10 ms·

Upgrade Your Memory with a Surgically Implanted Chip

80 points by ETHisso2017 7y ago

xchip 7y ago
Any idea why the max in the graph is at 350? It looks like the data only reaches a maximum value 150...
warent 7y ago
"If brain activity is suboptimal, the device provides a small zap, undetectable to the patient, to strengthen the signal and increase the chance of memory formation." I always wonder if things like this are worded like so for the layperson to understand? Because to me it sounds like an incredibly crude and hackish way to do anything. "Yeah, just shock the brain and it forms better memories! We're not entirely sure how or why, or what the implications are, but it seems to work for some reason!"
- temikus 7y ago
  You’d be surprised but that’s how a lot of medicine works. Your common paracetamol (Panadol) has a mechanism of action that is “not completely understood”. We’ve come a long way in the past 100 years but certain areas are still pretty much trial and error.
  - manjana 7y ago
    Same goes for our theory regarding depression for instance. We say the cause is a chemical imbalance, but this has never been measured; same goes for many mental conditions since it's next to impossible to measure the causal element given it's happening inside the brain.
    - jdietrich 7y ago
      >We say the cause is a chemical imbalance "We" don't say that; pharmaceutical sales reps say it. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
      - grumdan 7y ago
        In particular, this shows that it's not that it's not been measured. It's been measured and not found to be an incorrect explanation of what's happening.
  - puranjay 7y ago
    So much of medicine is like this. My in-laws are doctors and so many of their diagnoses eventually end up as "we have no idea what's happening, but these steroids should help. Why, we have no clue."
    - nerdponx 7y ago
      And yet doctors reject all manner of so-called "alternative" therapies on the grounds that they have no plausible mechanism of action. A family member of mine had a somewhat-debilitating chronic condition in high school, which only got better with a combination of what today are garden-variety alternative therapies (acupuncture, elimination diet, et al). Today, as a doctor, pooh-poohs a lot of that stuff. It's confusing and disappointing to see.
      - bradleyjg 7y ago
        Do a well designed study and it won’t be “so called ‘alternative’” anymore. We may not know why various real medical interventions work but we have better than “I’ve got a cousin” evidence that they do.
        alexandercrohde 7y ago
        I can't speak to this from personal experience, but I constantly hear the accusation that any sort of solid study on say herbals is going to cost millions of dollars, and that no big-pharma company would even bother to sponsor such a study because they can't patent the result (because it's an herb).
        bradleyjg 7y ago
        There’s at least one pot based drug on the market. So I think there must be some way to profit from medicines that were known anecdotally to be medicinal in herb form.
        krageon 7y ago
        They could patent a delivery mechanism, or isolate some compounds from the herb that work almost as well (that's not exactly an unusual result either). These arguments fall down because they don't make any sense.
- antonvs 7y ago
  You get better memory, and the PTSD is a free bonus!
  - Kirth 7y ago
    Just buy our other product to remove unwanted memories ;)
    - apoph3nia 7y ago
      "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  A huge amount of medicine, and especially neuroscience, is like this. Nobody really knows why ECT works, for instances. Similarly, I don't think the mechanism behind TMS is well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...
  - imperio59 7y ago
    That's because ECT and TMS don't work and have never been proven to be safe and effective by clinical trial. They were "grandfathered in" by the FDA but don't actually work and cause memory loss amongst other terrible side effects. See http://emord.com/blawg/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1-ECT-Citizen-Petition.pdf http://emord.com/blawg/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1-ECT-Citi...
    - ForHackernews 7y ago
      You shouldn't conflate those two, as they're very different things. TMS is currently undergoing lots of trials. ECT does have significant negative side effects, but it does seem to help some people. You may be right that it wouldn't be approved as a new treatment today.
      - Amygaz 7y ago
        Just a word of caution, keep in mind that all those trials are designed around very crude observation or short term duration. Also, lot of things are going into trial that shouldn't. That being said I do have an uncle with Parkison who had a neurostimulator implanted (DBS) 15 years ago. It worked quite well for a while, more than any medication at the time. It doesn't anymore, and he has lost cognitive abilities also, which is most likely due to the progressive nature of the disease, rather than DBS. This technique has been in clinical trial for 20+ years...
        epmaybe 7y ago
