[HN Gopher] Brain Scientists Discover the Glue That Makes Memori...
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Brain Scientists Discover the Glue That Makes Memories Stick for a
Lifetime
Author : kungfudoi
Score : 46 points
Date : 2024-09-01 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Not that Scientific American doesn't deserve to be funded, but
| I'm not sure how I feel about this article being paywalled while
| the scientific paper it's summarizing is free:
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl0030
| PcChip wrote:
| Why are there so many paywalled links lately?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Advertising based funding was always a scam and doomed to be a
| race to the bottom as per unit margins can barely support unit
| costs of production. The incentives for attention capture and
| sale of private information are the only material market
| pressure.
|
| Sadly in a world of scarcity journalists need to eat too, have
| families, retirement funds to accumulate, etc. Quality of work
| requires paying humans, which requires funds from the consumers
| of the product one way or another. By paying as a first order
| user you boost the unit margin considerably and change the
| incentive structure to prioritize your priorities, not the
| priorities of advertisers and surveillance economy
| participants.
|
| Sadly I don't think anyone has come up with an alternative way
| of paying for the people to do the work.
| sgc wrote:
| Here is a (not very novel) idea: Netflix for news. I would
| happily pay for a solid aggregator subscription. But the
| number of times that some random news site from halfway
| across the world is the site of the day just keeps me away
| from news subscriptions. It feels like I am pigeon-holing
| myself and limiting my worldview to that of a couple of
| editorial boards / companies.
|
| Also, for sites that want to have single-site subscriptions:
| If you bundle with print, give me the option of donating my
| print subscription to a library if I don't want the hard
| copy. Many people for whom the subscription is too much
| friction / not a great value proposition, will bite if at
| least they know the libraries are eating for free.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Just imagine this 2034, and the NewStream service is
| competing with a bunch of newspapers selling their own news
| streams. The original NewStream is hiring reporters to make
| its own news, and some people like them.
| bn-l wrote:
| This is what I want also (it's strange it doesn't exist
| yet). I'm not going to pay a subscription to a hundred
| different news sites.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Apple News+ is the shitty cable network version of this,
| where you pay for access but you still get the ads anyway.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/MSetk
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385322
| metadat wrote:
| No discussion == no dupe.
|
| (Unfortunate sometimes. You are absolutely one of the most
| prolific HN submitters, Joe!)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| "No discussion == no dupe." Excellent point, taken!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| "You are absolutely one of the most prolific HN submitters,
| Joe!"
|
| It took me until I reached 76 years of age to finally
| discover what I'm good at.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This is mildly terrifying. Imagine a drug that penetrates the
| blood-brain barrier and inhibits the interaction of these two
| proteins. Administered over a long enough period of time, could
| it erase your memories... effectively, erasing you? Imagine such
| a thing being used maliciously, by governments against their
| critics, or as a covert weapon.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| My first thought is someone is going to do these experiments,
| probably on a prisoner. Then my second thought was death row
| prisoners being given the choice of a memory wipe or death as
| some sort of attempt at rehabilitation. I can't yet see half
| the ways this could go horribly for humanity.
|
| On the other hand knowing how this works we might be able to
| boost the process and make people super fast learners, that
| could be really cool.
| crooked-v wrote:
| That kind of thing is what gets you a society with incentives
| to produce more death-row convictions.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > My first thought is someone is going to do these
| experiments, probably on a prisoner.
|
| In the animal model, they surgically altered the animals to
| have an injection cannula placed in their skulls, it's
| obviously hard to target, so you just install it and run the
| experiment, then after the experiment, you kill and necropsy
| the animal to see if it was in the right place after all. If
| it was you can keep those results, if it wasn't, you throw
| those results away.
|
| Meanwhile the test is putting them on a rotating platform and
| shocking their feet on certain platform areas. Then waiting
| for them to avoid it habitually. Then you inject them. Then
| you see if they still avoid it.
|
| These guys basically know next to nothing about how memories
| are formed at this point. Their test is so amazingly cruel
| while being particularly narrow that you can't actually
| divine anything useful from it. Except maybe more funding to
| keep shooting in the dark at these animals expense.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Yes, although, you could just poison and kill anyone as easily
| already now, so I'm not sure if it's exactly more terrifying or
| not.
| grugagag wrote:
| Possibly more humiliating to see an opponent mind be
| completely wiped out, possibly living the rest of their lives
| as a vegetable and to need the care of someone. When one is
| killed for their ideas they become a martyr of sorts.
| smith7018 wrote:
| It is already much easier to turn someone into a vegetable
| or to mentally incapacitate people
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I think if you want terrifying, look for the "Devil's
| Breath" or Scopolamine. This has been actively used by
| robbers and can ruin a life forever.
| wtetzner wrote:
| I wonder if there's something in our food and/or environment
| that effectively does that over long periods of time,
| ultimately causing some forms of dementia?
| throw7 wrote:
| MKUltra v2.0
| dv_dt wrote:
| On the other hand something like that might also have
| legitimate medical uses with ptsd treatments.
| mdhb wrote:
| Of course the most deranged and paranoid government is out to
| get me comment got voted to the top of HN of an unrelated
| article.
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