[HN Gopher] A single memory is stored across many connected brai...
___________________________________________________________________
A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions
Author : gigama
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-05-03 12:23 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| escapecharacter wrote:
| If I had to design my brain I'd make it a RAID too
| julianbuse wrote:
| the question is, is this raid 0 or raid 10
| miika wrote:
| There is also another model about memory which I totally love. In
| that memory is not stored but brain is more like an antenna which
| can retrieve information from the space time coordinates where
| events actually took place.
|
| Because everything is constantly moving around something each
| event in the universe probably has unique location, a real
| physical place where it happened.
|
| So, the idea is that as we're moving through space we're leaving
| a trail as the events are (lack of better word) "printed" in the
| fabric of space. Then as apparently Space is not empty at all but
| filled with Planck scale micro wormholes entangling all things
| into this one universal neural network, then our brains should be
| very well capable of tracing back our unique trails through space
| and retrieve information through those micro wormholes.
|
| As developer I think it would make most sense to only save
| references rather than trying store all events inside everyones
| brains. That would be huge waste of resources and just damn
| stupid.
|
| And probably the way we humans have built our computers also
| reflects how the universe really works, because after all we are
| bits of the universe doing whatever the universe is doing.
|
| Peace
| myth_drannon wrote:
| That's too much of Dan Simmons here.
| glenstein wrote:
| > "printed" in the fabric of space. Then as apparently Space is
| not empty at all but filled with Planck scale micro wormholes
| entangling all things into this one universal neural network,
| then our brains should be very well capable of tracing back our
| unique trails through space and retrieve information through
| those micro wormholes.
|
| That's fun enough if that's intended as some form of
| recreational speculative fiction/sci-fi. I'm all about that.
|
| But you said "model", without qualification, so its hard for me
| to tell from your comment the extent to which you want to put
| this forward as something that stands a chance of really being
| true.
| treeman79 wrote:
| True or not. This would make much better sci-fi trope then
| current quantum entanglement plot lines
| pvarangot wrote:
| Coherence (2013) was pretty good though. Haven't really seen
| a quantum entanglement movie after that one.
| namlem wrote:
| Reminds me somewhat of the Pale in Disco Elysium
| omegadeep10 wrote:
| This reminds me of the book Recursion by Blake Crouch. In the
| book, scientists figure out how to use memories to time travel.
| Interesting concept.
| outworlder wrote:
| That's potentially a good starting point for a sci-fi setting.
|
| That's unlikely to have any resemblance to how brains work
| though. For one, we would be lacking the mechanism to do such a
| 'retrieval'. We can also influence memory formation.
|
| Say you binge drink. You are temporarily unable to form
| memories. We can pinpoint the exact area affected. Unless
| alcohol is somehow able to influence the micro-wormholes, it
| shouldn't affect memories at all.
|
| > As developer I think it would make most sense to only save
| references rather than trying store all events inside everyones
| brains.
|
| Remember, nature does not care about that.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > As developer I think it would make most sense to only save
| references rather than trying store all events inside everyones
| brains. That would be huge waste of resources and just damn
| stupid.
|
| > And probably the way we humans have built our computers also
| reflects how the universe really works, because after all we
| are bits of the universe doing whatever the universe is doing.
|
| I think this is way too simplistic. Just like planes don't fly
| like birds, computers don't work like "the universe"
|
| We don't know much about the brain at all and starting to think
| about it in terms of "computer" logic seems very wrong to me.
| Computers are our very crude and poor attempt at replicating
| brains/intelligence, by definition they're built on ultra
| simplified principles that our own brains came up with, using
| computer terms to define the brain/universe is closing a loop
| that doesn't exist
|
| It only sounds like a waste because you(we)'re constrained by
| our own brains, the universe doesn't care about our ability to
| understand or make sense of it. Something might sound
| unoptimised to you(us) but might be the only way allowed by
| physics.
|
| Naming and defining computer parts using human/brain related
| terms was an error imho, it confuses people and make them think
| we are able to replicate (or even understand) things that we
| have no clue about, they're very poor analogies.
|
| > That would be huge waste of resources and just damn stupid.
