The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory

https://www.ibm.com/think/news/discovery-changed-how-scientists-think-about-memory-kavli-prize

by rbanffy • 1 month ago

128 53 1 month ago

Animats• 1 month ago

Great result on the biochemistry of memory storage. Then they venture into philosophy: "They still struggle to explain the spark that transforms information into insight."

Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.

project2501a• 1 month ago

i'm sorry, I cannot agree that anything like that can create "originality".

taneq• 1 month ago

Creativity can be thought of as a combination of two things: A random idea generator, and a nonsense filter. Generate new random results ideas, filter out the nonsense ones, and you’ve generated good ideas.

coldtea3• 1 month ago

As opposed to what? Water and tissue?

mr_toad2• 1 month ago

It still surprises me that people can complain about LLMs making things up (i.e. hallucinating), and simultaneously complain that they never produce anything original.

MarceliusK4• 1 month ago

So I'd say diffusion models make the philosophy less mystical but not necessarily solved

bambax• 1 month 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-decapita...

Earw0rm6• 1 month ago

Flatworms 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.

Roark662• 1 month ago

Did you know human overies contain neurons? I suppose memories are not stored there :-) but still the fact is rather surprising.

boston_clone2• 1 month ago

I think the evidence is strong, here. Quite difficult to form new memories without a brain!

IsTom• 1 month ago

At least spinal cord has a kind of memory related to movement, but that's something else than episodic memory obviously.

abc123abc1232• 1 month 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! ;)

christophilus• 1 month ago

Well, 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.

piskov• 1 month ago

Memory stored in RNA is a known thing:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711021v1

https://www.sciencealert.com/worms-can-share-memories-of-a-b...

coldtea3• 1 month ago

What's funnier is the implication under which the "objection" is stated, as if those researchers didn't/couldn't know it.

Zardoz84• 1 month ago

We found that some kind of gigant unicelular life can remember where was food.

strogonoff• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

People 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• 1 month ago

Another 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.

kator2• 1 month ago

I think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982...

Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.

[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf

layer8• 1 month ago

It used to be slower in software development as well. The internet and the exponentially increasing number of software developers accelerated it. And of course new hardware that made things practical that were only a theoretical possibility before.

kator2• 1 month ago

True, that said, I downloaded and compiled Perl in 1987 from comp.sources.misc, even back then, things moved at light speed compared to health and medical.

MarceliusK4• 1 month ago

A lot of "rapid adoption" in software is really the result of unusually cheap distribution and feedback loops

MarceliusK4• 1 month ago

I think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system is noisy, the experiments are slow and the implications may not be obvious until other pieces of the puzzle show up

unsupp0rted• 1 month ago

It's amazing after all these years we're still so bad at improving an average person's recall, even by 50%. It feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and all we can do is spaced repetition systems, the memory palace, strong associative scents, etc

Weak.

If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.

MarceliusK4• 1 month ago

What I like about this story is how physical the problem is

gibsonf1• 1 month ago

This discovery fully validates the organic system side of Peter Putnam's theory on induction, the Neuro Conditioned Reflex Principle, that requires changing state at synapses over time to select the nested Relative Dominance feedback winner in a given Conditioned Reflex feedback loop. Its quite incredible that the functionality of induction proposed by Putnam in 1963 has been consistently validated since then. [1]

[1] https://www.peterputnam.org/outline-of-a-functional-model-of...

The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory

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