Great result on the biochemistry of memory storage. Then they venture into philosophy: "They still struggle to explain the spark that transforms information into insight."
Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
People love to bring this up, but while yes, all cells have some form of memory mechanism or another, with quite the number of nerves outside the brain, we are still a cognitively top-eown organism and quite unlike simpler organisms where the line is blurry.
In machine learning terms, we've basically got a layer or two of neurons responsible for physical memory stored outside the brain, sure. But it's out of dozens if not hundreds total.
Another flatworms-are-fun story: If you irradiate a flatworm using a nuclear reactor, to kill off its stem-cell equivalents, it sort of "rots" as other cells eventually die and aren't being replaced. If after zap, you insert donor stems, its life can instead proceed normally, and the entire body is eventually refreshed. So ship of Theseus like, you have an individual flatworm, swimming through its life, which ends up being genetically unrelated to its earlier self.
I think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982...
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
It's amazing after all these years we're still so bad at improving an average person's recall, even by 50%. It feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and all we can do is spaced repetition systems, the memory palace, strong associative scents, etc
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
This discovery fully validates the organic system side of Peter Putnam's theory on induction, the Neuro Conditioned Reflex Principle, that requires changing state at synapses over time to select the nested Relative Dominance feedback winner in a given Conditioned Reflex feedback loop. Its quite incredible that the functionality of induction proposed by Putnam in 1963 has been consistently validated since then. [1]
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 27.1 ms ] threadGo watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
In machine learning terms, we've basically got a layer or two of neurons responsible for physical memory stored outside the brain, sure. But it's out of dozens if not hundreds total.
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
[1] https://www.peterputnam.org/outline-of-a-functional-model-of...