10 ms·

Neuroscientists discover molecular mechanism that allows memories to form (2020)

171 points by andyxor 6y ago

imvetri 6y ago
Structure is the memory. Neuron cells got nothing to do with it. Slime mold has memory, and it doesn't have a neural network.
- ChainOfFools 6y ago
  this seems excessively reductive. by this reasoning we should expect to find that removing neurons from the "structure" has no effect on its capacity for encoding memory. if one reduces "memory" to anything that exhibits sustained interplay between hysteresis and goal optimization then yes, neurons may lie below the level of explanation you wish to use, and could thus be substituted with some other signaling medium, but this is not the same as claiming they are not involved at all.
andelu 6y ago
Original article here (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00717-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00717-0
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Just reading the abstract, is it me, or did the authors revel in spewing a ridiculous amount of jargon instead of using the opportunity to give a simple and clear statement of the fundamental finding of the work to a general scientific audience? "The epigenome and three-dimensional (3D) genomic architecture are emerging as key factors in the dynamic regulation of different transcriptional programs required for neuronal functions. In this study, we used an activity-dependent tagging system in mice to determine the epigenetic state, 3D genome architecture and transcriptional landscape of engram cells over the lifespan of memory formation and recall. Our findings reveal that memory encoding leads to an epigenetic priming event, marked by increased accessibility of enhancers without the corresponding transcriptional changes. Memory consolidation subsequently results in spatial reorganization of large chromatin segments and promoter–enhancer interactions. Finally, with reactivation, engram neurons use a subset of de novo long-range interactions, where primed enhancers are brought in contact with their respective promoters to upregulate genes involved in local protein translation in synaptic compartments. Collectively, our work elucidates the comprehensive transcriptional and epigenomic landscape across the lifespan of memory formation and recall in the hippocampal engram ensemble." I think back to a historical abstract: "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."
  - throwanem 6y ago
    It's you. This paper describes a process significantly more complex than the static molecular structure of DNA, and its abstract is written for the audience of researchers sharing the authors' own specialism. That's actually more useful than the converse, because it enables members of that audience quickly to evaluate the contents for relevance to their own work, in a way that would be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, were it written more concisely.
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      Seconding this. The abstract reads as incredibly well written and clear to me. The technical terms are relevant and appropriately used. I don't see anything I would describe as reveling in jargon, though I have definitely come across such papers before. I really don't understand why a non-expert would expect experts who are writing for other experts to dumb things down for them. You might as well complain that a graduate level physics textbook isn't readily understandable to someone with no mathematical background!
  - beowulfey 6y ago
    Nature journals have strict structural requirements for submitted abstracts. And unfortunately, because this was Nature Neuroscience, the intended audience is more specific, which is why you see more jargon there. Here is an extracted example from the latest issue of Science, for which the intended audience is more general: Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia impose enormous human, social, and economic burdens. The prognosis of psychotic disorders has not substantially improved over the past decades because our understanding of the underlying neurobiology has remained stagnant. Indeed, the subjective nature of hallucinations, a defining symptom of psychosis, presents an enduring challenge for their rigorous study in humans and translation to preclinical animal models. Here, we developed a cross-species computational psychiatry approach to directly relate human and rodent behavior and used this approach to study the neural basis of hallucination-like perception in mice. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740 It’s not a perfect comparison because Science abstracts are apparently much larger (this is just the Intro!) but it does convey my point about language.
- Kliment 6y ago
  de-paywalled here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0
iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
this seems incredibly related https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code i’m not surprised that a mechanism like this is involved in memory storage/retrieval. im left with questions about the heritability of these epigenetic parts of memory.
- andelu 6y ago
  Heritability? How? Remember that gamets (egg/sperm) are not affected by this, so passing these memories onto the next generation is not plausible.
- beowulfey 6y ago
  this particular kind of interaction would not be transmissible. Some other mechanisms, such as DNA methylation or miRNA may be though.
