Memories Can Be Injected and Survive Amputation and Metamorphosis | Hacker News Reader

Memories Can Be Injected and Survive Amputation and Metamorphosis

nautil.us

128 pointshowsilly44 comments

Small aside about memory in humans: I am reminded of a story told during a lecture of a transplant recipient receiving a heart transplant and was interviewed after the successful surgery about what they would like to eat now that they had a new heart (previously, was on a really restricted diet due to heart condition).

The person responded with "Kentucky fried chicken" on a whim.

It was later explained that they don't know why they felt compelled to say KFC since they never been to one in their life. Later on, they find information about the donor and how they died (motorcycle accident -- be safe on your bikes please kids). The donor was a pretty husky guy, and loved Kentucky fried chicken.

Now could have this just been sheer coincidence or chance? Most likely. Is this scientifically verifiable? Of course not, not with current means. But for some reason I've always had a strange suspicion that there was more to memory than just storage in our brains, but that they are also somehow part of us as well.

Interesting... any chance you have a link of that lecture or a story on it?

There are many cases of people who get organ transplant inherit the memory of the donor. I have heard in more than one places or another. A simple search on the web will yield this:

Here is a link: https://www.medicaldaily.com/can-organ-transplant-change-rec...

We still don't know squats about how memory are stored. And cases like that can be a valid argument for memory and consciousness being a non-local phenomenon. Kinda like how client-server model in CS. ;-) . Are our brain just a browser?

> We still don't know squats about how memory are stored.

Yeah, but not in the kidneys or the liver. Get back to us when you find sources from peer-reviewed journals.

Memories in the conventional sense are stored in the brain.

By stretching the definition of memory, you can get to the conclusion that the whole body remembers. Scientists have found that the neurons in the spine learn when practicing motor tasks. The immune system remembers pathogens. Hormonal glands remember concentrations of relevant hormones by growing / shrinking. Muscles (including the heart) remember exercise by growing. If you play the guitar your fingertips harden, they "remember" the stress and toughen up in anticipation. And every single cell will learn by epigenetic changes. Maybe you could say that diabetes type 2 happens because the cells learn to respond less to insulin.

Get back to me when someone gets an arm amputated and forgets math.

Oh and here is the KFC thing.

https://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/Memory-transference-...

Note, however: While this web site has "journal" in its title, it is not a scientific publication. Namah describes itself as "The Journal of Integral Health" -- it is published by a branch of a yogic spiritual community.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the anecdotes described there are false, but I'd be inclined to take them with a grain of salt.

A grain of salt, pepper and herbs and spices

It ain't KFC without MSG!

Reading more and more will never get us anywhere. What can we do with what we know now is worth sharing.

Acquiring memories and personalities through organ transplants is a somewhat known urban legend and a fiction trope, but AFAIK the only thing you can transmit through a transplant that's been verifiably demonstrated is pathogens.

Pathogens and microbes can influence alot about our bodies

Maybe a “memory” like a neuron based thing isnt what is being transmitted, but instead nearest urges directed by unique sets of microbes found in individuals

And DNA, in the case of bone marrow transplant:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/us/dna-bone-marrow-transp...

What about encoding long term memories in DNA?

Sounds like you've been playing Assassin's Creed!

Maybe not quite a 'long-term' memory in the context you're after, but I wonder how this would compare to something like instinct and how we would tell the difference?

Somewhat related to this is Microsoft Research's project to use DNA for data storage: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/dna-storage...

Thanks for sharing.

We kind of waste our time by verifying with science for new surprises. We live for <60 years, we have to manage our time with something that is impactful. So verifying anything with science is not worth our time (thinking -> googling -> starting threads). Instead, simplify the facts and write it down on paper. Keep accumulating your findings, you will come up with your own more connected theories. Occasionally, prove your theories wrong to build a stronger base knowledge.

My message is just a reply for "Is this scientifically verifiable? Of course not, not with current means"

> We live for <60 years

What country are you from?

    > We live for <60 years

That's false. And please hold on with "your own theories". We have too much "fun" with antivaxers already.

I'm not justifying their "boo science, yay debauchery" line of thinking but let us look at the numbers (because I'm curious):

This is for the US, from CDC data, so probably 30-something percent depending on how many were between 60 and 64:

>Totals For 2010: 2,468,435 people of all ages died. About 11.9% aged 25 to 54. 24.5% aged 25 to 64

https://modlinlegal.com/blog/maybe-i-just-won-t-plan/90-the-...

And this https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS

shows numbers kinda all over the place depending on country, depending on where the person is from it may very well be that the majority die before 60-65 in their country.

Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, both Congo, Cote d'Ivorie, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Lesotho, Malawi, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe all appear to be under 60% chance (one or two may be at or above, I made the list quickly) of making it to 65 if I'm reading that table correctly.

So, that's about 679 million people using 2017 numbers found via Google so not even 9% of the global population but still, that's roughly a 1 in 12 chance they are from a country where death before 65 is a thing for 40-60% of the population.

Also TIL Nigeria has 191 million people!!! Wow, I would have never come close to that if told to guess.

