[HN Gopher] An FDA-approved asthma drug has shown the ability to...
___________________________________________________________________
An FDA-approved asthma drug has shown the ability to restore
memories in mice
Author : BoardsOfCanada
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-02-11 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thedebrief.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (thedebrief.org)
| gardenfelder wrote:
| full paper https://www.cell.com/current-
| biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)...
| [deleted]
| cwillu wrote:
| ...in mice.
|
| "Havekes is quick to note that "this is all speculation," but
| given the successes his team had in the lab, he believes his work
| can serve as a guidepost for researchers and pharmaceutical
| companies who are trying desperately to help folks retrieve their
| lost memories. Finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the
| researcher is just as enthusiastic about the new questions his
| work opens up as he is about the previously accumulated knowledge
| it may reveal."
| rzzzt wrote:
| The title does end with the magic word pair now if it didn't
| earlier.
| cwillu wrote:
| Thanks, good edit. The title of the linked page (and
| therefore iirc the original title on the post here) was
| ""Magic" Drug Restores Lost Memories and Unleashes Hidden
| Knowledge", which is considerably more misleading than the
| current title.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| those murine preschool teachers ought to be running scared now.
| godelski wrote:
| I doubt the claim in the title, but I'll add something probably
| more useful. I only personally know one person with an eidetic
| memory (what people think is "photographic"). That "superpower"
| affects them in a pretty negative way. People think of this power
| through very rose colored glasses, but there is also a dark side
| to it. You don't just have a high recall for good times, your
| tool's documentation, etc but you also have a high recall for any
| trauma and bad things that have happened to you. Since you have
| such high recall with high precision it is much closer to
| reliving the experience than a typical person's memory would be.
| (there's that popular image floating around of how well you can
| visualize an apple in your head. Eidetic people are on the
| extreme end while Aphantasia people are on the other) People with
| eidetic memories often over think things because they can recall
| a large swath of historical information to make judgements upon
| (and this leads to overload). It also freaks people out when you
| can recall what they had for breakfast several years ago on a
| specific day.
|
| There are definitely advantages to this level of memory, but
| there are often disadvantages that come along with it. There was
| a reason evolution selected for brains that could forget and fuzz
| information. Fuzzing helps with abstraction. We even see some of
| this usefulness of forgetting when training neural networks (DNNs
| are __NOT__ akin to brains. Neither in respect to {hard,wet}ware
| nor algorithmically. But there are a weak similarities and
| similar abstractions).
|
| It's probably also worth adding that our memories are terrible in
| a different way. Not just in recall, but in that sometimes we
| just make shit up. This can be hard to distinguish and be
| problematic too. If you know any vivid or lucid dreamers ask them
| about their experiences (if someone is keeping a dream journal
| they're likely to be a vivid dreamer. I stopped keeping a dream
| journal for this reason).
|
| I'm sure someone that is way more knowledgeable about this could
| say more, fill in many gaps, and correct misunderstandings I
| have. I am not an expert (I study NNs, not brains). So if you are
| an _expert_ in this area, I'd love to learn more. Domain
| knowledge is often hard to come by and nuances matter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
| myself248 wrote:
| Is that likely to interfere with the forgetting of dreams? I
| can't imagine how cluttered my mind would be if that bizarre
| stuff didn't blissfully fade within a few minutes of waking up.
| derefr wrote:
| > I can't imagine how cluttered my mind would be if that
| bizarre stuff didn't blissfully fade within a few minutes of
| waking up.
|
| Not necessarily true, if (as the hypothesis goes) dreams are
| just an alternate (incorrect) decoding of your existing
| memories, experienced as a side-effect of the process of memory
| reconsolidation -- the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
| of what's in your short-term memory buffer.
|
| If that hypothesis holds, then "remembering" dreams wouldn't be
| like "remembering" regular memories, requiring independent
| storage of the data about them, but rather would be "free" as
| long as you retain the memory that the dream is an incorrect
| decoding of -- the "memory" for the dream just being a pointer
| to the original memory, plus a pointer to the mental trick to
| reinterpret it. Such data wouldn't take up more than a trivial
| amount of space to "remember", any more than procedurally-
| generated background art in old video games take up space to
| "store."
|
| (But, of course, the downside is these dream-pointers are
| probably not "strong references" to the things they point at
| from the brain's memory garbage-collection perspective -- which
| is why dreams are so easily forgotten in the first place.
| Forget the original thing, and you forget the dream, whether
| you intend to remember the dream or not!)