andelu 6y ago
I wonder what the significance of this mechanism vs long term potentiation (LTP) is. Any insights?
- Zebrakopf 6y ago
  From the article it sounds like it may describe another level of reduction to LTP. So, rather than 'this mechanism vs. LTP' it offers a potential genetic mechanism that may explain the changes to neuronal growth during memory formation.
andelu 6y ago
"Notably, in line with previous publications12,13,23, our data suggest that memory formation is largely an enhancer-driven phenomenon." This is very interesting, and for me a new take on memory formation. It seems to have the advantage over LTP that it can work as a conincidene detector over longer time-spans.
henearkr 6y ago
What's interesting is that there is a category of specific neurons (called engram neurons) in which this process of chromatin-based memory formation occurs. It would be really cool to know how these neurons are different, and how and when they differentiate.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Maybe one day we'll have pills to have total recall for a few hours, wouldn't that be cool for exams and learning languages ? I much prefer that than a chip in my head which the silicon valley seems super keen on selling me.
- k__ 6y ago
  Reminds me of the book "There is no Antimemetics Division" where they take mnestics so they don't forget entities with antimemetic properties.
- jcims 6y ago
  My memory is generally terrible. One discovery that was alarming, encouraging and disturbing at the same time is that I do appear to have some form of nearly total recall buried in there somewhere. Unfortunately it only surfaces in one way. If I listen to a podcast while I’m doing something, then listen to that same podcast again within a week or so, I will have regular, intrusive visual recall of exactly what I was doing the last time I heard whatever passage the podcast I was listening to. The recall is synchronized down to the word with the podcast, and is vividly detailed and colorful and includes some sensation of feeling as well. It’s weird and cool at the same time. One of these days I’d like to do an experiment where I videotape myself listening to the podcast, wait a week, then listen to it again and record myself describing what I see in my mind to test how accurate it is.
  - victor106 6y ago
    This is cool. Will try it.
    - jcims 6y ago
      I never noticed or attempted to prime it. Just go listen to some episodes that you’ve listened to recently and see what happens. It’s not like rolling a projector when you hit play, it’ll fade in and out most likely.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
cblconfederate 6y ago
I often wonder why universities post these press releases for the general public. Epigenetic modifications and memory is still basic research in early investigation, known to play a role in memory extinction and reconsolidation for example, but this is still too early research to make any concrete announcements that would have actionable information, esp. for the general public.
- culopatin 6y ago
  Because people need something to talk about and universities benefit from the publicity perhaps?
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    well people don't know what they re talking about when it's about so specialized basic research. Universities do benefit from the publicity , but it feels like selling snake oil to naive people.
    - bsenftner 6y ago
      This announcement is for student candidates in the field, fellow professionals in the field, and the larger layman field of financing sources for the University.
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      It's not really meant for "naive people": nobody expects you to change your behavior as a result of this press release. The target audience is really science journalists on EurekaWire. They're hoping this press release will get picked up by a science writer for the New York Times or Scientific American, etc. A parallel goal is to demonstrate that the university is doing cutting edge work, which helps with student enrollment, fundraising, and recruitment. This also applies to the funders: they want to demonstrate that donations (or tax dollars) are being put to good use. If it directly catches the attention of science aficionados, that's mostly a bonus.
- he0001 6y ago
foldr 6y ago
Neuroscience is way out of my wheelhouse, but my layman's understanding of this led me to believe that it could be some indication that Randy Gallistel has been on the right track: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/LangilleGallistel.pdf https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/LangilleGallistel.pdf
stinky 6y ago
Does this mean that memories are discrete? As in stored as integers corresponding to the DNA code?
Kliment 6y ago
Original article here (fuck paywalls) https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0
Roark66 6y ago
