The man who mistook his wife for a hat (1983)

For anyone looking for a great hard-scifi read Blindsight and it's sequel Echopraxia are actually brilliant reads.

The book is one of my biggest trauma from my childhood. My mother was studying psychology and it was one of the books that most changed his view on the topic, and I was interested.

Reading it, though cannot remember all of it, really gave me the feeling of how fragile such a complex system can be and how incredible are its recovering abilities.

The “man who mistook his wife for a hat” is just one of the cases analyzed.

It's not very well understood yet, but one of my favorite layman pieces on recent research is at: http://www.wired.com/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/

Somewhat tangentially (but I can't resist), this excellent story by Ted Chiang explores the transience of memory, and the role technology might play in sustaining it: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_o...

There's this recent review: http://w3.arizona.edu/~tigger/assets/documents/Nadel-etal%20...

But whenever I read these, I always think they might be getting it largely wrong. In fact, they themselves admit to it being partially speculative information.

I am by no means an expert, but I was neuroscience major in undergrad, and back then (~5-7 years ago) it wasn't known exactly for sure how it works besides the fact that a part of hippocampus interacts with other parts of the brain and that certain things are reinforced with more learning.

Most of the well known and still relevant studies in the field look at people that have a particular part of the brain damaged and how it affected them. Obviously, there aren't too many of such patients.

There are also studies in mice and other animals, but their brains work differently sometimes and other times there are a lot of unrelated variables.

To give you an idea of where the field was a few years ago: I was a research assistant in a neuro-psych lab and we were giving animals drugs in large amounts and then checking whether the cells in a specific region of the brain are damaged. If the CA1 area of hipoccampus was damaged, we could say that it potentially affects memory formation. That was checked by the ability of a rat to solve puzzles it previously solved. Very crude, unfortunately.

We do know some of these things.

Brains don't store "knowledge" like SSDs by capturing discrete electrons then poking them to read the stored data. Brains encode data physically as the arrangement of synapses between neurons. Brain's aren't just electrical—they are electrochemical.

Important point: knowledge/memory is stored as synapse configurations, not by shoving information inside neurons themselves.

As for suggesting "bizarre quaternary structure of DNA to store the memory ..." that's probably more for wishful new age crystal healing websites than anything based in reality.

Back to your original query: let's not forget The Source Of All Knowledge happily fields such questions: https://www.google.com/search?q=a+good+article+on+how+memory...

I wish I could share the stuff behind the paywall, but memory is a very interesting question in Neuroscience. I am a neuroradiologist and I still learn about truly incredible phenomena that challenge my preconceived notions about how the brain functions. For example, we had a case recently of "transient global amnesia" and although initially we thought the MRI was normal... more careful review showed a tiny infarct in the hippocampus, a structure critical in memory. Here's a paper behind the paywall discussing a similar case report:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15746236

Or consider the fact that the cerebellum is a lot more crucial in global brain function than was previously taught. It's really exciting, cutting-edge work:

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

Radiolab - which Oliver Sacks frequently appeared on - has a good piece on Memory: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/

The human genome is ~700MB.[0] Even if 75% of that is noise, there's not much capacity for memory. But with CRISPR, one could store a few keys and passphrases ;) Eventually, maybe add a storage organelle.

[0] https://medium.com/precision-medicine/how-big-is-the-human-g...

The condition is prosopagnosia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia and the wiki page says Saks himself suffered from it. It is not that rare, though many people that have it just think they are "bad with faces" or have bad memory when recognizing faces (even though otherwise their memory may be excellent). Many people that have it learn to "route around" it by explicitly memorizing facial cues (hairstyle, facial features, hair color) or other cues (clothing style, voice, body characteristics, etc.) and going off context ("if I meet this person in the office, this is one of my coworkers"). If the person is encountered out of context and in unusual attire/situation, they may not have enough clues to trigger recognition - so if somebody you know doesn't recognize you on the street, maybe they are not necessarily rude or avoiding you but maybe just have some prosopagnosia. :)

Part of the article actually uses this as in exact example of how brains are different from computers. Granted, it's from 1983.

The man in question essentially missed the forest for the trees - unable to perform any visual abstraction or familiarity, while still having strong abilities to identify the individual features of an object.

At the end of the day, brains are, indeed quite different from computers. The closest things that I'm aware of are neural nets, which can be subject to biases and confusion in a similar way to human brains - rather than a CPU.

Ahem. Buttonhole.

The actual quote,

"I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower.

‘About six inches in length,’ he commented, ‘a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.’

‘Yes,’ I said encouragingly, and what do you think it is, Dr P.?’

‘Not easy to say.’ He seemed perplexed. ‘It lacks the simple symmetry of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own ... I think this could be an inflorescence or flower.’

‘Could be?’ I queried.

‘Could be,’ he confirmed.

‘Smell it,’ I suggested, and he again looked somewhat puzzled, as if I had asked him to smell a higher symmetry. But he complied courteously, and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life."

In all honesty, after reading about the doctor; I know why he didn't want to let the world know about his sexuality; he didn't want his personal life interfering with his professional life.

I always thought I was pretty liberal, and open minded person, but once I learned of his sexuality; I read his work in a different light. I am ashamed of it, and I hope I can grow from the preconcieved assumptions? Assumptions that were on a subconcious level? I found myself questioning why he wrote mini-essays on literally every patient? I found myself thinking, "Did he write the elaborate patient summaries for the patient's sake, or was their some other compulsion at play? No-not necessarily sexual, just questing the man--wrongly! Wow--I thought I was better than this?

Anyways, I'm sorry he died, and I'm honestly not sure how he will be ranked in history among his peers. Will it be the brilliant doctor, or just another well meaning, average--Practicioner, who used his profession, and patients to get out of back breaking work? I understand his passion for writing, but there's a part of me that wonders--if he really cared about his patients, or did he used them as a muse to further his writing? I am sicken to admit this, but because I know about his personal life; my wild assumptions are wrongly running wild! Yes, they are, and I am ashamed of it. I a middle aged man who needs to learn so much more!

Anyone who has followed my posts, know I am no fan of most MD's, except my own of course. Actually, one I have is in on it for the right reasons! The other's I have known; well I just hope they didn't stop learning after med. school, and realize doing the right thing is better than harming a patient for money? I hope? Oh, I hope?

I will get pummeled for this post, but this is my Goodbye. Yes--it's an easy away to dodge the questions, but I'm done.

When I researched the parent post(still not sure of the Internet lingo), I found it immediately indexed on Google--word for word! It was wrong--it is "buttonhole", but this guy's rude post is there forever. This guy made a terrible joke, but should it live forever?

I finally realized/conceptualized how Noting Is Forgotten on HN. There Is No Annonymity On The Internet. How far off Is the day a post is tied to an IP address, and that address is published for all to see? We all know just how easy it is to obtain a IP.

Goodby All. I really enjoyed my time here! Those suffering from mental illness, even slight--it gets better with age. I have no reason to lie. And while the doctor's death is tragic, he lived a long, good life. His patients are the ones we should be grieving for? I hope the next generation of doctors make these patients lives easier? In reality, so little progress has been made to Dr. Oliver's patients? So little? It's beyond sad?