs". Too bad individuals aren't aware that they don't every see reality.... until they pass the test. Brains? Really?

    Been pwned lately?

Re:first application will be ....

[dissy]

I remember a Calvin & Hobbes strip where a robot doctor implants grey matter into Calvin's brain. "Well, there's grades 1-12. Now go have 12 years of fun."
The more complex our world becomes, the less opportunities kids have to be kids

Too true. Except unfortunately they will just up the minimum requirement to be 24 years or more worth of education in those 12 years.

At least it will prepare them for corporate life, where HR demands 10 years experience with a software package that has only existed for 4 years before they will hire you.

With any luck, by then they will have expanded the day to have more hours in it, and then the whole cycle can start anew!

Re:first application will be ....

[X86Daddy]

(g) The government will use this to perform extra-advanced interrogations on everyone who might know about terror, drug sales and distribution, and on women who report an ambiguous rape so that they can have an abortion in the few states that keep a rape exception in the next few years.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[PatPending]

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.

My mind is blown

[DaleGlass]

I took a look at the paper in case I managed to understand something, and came across this:

Information Storage Capacity

If each extended kinase can either phosphorylate at the S-T site on a tubulin substrate, or not, the process effectively conveys one bit of information (e.g. no phosphorylation = 0, phosphorylation = 1). Each set of six extended kinases on either side of a CaMKII holoenzyme can thus act collectively as 6 bits of information. Ordered arrays of bits are termed âbytesâ(TM).
[...]

Logic Gates

Clusters of phosphorylated tubulin, and/or MAP attachment may serve as logic gates for propagating information. Figures 9 and 10 demonstrate two types of Boolean logic gates, an AND gate and an exclusive OR gate (XOR) in which MAPs convey inputs, with output along tubulin pathways. Figures 11 and 12 show AND and XOR gates in which MAPs convey output of inputs and processes in tubulins within the MT. The combination of XOR and AND logic gates forms a universal set for computation in which all other logic gates (NOT, OR etc.) can be conceived. Signals propagating through MT-MAP logic circuits may extend throughout cytoskeletal networks, regulating synaptic function, cognition and behavior.

Whoa. If that research is correct then that's really amazing.

Re:My mind is blown

[tgv]

I, for one, welcome our new logic overlords.

O wait, that's us!

Re:My mind is blown

[Twinbee]

If they read the paper (or hired an expert to read it, and summarize it to them), they would have had a much better story ("Humans are computers!"), and would have probably driven much more traffic to their site. It's weird that didn't happen...

Re:My mind is blown

[ColdWetDog]

This research implies that long term storage is digital and has the ability to be manipulated by logic constructs familiar to at least some of us who work with computers and similar machines. That's an interesting statement. Their hypothesis centers on a protein that works on tubulin (a common structural protein that makes, wait for it, tubes) and that this represents the 'logic framework' for memory storage.

Aside from the 'it's full of tubes' attempt at humor, it's a striking hypothesis and probably wrong but certainly one that would be amenable to experimental manipulation by modifying the kinase or finding that in organisms with 'memory' the kinase is a very preserved structure.

Re:My mind is blown

[sunwolf]

This reddit comment seems to debunk the foundations of the paper. TL;DR copied below:

TL;DR The experiment has nothing to do with memory as most neuroscientists and psychologists understand it. However, it's much easier to make unsupported statements in a press release than in the peer-review process. The author of the article fell for the press release of a lab known for making outrageous statements.

Re:My mind is blown

[w0mprat]

I took a look at the paper in case I managed to understand something, and came across this:

Information Storage Capacity

If each extended kinase can either phosphorylate at the S-T site on a tubulin substrate, or not, the process effectively conveys one bit of information (e.g. no phosphorylation = 0, phosphorylation = 1). Each set of six extended kinases on either side of a CaMKII holoenzyme can thus act collectively as 6 bits of information. Ordered arrays of bits are termed âbytesâ(TM). [...]

