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The worm that regrows its head, and memories, when decapitated
- Splendor 13y agoYou crazy for this one, science.
- lewispollard 13y agoFrom the comments: >Why is this news? Memories aren't stored only in our brains. There have been heart-transplant patients who suddenly craved food they'd never eaten. wat
- polymatter 13y agoRelevant academic article: "Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors" (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1013009425905 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1013009425905) tldr; "Sensitive transplant patients may evidence personal changes that parallel the history of their donors ... We suggest that cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is a plausible explanation for these parallels."
- lewispollard 13y agoMadness!
- pygy_ 13y agoA more reasonable hypothesis: the severance of the autonomous afferences coming from the heart affects the brain stem and / or hypothalamus, which in turns affects the rest of the brain. It has the advantage of being testable. Another (IMO less likely) possibility would be that the lack of brain-induced rhythm variations of the denerved heart has an influence on the brain.
- Helianthus 13y agoIt's more reasonable in that it's more palatable to you, but let's be clear: you're speculating.
- nitrogen 13y agoThe speculation that relies on a known mechanism is more believable than the speculation that doesn't even propose a mechanism.
- Helianthus 13y agoThe term 'speculation' implies a mechanism unknown/unproposed. 'Known mechanism' is again shorthand for 'palatable.'
- nitrogen 13y agoPalatability is an unnecessarily pejorative shorthand for agreement with one's expectations of reality. I don't read "speculation" as meaning anything other than that the object of speculation is as yet unproven, so speculation that makes an argument based on previously known physical principles can still fairly be called speculation. However, such speculation can rightly be given greater weight than speculation which draws no connection to prior knowledge. For example, if one were to argue that fairies make plants grow, with no other information, then their argument can safely be ignored. On the other hand, if their argument includes a testable definition of a fairy, suggests a mechanism by which fairies add matter to plants, and provides a way of verifying that mechanism, then the detailed fairy argument should be given higher weight than the unsupported fairy argument, until evidence is available that either disproves the definition of a fairy, disproves the mechanism by which fairies make plants grow, or provides greater evidence for a different mechanism by which plants grow (mitosis, perhaps).
- scott_s 13y agoBased on the wording of the abstract, so are the study's authors. (That is, they say "we suggest" as opposed to "we hypothesized and provide supporting evidence." But, maybe they do in the full article, I don't know.)
- tyohn 13y agoMakes we wonder - if somehow we could train our bodies to transfer memories to other body parts... which leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities.
- gwern 13y ago"We conducted open-ended interviews..." Can you say, "we asked leading questions until we get what we wanted"? Can you say, "Satanic scare fueled by 'recovered memories'"? Good boy.
- polymatter 13y agoRather than being a phenomena that we can't explain, this is most probably a load of ridiculous pseudoscience. See for example (http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2006/04/cellular-memory-fails-memory-test.html http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2006/04/cellular-memory-fail...) for one such critism. sorry for posting rubbish. I will check my sources better next time.
- asksol 13y ago"Journal of Near-Death studies"? Some of the papers in there are interesting, but it does seem kind of .. experimental
- speeder 13y agoHere in Brazil there are several known cases of people changing their soccer team after a heart transplant. This is known here because soccer fanatism is common, and some of the "victims" would never changed their team normally.
- chris_mahan 13y agoPerhaps they had a change of heart...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lewispollard 13y agoSounds like science to me!
- lewispollard 13y agoSounds like science to me!
- sanoli 13y agoWhat? Please provide some links. The only story I heard so far about it was this one: http://www.orfury.com.br/blog/65748/tricolor-de-coracao-e-figado-tambem:-torcedor-troca-de-clube-apos-transplante---carioca-2013.html http://www.orfury.com.br/blog/65748/tricolor-de-coracao-e-fi... And it's pretty clear that what happened is not what you are talking about. (I'm asking for links out of sincere curiosity)
- GravityWell 13y agoThe more reasonable explanation is cherry picking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy) Or selection bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias Or some blogger looking for ad revenue from clicks. Take your pick.
- HNJohnC 13y agoHmm...or maybe the worms are leaving an invisible trail of some kind which helps them find it again. Like ants. Doesn't sound very rigorous.
- jackbravo 13y agoBut then, other worm should be able to follow it?
- swombat 13y agoMaybe planar worms have souls... Alternatively, the hypothesis that some of your learning is stored in your nervous system outside of your brain seems compelling.
- ldh 13y agoI'll take the actual hypothesis over a hand-wave.
- stephengillie 13y agoSouls are just programming...
- Helianthus 13y agoElaborate?
- stephengillie 13y agoWhat is a soul? Is it what guides a living object when it moves, like a human, dog, or worm? If robots act autonomously, that is, without direct instruction from a living object, do they have souls? What if the robot is merely a plastic frame, a motor attached to wheels, an Arduino with a motor shield, and an ultrasonic Ping distance sensor, but this assemblage can navigate a room without colliding with anything -- does it have a soul? I say yes -- souls are the feedback loops which we have learned or been taught, and they motivate or dissuade us and robots alike. And programming is just teaching, providing instructions that will result in a desired outcome.
