The brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39518580

by akbarnama • 9 years ago

285 73 9 years ago

bbc.com

lsh• 9 years ago

"The experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to human brains too."

I look forward to human trials.

logfromblammo• 9 years ago

Uh oh. Looks like there was a bit of an overrun there. But you can clearly see that this is your signature on the release form, right?

We advise you to avoid calendars for a few weeks, until you adjust.

loader• 9 years ago

Maybe in the future they'll simply erase the memory you had of being part of the trial.

lutusp• 9 years ago

This is another welcome step on our journey between psychology and neuroscience.

smitherfield• 9 years ago

Not much real-world import, but this fixes a few aspects of the movie "Memento" I had considered plot holes. :)

(How does he remember what "remember Sammy Jankis" means? How does he remember he has short-term memory loss?)

johnfn• 9 years ago

Sammy Jenkins had short term memory loss. When he's confused about where he is or what he's doing, he sees the message on his hand, and remembers Sammys condition and understands he has the same condition.

Yeah, it's a slight mental leap, but "remember you have Sammy Jenkins' medical condition" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. :)

shahbaby• 9 years ago

Further supports the notion that understanding the neocortex is the key to understanding intelligence.

"It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof Tonegawa said.

What's going on during those first several days? It's probably re-arranging it's model of the world to account for those new memories.

"The idea you need the cortex for memories I'm comfortable with, but the fact it's so early is a surprise."

The neocortex is constantly making predictions about the future, so it makes sense that it has some short term memory of its own to make those predictions from.

devoply2• 9 years ago

Why do we need to understand intelligence, so we can make the intelligent irrelevant. Sort of like how the evolution of the human brain made animals irrelevant.

tankenmate• 9 years ago

If every human on the planet died the planet would largely continue on, if every insect died then the planet would go through a large catastrophic change. "Animals" aren't irrelevant, and the human brain isn't everything.

tmsldd2• 9 years ago

We need to understand intelligence because that is the only way it can be relevant..

willvarfar• 9 years ago

Researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of individual neurons - they could literally switch memories on or off.

So can this be extended to movie-plot-like memories be wiped, or false memories implanted? How did they identify the memories to be targeted and where they were stored?

There's lots of exciting work to reverse-engineer and extract rules from software neural nets. Can the same be possible in hardware nets too, or will attempting to measure it interfere and distort it?

stevenwoo• 9 years ago

In the article I thought it said they monitored the brain for any activity in response to the shock and the neurons that activated were assumed to be the associated in response to the memory. This is a far cry from being able to look at a neuron in situ and saying what memory or memories are associated with that neuron.

This is an old article and may be superceded by more recent research but false memories may not have to be implanted, in some sense we do it ourselves every time we recall a memory http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-our-brains-...

glippiglop• 9 years ago

A more practical use might be found in psychotherapy - recalling traumatic memories to identify the relevant neurons and then switching them off. That could be extremely useful for treating PTSD if it's feasible to do so.

cryptarch• 9 years ago

"The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is [SPOILER ALERT] a movie about erasing the memories of a past lover, a very similar idea.

phkahler• 9 years ago

You might want to read about EMDR therapy. I believe any attempt to overcome the effects of traumatic experiences requires reactivating those neurons at least temporarily. I feel like even the use of CBT to change behavior works better if you can associate the unwanted behavior with memories of how you came to acquire that behavior - at that point you'll want to change the narrative of the old events to something that can be more easily accepted. This isn't really new.

pseud0r• 9 years ago

You might be interested in this

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-figured-out-how-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_erasure

jlebrech• 9 years ago

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338337/

return0• 9 years ago

So can this be extended to movie-plot-like memories be wiped, or false memories implanted? How did they identify the memories to be targeted and where they were stored?

The same group has done all that stuff with optogenetics and molecular techniques:

http://tonegawalab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/296_Li...

http://tonegawalab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/297_Ra...

http://tonegawalab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/289_li...

