The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory
ibm.com
ibm.com
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories."
And that's what it took. One comment on hackernews and the prize was retracted. HN at its best! ;)
> Personality changes have been reported following organ transplantation. Most commonly, such changes have been described among heart transplant recipients. [...] A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 47 participants (23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients) completed an online survey. In this study, 89% of all transplant recipients reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery, which was similar for heart and other organ recipients.
Who knows the cause though, could be anything I suppose, not necessarily that "memory sits in tissue".
And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.
that's not obvious on the face of it from a mechanical standpoint. I'd you're sick enough to need one, wouldn't we just give you a mechanical temporary replacement, and keep that one going as high as possible instead as low as possible?
Is anyone surprised that surviving traumatic surgery with a long debilitating recovery time causes mental stress?
No, but some of the references reports and studies (referenced in the above study), if truthful, would be too much of a coincidence, no?
> a heart and lung transplant at Yale-New Haven hospital in 1988. Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets”
> a 5-year-old boy received the heart of a 3-year-old boy but was not informed about his donor’s age or cause of death. Despite this lack of information, he provided a vivid description of his donor after the surgery: “He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore though” (p. 70, [8]). Subsequently it was reported that his donor had died after falling from an apartment window while trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen onto the window ledge. After receiving his new heart, the recipient refused to touch or play with Power Rangers
I'm sure there might be other explanations to all of these, but at least people are trying to study it more.
Again, not claiming "memory sits in the heart", just that it wouldn't be surprising if there was more to it than just in the brain itself.
I once realized that the “snowball” of dread/fear in my chest was likely a minor irregular heartbeat (that I’ve always had) exacerbated in stressful situations.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711021v1
https://www.sciencealert.com/worms-can-share-memories-of-a-b...
In machine learning terms, we've basically got a layer or two of neurons responsible for physical memory stored outside the brain, sure. But it's out of dozens if not hundreds total.
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
[1] https://www.peterputnam.org/outline-of-a-functional-model-of...
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf
Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
A lot of good, creative ideas have been called out and derived as nonsense or crazy. Many still are.
But when we discover new information, we must decide whether the information is useful. Otherwise the information is considered noise.
We give weight to decisions: time spent pondering, considering, and the more weight we give, the better the decision. Almost always the idea is measured in usefulness.
Sound familiar?
One could argue from a religious standpoint that creativity requires a spark of divinity.
One could argue from a naturalist standpoint that natural selection has been a creative process in which nature tries random things until they stick for no purpose that we can directly observe.
One could argue from a platonic standpoint that creativity in this realm of existence is merely the process of approximating ideal forms.
I'd wager that creativity is a human construct and therefore up to interpretation. Kinda like how the ancient greeks didn't have as many colors words as we did. Was it because they couldn't see all the colors we could see? No, it was because in their opinion only certain color words were necessary to discuss what was important.
>>>They're made out of weights...