It is really cool we're getting (slightly) closer to the understanding how memories work. It is still basic research, but if I understand the significance of this correctly having a confirmation there are specific physical changes neurons undergo when forming some kinds of memories allows at least theoretically extraction of those memories from pieces of inactive tissue. As a layman in the subject I've been always very much interested how much of our personality and consciousness is "encoded" in the electro-chemical activity (software) vs how things are connected and formed together(hardware). The more of "us" is in the hardware the more likely someone in future will come up with a way to "scan" features of dead tissue to recover (in a simulation perhaps) the person lost to death. We're currently probably as far from that as a medieval battlefield "surgeon" from modern heart transplant, but at least we're moving in the right direction.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  If our current connectionist understanding of the brain is correct, then we should be able to recover a personality from a very detailed CT scan, and maybe in the future to revive it. (Personally, i d prefer that in a solar-powered ball that is shot out of the solar system in high velocity)
- hans1729 6y ago
  I'd argue that the line between software and hardware isn't as clear in neuro as someone with an IT background would like to think, specifically because the electro-chemical activities going on are both, hard and soft, at the same time. This isn't some abstract process running on a biological computer, the biological computer is the sum of the processes that constitute itself. (That's the fascinating thing about bio) To form a memory is something completely different than to store data in a db, as it involves lots and lots of encoding factors. If anything is actually stored, it's not the memory itself, but the perception at time T in relation to the expectations for T, i.e. a delta (think of the times when you listen to a song from the old days and it hurts, because the emotional connotation from back then doesn't match the current situation). Retrieving this delta would be meaningless unless you have the matching interpreter, the entire status machine.
iandanforth 6y ago
Please please don't take away from this that there are "memory cells" that "encode memories." The article is so badly written it seems to imply that. Memory is a whole brain phenomenon, and memory formation involves connections being formed and lost constantly between all types of neurons everywhere in the brain. One small aspect of memory (episodic memory) relies more heavily on hippocampal neurons during consolidation, and a small portion of that process is what is being discussed here.
- api 6y ago
  Proper title: "Neuroscientists discover one potential mechanism of memory formation and make a preliminary attempt to identify the most active regions where it occurs." Less click baity.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  So, isn’t the nature of memory in the brain still understood pretty vaguely? The “memory is connections and involves the whole brain” is still kind of a hypothesis and less of a hard, empirically-validated theory, no? May still be the best idea we have, but from what I understand (which isn’t much), it’s not nearly that cut and dry and we don’t really know enough to exclude a lot of the other models of memory formation.
  - deepsun 6y ago
    There's no single concept of nature that's understood completely. For example, there are a lot of things still understood pretty vaguely about milk. Or apples. So you can say that about pretty much anything.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      >There's no single concept of nature that's understood completely. For example, there are a lot of things still understood pretty vaguely about milk. Or apples. So you can say that about pretty much anything. But that is practically untrue (I'm not just saying there are corner cases, but that the main topic is still very poorly understood) and a cop-out. And yet I can speak concretely about a hydrogen atom. Or even photosynthesis. Or DNA. In DNA, there are 4 base pairs. We can see how that maps to RNA and how that in turn codes to amino acids. (and exceptions exist to these things, but we have a pretty strong grasp on it.) We can even try to fold the resulting Amino Acids into shapes, although it's computationally very difficult to do so. So data storage within a cell has some concrete understanding. Empirically validated and useful (this is how we were able to engineer the mRNA vaccines). Our knowledge of memory, our knowledge of data storage in the brain is far less concrete. And not just because it's not thought to be precisely molecular like DNA or RNA (although perhaps it could be!) but we have a poor grasp of even where, precisely, information is stored in the connections. Like, sure, you can say it's not stored in a particular location in 3D space, but there must be some transformation, some (non-euclidian) representation of the connections where memories CAN be located. Because our brains are capable of recalling memories on demand. But we have only a vague understanding of how that all occurs. It's very unlike DNA or RNA or whathaveyou in that our understanding is still primitive and vague.
leemailll 6y ago
big deal, if this is the mechanism, the mechanism of memory was discovered dozens of times in the 90s I hate institution's PR release hyperbole everything to the max. And the senior author of the paper has a few listed on PubPeer https://pubpeer.com/search?q=li-huei+tsai https://pubpeer.com/search?q=li-huei+tsai
DangTruckBuddiy 6y ago
With only 45 comments of seven hours we can presume that these premises are bullshit. Case closed!
FranOntanaya 6y ago
I guess one interesting question is whether other kinds of chromatin elsewhere encode any information by favoring expression of certain genes over other.
RhodoGSA 6y ago