        Side note regarding DBS: There's some interesting research in grafting a nerve (I could be misremembering, but it's definitely a nerve graft) onto the substantia nigra (a part of the brain that we know produces dopamine), and then doing DBS on that region. Early stages, phase I trial, but a neat idea nonetheless.
- d2161 7y ago
  Yep that's cuz we practice Evidence Based Medicine. If it works, it works, we don't care for the mechanism. Mechanism of action is only ever a hypothesis anyways. But as a 2nd point, we don't always do things by evidence either. Obstetrics is an example of an entire field where there is not much evidence, and people practice what was passed down to them. The reason is because often you cannot do an RCT in an ethical way with Obs. Additionally, often times when we prescribe a medication/treatment, there is a really significant chance it won't do anything for you. The number needed to treat before one person experiences a benefit could be quite high, like 10 or 15. We still do it if the benefit outweigh the risk. TLDR: We don't care how it works just that it works. Some fields like obstetrics have little evidence for many things. And just cuz there is evidence, doesn't mean it'll help most of the ppl who get it.
  - rczhang 7y ago
    This is not Evidence-based Medicine. EBM does not say to we shouldn't care about the mechanism of action. EBM will say that treatments without a randomized control trial can only be weakly recommended. In a perfect EBM world, everything would be strictly tested. You're describing why we have trouble practicing "pure" EBM.
fromthestart 7y ago
>“I don’t think any of us are going to be signing up for voluntary brain surgery anytime soon,” Sanchez says. “Only when these technologies become less invasive, or noninvasive, will they become widespread.” Are you kidding? 15-37% improvement in memory formation/recall? Where do I sign?
- rebuilder 7y ago
  Improvement in patients with traumatic brain injury, mind. It's not clear at all that the implant would give comparable results in healthy people.
- goodside 7y ago
  The surgery needed to install the chip is itself detrimental to your IQ. The brain was not made to be exposed to air. You don’t get your skull opened up unless there’s no other option — these are patients who were already forced into this circumstance.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    Could you not e.g. operate in an artificial vacuum using oxygen masks? If open skull surgery is so detrimental to IQ, why is this not done? I understand there's a cost factor but given the scale of medical expenses, it seems within the realm of possibility?
    - andrey_utkin 7y ago
      Because brain and other body tissues normally have internal pressure of 1 atmosphere, so if you put it into vacuum, it will explode and blood and other liquids will boil.
      - gruez 7y ago
        He probably means some sort of inert gas to minimize the effects of air exposure.
      - 7y ago
toephu2 7y ago
This is like a precursor to Elon Musk's Neuralink idea. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
- matt-snider 7y ago
  They are hiring for several technical and non-technical positions, e.g. Software Eng both Full Stack and Robotics, Mech Eng, Electrical Eng, Accountant, Talent Aquisition, etc. If I lived over there I'd definitely consider it. Such a cool area of work! https://neuralink.com/ https://neuralink.com/
- _0ffh 7y ago
  Please stop ascribing old SF literature ideas to the first billionaire who passes along, promising to make them true.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Agreed. The term 'neural lace' was coined by Ian M. Banks (as far as I know) but the concept of an implanted brain-computer interface which can augment brain function is decades old.
    - DocSavage 7y ago
      Musk reportedly got the idea from the Banks novels: https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/the-daily/the-novelist-who-inspired-elon-musk https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/the-daily/the-novelist-...
ironchest 7y ago
I wonder if rare circumstances like taking hallucinogens or being in the middle of a Carrington event have been considered...
Bombthecat 7y ago
> get your competitive advantage now! Get your chip now!
- mirceal 7y ago
  i like the idea of artificially enhanced humans (including implanted hardware) but I don’t really want to be the guinea pig for this kind if thing.
sireat 7y ago
" He was the first person the Finn had known who'd `gone silicon' -the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case -and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales." - not quite the same thing but we are on the way there.
hyperpallium 7y ago
No, of course it isn't biased towards certain brands, or censor certain criticism. As a happy recipient of the device, I don't know how you could even think such as thing.
madengr 7y ago
Someday a method/implant will be invented to trigger the orgasmic response in the brain. Will be interesting to see how humanity handles that drug. Reminds me of Star Trek DS9, where the Cardassian tailor had the brain implant to make him resistant to torture. He had turned it on, and left it on for 20 years, then it failed.
