How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level | Hacker News Reader

How the brain encodes memories at a cellular level

sciencedaily.com

47 pointsrobg12 comments

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I know about the brain, the title is misleading. What the team of scientists found seems to be more like a more detailed explanation of how the brain actually goes about storing the memories, not encoding them. Finding how the brain encodes the memories should unveil the API the brain uses and eventually lead us to exploring the way we could read the data from the brain.

I believe we have already made progress into reading data from the human brain - Identifying natural images from human brain activity (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/nature0...)

That's reading the activity of visual cortex, though, not extracting stored memories. The former is pretty well understood, and works mostly the same across vertebrates. The latter is still mostly a mystery, thus the linked article is major news.

I think that's more like sniffing the bus, or the buffer, in which images are "held" between eyes and encoding, or after recall.

I would agree with the core part of what you're saying. There is a difference between the physical medium information is stored in, and the pattern of the medium that is storing the information.

To make this difference clearer, look at a typical cd or dvd. An equivalent article would talk about which chemicals and combination of lasers at certain optical frequencies are used to etch patterns into the surface of the cd/dvd.

An article on encoding would detail how the pattern of microscopic bumps on a cd/dvd represents binary data formats.

This is a common problem with Science Daily. They basically copy and paste press releases from universities with all the bullshit hype intact. Every article has the same format: Scientists discover mind-blowing new theory that will blow your mind and cure cancer, AIDS, and global warming!!!!

Further to this point.

I have a few friends in different fields of research and in the biotech field. I sent them a link from sciencedaily, after thanking me for the link. They politely informed me that sciencedaily is not a worth while publication and therefore deem the information from it not so exciting / important.

You could say they are being snobbish maybe even elitist. But as mentioned in the comments, this is not the first time a post to there has had words like "misleading" etc.

What if we had a peer review, prestigious website where you could submit your articles for publishing in the IT world?

Equally, does "snobbishness" exist already in peer review sites for the IT world already?

If anything I would expect two crowds to form, the larger of which being an "anti-snob" crowd that says, "If it wasn't on a developer's personal blog, it isn't worth reading!"

the pattern of microscopic bumps on neurons are dendritic spines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendritic_spine. these have glutamate receptors.

Glutamate is the primary excitatory transmitter in the brain. The Glutamate synpase has two receptors: AMPA and NMDA. These act as an AND gate for learning and are both activated by glutamate.

When glutamate binds to the AMPA receptor, it opens a channel that lets in sodium (Na+). If enough enters fast enough, Mg+2 is reppelled from blockading the NMDA receptor allowing Ca+2 ions to enter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitatory_postsynaptic_potenti...

When Ca+2 enters the cells through NMDA, it triggers a ton of internal metabolic changes. in the neuron in order to do make it more sensitive and conditioned to the connections from stimulating neurons such as producing more AMPA receptors at that location for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_learning

We don't know all of the internal metabolic changes that allow the cell to do such things, and this article is about one of them.

Brief neurosci101 to put the article in perspective.

Either way, learning how memories are stored in the brain is the first step to learning how they are encoded.

I've been in figuring out how to encode content using the tools the brain has "at hand", for a while now.

Originally, I thought similarly, but then: The less interesting part might be to decode information from the brain but to it.

Here (I think) the research paper at PubMed:

Banerjee, Sourav, Pierre Neveu, and Kenneth S Kosik, A coordinated local translational control point at the synapse involving relief from silencing and MOV10 degradation, Neuron 64, no. 6 (December 24, 2009): 871-884. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20064393.

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