RE: Long term memory is extra-corporeal

Fri, 26 Dec 2014 13:46:13 -0800 

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Friday, December 26, 2014 10:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Long term memory is extra-corporeal

 

On 12/25/2014 11:45 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:

 

 

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kim Jones
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Long term memory is extra-corporeal

 

 

 


On 26 Dec 2014, at 1:43 pm, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:

On 12/25/2014 1:17 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

In paper 

Forsdyke, D.R. (2009). Samuel Butler and human long term memory: is the 
cupboard bare? Journal of Theoretical Biology 258(1), 156-164. (see 
http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/mind01.htm 
<http://post.queensu.ca/%7Eforsdyke/mind01.htm> ) 

the author considers a possibility that the long term memory is outside the 
brain. I guess that Bruno should like it. 


That seems backwards for Bruno's idea.  If memories are outside the brain then 
they should survive destruction of the brain.  But as I understand Bruno's idea 
one's "soul" survives destruction of the brain as in reincarnation, but 
memories don't.

Brent 

 

Don't forget this is about long-term memory. How long is long-term? I would say 
beyond the life of the individual. Seen like that, there has to be some kind of 
library or lookup table which in no way correlates to anything to do with human 
brain size, the authors conclude. Certain of these very-long-term memories do 
get encoded somehow to survive destruction of the brain, as in Jung's 'racial 
memory' or "collective unconscious' - the original engrams or patterns of 
recognition (archetypes) some of them terrifyingly inexplicable and probably 
arising in dreams and recorded as revelations. Folklore is the racial memory of 
homo sapiens. We still churn it out. What we cannot remember exactly we plaster 
over with something else anyway, because HS are natural-born story tellers who 
cannot pass up a good story. If the shoe fits, we tend to wear it. It's 
literally in our DNA these authors conclude. This suggests to me that the 
notion of "Junk DNA" is perhaps itself junk as the very purpose of DNA is to 
record ie encode experience at something for the purpose of passing it on. DNA 
cannot fail at that purpose. Whenever scientists declare something "Junk" or 
"Dark" this just means "we are clueless over this" so it's time to find the 
macro-molecular link that allows this almost-Lamarckian effect of racial memory 
to come about. 

 

The term “junk DNA”, itself has been junked a while ago, when it was discovered 
that a portion of this DNA acts like a kind of OS that switches encoding 
sections on and off. It is a mistake I believe to look at DNA as a static 
repository of hereditary information alone. It is this of course, but it turns 
out to be more complex, dynamic and layered than the simple static model. A lot 
of the so called “junk DNA” (but not all of it by any means) seems to be 
involved in this dynamic process. Especially, during the process of 
embryogenesis, DNA expression is undergoing dynamic highly sequenced and 
seemingly (somehow) choreographed changes (through methylation and other means).

Other parts of this junk DNA, seem to be parasitical in nature; e.g. the 
selfish DNA hypothesis, and this also seems very likely – IMO. If such DNA 
“parasite entities” exist, perhaps using viruses as vehicles during their 
“life-cycle” in order to ride with them on into a hosts DNA and insert 
themselves into a new happy home, passing copies down for as long as the 
lineage continues. Perhaps a parasite is “junk” for the host, but from the 
parasites perspective I am sure the view is different… so even here in this 
case is it really junk.

-Chris

 


But to say that DNA provides "long term memory" seems like an abuse of 
terminology, making a metaphor into a factual description.  DNA provides 
"memory" only in that sometimes parts of it get to reproduce.  Genes are more 
persistent units, but their "memory" is just get copied to not.  There's 
nothing Lamarckian about it, much less extra-corporeal survival of memories.  
Memories are necessarily things that are remembered.  I don't remember any 
previous life and I doubt that you do either.

Not sure who you are responding to. I was commenting on Kim’s use of the term 
“junk DNA” and how some of what had been thought of as being “junk” was later 
discovered to play a role in determining what DNA actually got encoded… and 
that some of these DNA regions also appear to be “parasitic” (e.g. the selfish 
gene hypothesis).

I could see some instinct-behavioral patterns being encoded in the DNA, but 
memories I do not see how this would occur. Recording a memory would have to 
have some measurable effect on the underlying substrate (e.g. the DNA) in which 
it was being recorded. I see no evidence of memory formation having any effect 
on an organisms DNA, and also do not see DNA as being even well suited for 
this… how would the mind communicate with a hypothetical memory recorded in 
DNA? 

Now the glial cells are another matter. I have been reading interesting studies 
that indicate that at least some kinds of glial cells (thought by most 
researchers to play a secondary minor role and largely ignored in favor of 
focusing in on the much more active and visible electrically active neural 
sheet) may play a fundamental role in the formation and storage/retrieval of 
long term memories. I could see the far more numerous glial cells as forming 
some kind of chemical switch based repository for memory that is read and 
written to by the electrically active neurons (perhaps at an order of magnitude 
slower rates than neuron to neuron activity… which would fit the introspective 
perception of the relative slowness of the process of deep memory retrieval… 
recalling deep memories takes time)

-Chris


Brent

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