- lolcraft 13y ago> What is a soul? Soul, noun: social construct developed over millenia for purposes of group identification, specifically religious; sometimes used for political (crusades, justification of kings), even economical (selling of indulgences' scandal, the Protestant Ethic) purposes. This project didn't at the end obtain as much credibility as other (better built, with more interesting purposes) social constructs such as physics or mathematics; though not for lack of trying, from Plato to Kant and similar scholastics. Now seriously, some terms are very ridiculously loaded, and IMO should be avoided in science. If you want to talk about a "feedback loop" that generates consciousness, go on, be my guest. Now, calling it "soul"... that's just openly inviting every faith in the world to, at best, hijack your theory with pious, well-meaning BS.
- j2d3 13y agothis kind of memory is likely stored throughout the worms nervous system / body, rather than centralized in its brain.
- jessriedel 13y agoYep. This study provides zero evidence justifying the claim in the title that the memories regrew, in any meaningful sense.
- ibudiallo 13y agoThe worm can grow a new head from the body. Can it grow a new body from the head? If so you cut its head and you have 2 worms now.
- Zikes 13y agoIf I'm not mistaken, starfish are capable of this.
- drobati 13y agoYou're not mistaken. "Because starfish like to eat clams and oysters, fishermen who gather shellfish have tried for years to get rid of them. To kill the starfish, fishermen would catch them, slice them right in half, and throw them back in the ocean. However, because starfish can grow back parts of their bodies, they were actually increasing the number of starfish." - Wiki on Starfish http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish
- AndrewKemendo 13y agoFascinating anecdote!
- mratzloff 13y agoInteresting, but I'm curious why the author felt the need to include a surprise spoiler to "A Game of Thrones" out of the blue.
- ceejayoz 13y agoI think we're well past the "omg spoilers!" timeframe on Game fo Thrones' first book/season.
- Helianthus 13y agoAgreed, but the GoT references were really freakin unnecessary.
- mratzloff 13y agoSure, on a message board topic about it, but generally you don't expect to run across spoilers for a popular show in a science article a mere 2 years after the episode aired. "If you're not caught up on every popular show you may be interested in within 2 years, screw you" seems kind of harsh. Anyway, no need to continue this sub-thread, just thought it was unnecessary.
- Eva_Peron 13y agoHerbert West, MD, is doubtless all over this one.
- 6ren 13y agomorphogenesis \holds up hands Or, perhaps their bodies and muscles were adapted to the type of terrain.
- tareqak 13y agoWas I the only one who read the title and thought "botnet"?
- ypcx 13y agoI'm wondering why is it that we will do absolutely anything to avoid pondering the hypothesis that the currently observable matter which constitues human body may only be a half of the answer, and that the other half may be, what we could approximately call some sort of energetic, perhaps electro-magnetic field, carrying the missing link to many of our puzzles. How about the cases of patients who lost large portions of their brain, or people who were born with or have developed to most of their brain missing - the rest of their head filled with fluid - these people are usually way more functional than what any of our brain theories would suggest. So perhaps the brain is only an antenna into this energetic field which is the other half of that what see and can detect and measure. The question is why does this sound ridiculous to you.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoYou're privileging the hypothesis. Why half of the answer, not 1/3 or 2/3? Why energetic, not dark-matter? Why electro-magnetic? But still, as far as I can tell, the "antenna" hypothesis was considered and rejected, because right now we can pin-point different processes within a brain using fMRIs, we can read out what an animal imagines out of its brain directly... and basically "brain as a computer" is a simpler and better fitting the data model than "brain as an antenna".
- negamax 13y agoCan this learning be something in the genetic makeup, that these worms now have some kind of genetic advantage to find the food?
- freefrancisco 13y agoIt will be interesting to see what happens with the first head transplants which are now possible. If memories are stored not only in the brain but also throughout the nervous system in the body, head transplant patients will have some of the memories of their new host body.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hacker789 13y agoThat article has a very peculiar comment: http://theweek.com/article/index/246703/the-worm-that-regrows-its-head-and-memories-when-decapitated#comment-958983858 http://theweek.com/article/index/246703/the-worm-that-regrow... I hesitate to copy and paste the entire comment, lest I be flagged by an algorithm for spamming, but it uses Latin-like characters to write some typical spam about making money from home. Then, it has a link to the following site: viewmore------------------------------------------.qr.net/kkEj After that link, the comment continues with an extremely interesting tidbit that relates to the article, full of manual line breaks. I can't find it anywhere else online: We replicated the results of a similar experiment in a class I took in 1976, and also another one that's even stranger. We trained planaria, killed them, dried them, and fed them to untrained planaria. The training times for the untrained planaria were shortened. Our experiments used planaria reactions to light and subsequent electric shock, not food-finding behavior. Is someone being paid to come up with original, relevant-sounding content to post alongside spam? That text does not look machine generated.
- jlgreco 13y agoPerhaps someone has a malware infection that inserts spam into the comments they make online without them knowing. That would be a pretty slick way of getting around CAPTCHAs and possibly spam filters.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bennyg 13y agoThat sounds like an awesome experiment too. More info on an experiment similar to what the spam comment suggests: http://www.planarians.org/ http://www.planarians.org/
- slunk 13y agoLook for Steve Conklin's comment (posted around the same time).