8 ms·
Decapitated Worms Regrow Heads, Keep Old Memories
- pishpash 9y ago"Then the team showed the worms with the regrown heads where to find food, essentially a refresher course of their light training before decapitation." Uh...
- falsprofet 9y agoCould be the regenerated heads learn faster because they are fresh, just like after a good night of sleep.
- dnautics 9y agothere's a good null control for that experiment which i presume they did.
- everdev 9y agoSurprising but I guess it makes sense since we know of "muscle memory" as storing information outside of the brain. Same with decapitated chickens who are clearly still experiencing panic and attempting to flee until they die.
- pishpash 9y ago"Muscle memory is stored outside of the brain" -- reference? Decapitated chickens could be entirely driven by processes already communicated just before decapitation. This claims to be much more.
- fooker 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasympathetic_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasympathetic_nervous_system
- kgwgk 9y agoWhat’s the relation to “muscle memory”?
- dbspin 9y ago(In mammals) neurons lace the gut and other organs, and are implicated both in cognition and recall. For example Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis holds that affective decision making 'polls' physiological responses which direct affect, providing intuitive 'system 1' information to aid decision making. There's a whole field of embodied cognition which studies the interaction of the body and brain / central nervous system in behaviour and decision making. While all this is a far cry from regenerating memories in the sense we think of them; the authors are merely referring to conditioned information, which could certainly be stored in the extra-cortical nervous system.
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- andrewflnr 9y agoI was always pretty sure "muscle memory" was a misnomer that actually referred to memory in the cerebellum. The headless chicken thing does put a damper on that theory, though.
- notfed 9y agoKeep in mind that, while Mike (the chicken) did have most of his head cut off, some of his brain—and indeed most likely his cerebellum—was left intact. "If the bird still has a bottom beak, the cerebellum and brain stem are likely still intact, which makes the chicken’s basic motor functions and ability to breathe quite likely." - Dr. Wayne J. Kuenzel (a poultry physiologist and neurobiologist) [1] [1] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/08/heres-chicken-can-live-without-head/ https://modernfarmer.com/2014/08/heres-chicken-can-live-with...
- randomdrake 9y agoStudy: An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planaria and its persistence through head regeneration Citation: Tal Shomrat, Michael Levin. Journal of Experimental Biology 2013. Published July 2, 2013 Link: http://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.087809 http://jeb.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.087809 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.087809 Summary: Planarian flatworms are a popular system for research into the molecular mechanisms that enable these complex organisms to regenerate their entire body, including the brain. Classical data suggest that they may also be capable of long-term memory. Thus, the planarian system may offer the unique opportunity to study brain regeneration and memory in the same animal. To establish a system for the investigation of the dynamics of memory in a regenerating brain, we developed a computerized training and testing paradigm that avoided the many issues that confounded previous, manual attempts to train planarians. We then used this new system to train flatworms in an environmental familiarization protocol. We show that worms exhibit environmental familiarization, and that this memory persists for at least 14 days – long enough for the brain to regenerate. We further show that trained, decapitated planarians exhibit evidence of memory retrieval in a savings paradigm after regenerating a new head. Our work establishes a foundation for objective, high-throughput assays in this molecularly tractable model system that will shed light on the fundamental interface between body patterning and stored memories. We propose planarians as key emerging model species for mechanistic investigations of the encoding of specific memories in biological tissues. Moreover, this system is lik ely to have important implications for the biomedicine of stem-cell-derived treatments of degenerative brain disorders in human adults.
- Elv13 9y agoAs a related story, meet Mike, the headless chicken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
- unmango 9y agoA question comes to my mind: what could Mike the chicken not do without those "higher brain centres" the article mentions?
- jjoonathan 9y agoHow long do you think Mike would have survived had he not been specially cared for? My guess: barely long enough to die from dehydration.
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoReproduce
- shoo 9y agoFor some reason i'm reminded of chicken little, the delicious chicken tissue growth from Frederick Pohl's The Space Merchants
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Then the team showed the worms with the regrown heads where to find food, essentially a refresher course of their light training before decapitation Would the worms remember without this “refresher course”?