- fgkramer 7y ago
  This following is completely unfounded, but I think that it would become a stigma to those who got it. We are all driven by chemicals and everyone has their own preference on how to release dopamine and any other chemicals, be it exercise, drugs, alcohol, anything you can imagine. Getting a button to trigger such a strong response would mean a certain division in society, those who seek pleasure the new way or those who want to keep with the traditional way. Overall I think that facilitating this would give people a huge (maybe too big) escape from reality and would certainly be abused. Robin Cook had a plot about this (triggering orgasm-like responses on brains) many years ago in his book Brain: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529804.Brain https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529804.Brain
  - Funes- 7y ago
    >Getting a button to trigger such a strong response would mean a certain division in society, those who seek pleasure the new way or those who want to keep with the traditional way. Isn't this already happening to a certain extent--and progressively getting worse? I think there's an ever-increasing chasm between people who occupy their leisure time with digital entertainment engineered to be an easy--and highly addictive--dopamine fix, and people who try to enjoy more mindful activities. The latter option is, of course, incomparably harder.
  - tachyonbeam 7y ago
    The reward circuitry in the brain is very much fundamental to how we operate and what motivates us in life. This is why drugs can be so life destroying. People tend to restructure their life so that they can keep getting that reward, at the expense of everything else. It's something that's maybe hard to understand unless you've done drugs. I used to go out raving and do MDMA a lot. At the peak I was doing it almost every weekend. Until I found myself going out alone and looking for opportunities to go out, even if nobody I knew was going or the party wasn't good. I thought I really liked dancing, but I eventually realized, my brain was looking for an excuse to put me in that environment where I would typically do drugs, even if I actually knew going out that night would be a shitty experience. In other words, when you mess with your reward circuitry, your brain will begin to "lie" to you to guide you back to situations where you will get more of that reward. Your way of thinking will shift, and you might not even notice. I personally don't think there is any way that brain implants can hook into our reward circuit and be used in a safe/responsible way. At least, not if the users themselves have direct control. The only way it could maybe be used sustainably is to reward certain behaviors in a way that the person themselves doesn't have control over, but that's a whole other dystopian can of worms. Personally, I think brain implants might fuck up society beyond recognition. Imagine if people could turn their sex drive on or off at will, or stop themselves from falling in love, get over someone instantly, make themselves love their miserable jobs. Sounds great right? Except we'll stop being human, we'll become machines.
apo 7y ago
> In two separate studies, researchers found the prototype consistently boosted memory 15% to 18%. No mention of controls or error bars. Until then, this is all placebo effect.
ddingus 7y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12678461-amped https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12678461-amped This is a great romp, good for your next flight or downtime. The premise is what happens to society when augmented people start to matter.
test6554 7y ago
I was kind of hoping for a chip that interfaces with the brain. Stores data digitally and responds to brain's request for information. But that's probably the wrong way of thinking about it on multiple levels. As someone with no knowledge of how this stuff works, I like to imagine that when you try to remember something, your brain sends signals the same connections that were formed when you last saw that thing. It then activates your visual cortex, your auditory cortex and language centers. So you visualize it, see the word, and hear it in your brain, then suddenly you feel as if you know the answer to the thing you were trying to remember.
- Balgair 7y ago
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517131928.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517131928.h... It's thought of as occurring just as you described, but it's very difficult to prove it even in rodent models. Also, humans are wildly diverse. Some people have aphantasia, where they cannot 'image' things in their heads. Invariably when you bring this up on HN, you get a lot of people saying they cannot believe this and a lot of people saying that this is their normal reality. Similar to discussions on synestensia (hearing colors, tasting names, other 'mix ups') and if you stand or sit when you wipe in the bathroom. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/cant-imagine-pictures-your-mind-you-might-have-aphantasia/ https://www.iflscience.com/brain/cant-imagine-pictures-your-...