GeeJay• 9 years ago

Helpful for 'Memento', obsoletes 'Inside Out'.

scribu• 9 years ago

Fortunately for 'Inside Out', the concept of memory is not the central component of the movie. Rather, it's the idea that we each have multiple competing subpersonalities inside our heads, which remains a useful model.

sjcsjc• 9 years ago

Link to paper http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6333/73

Dowwie• 9 years ago

is there a package I can install to upgrade mine because this one seems to take high availability over consistency

swombat• 9 years ago

Just type "aptitude increase" in your brain-keyboard. You may have to read a number of books and live a number of years before the keyboard shows up though.

chatmasta• 9 years ago

With the right medication, you might be able to accelerate the appearance of that keyboard, at least for a few hours. :)

bertlequant• 9 years ago

2nd copy is in tape though

tmsldd2• 9 years ago

Backup..

dmitripopov• 9 years ago

Tons of "Improve your memory" books are irrelevant from this moment. No suprise that none of them actually worked for anyone except placebo effect.

mettamage• 9 years ago

Any clue as to what would work?

rimliu• 9 years ago

Check out books of the memory champions (Tony Buzan, Domnic O'Brian, Joshua Foer). The idea is not to improve your memory, just to use it efficiently. The core is very simple: our brains have a hard time memorising abstract things. Solution—convert them to highly vivid imagery/stories. Visualisation being step one, step two is somehow to link the resulting images. Here you have a choice of link system, peg system, memory palace/method of loci. That's basically it. You will probably learn some system for converting numbers to images (Major system, o Dominic system), but that's just a tool for the first step. Also, get enough sleep.

stinos• 9 years ago

How did you come to this conclusion? IIRC the research is about finding out how memories are stored. Not about how to recall them. Or to make sure they are formed in the first place.

psyc• 9 years ago

RAID1

shrimp_emoji• 9 years ago

More like RAM and secondary storage.

amelius• 9 years ago

Just hypothesizing but could it be that the brain is structured as two adversarial networks, which train each other e.g. during sleep?

SpeakMouthWords• 9 years ago

It's always tempting to think about the body in terms of the technological concepts of the age. It's not automatically wrong, but there's nothing special about this particular era of computing that would mean we're working with the same methods as the human brain. Not even the fact that we call our systems "neural networks".

Senderman• 9 years ago

They're called neural networks because their design mirrors observations from neurons in the brain.

There's truth to your sentiment, that the current level of knowledge is always somewhat arbitrary, but to say there's "nothing" that suggests a connection between the two is far too dismissive of an interesting question posed by the original comment.

ajuc2• 9 years ago

If there's optimal way to solve the problems brain (and AI) are good at - then as times passes probability both we and nature use these methods increase. So we're indeed special in that we had more time than people before.

bradfordarner4• 9 years ago

So true! 50 years ago they were using concepts from early computing to describe how the human brain works. With each new wave of advances in computing, there is a new set of analogies that philosophers and neuroscientists adopt to say: "See, the brain is like this". It Seems problematic to me. Models are models, not reality. They may be good for descriptive effects, but that doesn't me they are anything other than story-telling devices.

As a tangent, this seems to me to be a problem with Daniel Dennett's ideas and why, in the end, David Chalmers seems to be gaining ground with every passing year.

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

That sentiment makes it easy to dismiss the models we use, but here's the thing - the technological concepts of the age limit what models people can express in that age. Better technology = better models, i.e. models that explain more and predict more.

Also this sentiment casually dismisses the fact that behind computing there's a whole lot of theoretical work that stems not from technology itself, but from how reality works (i.e. math).

zaking17• 9 years ago

I saw Terry Sejnowski give a talk last week in San Diego, and he made the exact same suggestion. He did not provide any evidence, but it's hard not to take his ideas seriously.

SubiculumCode• 9 years ago

I'm on a phone so I won't type much. From my dissertational research and reading, I've got no hint that the hippocampus and the cortex learn advesariily, at least to my limited understanding of how such networks work. The hippocampus is thought to bind together the features of events into an integrated memory representation. It may do so by relating coded indexes in the hippocampus for features that actually exist in the cortex. So for example, you observe a car and a bike hit each other. Your percepts for the car and bike (features) are in your perceptual cortices. The hippocampus generates an index that when propogated back to the cortex, reactivates those cortices into a state similar to when you originally saw the event. That is memory...that reactivation. At least that is a popular idea in memory research that has empirical support.

trishume• 9 years ago

Hypothesis: Deja Vu happens when the long term memory isn't suppressed properly during the first few days.

I often find when I experience Deja Vu I think I remember doing a thing I did the day before a long time before that. It feels like I have two memories, one of a recent event and one a vague recollection of something a long time ago. This sounds like exactly what one would expect if two memories are recorded, one suppressed for a few days and one forgotten in a few days, but the suppression fails.