|
| Isn't the entire universe a huge waste of resource and just
| damn stupid ?
| elliekelly wrote:
| Helicopters kind of fly like birds don't they?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Rather like some particular family of insects. Both planes
| (depending on their engine part) and helicopters use aero
| propulsion but their mechanisms differ somewhat as much as
| for between helicopters and birds.
| outworlder wrote:
| They don't. They fly because they are so ugly that the
| ground repels them.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| Yeah I always like to think like this sometimes, but as far
| as we know a "reference" doesn't make sense in the brain - it
| doesn't have access to external stuff so in the brain context
| it would be like neurons connecting to a single neuron. Aside
| from something like a URL a computer can't reference anything
| outside of itself and I don't think we have a brain
| equivalent
| flatline wrote:
| In Buddhist philosophy the mind is a sixth sense organ,
| perceiving thoughts. The Lankavatara Sutra from Mahayana
| buddhism goes into some detail as to how karma is formed, past
| life memories and the like, in the "storehouse consciousness"
| which is basically encoded into the world around us by our
| actions. I thought your post was very beautiful and similar in
| spirit to a lot of ancient philosophy on consciousness.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Clearly the brain is the message processing center for the
| antenna, which is the pineal gland.
| phantompeace wrote:
| Created an account to say that this post has probably changed
| my life. What an extremely interesting thought.
| exitheone wrote:
| Keep in mind that this comment is in no way even a tiny bit
| compatible with our current understanding of how the brain
| works. Treat it as a good sci-fi plot.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yeah well that's what I did, but by sci-fi plot standards
| it had a huge amount of merit and originality.
|
| This isn't a peer-reviewed journal, nor the Bible. And your
| comment contributes too, by pointing out it isn't
| consistent with Western medicine. You're helping the reader
| who happened to buy into that, not to try combining it with
| scientific mainstream things, not talk about it at the
| water cooler, and not talk about it for instance when being
| psychologically evaluated. Like even if the psych likes you
| if you say things like that it's out of his hands and he
| has to flunk you. That's the mistake Feynman made, he talks
| about flunking a psych exam for the military, but like
| full-on full F, like they used special words to describe
| how poor they judged his mind to be, and then he replied to
| them accepting the F and asking to be flunked harder on the
| basis it was clearly crazy to write them that letter.
|
| And he was constantly thinking about the fabric of the
| universe, entertained many wild theories to arrive at sound
| ones, I'm sure of that.
|
| But yeah, thanks for saying that, in case readers didn't
| take that comment with a grain of salt. Yours was the grain
| of salt.
| lobstrosity420 wrote:
| This is a very interesting idea. My criticism would be that our
| memories are such imperfect recollections of the real thing
| that its hard for me not to see them as a "copy" rather than a
| "pointer". Signal loss through the fabric of space?
| jameshart wrote:
| Seems like there's nothing in that model that would stop you
| from being able to remember events that didn't even happen to
| you.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| Encryption with a signed keypair maybe.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Or events that didn't happen, or memories formed differently
| from how events actually occurred...
| [deleted]
| pcardoso wrote:
| This reminds me of the the Stephen's Baxter book "the light of
| other days". A wormhole device was used to capture video from
| any spacetime coordinates. It was a nice book.
| axg11 wrote:
| Disclaimer: I know brain != deep learning neural nets. We do have
| a lot of evidence that the brain is _some_ type of network with
| analogue qualities.
|
| Does it even make sense to say that a memory is stored somewhere
| in a specific region, if the brain is an analogue network? A
| property of analogue networks is that all nodes make a
| contribution, even if many of the contributions are
| infinitesimally small. The equivalent for deep learning is that
| information is stored in the weights and any given output is a
| function of all the weights. Some weights are more important than
| others in producing the output, but the point still stands.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I don't have any clear answers for you, but one interesting
| note here is that a recent paper showed that it took a deep
| neural net to be able to simulate the "IO" of a single cortical
| neuron. So that should give you some idea of the complexity
| involved compared to artificial neural nets, Re: your
| disclaimer.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08966...
