Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

So this article is saying something like: modern neuroscience thinks that the "storage" mechanism is based on connections but maybe there's more like "secondary memory" on each neuron that can also store "facts"?

I can see the connection thing. It's like

  circle -> ball -> -- -> lightbulb
  white  -> light _/

Here circle and white come from a group of neurons firing when the electrical stimuly from the eye hits them and that particular group from a lot of lower level "concepts" fires the white and the circle.

Is someone saying that maybe a single neuron can "store" something like "white"?

I only see one claim backed by experiment: “The ferret-experiment shows that the measuring of—and then storage of—a maximally-simple experiential-fact (the duration of the interval between two simple events) occurs within a single huge cell (neuron) in the cerebellum. It also shows that subsequent single-spike input to this cell triggers the reading-out of this memory into a simple behavior: an appropriately-timed blink.”

The huge cell is a Purkinje cell. I don’t remember much about neuroscience, so I hope someone else can elaborate.

Later on the interview suggests that every single neuron could store megabytes of information, but this seems more like conjecture to me.

All in all I don't believe information can exist in a vacuum and 'white', even mostly encoded in one neuron, is probably still coupled with every other neuron related to any white stimuli or concept (color, spectrum, hue, negative, its spelling, voice, heat, locations...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com