Does anyone else have Deja Vu like this?

yathern• 9 years ago

In my experience Deja Vu doesn't happen for something I remember doing yesterday, but something I'm currently doing right now, or some combination of events that just occurred. But either way, that's a good hypothesis.

jat850• 9 years ago

This matches my experience. Deja vu is not something I remember from a past event, but from something happening right at the moment. If I understand the article correctly, and a candidate theory for deja vu encountered on Wikipedia, this might make sense.

I think the theory is that occasionally there are slight issues with the timing/synchronization of the memory being stored in certain parts of the brain. Since the research shows that memories are written twice, if such a desync occurred, maybe deja vu is some perception of disagreement between short and long term memories?

For some reason, I find the experience of deja vu somehow quite ... pleasing. I am not sure if this is true for everyone.

bencollier49• 9 years ago

Short term memory isn't a matter of days, it's a matter of seconds and minutes. But otherwise, that makes sense. In fact, I think this is already a hypothesis which has come out of fMRI?

clueless123• 9 years ago

Since our brains store a simplistic version of what our sensors actually read, my WAG Hypothesis is that Deja Vu happens when the digested patterns ready for storage, collide with previous experiences in memory. Kind of a hashing collision.

chrisco255• 9 years ago

Deja Vu happens when they change something in the Matrix.

saurabh• 9 years ago

This is the correct explanation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KmNZNT5xw

acchow• 9 years ago

I've had a few Deja Vu experiences that felt so incredibly real, like I had experienced precisely this before, but my memory tells me for sure I've never gone through anything similar.

Is this because the clearer "short term" version is completely lost?

spike021• 9 years ago

When I have Deja Vu it's very clear to me that what I'm doing _right now_, in this second, is something that's happened before. I sometimes have experiences where the Deja Vu occurring in the present is possibly the _third_ time that it's happened as well. It just feels so familiar in multiple ways that I am reminded of something happening a while back.

Such an odd sensation when your brain is telling you you're experiencing a repeated situation, but your mind is telling you it's impossible.

run4yourlives2• 9 years ago

There's a second part to a Deja Vu phenomenom that often gets overlooked... the feeling that you've had this experience before is coupled with the ability to predict what will happen next based on the 'memory'.

Next time you get deja vu, try to "remember" what happens next. It's scarily accurate after you willingly try it once or twice.

My overall hypothesis is somewhat inline with yours (although I don't have nearly the expertise to properly examine these things) - that somehow the brain 'skips' filing the memory properly, and the experience being recalled milliseconds later as "now" is being mis-remembered as "past".

Very cool machine our brain.

tannerc• 9 years ago

We've known this for some time, but this is additional evidence to the notion of our brain processing and prioritizing which information gets stored in short-term vs. long term memory.

This also explains deja vu, but possibly not as many on this thread have tried to explain.

I've written about this about two years ago, the leading theory of deja vu being that your brain processes and stores an experience in the long term memory before it's had a chance to properly store it in short term. By the time the short term memory has caught-up, the event feels already lived, because it's already been processed and stored in long term memory.

At least, that's one theory.

heisenbit• 9 years ago

This should have a major impact on learning strategies for long term retention. Short term retention may not be any indicator for long term retention as different mechanisms are at work there. But short term memory at least initially will hide any long term memory so how can we measure and optimize what we remember in the long run?

Jonathanks• 9 years ago

""It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof Tonegawa said. 'Strong case' The researchers also showed the long- term memory never matured if the connection between the hippocampus and the cortex was blocked. So there is still a link between the two parts of the brain, with the balance of power shifting from the hippocampus to the cortex over time."

I have no good knowledge of neuroscience, so I'll be happy to read other thoughts on this. Personally, it seems to me that this is an evolved technique to direct us to:

act on impulses at the moment of an event, instead of contemplating rational choices that may take too much time to arrive at (thus limiting our chances of survival);

pursue rational choices in calmer times, trusting us to draw on stored memories of similar events to help make better decisions (the purpose of Deja Vu?)

For the link between the hippocampus and the cortex being required to retrieve memories; maybe those memories are useless without the emotional context, and the hippocampus is needed to relive those emotions to have a more accurate recollection of the memories.

It might not make sense (I know almost nothing about neuroscience), but it's a thought.

The brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events

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