80 points by ETHisso2017 7y ago

Any idea why the max in the graph is at 350? It looks like the data only reaches a maximum value 150...

"If brain activity is suboptimal, the device provides a small zap, undetectable to the patient, to strengthen the signal and increase the chance of memory formation." I always wonder if things like this are worded like so for the layperson to understand? Because to me it sounds like an incredibly crude and hackish way to do anything. "Yeah, just shock the brain and it forms better memories! We're not entirely sure how or why, or what the implications are, but it seems to work for some reason!"

temikus 7y ago
You’d be surprised but that’s how a lot of medicine works. Your common paracetamol (Panadol) has a mechanism of action that is “not completely understood”. We’ve come a long way in the past 100 years but certain areas are still pretty much trial and error.
- manjana 7y ago
  Same goes for our theory regarding depression for instance. We say the cause is a chemical imbalance, but this has never been measured; same goes for many mental conditions since it's next to impossible to measure the causal element given it's happening inside the brain.
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    >We say the cause is a chemical imbalance "We" don't say that; pharmaceutical sales reps say it. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
    - grumdan 7y ago
      In particular, this shows that it's not that it's not been measured. It's been measured and not found to be an incorrect explanation of what's happening.
- puranjay 7y ago
  So much of medicine is like this. My in-laws are doctors and so many of their diagnoses eventually end up as "we have no idea what's happening, but these steroids should help. Why, we have no clue."
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    And yet doctors reject all manner of so-called "alternative" therapies on the grounds that they have no plausible mechanism of action. A family member of mine had a somewhat-debilitating chronic condition in high school, which only got better with a combination of what today are garden-variety alternative therapies (acupuncture, elimination diet, et al). Today, as a doctor, pooh-poohs a lot of that stuff. It's confusing and disappointing to see.
    - bradleyjg 7y ago
      Do a well designed study and it won’t be “so called ‘alternative’” anymore. We may not know why various real medical interventions work but we have better than “I’ve got a cousin” evidence that they do.
      - alexandercrohde 7y ago
        I can't speak to this from personal experience, but I constantly hear the accusation that any sort of solid study on say herbals is going to cost millions of dollars, and that no big-pharma company would even bother to sponsor such a study because they can't patent the result (because it's an herb).
        bradleyjg 7y ago
        There’s at least one pot based drug on the market. So I think there must be some way to profit from medicines that were known anecdotally to be medicinal in herb form.
        krageon 7y ago
        They could patent a delivery mechanism, or isolate some compounds from the herb that work almost as well (that's not exactly an unusual result either). These arguments fall down because they don't make any sense.
antonvs 7y ago
You get better memory, and the PTSD is a free bonus!
- Kirth 7y ago
  Just buy our other product to remove unwanted memories ;)
  - apoph3nia 7y ago
    "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
ForHackernews 7y ago
A huge amount of medicine, and especially neuroscience, is like this. Nobody really knows why ECT works, for instances. Similarly, I don't think the mechanism behind TMS is well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...
- imperio59 7y ago
  That's because ECT and TMS don't work and have never been proven to be safe and effective by clinical trial. They were "grandfathered in" by the FDA but don't actually work and cause memory loss amongst other terrible side effects. See http://emord.com/blawg/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1-ECT-Citizen-Petition.pdf http://emord.com/blawg/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/1-ECT-Citi...
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    You shouldn't conflate those two, as they're very different things. TMS is currently undergoing lots of trials. ECT does have significant negative side effects, but it does seem to help some people. You may be right that it wouldn't be approved as a new treatment today.
    - Amygaz 7y ago
      Just a word of caution, keep in mind that all those trials are designed around very crude observation or short term duration. Also, lot of things are going into trial that shouldn't. That being said I do have an uncle with Parkison who had a neurostimulator implanted (DBS) 15 years ago. It worked quite well for a while, more than any medication at the time. It doesn't anymore, and he has lost cognitive abilities also, which is most likely due to the progressive nature of the disease, rather than DBS. This technique has been in clinical trial for 20+ years...
      - epmaybe 7y ago
        Side note regarding DBS: There's some interesting research in grafting a nerve (I could be misremembering, but it's definitely a nerve graft) onto the substantia nigra (a part of the brain that we know produces dopamine), and then doing DBS on that region. Early stages, phase I trial, but a neat idea nonetheless.
d2161 7y ago
Yep that's cuz we practice Evidence Based Medicine. If it works, it works, we don't care for the mechanism. Mechanism of action is only ever a hypothesis anyways. But as a 2nd point, we don't always do things by evidence either. Obstetrics is an example of an entire field where there is not much evidence, and people practice what was passed down to them. The reason is because often you cannot do an RCT in an ethical way with Obs. Additionally, often times when we prescribe a medication/treatment, there is a really significant chance it won't do anything for you. The number needed to treat before one person experiences a benefit could be quite high, like 10 or 15. We still do it if the benefit outweigh the risk. TLDR: We don't care how it works just that it works. Some fields like obstetrics have little evidence for many things. And just cuz there is evidence, doesn't mean it'll help most of the ppl who get it.
- rczhang 7y ago
  This is not Evidence-based Medicine. EBM does not say to we shouldn't care about the mechanism of action. EBM will say that treatments without a randomized control trial can only be weakly recommended. In a perfect EBM world, everything would be strictly tested. You're describing why we have trouble practicing "pure" EBM.