- Namrog84 9y agoAlthough I didn't read. I'd assume and hope they had some basic controls in place like an untrained worm decapitated and also a trained worm non decapitated
- jeanrene 9y agoThe experiment does not sound too good to me. They had to retrain the formerly decapitated worms. The article does not mention how much faster the "refresher course" trained the decapitated worms.
- vxl 9y ago>Headless fragments regenerated from familiarized worms displayed slightly shorter feeding latency compared with headless fragments from unfamiliarized worms ... However, the effect was not statistically significant. So, no. But they do better with the refresher course than other worms if I understand correctly.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago>However, the effect was not statistically significant. // AKA - there's no effect as far as we can tell without further experiment. Correction: the paper (http://jeb.biologists.org/content/early/2013/06/27/jeb.087809.full.pdf http://jeb.biologists.org/content/early/2013/06/27/jeb.08780...) is talking about the worms before re-familiarisation. They claim significance for previously "trained" worms being faster at picking up the training post decap+regen.
- gumby 9y agoRather a side point but I've always been bemused by how people refer to decapitation. "Decapitated body" makes sense. But we mostly consider the head when talking about people (mugshots are heads, etc) -- so why aren't people decorporated rather than decapitated? Lavoisier's blinking experiment after his beheading didn't involve picking up his body! (yes, yes I know that that is why this planaria experiment is so interesting). If you don't know about Lavoisier's alleged extreme science experiment: http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/02/06/lavoisier-blinks/ http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/02/06/lavoisier-blinks/
- kepano 9y agoRegarding Lavoisier, "alleged" is correct. There seems to be no historical evidence that Lavoisier was the subject of this experiment, though it does make for a good story and was probably tried by someone at some point. See http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=36;t=000797;p=1 http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...
- GavinMcG 9y agoPeople are decapitated, because they're the direct object of "decapitation" – the verb describing the removal of the head from the body. I disagree that "we mostly consider the head when talking about people". We might mostly consider the face when talking about identity, but what specifically we consider in a person is context-dependent. Also, "decorporation" would indeed suggest the removal of the body – but from what? "Decapitation" makes sense because the head is a part of the body. "Decorporation" would require the body to be removed from a larger whole, if it's to follow the same latinate prefix pattern.
- gumby 9y agoIndeed, to remove the body from the important part — the head. Likewise a “head transplant” always seems like a weird thing to discuss. It’s really (from my PoV) a “body transplant.” Unless you’d be happy receiving a head transplant from me :-)
- hateduser2 9y ago
- jrubinovitz 9y agoTraumatic memories are accepted as sometimes being stored in some capacity in human body regions other than the head, I'd be very interested in seeing if this is connected, as research progresses. Source: https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/B00OBT7KAO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1515881079&sr=8-2 https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/B0...
- ourmandave 9y agoI'd give my right arm to forget that trauma.
- andai 9y agoThe real feat here is that they convinced the worms it was safe to eat there even though they got their heads cut off.
- chanux 9y agoMaybe they know, so they don't really care. :D
- Nomentatus 9y agoOuch. Turns out even worms backup more frequently than humans do.
- rkagerer 9y agoAt some point a software engineer actually sat down and implemented a worm "torturing" algorithm. I'm not a worm rights activist or anything, and the paper was a fascinating read, but man I'd hate to be a flatworm in these guys' lab. Makes me wonder if some dark agency somewhere in the world is using AI to perfect their autonomous human-torturing machine.
- sombremesa 9y agoHumanity is very good at torturing itself already.
- Razengan 9y agoMaybe someone or something [0] already invented the perfect human-torturing machine and that’s what life is. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
- andai 9y agoCheck out Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. https://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml https://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml
- Someone 9y ago”At some point a software engineer” More likely a Ph.D. student in biology. And, reading the paper, I get the impression the decapitation was still done manually. That must be a dangerous job, given that these animals have “a high tendency to undergo spontaneously fission” :-) But yes, the paper doesn’t mention an ethics committee, so it appears the hunting season for flatworms is completely unrestricted.