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Take that stuff only to be overwhelmed with all the cringe
| moments you ever had in your entire life and successfully
| suppressed until that very moment.
| [deleted]
| mcphage wrote:
| Joke's on you: I never forget my cringe moments.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Oh god what have you done to me.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| One workaround is to catch yourself in those moments and
| say, under your breath, "The person who did that is dead.
| I'm his/her replacement. I'll do better."
| smartscience wrote:
| The drug in the article is roflumilast, which seems to share some
| structure with the nootropic ampakine CX-546. I've never consumed
| that, but I've had some experience with IDRA-21 doing something
| like what the article describes, such as having vivid dreams of
| minor chart hits from decades ago that I'd previously gone a long
| time without being reminded of.
| jamisteven wrote:
| Where can one get this ampakine CX-546?
| graphe wrote:
| I've heard of a Russian medication that can be used in low
| doses that gives old memories back. It starts with"bro" and it
| has something to do with dopamine.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Would it be Bromantane by any chance? It's quite a
| fascinating drug.
| graphe wrote:
| Yes. Someone told of a story where he took very low doses
| and he got childhood memories every night.
| gjm11 wrote:
| ... in mice.
| bawolff wrote:
| Given roflumilast is already used in humans, it does raise the
| question if asthma patients are reporting extra memories.
| ac29 wrote:
| Sleep-deprived mice, even
| msla wrote:
| I notice they eventually changed the lying headline this was
| originally posted with.
|
| Is there a better way to prevent lying headlines in the future?
| cwillu wrote:
| The original title is still the title of the relevant page, and
| generally hn discourages editorializing the title in the
| submission.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| The Headline is misleading: "Recovering object-location memories
| after sleep deprivation-induced amnesia"
|
| This is possibly only effective in stress induced amnesia.
|
| This effect of Roflumilast has been known since 2015:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00142...
|
| Roflumilast is a PDE4B and PDE4D inhibitor.
|
| The enzyme, PDE4 (https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/P27815/entry)
| uses Zinc and/or Magnesium as a cofactor.
|
| What is the function of PDE4? It metabolizes cAMP (3',5'-cyclic
| AMP + H2O = AMP + H+) stimulated by Nitric Oxide which is
| responsible for LTP, or memory formation.
|
| http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/13/1/35/F7.expansion.html
|
| This is what Viagra does as well but Roflumilast works in the
| brain because of its' PDE4B and PDE4D selectivity.
|
| So what does this have to do with stress and nitric oxide?
| Everything! https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28061969/
|
| But IMO this is a healthy function of the body. We should NOT be
| remembering our stressful experiences!
| 58x14 wrote:
| Whenever I read articles or studies about scientific approaches
| to "restoring" memories, particularly approaches involving
| pharmaceuticals, I instinctively assume there's a significant
| metacognitive counterpart. Surely mental/psychological techniques
| and external stimuli have an equal or greater impact on memory
| retrieval?
|
| I have a bizarre personal anecdotal experience with spontaneous
| memory activation. I was leaving work one evening, and I'm
| recounting a dream from the night prior to a colleague as we
| left.
|
| Suddenly, in what felt like an instant, I began to rapidly recall
| a chain of lucid dreams I've had. Dreams I hadn't remembered in
| years. I remembered not only the dreams themselves, but my life's
| circumstances when I had them. I describe this as a chain, but it
| felt to me more of a... portal. As if inside each of these dreams
| was a connection to the next.