fromthestart 7y ago

>“I don’t think any of us are going to be signing up for voluntary brain surgery anytime soon,” Sanchez says. “Only when these technologies become less invasive, or noninvasive, will they become widespread.” Are you kidding? 15-37% improvement in memory formation/recall? Where do I sign?

rebuilder 7y ago
Improvement in patients with traumatic brain injury, mind. It's not clear at all that the implant would give comparable results in healthy people.
goodside 7y ago
The surgery needed to install the chip is itself detrimental to your IQ. The brain was not made to be exposed to air. You don’t get your skull opened up unless there’s no other option — these are patients who were already forced into this circumstance.
- nexuist 7y ago
  Could you not e.g. operate in an artificial vacuum using oxygen masks? If open skull surgery is so detrimental to IQ, why is this not done? I understand there's a cost factor but given the scale of medical expenses, it seems within the realm of possibility?
  - andrey_utkin 7y ago
    Because brain and other body tissues normally have internal pressure of 1 atmosphere, so if you put it into vacuum, it will explode and blood and other liquids will boil.
    - gruez 7y ago
      He probably means some sort of inert gas to minimize the effects of air exposure.
    - 7y ago

toephu2 7y ago

This is like a precursor to Elon Musk's Neuralink idea. https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

matt-snider 7y ago
They are hiring for several technical and non-technical positions, e.g. Software Eng both Full Stack and Robotics, Mech Eng, Electrical Eng, Accountant, Talent Aquisition, etc. If I lived over there I'd definitely consider it. Such a cool area of work! https://neuralink.com/ https://neuralink.com/
_0ffh 7y ago
Please stop ascribing old SF literature ideas to the first billionaire who passes along, promising to make them true.
- taneq 7y ago
  Agreed. The term 'neural lace' was coined by Ian M. Banks (as far as I know) but the concept of an implanted brain-computer interface which can augment brain function is decades old.
  - DocSavage 7y ago
    Musk reportedly got the idea from the Banks novels: https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/the-daily/the-novelist-who-inspired-elon-musk https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/the-daily/the-novelist-...

ironchest 7y ago

I wonder if rare circumstances like taking hallucinogens or being in the middle of a Carrington event have been considered...