Article does a pretty terrible job at explaining how memory's are formed, some bits even misleading. If you're interested in the biological basis of memory, I suggest reading 'In search of memory' by Eric Kandel. It's a biographic tale of Eric Kandel winning his nobel and along the way you learn a ton about how the brain works.
WaltPurvis 6y ago
I experienced an episode of transient global amnesia [1] a couple of years ago. It lasted for 6-7 hours, during which I was transported to the hospital, but every 2-3 minutes I would ask anew "Why am I in the hospital?" — having no memory at all of being there. I still have no clue what might have caused it. I mean, scientists don't have a clue what causes it, only a wide range of speculated causes, none of which really applied to me. Since there's no known way to prevent TGA, no treatment, and apparently no lasting damage, it has never (AFAIK) been researched, certainly not researched much, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that should be studied. If scientists could figure out how memory formation is completely blocked in episodes of TGA, it seems like that would provide useful data about how memory formation normally works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_global_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_global_amnesia
- d110af5ccf 6y ago
  > Since there's no known way to prevent TGA, no treatment, and apparently no lasting damage, it has never (AFAIK) been researched, certainly not researched much I suspect the issue may be the lack of a good biological model. I'd guess it would be a very attractive and obvious research target for anyone aiming to investigate memory formation and recall. However, systematic studies generally require a model system that can be reliably reproduced.
  - sprafa 6y ago
    Indeed, studying TGA would mean finding these people who have 2-8 hour episodes.
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      > finding these people Possibly, but I strongly suspect humans wouldn't be very good models in this case given how much we don't know about memory in general. Rather you'd want a robust non-human animal model of some sort, with a straightforward way of inducing TGA (or something that appeared to be substantially similar) on demand. Think rodent with optogenetic modifications or similar.
andyxor 6y ago
If you're interested in memory at somewhat higher level of abstraction check out the recent work on "cognitive maps". It started decades ago with seminal work on place & grid cells in spatial navigation (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2014/may-britt-moser/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2014/may-britt-mo...) which was later shown to be generalizable to multidimensional "concept spaces". It's probably the most exciting field in neuroscience right now, it also maps very nicely into mathematics of high-dimensional spaces: "Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaat6766.abstract https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaat6766.abs... "Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6292/1464 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6292/1464 "The Hippocampus Encodes Distances in Multidimensional Feature Space" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982219302052 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221... "A non-spatial account of place and grid cells based on clustering models of concept learning" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13760-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13760-8 "A learned map for places and concepts in the human MTL" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.15.152504v1.abstract https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.15.152504v1.... "What Is a Cognitive Map? Organizing Knowledge for Flexible Behavior" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627318308560 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731... "A map of abstract relational knowledge in the human hippocampal–entorhinal cortex" https://elifesciences.org/articles/17086 https://elifesciences.org/articles/17086 "Map-Like Representations of an Abstract Conceptual Space in the Human Brain" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7884611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7884611/ "Knowledge Across Reference Frames: Cognitive Maps and Image Spaces" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661320301327 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136466132... "Concept formation as a computational cognitive process" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462030190X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... "Efficient and flexible representation of higher-dimensional cognitive variables with grid cells" https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007796 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... "The cognitive map in humans: spatial navigation and beyond" https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4656 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4656 "A general model of hippocampal and dorsal striatal learning and decision making" https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31427.short https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31427.short "On the Integration of Space, Time, and Memory" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627317305603 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...