Logic Gates

Clusters of phosphorylated tubulin, and/or MAP attachment may serve as logic gates for propagating information. Figures 9 and 10 demonstrate two types of Boolean logic gates, an AND gate and an exclusive OR gate (XOR) in which MAPs convey inputs, with output along tubulin pathways. Figures 11 and 12 show AND and XOR gates in which MAPs convey output of inputs and processes in tubulins within the MT. The combination of XOR and AND logic gates forms a universal set for computation in which all other logic gates (NOT, OR etc.) can be conceived. Signals propagating through MT-MAP logic circuits may extend throughout cytoskeletal networks, regulating synaptic function, cognition and behavior.

Whoa. If that research is correct then that's really amazing.

This means the brain is using what we recognize as computational functions. That has profound implications. We ARE software.

Mem'rieeees

[Cazekiel]

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.

Where's PharmaKom when you need 'em?

[Jawnn]

FTA...

“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.

Re:Where's PharmaKom when you need 'em?

[doston]

FTA...

“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.

What captialism? Capitalism doesn't exist anywhere in the world. What you are talking about is state capitalism....aka socialist capitalism; That's what we have here. Leaders of industry know that capitalism doesn't work. That's why they like a nice, rich government they control to bail them out. Business couldn't stand up to the ravages of the market for one minute without a hand-out from good old socialism. That's why business is perfectly happy when individuals pay taxes, so they can do their socialist funded R&D and get bailed out by socialism and enjoy generous socialist hand-outs. Look it up...that's NOT capitalism, so stop calling it that, Orwell.

Re:Where's PharmaKom when you need 'em?

[semi-extrinsic]

(Note: assuming that you are defending capitalism; not expressly stated in your post, but implied.)
I find it funny how people defending capitalism have had to fall back on the same argument as used in favor of communism - "True x-ism has never existed, so you can't say it has failed".

Re:Where's PharmaKom when you need 'em?

[doston]

Not at all and didn't mean to imply it. Was implying that socialism is what's being used to keep this bastardized form of 'capitalism' alive. I thought you were implying that innovation is impossible without 'capitalism'...and that just isn't so.

Get your ass to Mars.

[Rodness]

How much will it cost me to remember being an invincible secret agent on Mars??

Re:Get your ass to Mars.

[cowboy76Spain]

How much will it cost me to remember being an invincible secret agent on Mars??

<pedantic>That's nothing, I want to remember how I saved Mankind from an alien invasion while I was a kid. Just by being kind to them.</pedantic>

Re:Fuck GizMag

[CanHasDIY]

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?

Cloud Storage

[InfiniteZero]

Well, the religious types will tell you there is also a backup copy stored somewhere, somehow in the cloud, literally.

It's clearly flash memory

[Walt Dismal]

It's been obvious to me that we store memories in tiny little flash drives embedded in our brain. Sometimes they go bad, and then we get getstuckget stuck and files don'tloadloadloadfilesystemcorrupt

Drugs: don't do 'em, kids.

Useful?

[rts008]

Well, that's good news, but what I want to know is...can they find my confounded car keys!

Re:Fuck GizMag

[h5inz]

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

Important work, but clearly being oversold

[neurophil12]

"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.

Re:Important work, but clearly being oversold

[ColdWetDog]

Tubulin is a major structural protein, so manipulating it may allow you to create 'memory structures' whatever they may be. However, my reading of TFA is that it's the logic information held by the kinase by way of the degrees of phosphorylation on the molecule that actually encodes the data.

As you say, very speculative but interesting. I'm sure there are experimental systems with mutations in both the kinase and tubulins - that should offer some experimental avenues to look into this.

Re:Important work, but clearly being oversold

[neurophil12]

Tubulin is a major structural protein, so manipulating it may allow you to create 'memory structures' whatever they may be. However, my reading of TFA is that it's the logic information held by the kinase by way of the degrees of phosphorylation on the molecule that actually encodes the data.

As you say, very speculative but interesting. I'm sure there are experimental systems with mutations in both the kinase and tubulins - that should offer some experimental avenues to look into this.

