Bacteria store memories and pass them on for generations
news.utexas.edu
news.utexas.edu
Also there were claims starting in the 50s where planarians were taught a maze or to respond to certain stimuli and then fed to other planarians and that the trait would sometimes transfer as well. I don't know if any of those studies were reproduced, thus the claims might be dubious, but it would be interesting if they were true.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
I remember reading an anecdote about a baby who didn’t like being held by their father, who happened to beat the baby’s mother during pregnancy. No idea of the veracity of the story but something about it had me thinking similarly about “instincts” and where they come from. The meaning of the word does seem to be a lot like memories that are “passed on for generations”.
Young children generally are more cautious around men than women, which is probably good risk management. Instinctive? Possibly.
Is it, though? This data [0] says otherwise.
[0]: http://www.breakingthescience.org/SimplifiedDataFromDHHS.php
A more neutral source:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
… which suggests the opposite (but there’s not much in it).
In terms of broader risks, males commit a clear majority of violent offences and a vast majority of sexual offences.
This isn’t even just a human thing. Male primates (and mammals generally) exhibit more aggressive behavior than females. It’s probably a deep consequence of anisogamous sexual differentiation:
https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169...
So superpowers were transferred when ate? Kirby devs were on to something.
[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/dna-jumps-between-animal-spec...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
> The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to occur via the transfer of cellular memory
http://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/Memory-transference-i...
> There have been perplexing reports of organ transplant receivers claiming that they seem to have inherited the memory, experiences and emotions of their deceased donors, and which are causing quirky changes in their personality.
Possibly related: it turns out horizontal gene transfer is way more common in humans than we could expect and we really don't have a good explanation for how it's happening
Signals from the gut to the brain arrive via the vagus nerve and probably also the other cranial nerves.
Neurotransmitters in general don't particularly imply they're being used in the brain. Some neurotransmitters travel through the body, but a larger fraction are produced locally by a cell and intended only for close neighbors.
(For those about to watch it: the soul-vibing Neighbours-esque intro song is all part of the charm of this show. The shittier the intro, the more dramatic the needless melodrama is in contrast)
“Finding Mr Young”[1] identifies him as: “Mr Young was probably Quin Fischer Curtis, in his theses published in 1931/1936, as part of John F. Shepard’s multi-decade research programme at the University of Michigan into ‘floor cues’, going well beyond just putting sand on the floor.”
I don't know about people in biology in general, but it seems a whole new space of considerations.. topological communication, spread of information..
and if people are curious about other aspects of this, google peter reddien, he had a lab who focused on planaria regeneration too, and by playing with location and numbers of cuts they triggered some cascading patterns of regeneration (think https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/File:iso_paper_si... but with biological tissue and organs)
https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/fulltext/S1360-138...
Given this and the recent discovery that plants can pass down RNA through mycorrhizal networks and can recognize their own offspring, it seems plausible that memories can also be passed through mycorrhizal networks.
What stories does the soil hold?
The bacteria cut up the phage genome when they’re first attacked and (if they survive) store pieces in their own genome. Then when they detect the phage genes again they produce anti-phage defenses.
The system is called “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”. It’s also known as CRISPR (better known for other work :)
I was also musing about making one myself using lobste.rs GitHub. But I never looked into it much.
Make note that for example “when well fed, E. coli bacteria divide once every 20 minutes”[1], making that iron memory last for 80 to 140 minutes. Though that may still be longer than it takes them to discard a plasmid (genetic “loose change” on e.g. immunity resistance) when competing for reproductive speed.
1: Nick Lane, “Power, Sex, Suicide. Mitochondria and the meaning of life”, 2nd ed., 2018, p. 175
In times of war and stress, how a society can come together and work in unison to defeat the threat. It seems like there's more to it than patriotism. Why should one individuals be willing to die for the benefit of others...Very often young man, who have not yet reproduced. Seems like an evolutionary dead end behaviour. Is there some Psycho/chemical mechanism by which its triggered.
The way so many people were scared of covid, that fear spread and like a virus infected the society.
Came across a thread on Reddit recently about these three and many people made the point that Ruin & Memory are so different from each other in terms of sequels that which is the "good one" is a polarizing discussion.
If that were the case, the body (including the brain) could die but the consciousness could continue to exist.
How would these signals be driven? What mechanism is used for signalling?
Yes, I hope that it exists but it clashes with research that shows that brain damage can change a persons behavior and personality. So this take tries to combine both concepts.
I have no idea how the signals are transmitted but I believe there is some room for transmission mechanisms we have not discovered or understood yet.
I often wonder if my Irish ancestors genes passed on trauma through my family to me. With 900 years of invasion, war, famine, and strife you'd think something like that would be passed on.
Consider again the glider translated across space time. Is it the same glider after 1,2,10 generations in time?
I always found it curious the ancient archons had rulerships which kept continuity in nominative identity across individuals for several generations. The social practice continues with the first, the second, III, IV etc.
The epigenetic view supports it.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-straig...
The actual biological reality is fascinating, and so much more interesting than the distorted version you get from unscientific fabulists.
Epigenetics is one way that cells have of turning on and off the genes that are expressed. The same way that you can 'comment' a piece of code out using some special flags.
What is special about it is that it turns out that your mom's experience during pregnancy (and your experience during development) can affect which genes are turned on and off in your cells.
The classic example of this is that children of starving mothers such as during the holocaust, or during other famines, often went on to be overweight, because they were conditioned to be in 'starvation mode' so the genes for uptake of nutrients were more turned on, or the genes for decreasing wastefulness were turned off.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how some of these things could reinforce each other, or alternate, over multiple generations.
If you cut a tree, it will heal, and then decades later the effect of the cut will still be influencing the how the tree grows around the scar. But that's doesn't mean the tree 'remembers' the cut.
I don't think you should use the term for anything that doesn't have a consciousness, and only if the memory is something that is directly accessible to the conscious mind (via introspection, for instance), not indirectly via senses. Feeling a sore ankle is not a memory of an injury. Inheriting high lead levels in your blood from your mother is not a memory of lead exposure.