| wongarsu wrote:
| If I take pretrained imagenet and just make it wider with nodes
| with random weights and biases, I can still feed the network an
| image and get a reasonably correct label as an output. In this
| example I could obviously point at the nodes from the original
| imagenet and say that those do the image recognition, we know
| the rest of the network doesn't contribute anything but noise.
|
| On a technical level of course the whole network contributed to
| the output. In everyday reasoning and language however we
| usually focus on the parts that matter to a reasonable degree
| and ignore the rest. A sack of rice falling over in 2005 might
| have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. With the world
| being an analog network of particles it even seems obvious that
| that sack of rice must have had some infinitesimal influence
| one way or the other, it's just more practical to ignore it.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Some types of artificial neural networks are biologically
| plausible. The layered structure of the cerebral cortex
| reflects the layers of an artificial network.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| The difference being of course that as opposed to a mere 16
| bit parameter, a cortical neuron is a complex
| "nanomechanical" machine capable of significant computation
| in its own right.
| mcdonje wrote:
| Their study looks not specifically at a storage site, but that
| along with the sites for processing a new memory for storage, and
| processes for recalling a memory from storage.
|
| When you see something, that visual input is processed in a
| certain area that, IIRC, is the same area that is fired when
| recalling a visual memory.
|
| When a memory is recalled, it is processed by the same regions
| that interpreted it initially upon first experiencing the
| stimulus. Compare that to a computer pulling a png from storage,
| loading into memory, calling necessary drivers to present
| onscreen, etc.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I remember telling some people that this is how it works back
| in 2003 or so.
|
| I read a book that said the architecture of the brain was like
| a polyhedron where the vertexes represented different
| processing modes (visual, auditory, linguistic, emotional, ...)
| and that bundles of fibers that go down into the white matter
| and connect processing areas in the grey matter of the cortex.
|
| If you think about a "dog", those connecting fibers activate
| images of the dog, the sounds the dog makes, the motor program
| to pet the dog, the feeling of the fur, etc...
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Agree. Our experience of the world isn't a screen painted
| with what the world looks like. But instead is a collection
| of affordances and expectations.
|
| Have you ever picked up an empty milk jug and yanked it super
| fast? Did you choose to yank it. Or did the program called
| pick up heavy milk jug run instead of empty milk jug. Feeling
| the confusion over how light the jug was causes the program
| "confusion" to run to help you look for an explanation about
| why this object is so different from what you expected.
|
| The reasoning program creates the feeling of resolution once
| you arrive at, "I believed it was full but it wasn't", but
| prior to that resolution, if you really pay attention, you
| are just standing there for a moment puzzled about why your
| arm is moving so fast.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Their paper assume in the premise the conclusion.. All depend on
| the accuracy of their fluorescent genetic memory correlate. It's
| not because this genetic marker is necessary for memory encoding
| that it is parcimonious and only affect memory encoded region. An
| in depth presentation of the properties of the gene would
| solidify or weaken their findings, as for now since I'm lazy, I
| will suspend my judgment.
| ckemere wrote:
| I've never really loved contextual fear conditioning as the
| default for "memory". Another way of describing this result is
| that "even a mild trauma scars the entire brain."
|
| In all seriousness, though, I'd say that there's a broad dispute
| in the field between those that believe that memory involves
| dynamic neural activity involving a multiplexed circuit of
| neurons that encode many different memories and those (currently
| led by the Tonegawa lab) that think that memories are associated
| with individual neurons.
| davidktr wrote:
| Do we actually know how the memory is coded specifically? Is it
| a specific firing of a neuron (or a neuron ensemble), is it the
| specific answer you get from exciting the neuron(s)? Or any
| combination thereof?
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Do we actually know how the memory is coded specifically?
|
| No, we don't.
| kanzure wrote:
| There are a few proposals for how memory might work, but
| it's still early.
|
| https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/neuro/The%20mechanical%20b
| a...
