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> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and ski
by bambax 4mo ago
> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapitated-worms-regrow-old-memories-along-with-new-heads-9497048/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
- Earw0rm 4mo agoFlatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system. Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
- Roark66 4mo agoDid you know human overies contain neurons? I suppose memories are not stored there :-) but still the fact is rather surprising.
- j45 4mo agoThe heart has neurons in it too.
- adrianN 4mo agoI believe there are tastebuds in your colon too.
- Earw0rm 4mo agoAFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures. The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
- Roark66 3mo agoI actually believe you... I was sure I can taste certain spicy things on their way out if you know what I mean :-D
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoThat's interesting, but bear in mind that sensory neurons are basically just transducers that sense something and convert it into a neural output. It makes sense that a woman's brain would find it useful to know when she is ovulating.
- boston_clone 4mo agoI think the evidence is strong, here. Quite difficult to form new memories without a brain!
- IsTom 4mo agoAt least spinal cord has a kind of memory related to movement, but that's something else than episodic memory obviously.
- abc123abc123 4mo ago"Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain. A discovery that helped explain those changes has earned neuroscientist Oswald Steward one of science’s highest honors. Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories." And that's what it took. One comment on hackernews and the prize was retracted. HN at its best! ;)
- coldtea 4mo agoWhat's funnier is the implication under which the "objection" is stated, as if those researchers didn't/couldn't know it.
- christophilus 4mo agoWell, it does seem that memories may be embedded in the nervous system as well as the brain, so I don’t think the OP is wrong. You sometimes hear of heart transplant patients having other people’s memories / preferences. So, it’s not good evidence, but it’s a possibility.
- Earw0rm 4mo agoThat's quite a leap. The idea that _semantic_ memories are encoded so as to be transmissible via blobs of neural tissue stretches plausibility.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoIt doesn't seem so implausible: Personality Changes Associated with Organ Transplants (https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/12 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/12) > Personality changes have been reported following organ transplantation. Most commonly, such changes have been described among heart transplant recipients. [...] A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 47 participants (23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients) completed an online survey. In this study, 89% of all transplant recipients reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery, which was similar for heart and other organ recipients. Who knows the cause though, could be anything I suppose, not necessarily that "memory sits in tissue".
- Zardoz84 4mo agoWe found that some kind of gigant unicelular life can remember where was food.
- strogonoff 4mo ago“A memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain” as truth statement is a basic fallacy of naive physicalism. There is no falsifiable way to ascertain in which direction causality points, nor is natural science even intended provide a definitive answer—it is designed to make predictions and any models that arise in the process are necessarily faulty and do not describe the true nature of underlying reality, which this ultimately comes down to.
- Llamamoe 4mo agoPeople love to bring this up, but while yes, all cells have some form of memory mechanism or another, with quite the number of nerves outside the brain, we are still a cognitively top-eown organism and quite unlike simpler organisms where the line is blurry. In machine learning terms, we've basically got a layer or two of neurons responsible for physical memory stored outside the brain, sure. But it's out of dozens if not hundreds total.
- mncharity 4mo agoAnother flatworms-are-fun story: If you irradiate a flatworm using a nuclear reactor, to kill off its stem-cell equivalents, it sort of "rots" as other cells eventually die and aren't being replaced. If after zap, you insert donor stems, its life can instead proceed normally, and the entire body is eventually refreshed. So ship of Theseus like, you have an individual flatworm, swimming through its life, which ends up being genetically unrelated to its earlier self.