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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the distinction you are trying to make. Trained snails learned to withdraw into their shells for long period of times after a shock to avoid receiving any more shocks. That learning was passed along to other snails through RNA. It's a conditional response to an external stimuli that I would expect to be stored just as any other memory?

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>Trained snails learned to withdraw

This is the part I'm not sure about. The alternate explanation I have goes like this:

  - Snail A gets shocked a lot, as a result it gets really stressed out, altering its RNA/epigenetics to produce lots of stress hormones

  - Lots of stress hormones lead Snail A to withdraw for a long time when touched

  - Snail B gets an injection of Snail A's RNA

  - As a result, Snail B starts producing lots of stress hormones

  - Lots of stress hormones lead Snail B to withdraw for a long time when touched

This doesn't involve what we would typically regard as memory or learning, and certainly wouldn't generalize to a method of transferring memories in the general case. A modified experiment that I think would show genuine memory transferal would be to occasionally show red and green lights, have snails in group 1 shocked after the green lights only and snails in group 2 shocked after the red lights only, inject their respective RNA, and see if the receiving groups are distinguishable in their responses to red vs green lights.

How is your explanation different than memory propagating through RNA? If memory is being passed through genetics, isn't the employment of epigenetics essentially a tautology?

Saying that the ability to pass memories is limited to a specific type or granularity doesn't negate that a learned response (a memory) was passed on.

buts its not a neurological memory, you're just bridging a physiological response from A to B. B doesn't have any new memories, its just being roped into behaving like A because the genetic expression of A altered, and that got copied to B through RNA.

maybe 'state' would be a better word

Memory != Neurological Memory is the claim, isn't it? That there is another mechanism for remembering, something besides neurons.

> This doesn't involve what we would typically regard as memory or learning

But it is memory nevertheless, just a special kind of it. Maybe more ancient kind created for diffuse nervous system with abilities limited by abilities of a diffuse nervous system.

> and certainly wouldn't generalize to a method of transferring memories in the general case.

Yes, I believe, so. One could learn by an injection nothing that couldn't be learned by a hydra.

Or maybe a more complex nervous system could learn something on top of learned by a hydra? I mean all those ancient physiological mechanism are mostly intact in our bodies, they work and body relies on them and uses them. Why not to get more than a simple hydra?

If depends if there is a physiological pathway between the mRNA and whatever neural structure is used for memory. This does not necessarily mean that the same effect can be replicated in mammals, a snail is several magnitudes simpler than your typical mammallia animal. It would nonetheless be quite interesting to study.

Hypothetically, if memory and experiences can be, to use a programmer term, serialized into mRNA, then that would be quite an advancement for brain computer interface technology as the mRNA can then be amplified and sequenced to extract out the information.

It seems on the same level as a vaccine being a “kind of memory.”

How about stop harming snails?

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