171 points by andyxor 6y ago

Structure is the memory. Neuron cells got nothing to do with it. Slime mold has memory, and it doesn't have a neural network.

ChainOfFools 6y ago
this seems excessively reductive. by this reasoning we should expect to find that removing neurons from the "structure" has no effect on its capacity for encoding memory. if one reduces "memory" to anything that exhibits sustained interplay between hysteresis and goal optimization then yes, neurons may lie below the level of explanation you wish to use, and could thus be substituted with some other signaling medium, but this is not the same as claiming they are not involved at all.

andelu 6y ago

Original article here (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00717-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-00717-0

supernova87a 6y ago
Just reading the abstract, is it me, or did the authors revel in spewing a ridiculous amount of jargon instead of using the opportunity to give a simple and clear statement of the fundamental finding of the work to a general scientific audience? "The epigenome and three-dimensional (3D) genomic architecture are emerging as key factors in the dynamic regulation of different transcriptional programs required for neuronal functions. In this study, we used an activity-dependent tagging system in mice to determine the epigenetic state, 3D genome architecture and transcriptional landscape of engram cells over the lifespan of memory formation and recall. Our findings reveal that memory encoding leads to an epigenetic priming event, marked by increased accessibility of enhancers without the corresponding transcriptional changes. Memory consolidation subsequently results in spatial reorganization of large chromatin segments and promoter–enhancer interactions. Finally, with reactivation, engram neurons use a subset of de novo long-range interactions, where primed enhancers are brought in contact with their respective promoters to upregulate genes involved in local protein translation in synaptic compartments. Collectively, our work elucidates the comprehensive transcriptional and epigenomic landscape across the lifespan of memory formation and recall in the hippocampal engram ensemble." I think back to a historical abstract: "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."
- throwanem 6y ago
  It's you. This paper describes a process significantly more complex than the static molecular structure of DNA, and its abstract is written for the audience of researchers sharing the authors' own specialism. That's actually more useful than the converse, because it enables members of that audience quickly to evaluate the contents for relevance to their own work, in a way that would be much more difficult, perhaps impossible, were it written more concisely.
  - d110af5ccf 6y ago
    Seconding this. The abstract reads as incredibly well written and clear to me. The technical terms are relevant and appropriately used. I don't see anything I would describe as reveling in jargon, though I have definitely come across such papers before. I really don't understand why a non-expert would expect experts who are writing for other experts to dumb things down for them. You might as well complain that a graduate level physics textbook isn't readily understandable to someone with no mathematical background!
- beowulfey 6y ago
  Nature journals have strict structural requirements for submitted abstracts. And unfortunately, because this was Nature Neuroscience, the intended audience is more specific, which is why you see more jargon there. Here is an extracted example from the latest issue of Science, for which the intended audience is more general: Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia impose enormous human, social, and economic burdens. The prognosis of psychotic disorders has not substantially improved over the past decades because our understanding of the underlying neurobiology has remained stagnant. Indeed, the subjective nature of hallucinations, a defining symptom of psychosis, presents an enduring challenge for their rigorous study in humans and translation to preclinical animal models. Here, we developed a cross-species computational psychiatry approach to directly relate human and rodent behavior and used this approach to study the neural basis of hallucination-like perception in mice. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740 It’s not a perfect comparison because Science abstracts are apparently much larger (this is just the Intro!) but it does convey my point about language.
Kliment 6y ago
de-paywalled here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago

this seems incredibly related https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code i’m not surprised that a mechanism like this is involved in memory storage/retrieval. im left with questions about the heritability of these epigenetic parts of memory.

andelu 6y ago
Heritability? How? Remember that gamets (egg/sperm) are not affected by this, so passing these memories onto the next generation is not plausible.
beowulfey 6y ago
this particular kind of interaction would not be transmissible. Some other mechanisms, such as DNA methylation or miRNA may be though.

andelu 6y ago

I wonder what the significance of this mechanism vs long term potentiation (LTP) is. Any insights?