Good point on the idea of mutations, though under either theory (direct vs indirect impact on memory storage and computation) there would be a deficit in memory at some point. Both theories would need to be firmed up to actually make a prediction as to how a given mutation would impact memory in a given task. And while I am highly skeptical that those degrees of phosphorylation encode memory in the way they suggest, I wouldn't be surprised if the specific phosphorylation states do have functional implications at some level. There's plenty more to learn down there, I'm just not sure it's absolutely necessary to know all of it to understand learning and memory. Granted, it may be important to understand specific diseases.

Re:Important work, but clearly being oversold

[WillAffleckUW]

I think this does promise to be important work, but it seems unlikely to be that useful in Alzheimers. More promising is the work on resveratrol, for example.

Reminds me of one clinical test we did on a drug to remove plaque which worked too well - the brain cells ended up leaking for some subjects, because they had giant surface holes in them! Not a big deal for minor plaque impacts, but a big problem for an AD subject with large scale plaque in their brain cells.

Re:Important work, but clearly being oversold

[dzfoo]

Somebody, quick, mod this post Informational!!

      dZ.

P.S. Thanks for the great overview and insightful perspective.

Re:Important work, but clearly being oversold

[neurophil12]

Much appreciated, and you're welcome. Hopefully it makes sense to most. I don't know if the average reader here will know much about phosphorylation states or not, but that post could have doubled or tripled in length if I'd allowed myself to explain much more. I have a tendency to go on if I don't restrain myself :)

Re:Important work, but clearly being oversold

[dzfoo]

No worries. I am one of those readers that does not know anything about phosphorylation states or what phosphorylation is at all. Nonetheless, I found the original article very interesting, though absolutely over my head.

Your comments seemed more level-headed than others, and actually put some of the things that I took from the article into perspective.

For instance, it did strike me as fantastic that they would suggest not only that these mechanisms support memory encoding, but actual functional logic signal processing. But what do I know.

When I saw your comment, it was buried under the fold with a score of 1; hence my call to moderators. I thought it deserved much higher prominence, and now I see others did too.

Regards,
              -dZ.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Ihmhi]

Wait, so the human body does nightly backups? That is awesome.

forget alzheimers treatments

[um... Lucas]

this brings us many steps closer to Total Recall!

Two weeks... two weeks... two weeks.... two weeks...

Re:Brains are not digital

[DaleGlass]

Great, I await your refutation of this paper. I'm sure it'll be interesting to read.

Better article

[Derek Pomery]

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)

Ogg Vorbis??

[malraid]

I suspected it all along ....

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 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).

Memory encoding

[gallondr00nk]

I just hope it isn't encoded in WMV or something, or we'll all end up paying royalties for the images in our heads.

Bad Title

[SoftwareArtist]

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.

Re:Bad Title

[khakipuce]

Damn, just used up my mod points otherwise I would have modded you up.

Re:Bad Title

[ceoyoyo]

They've proposed that memories are stored in binary, in six bit bytes. That is at least part of the encoding.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Centurix]

It uses crantab

Re:Fuck GizMag

[mikael]

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.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[DigiShaman]

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.

Re:Is this point up for debate?

[Eponymous Hero]

yes, some people do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory

there are options.

[mevets]

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.

Memory is binary coded?

[TheSync]

From the actual scientific article:
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"...
...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...

Re:Memory is binary coded?

[coofercat]

I encode my memories with ROT13.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[stevelinton]

The research in question is about the exact process on a molecular level. We may know which cells
or synapses are affected, but we don't know much if anything about the chemistry of that process. These
simulation studies suggest an intriguing possibility

Re:Pure B.S.

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

I have to agree with this.

>quote>

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

I have to disagree with this.

Re:Useful? or what about my car keys?

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Stuart Hameroff

[wytcld]

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.

format

[kiep]

wow, now I can format my brain

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Taco Cowboy]

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

Recall Recall

[snookerhog]

those brain butchers?

Some people ....

[PPH]

.... are little endian. Some are big endian.

Re:Some people ....

[Prof.Phreak]

big endians eat little endians!

The brain does not store memories

[JRHelgeson]

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.