|
| I awkwardly paused, said a brief goodbye, and returned inside to
| look at myself in the mirror. My pupils were very dilated, and I
| felt like I was on psychedelics.
|
| The strangest part is that this... connection has persisted. If I
| try to recall _any_ of these dreams, including writing this
| comment, I 'm unwillingly transported through these memories, and
| I have to consciously focus elsewhere.
|
| No idea what to make of this, but it's definitely interesting.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Dreams have this tendency to disappear from memory even as one
| is thinking about them in the morning. Keywords written quickly
| in a dream journal at night can amazingly trigger entire scenes
| back into memory.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how do you know you're remembering things
| that actually happened? Keep in mind the "felt sensation" of
| remembering is itself also generated in your head, and we know
| people can have that sensation while "remembering" things that
| never happened.
| 58x14 wrote:
| I suppose it's impossible for me to "prove" whether these
| memories were/are more-or-less accurate. However they're
| self-consistent: since this phenomena emerged I've been
| recording my experiences and the referenced details within
| the dreams have remained unchanged. The circumstances also
| map correctly to knowable context: in one of these dreams, I
| was traveling for work and staying at a hotel. I have the
| email confirmation from that hotel, and a note from the same
| day with a simple remark about that lucid dream.
|
| Beyond this, I feel a deep, unshakeable confidence that this
| experience of recollection is unmistakably true. Who knows?
| darepublic wrote:
| I have occasionally experienced disassociative episodes where
| memories of dreams start to mingle with real memories and I
| have a hard time telling them apart. Has happened to me a few
| times.
| derefr wrote:
| Funny, I have a similar cognitive sensation for a kind of deja
| vu I sometimes get, where I'll remember remembering something
| and my train of thought about it, but also remember remembering
| remembering all the previous times I remembered remembering it,
| and along with it, unwillingly, I'll remember all the trains of
| thought I had at the times I remembered remembering, sort of
| replaying all at once, cacaphonously.
|
| It's sort of like looking down a well, but it's well of time,
| where each time I look, the well is one unit deeper and there's
| another new snapshot of me looking down the well added to the
| top.
|
| It's honestly kind of annoying, because it's almost the
| cognitive equivalent of an earworm -- I have to willfully
| dismiss it from my focus, otherwise it sticks around.
|
| I wonder if this is the original meaning of the term "navel
| gazing"?
| NortySpock wrote:
| > It's sort of like looking down a well, but it's well of
| time, where each time I look, the well is one unit deeper and
| there's another new snapshot of me looking down the well
| added to the top.
|
| I had to go digging, but it reminds me of the novella Cascade
| Point by Timothy Zahn. In it, spaceships can travel through
| hyperspace, but skimming the edge of parallel universes in
| this way causes the occupants of the spaceship to see
| visions/hallucinations of their parallel-universe-selves
| standing nearby. Being able to _see_ the various results of
| major decisions in your life -- some which lead to the death
| or grievous injury of the parallel-universe-self -- is quite
| a shock to most people, and thus it is customary for all
| passengers to be asleep for the hyperspace travel portion.
| But all captains are required by regulation to be awake for
| the transit, and thus in the story this captain must muse on
| his life-choices, alone on the bridge, because he runs a
| passenger liner.
|
| It's a bit of a wooden, flat story, with a somewhat basic
| plot, but I thought it was a neat concept-and-consequence of
| FTL.
|
| A blog post with a quick mostly-spoiler-free review:
| http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014/01/review-of-
| cascade-p...
| 58x14 wrote:
| This matches my experience eerily well, especially the "one
| unit deeper" aspect. I feel like I can voluntarily summon
| this experience in my mind and travel through it forever. It
| feels frightening, in a way, being confronted with the depths
| of an unexplored internal mental chasm.
|
| Do you have other "threads" with similar phenomena, or is
| there a singular thread that branches?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-11 23:00 UTC)