Zebrakopf 6y ago
From the article it sounds like it may describe another level of reduction to LTP. So, rather than 'this mechanism vs. LTP' it offers a potential genetic mechanism that may explain the changes to neuronal growth during memory formation.

andelu 6y ago

"Notably, in line with previous publications12,13,23, our data suggest that memory formation is largely an enhancer-driven phenomenon." This is very interesting, and for me a new take on memory formation. It seems to have the advantage over LTP that it can work as a conincidene detector over longer time-spans.

henearkr 6y ago

What's interesting is that there is a category of specific neurons (called engram neurons) in which this process of chromatin-based memory formation occurs. It would be really cool to know how these neurons are different, and how and when they differentiate.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Maybe one day we'll have pills to have total recall for a few hours, wouldn't that be cool for exams and learning languages ? I much prefer that than a chip in my head which the silicon valley seems super keen on selling me.

k__ 6y ago
Reminds me of the book "There is no Antimemetics Division" where they take mnestics so they don't forget entities with antimemetic properties.
jcims 6y ago
My memory is generally terrible. One discovery that was alarming, encouraging and disturbing at the same time is that I do appear to have some form of nearly total recall buried in there somewhere. Unfortunately it only surfaces in one way. If I listen to a podcast while I’m doing something, then listen to that same podcast again within a week or so, I will have regular, intrusive visual recall of exactly what I was doing the last time I heard whatever passage the podcast I was listening to. The recall is synchronized down to the word with the podcast, and is vividly detailed and colorful and includes some sensation of feeling as well. It’s weird and cool at the same time. One of these days I’d like to do an experiment where I videotape myself listening to the podcast, wait a week, then listen to it again and record myself describing what I see in my mind to test how accurate it is.
- victor106 6y ago
  This is cool. Will try it.
  - jcims 6y ago
    I never noticed or attempted to prime it. Just go listen to some episodes that you’ve listened to recently and see what happens. It’s not like rolling a projector when you hit play, it’ll fade in and out most likely.
- mrtksn 6y ago

cblconfederate 6y ago

I often wonder why universities post these press releases for the general public. Epigenetic modifications and memory is still basic research in early investigation, known to play a role in memory extinction and reconsolidation for example, but this is still too early research to make any concrete announcements that would have actionable information, esp. for the general public.

culopatin 6y ago
Because people need something to talk about and universities benefit from the publicity perhaps?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  well people don't know what they re talking about when it's about so specialized basic research. Universities do benefit from the publicity , but it feels like selling snake oil to naive people.
  - bsenftner 6y ago
    This announcement is for student candidates in the field, fellow professionals in the field, and the larger layman field of financing sources for the University.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    It's not really meant for "naive people": nobody expects you to change your behavior as a result of this press release. The target audience is really science journalists on EurekaWire. They're hoping this press release will get picked up by a science writer for the New York Times or Scientific American, etc. A parallel goal is to demonstrate that the university is doing cutting edge work, which helps with student enrollment, fundraising, and recruitment. This also applies to the funders: they want to demonstrate that donations (or tax dollars) are being put to good use. If it directly catches the attention of science aficionados, that's mostly a bonus.
he0001 6y ago

foldr 6y ago

Neuroscience is way out of my wheelhouse, but my layman's understanding of this led me to believe that it could be some indication that Randy Gallistel has been on the right track: https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/LangilleGallistel.pdf https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/LangilleGallistel.pdf

stinky 6y ago

Does this mean that memories are discrete? As in stored as integers corresponding to the DNA code?

