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This gets towards an answer to the question I've always posed to computer scientists seeking to emulate brain function in a program: what is the basic unit of m
by jboggan 9y ago
This gets towards an answer to the question I've always posed to computer scientists seeking to emulate brain function in a program: what is the basic unit of memory?
When you drill down to the fundamentals of computer science you get to the bit; all complex data is essentially a representation on top of bits. I've always wondered what the quantum of human memory is though. What's the smallest thing that you can remember?
I always think about this because my living memories are rich-media with sound and sight and smell and feel. I suppose facts can be a smaller bit of memory, but how is that actually encoded? Maybe we'll know in our lifetimes, maybe not.
- iandanforth 9y agoHave you read "In Search of Memory" by Kandel? It's half autobiography half exploration of that question. His studies on this topic won him a Nobel, and his life story is fascinating to boot!
- shahbaby 9y agoHow do you define memory? If you mean, "knowledge of the past" then even the simple neural nets of today exhibit memory when they can recognize your face. So where does this face recognizing neural net store information about eyes, ears, noses, etc? That information is part of the neural net but it's distributed across all the neurons. This type of memory system is much closer to how memory in the real brain works.
- phkahler 9y agoBut what if that's only one mechanism? What if some information is stored in DNA or RNA? And what if that can be copied and stored in other cells too? What if each neuron could store even kilobits of data in it's DNA? Capacity per neuron goes up by a few orders of magnitude.