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- m3kw9 9y agoThey need to make this happen for humans, it would revolutionize the cosmetics industry
- DaniFong 9y agoI see what you did there ;-)
- Aardwolf 9y agoSo the body grows a head back. Does also the head grow a body back, resulting in two worms? I know totally nothing about these worms, but my armchair guess now is that the brain in the head is a visual center for those eyes, and the nerves in the body have the memory. I hope they'll figure it out! And that they'll be able to map individual neurons like the 302 neurons of a Caenorhabditis elegans. And finally that they'll be able to simulate those neurons in software
- booleandilemma 9y agoIn reply to your first question, according to wikipedia, yes. ...each piece has the ability to regenerate into a fully formed individual.
- userbinator 9y agoThat's rather nightmarish. "Cut a worm in half. Now you have two worms." Reminds me of the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernaean_Hydra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernaean_Hydra
- inferiorhuman 9y agoWith the same memories that will then result in a pair of worms terrorizing you.
- alex_young 9y agoWhat if you cut the top off the bottom you cut off of the old top? Now we're in Ship of Theseus territory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- takeda 9y agoI don't understand why this is considered a paradox. It is only a paradox due to flawed thinking of what is considered the same. The problem is when you think of same object as a binary (it is same or it isn't). If you think of same object as a spectrum it becomes trivial. In case of the mentioned ship, as individual pieces are replaced, what's same becomes smaller and smaller part of the entire ship. If you take these parts and build another ship, that will be the same ship that you originally had.
- lyqwyd 9y agoThat's even better regeneration than Wolverine
- trumpsamerica 9y agothis is what's happening in Trumps America, beheading worms for personal gain And even CNN isn't telling me to get outraged!!! How will I know how to think now????
- vadimberman 9y agoSorry to be a bore, but does the brain of the flatworm have the same functions as that of the vertebrates? If an octopus, for example, has a "decentralised nervous system", I would not be surprised if it were the case with the worms.
- EgoIncarnate 9y agoThere was a similar experiment where a research ground up flatworms and fed them to other flatworms and they learned the behavior faster. [1] I suspect the worms aren't "learning" anything, but are simply adapting an inbuilt behavior based upon local conditions. If local conditions cause a hormone or epigentic shift, that would appear the behavior was learned and could be preserved when the brain was regrown. It would also explain how feeding the remains of other worms could "teach" it something. In reality it could just be an adjustment of hormone levels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian#Regeneration
- djsumdog 9y agoI was thinking that as I read it. Maybe their outer cells are just getting use to something and an evolutionary fitness mechanism keeps those other cells seeking whatever provides it nutrients. I mean it get into the definition of what _memory_ is. When humans talk about muscle memory, we're not actually talking about memories actually being held in those muscles. We're just training our brain an nervous system to be faster and more precise at a given task. When we train certain animals, their learning may have nothing to do with a central nervous system at all. And even the concept of "learning" could be a human personification we apply to an animals when really it is simply adapting or has some type of evolutionary fitness or propensity to repeat certain tasks that bring it food or warmth. On a side node, I really dislike it when people say "our feet were designed to" or "this animal's webbed feet are designed to." I always try to say they "evolved to" or "adapted to." It's similar to when people say "It's suppose to rain all well," when you should really say, "They're predicting rain all week."
- ttctciyf 9y agoYes! I sometimes wonder if Frank Herbert was aware of this study, reported in the press [1] three years before the publication of Dune, with its tales of transgenerational memory transmission and sandworms.. 1: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=BrgeAAAAIBAJ&%20sjid=RmUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4807,6623836 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=BrgeAAAAIBAJ&%20sjid=R...
- chisleu 9y agoWorms have very few neurons though. Someone simulated one with a toy robot and it acted very much like an earthworm.