Kliment 6y ago

Original article here (fuck paywalls) https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0 https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41593-020-00717-0

Roark66 6y ago

It is really cool we're getting (slightly) closer to the understanding how memories work. It is still basic research, but if I understand the significance of this correctly having a confirmation there are specific physical changes neurons undergo when forming some kinds of memories allows at least theoretically extraction of those memories from pieces of inactive tissue. As a layman in the subject I've been always very much interested how much of our personality and consciousness is "encoded" in the electro-chemical activity (software) vs how things are connected and formed together(hardware). The more of "us" is in the hardware the more likely someone in future will come up with a way to "scan" features of dead tissue to recover (in a simulation perhaps) the person lost to death. We're currently probably as far from that as a medieval battlefield "surgeon" from modern heart transplant, but at least we're moving in the right direction.

cblconfederate 6y ago
If our current connectionist understanding of the brain is correct, then we should be able to recover a personality from a very detailed CT scan, and maybe in the future to revive it. (Personally, i d prefer that in a solar-powered ball that is shot out of the solar system in high velocity)
hans1729 6y ago
I'd argue that the line between software and hardware isn't as clear in neuro as someone with an IT background would like to think, specifically because the electro-chemical activities going on are both, hard and soft, at the same time. This isn't some abstract process running on a biological computer, the biological computer is the sum of the processes that constitute itself. (That's the fascinating thing about bio) To form a memory is something completely different than to store data in a db, as it involves lots and lots of encoding factors. If anything is actually stored, it's not the memory itself, but the perception at time T in relation to the expectations for T, i.e. a delta (think of the times when you listen to a song from the old days and it hurts, because the emotional connotation from back then doesn't match the current situation). Retrieving this delta would be meaningless unless you have the matching interpreter, the entire status machine.

iandanforth 6y ago

Please please don't take away from this that there are "memory cells" that "encode memories." The article is so badly written it seems to imply that. Memory is a whole brain phenomenon, and memory formation involves connections being formed and lost constantly between all types of neurons everywhere in the brain. One small aspect of memory (episodic memory) relies more heavily on hippocampal neurons during consolidation, and a small portion of that process is what is being discussed here.

api 6y ago
Proper title: "Neuroscientists discover one potential mechanism of memory formation and make a preliminary attempt to identify the most active regions where it occurs." Less click baity.
Robotbeat 6y ago
So, isn’t the nature of memory in the brain still understood pretty vaguely? The “memory is connections and involves the whole brain” is still kind of a hypothesis and less of a hard, empirically-validated theory, no? May still be the best idea we have, but from what I understand (which isn’t much), it’s not nearly that cut and dry and we don’t really know enough to exclude a lot of the other models of memory formation.
- deepsun 6y ago
  There's no single concept of nature that's understood completely. For example, there are a lot of things still understood pretty vaguely about milk. Or apples. So you can say that about pretty much anything.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    >There's no single concept of nature that's understood completely. For example, there are a lot of things still understood pretty vaguely about milk. Or apples. So you can say that about pretty much anything. But that is practically untrue (I'm not just saying there are corner cases, but that the main topic is still very poorly understood) and a cop-out. And yet I can speak concretely about a hydrogen atom. Or even photosynthesis. Or DNA. In DNA, there are 4 base pairs. We can see how that maps to RNA and how that in turn codes to amino acids. (and exceptions exist to these things, but we have a pretty strong grasp on it.) We can even try to fold the resulting Amino Acids into shapes, although it's computationally very difficult to do so. So data storage within a cell has some concrete understanding. Empirically validated and useful (this is how we were able to engineer the mRNA vaccines). Our knowledge of memory, our knowledge of data storage in the brain is far less concrete. And not just because it's not thought to be precisely molecular like DNA or RNA (although perhaps it could be!) but we have a poor grasp of even where, precisely, information is stored in the connections. Like, sure, you can say it's not stored in a particular location in 3D space, but there must be some transformation, some (non-euclidian) representation of the connections where memories CAN be located. Because our brains are capable of recalling memories on demand. But we have only a vague understanding of how that all occurs. It's very unlike DNA or RNA or whathaveyou in that our understanding is still primitive and vague.

leemailll 6y ago

big deal, if this is the mechanism, the mechanism of memory was discovered dozens of times in the 90s I hate institution's PR release hyperbole everything to the max. And the senior author of the paper has a few listed on PubPeer https://pubpeer.com/search?q=li-huei+tsai https://pubpeer.com/search?q=li-huei+tsai

DangTruckBuddiy 6y ago

With only 45 comments of seven hours we can presume that these premises are bullshit. Case closed!