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| My opinion is that its the evolutionary process of chemical
| organisation in an environment. We see gene differences but
| we also see many parallels in other species. Unlock every
| effect a chemical has and you can unlock consciousness.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Man I wish I became a neuroscientist or something. Seems
| like there's so much work to do in that field if we ever
| want to understand the human brain, which I have my doubts.
| I'd probably do it if it didn't involve basically a vow of
| poverty.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| IANA neuroscientist, so please correct me if I'm wrong or
| oversimplifying:
|
| IIRC one of the main cellular mechanisms thought to underlie
| memory is LTP(Long Term Potentiation) in glutamatergic
| neurons. There are different kinds of glutamate receptors,
| but we're interested in the two subtypes of ion channel
| based(ionotropic) Glut receptors, AMPA and NMDA.
|
| AMPA is sort of your main receptor for propagating signals:
| it's activated first.
|
| NMDA is much more complicated in that it requires binding
| both glutamate and another neurotransmitter, glycine, for the
| ion channel to open. But this ion channel can also be blocked
| by Mg2+ ions, which for reasons that currently escape me, is
| removed when the neuron depolarizes. Once NMDA is open, it
| has the downstream effect of upregulating the AMPA receptor,
| making more sensitive to future transmission, hence serving
| as a kind of "memory" of previous signals. I think the open
| question is more about understanding how memory as we know it
| emerges out of networks of these neurons, and less about the
| basic cellular mechanisms. And this is probably only one
| mechanism of LTP, then you have its opposite, Long Term
| Depression, which is also involved.
|
| Of course, in science the answer is always more complicated
| than what can be gleaned from the hand-wavey explanations of
| some programmer on HN :)
| mattkrause wrote:
| This is all true (as far as we know), but it's tricky to
| suss how exactly how this works in a living brain.
|
| It's relatively easy to induce spike-timing dependent
| plasticity _in vitro_ , where the background activity is
| low and the experimenter has almost total control over the
| pre/post-synaptic neurons' activity. However, _in vivo_
| neurons are often bombarded with input from thousands of
| synaptic partners, breaking the clear correspondence that
| underlies a lot of LTP /LTD rules. People have gotten them
| to work, after a fashion, _in vivo_ : Yang Dan's group
| shifted the orientation of V1 neurons and Dan Shultz's
| group has some cool backwards conditioning stuff in rat
| barrel cortex. However, the effects are small and often
| require a heroic, unphysiological amount of effort,
| so....there must be more to it than that.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| I'll look into the why a group believes memories are associated
| with individual neurons as my personal intuition (edit: and
| this article as well) tells me the opposite.
|
| For example, if I try to remember the name of an actor, I can
| have hints from my brain telling me "their name starts with an
| _m_" and "it's a man who played in a movie from the 90's", etc.
| A memory feels like it cannot be isolated, it always feels like
| a composition of different elements that, when put together,
| describe one thing, or many. The more elements (in that case
| maybe single neurons, or very small group of neurons) are
| activated the clearer the memory. A Venn diagram of sort where
| the overlap gets smaller and smaller. This would explain the
| "this makes me think of..." process, since a certain number of
| these elements from one memory will overlap with the elements
| of another one.
|
| This is completely personal and completely unscientific. And
| maybe this is neuroscience 101... In that case sorry for
| stating the obvious.
| causi wrote:
| _cells activated by naturally recalling the unpleasant memory_
|
| _The maps highlighted many regions expected to participate in
| memory, but also many that were not_
|
| This feels like a study from decades ago, as if it were done in
| complete ignorance of the fact brains store event descriptors and
| entity descriptors separately. "Program data" and "character
| data" to use an analogy. Of course that sort of unselective
| "memory make marker go brr" analysis will show up all over the
| place because the brain is touching a dozen or more different
| types of data at once. If you want usefully specific results you
| have to use usefully specific methods.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I've long suspected that memory storage in brains is holograph-
| like, with each neuron storing bits of many memories.
| stazz1 wrote:
| Non-locality :D
| desttro wrote:
| The implications of this on degenerative brain diseases is
| interesting.
| dboreham wrote:
| Seems like this would have to be the case because error
| correction and HA.
| drummer wrote:
| Memories are stored in every cell in the body. The body is a
| hologram/fractal.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-03 23:01 UTC)