Re:The brain does not store memories

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an interesting conjectgure, but fallacious. There are probably between 80 and 120 billion bit-neurons in the human brain, and a finitely non-discrete number of synapses, all of which act as de facto logic gates/memory bits. Since the brain is constantly purging anything it finds irrelevant, and since it has mechanisms for reconstructing meaningful memories from very limited data, there's no reason to assume that this massive memory-loaded processor has to have some (essentially) off-site location for actually long-term storing this data. The fallacy is that you're assuming that this transient storage is A) unacceptable for long-term storage and B) that the transmission and processing of this data is somehow analogous to a hard drive cable, which itself is neither capable of storing nor processing data. The closest analogy would be to a processor that has gigabytes of onboard memory with built-in disposal and propagation mechanisms, neither of which are present in any current processor. Assuming something far-fetched and backing it up with less-than-robust analogies is, at best, a very weak way to argue well, much less actually be right.

Re:The brain does not store memories

[swell]

Billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connectors can not explain the miracle of memory, learning or inspiration. The higher function of the brain is to connect us with the infinite found in another dimension. There it connects with a storehouse of information and wisdom partly shared with others.

Given sufficient energy, the brain accesses this storehouse more or less efficiently and produces results that lead to intelligence and success in navigating what we perceive as the world around us.

It would be premature at this time to introduce the idea that this storehouse is shared with brains on other worlds, but it's worth considering for those with hyper connectivity.

Re:The brain does not store memories

[Anonymous Coward]

that must be some really good pot.

Re:The brain does not store memories

[nut]

As funny as this mysticism clearly sounds to some, there are theories that some human memories are stored, "in the cloud" - when they are stored socially.

I have read ( but can't now find the reference :-( ) studies where groups of people have been asked to remember details from long stories, complex scenes, collections of objects etc.

One person will be the subject of the studies, the others will be actors. The actors 'remember' details that were definitely false - a red ball being blue for example, and reports it as such in front of the subject. The subject will then report remembering the same false memory - and honestly believe it. He can probably visualise the blue ball in his mind.

When you consider how many conversations you have with other people during the day, how much of that is creating, reinforcing and editing memories for you?

Re:The brain does not store memories

[cyberchondriac]

Well how else would the Akashic records work?

Forget water boarding!

[Dutchmaan]

That cheesy song that you can't get out of your head... that's right... FOREVER!

Re:Fuck GizMag

[La Gris]

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.

 

Re:Fuck GizMag

[geminidomino]

"C.R.S. Syndrome" - US. Colloquialism. Abbreviation expands to "Can't Remember Shit."

Re:Brains are not digital

[tgv]

I'm not sure you're talking to me, but:
1. Nobody has found logic gating in neurons at this level. There is a lot of spiking and thresholds, but logic gates at that level? You can build logic gates with Lego, but that doesn't mean that every Lego structure should be understood as such.
2. Having a logic gate isn't helping one bit to tell us how memory is organized. We have logic circuits. In computers. We cannot emulate our memory in a computer. Therefore identifying circuits that could make our brain work as a computer does not help us understand our memory.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[ceoyoyo]

Not offsite though. Not so awesome.

Cloud Brain

[vladwolodarsky]

I think social networking sites are a memory archive for a lot of people.

Re:I like this translation better.

[tehcyder]

That's good poetry.

The King James Version of the Bible is indeed one of the great works of English Literature. That says nothing at all about how true or accurate it is, and even less about how good a guide to existence it provides.

Re:Car Analogy?

[tehcyder]

I can't understand this unless it's presented as a car analogy.

When you turn off your car engine, your odometer still remembers what mileage you've done.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[La Gris]

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.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Ihmhi]

Not offsite though. Not so awesome.

...

... I need a female USB plug, a knife, and a clean room. NOW!

Alzheimer's

[lessthan]

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!"

Hmmm

[zevans]

I know I logged in for something...

Re:Fuck GizMag

[w0mprat]

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?

Re:Fuck GizMag

[LifesABeach]

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.

So Penrose and Hameroff were (about) right!

[Randym]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

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?

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Theovon]

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.

Re:Fuck GizMag

[Coren22]

Unfortunately, too little bandwidth...