FranOntanaya 6y ago

I guess one interesting question is whether other kinds of chromatin elsewhere encode any information by favoring expression of certain genes over other.

RhodoGSA 6y ago

Article does a pretty terrible job at explaining how memory's are formed, some bits even misleading. If you're interested in the biological basis of memory, I suggest reading 'In search of memory' by Eric Kandel. It's a biographic tale of Eric Kandel winning his nobel and along the way you learn a ton about how the brain works.

WaltPurvis 6y ago

I experienced an episode of transient global amnesia [1] a couple of years ago. It lasted for 6-7 hours, during which I was transported to the hospital, but every 2-3 minutes I would ask anew "Why am I in the hospital?" — having no memory at all of being there. I still have no clue what might have caused it. I mean, scientists don't have a clue what causes it, only a wide range of speculated causes, none of which really applied to me. Since there's no known way to prevent TGA, no treatment, and apparently no lasting damage, it has never (AFAIK) been researched, certainly not researched much, but it strikes me as the kind of thing that should be studied. If scientists could figure out how memory formation is completely blocked in episodes of TGA, it seems like that would provide useful data about how memory formation normally works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_global_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_global_amnesia

d110af5ccf 6y ago
> Since there's no known way to prevent TGA, no treatment, and apparently no lasting damage, it has never (AFAIK) been researched, certainly not researched much I suspect the issue may be the lack of a good biological model. I'd guess it would be a very attractive and obvious research target for anyone aiming to investigate memory formation and recall. However, systematic studies generally require a model system that can be reliably reproduced.
- sprafa 6y ago
  Indeed, studying TGA would mean finding these people who have 2-8 hour episodes.
  - d110af5ccf 6y ago
    > finding these people Possibly, but I strongly suspect humans wouldn't be very good models in this case given how much we don't know about memory in general. Rather you'd want a robust non-human animal model of some sort, with a straightforward way of inducing TGA (or something that appeared to be substantially similar) on demand. Think rodent with optogenetic modifications or similar.

andyxor 6y ago

If you're interested in memory at somewhat higher level of abstraction check out the recent work on "cognitive maps". It started decades ago with seminal work on place & grid cells in spatial navigation (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2014/may-britt-moser/lecture/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2014/may-britt-mo...) which was later shown to be generalizable to multidimensional "concept spaces". It's probably the most exciting field in neuroscience right now, it also maps very nicely into mathematics of high-dimensional spaces: "Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaat6766.abstract https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaat6766.abs... "Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6292/1464 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6292/1464 "The Hippocampus Encodes Distances in Multidimensional Feature Space" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982219302052 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221... "A non-spatial account of place and grid cells based on clustering models of concept learning" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13760-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13760-8 "A learned map for places and concepts in the human MTL" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.15.152504v1.abstract https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.15.152504v1.... "What Is a Cognitive Map? Organizing Knowledge for Flexible Behavior" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627318308560 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731... "A map of abstract relational knowledge in the human hippocampal–entorhinal cortex" https://elifesciences.org/articles/17086 https://elifesciences.org/articles/17086 "Map-Like Representations of an Abstract Conceptual Space in the Human Brain" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7884611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7884611/ "Knowledge Across Reference Frames: Cognitive Maps and Image Spaces" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661320301327 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136466132... "Concept formation as a computational cognitive process" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462030190X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462... "Efficient and flexible representation of higher-dimensional cognitive variables with grid cells" https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007796 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... "The cognitive map in humans: spatial navigation and beyond" https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4656 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4656 "A general model of hippocampal and dorsal striatal learning and decision making" https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31427.short https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31427.short "On the Integration of Space, Time, and Memory" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627317305603 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...