> verifying anything with science is not worth our time

You are apparently long, long overdue a revision of a few history books. It should very quickly become self-evident that it is in fact worth our collective time (and probably our individual time too, as it's a real achievement that everyone benefits from) to perform scientific studies.

The most obvious explanation is that they were making a joke by picking the most greasy, unhealthy thing they could think of and had no real desire to go to KFC.

"What are you going to do with your new heart?" "Clog it up just like the last one. duh."

In this case, the heart defect was congenital, not due to atherosclerosis

as somebody who meditates, i've noticed there are connections between brain and heart in terms of memories. i believe the heart has a big role to play in terms of memories but i can't back it up with anything verifiable.

My explanation: https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood - the surprising stuff is what spreads on the internet. Anecdotal information is becoming more and more useless - the only recourse is statistics.

I thought of the cells working as a raid system, Perhaps the flow of energy also stores and retrieves data to "refresh" the brain cells..

The old vision (brain = neurons => memories, rest of the body = organs which execute single or multiple functions, synchronized by the brain) is slowly fading away.

We have a lot of active neurons in the digestive system, which is in fact a second brain.

Same can be said for the heart which contains an autonomous neuronal system to control the cardiac function independently if need be.

Notions of distributed systems apply : redundancy, parallelism, coordinated autonomous systems, synchronization.

So why wouldn't memory storage be distributed too ?

Why wouldn't some memories stored in organs be retained after transplantation ?

The idea has some merit, but lots and lot of trasplants are done each year since decades. Nobody has exit the hospital suddenly turning on a pianist or an expert plumber after a hand transplant. And nobody suddenly forgot the knowledge to do some specialized thing, or recognize a beloved one, after losing an arm or a leg.

The kentucky fried thing (assuming that is a true history and not a fake new) could have a few simpler explanations like doctors talking about the donor in the pre or postoperatory phase while the patient was half-awake

Indeed, regarding the KFC case, there are a lot of possible explanations, because the evidence doesn't allow to elaborate a certain conclusion.

Regarding inherited memories, this isn't common case, nevertheless it happened in the case of transplants [0] [1]

[0] https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2016/10/15...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...

This is colloquially referred to as having a "gut feeling".

Coincidence sure seems like the simplest explanation. I'm sure the donor liked a great many things other than KFC, and I'm sure enjoyment of KFC is pretty common in the general population, who make up donors. Now if it was something extremely specific or rare, I'd pay a little more attention to it.

Never had KFC before? That seems extremely unlikely.

A headline sorely in need of "In Worms" on the end.

I remember hearing as a kid that worms cut in half would regenerate into two worms however as an adult I'm sure I was taught this isn't actually the case at all.

After a quick bit of googling, it seems that earthworms can re-grow their tail (if cut far enough down), but the other end doesn't re-grow. Flat-Worms, however are capable of entirely re-growing heads and tails from tiny pieces.

https://www.livescience.com/38405-how-flatworms-regrow-their...

Some human children have regrown finger tips: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/06/10/1903854...

    > I remember hearing as a kid that worms cut in half would 
    > regenerate into two worms however as an adult I'm sure I 
    > was taught this isn't actually the case at all.

Do you mean that you're sure that you weren't taught it, or that you're sure that it isn't the case in reality. Because the latter is easily answered by reading the article in question:

    > In an early experiment, McConnell trained the worms à la
    > Pavlov by pairing an electric shock with flashing lights. 
    > Eventually, the worms recoiled to the light alone. Then 
    > something interesting happened when he cut the worms in 
    > half. The head of one half of the worm grew a tail and, 
    > understandably, retained the memory of its training.
    > Surprisingly, however, the tail, which grew a head and a 
    > brain, also retained the memory of its training. If a 
    > headless worm can regrow a memory, then where is the memory 
    > stored, McConnell wondered. And, if a memory can 
    > regenerate, could he transfer it?

I meant I was sure that when I became an adult I was taught that worms regrowing was an urban myth. The fact the scientist in the article was regrowing them made me go and check and it turns out to be something that changes with different variants, rather than a blanket worm rule either way.

Age old wisdom. That's why you always eat the heart of your enemies, so you can grow in power.

Aside from hinting at wonderful new science, the strongest resonance I get from this story is hubris.

How proud and how wrong we can be. To disregard and minimise this research because it does not fit neatly within existing paradigms, is a crime. Hundreds of millions of dollars should be being poured into this research, the implications for our understanding of fundamental biology are profound.

Though now discredited, you'll occasionally see McConnell's idea of RNA-based memory transfer in old science fiction, in particular _A World Out of Time_ by Larry Niven.

If we are empathetic, capable of being aware of other people's feelings, it is reasonable that the memories attached to awareness exist not isolated in the individual but across people.

Not really; memories remain even when you go to space behind the moon alone.

You should look up mirror neurons. Aside from those we definitely do not know other people's feelings, though. I think that's obvious from the amount of conflict coming from this exact reason.

Being empathetic doesn't imply also being compassionate. Maybe we vie for power so much exactly because we do have a deep awareness of other people's feelings and people who wield power can say, "If I'm not happy, nobody is happy." All this conflict comes from not having to depend on people in power for our happiness.

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