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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.
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.
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!!
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.
How much will it cost me to remember being an invincible secret agent on Mars??
Well, the religious types will tell you there is also a backup copy stored somewhere, somehow in the cloud, literally.
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"'
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."
It uses crantab
Task Mangler
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
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.
(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".
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
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