- adrianN 9y agoThere is the http://openworm.org/ http://openworm.org/ project that tries to simulate a simple worm. It's not as easy as one might think, even if the whole connectome of the worm is known.
- aknoob 9y agoCould it be some extreme form of muscle-memory ?
- Iv 9y agoWorms don't really have a head though. One end is a mouth, the other is an anus. Their neural function happen within the handful of neurons they have in-between. There is little wonder that the memories in these neurons are kept.
- calibas 9y agoMore evidence that memories are at least partially epigenetic.
- meitham 9y agoWhat's the possibility these worms have some off-body cloud like memory storage!
- fsiefken 9y agoYou haven't heard about the controversial theories of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance? Rupert Sheldrake explains his idea on where memory is stored: https://youtu.be/RtofjlCkUno?t=2912 https://youtu.be/RtofjlCkUno?t=2912
- meitham 9y agovery interesting, no I have not heard about this theory before.
- fsiefken 9y agoRupert Sheldrake explains his wild theory on where memories could be are stored in this interview series with scientists ('A Glorious Accident'): https://youtu.be/RtofjlCkUno?t=2912 https://youtu.be/RtofjlCkUno?t=2912 Or maybe it has something to do with bioelectricity as one of the researchers Mark Levin theorizes: http://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/ http://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/
- trumpsamerica 9y agoMakes you wonder what kind of secret research is going on in China where the communist Govt has fewer "ethical concerns". A Chinese doctor friend of mine mentioned that Chinese no longer much care for Western research. I don't know if this was an exaggeration but interesting to know
- throwaway7312 9y agoThere is also the "person lives normal life, found to have almost no brain" phenomenon: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-b...
- GorgeRonde 9y agoMeanwhile, this was posted on HN a few hours ago: "Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules" Discussion/Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139798&ref=hvper.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139798&ref=hvper.com Maybe this is how the brain achieves back-propagation. This could explain how a headless worm grows back old memories (in other words, because the mechanism that allows it is infra-neuronal). Funnily enough, I also wonder if, at least from an abstract and blurry viewpoint, this kind of "ambient" diffusion of information could explain why one could spot links from one paper to another like I just did. In this particular case, this is of course speculative but I think the idea i'm drawing on here can be particularly interesting, at least to a computer-science-minded audience like that of HN. If I were to give this idea the flesh supplement it lacks to make it more palpable, I would ask: what would it take for a theory of the way ideas form and diffuse to explain how itself has been formed and diffused ? My guess is that it requires the theory thinker to rephrase the question in this way "Where, thinking this idea will lead me to ?" if he ought to be able to explain not just what the ideation process is like but also how he has found himself caught in its loop. This is the question I'm asking.
- bringtheaction 9y agoShould add (2013) to title. Interesting stuff though. Has there been any further research or developments relating to this since then?
- ijcd 9y agoThe title is misleading. I did a science project on this in the early 1990s. The paper mentions that the retention of memories after decapitation has been known since the 1950s. The news here seems to be that they have developed a computerized system to allow for easier, more consistent study of this phenomenon. This reminds me of Feynman's Cargo Cult of Science essay where he talks about the research that went into how to research rats, and why that was good science that many others ignored.
- gaurav_v 9y agoI'm working on extending this work, now. For those of you interested in the history of memories outside of the brain, I would suggest reading the first chapter of 'The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science': http://cstpr.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/collins_the_golem.pdf http://cstpr.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/collins_the_gol... The idea of memory outside of the brain originated in the 1950s, when it was believed that memories may be stored in genetic material. This idea was discredited for interesting sociological reasons which the book explains well. For those of you asking if the worm brain is a decent model: the work was done in planaria, which is the simplest organism known to have a centralized, two-hemisphere nervous system. So there really is a 'brain' up there in its head, the worm shows little behavior without it. You can email me if you'd like to know more.
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- a3n 9y agoDo they remember having their heads cut off?
- nikolay 9y agoI've read that with ECM (extracellular matrix) we can regenerate fingers, but more complex organs are possibly out of question.