Bombthecat 7y ago

> get your competitive advantage now! Get your chip now!

mirceal 7y ago
i like the idea of artificially enhanced humans (including implanted hardware) but I don’t really want to be the guinea pig for this kind if thing.

sireat 7y ago

" He was the first person the Finn had known who'd `gone silicon' -the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case -and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales." - not quite the same thing but we are on the way there.

hyperpallium 7y ago

No, of course it isn't biased towards certain brands, or censor certain criticism. As a happy recipient of the device, I don't know how you could even think such as thing.

madengr 7y ago

Someday a method/implant will be invented to trigger the orgasmic response in the brain. Will be interesting to see how humanity handles that drug. Reminds me of Star Trek DS9, where the Cardassian tailor had the brain implant to make him resistant to torture. He had turned it on, and left it on for 20 years, then it failed.

fgkramer 7y ago
This following is completely unfounded, but I think that it would become a stigma to those who got it. We are all driven by chemicals and everyone has their own preference on how to release dopamine and any other chemicals, be it exercise, drugs, alcohol, anything you can imagine. Getting a button to trigger such a strong response would mean a certain division in society, those who seek pleasure the new way or those who want to keep with the traditional way. Overall I think that facilitating this would give people a huge (maybe too big) escape from reality and would certainly be abused. Robin Cook had a plot about this (triggering orgasm-like responses on brains) many years ago in his book Brain: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529804.Brain https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529804.Brain
- Funes- 7y ago
  >Getting a button to trigger such a strong response would mean a certain division in society, those who seek pleasure the new way or those who want to keep with the traditional way. Isn't this already happening to a certain extent--and progressively getting worse? I think there's an ever-increasing chasm between people who occupy their leisure time with digital entertainment engineered to be an easy--and highly addictive--dopamine fix, and people who try to enjoy more mindful activities. The latter option is, of course, incomparably harder.
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
  The reward circuitry in the brain is very much fundamental to how we operate and what motivates us in life. This is why drugs can be so life destroying. People tend to restructure their life so that they can keep getting that reward, at the expense of everything else. It's something that's maybe hard to understand unless you've done drugs. I used to go out raving and do MDMA a lot. At the peak I was doing it almost every weekend. Until I found myself going out alone and looking for opportunities to go out, even if nobody I knew was going or the party wasn't good. I thought I really liked dancing, but I eventually realized, my brain was looking for an excuse to put me in that environment where I would typically do drugs, even if I actually knew going out that night would be a shitty experience. In other words, when you mess with your reward circuitry, your brain will begin to "lie" to you to guide you back to situations where you will get more of that reward. Your way of thinking will shift, and you might not even notice. I personally don't think there is any way that brain implants can hook into our reward circuit and be used in a safe/responsible way. At least, not if the users themselves have direct control. The only way it could maybe be used sustainably is to reward certain behaviors in a way that the person themselves doesn't have control over, but that's a whole other dystopian can of worms. Personally, I think brain implants might fuck up society beyond recognition. Imagine if people could turn their sex drive on or off at will, or stop themselves from falling in love, get over someone instantly, make themselves love their miserable jobs. Sounds great right? Except we'll stop being human, we'll become machines.

apo 7y ago

> In two separate studies, researchers found the prototype consistently boosted memory 15% to 18%. No mention of controls or error bars. Until then, this is all placebo effect.

ddingus 7y ago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12678461-amped https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12678461-amped This is a great romp, good for your next flight or downtime. The premise is what happens to society when augmented people start to matter.

test6554 7y ago

I was kind of hoping for a chip that interfaces with the brain. Stores data digitally and responds to brain's request for information. But that's probably the wrong way of thinking about it on multiple levels. As someone with no knowledge of how this stuff works, I like to imagine that when you try to remember something, your brain sends signals the same connections that were formed when you last saw that thing. It then activates your visual cortex, your auditory cortex and language centers. So you visualize it, see the word, and hear it in your brain, then suddenly you feel as if you know the answer to the thing you were trying to remember.

Balgair 7y ago
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517131928.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160517131928.h... It's thought of as occurring just as you described, but it's very difficult to prove it even in rodent models. Also, humans are wildly diverse. Some people have aphantasia, where they cannot 'image' things in their heads. Invariably when you bring this up on HN, you get a lot of people saying they cannot believe this and a lot of people saying that this is their normal reality. Similar to discussions on synestensia (hearing colors, tasting names, other 'mix ups') and if you stand or sit when you wipe in the bathroom. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/cant-imagine-pictures-your-mind-you-might-have-aphantasia/ https://www.iflscience.com/brain/cant-imagine-pictures-your-...