One of Salvador Dali’s greatest paintings is called “The Persistence of Memory”. Last week the results of a new study were published in Science magazine that conclusively prove the physical nature of that persistence. In what other scientists have called a ‘foundational study’ a team of researchers from America and Israel have discovered and documented the physical nature of memory.
In the study, the researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy. Evidently this implanting of electrodes is standard procedure as it allows doctors to pinpoint the brain activity that cause epileptic seizures. These patients watched 5 to 10 second film clips. The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person, all of which were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a part of the brain know to be critical for memory.
The researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one of the videos shown. Then after distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to recall the video clips and asked them to comment on “what comes to mind”. Most of the patients remembered the clips and most importantly the same cells that had been active during the viewing again became active. Additionally these cells became active a second or two before the patients were conscious of the memory.
What this means is that the cells that participated in the experience became the physical repository of the memory of the experience, and in fact fired up at the request to recall the experience. In addition, it was clear that the physical recollection of the memory started at the cellular level before that memory became conscious. In other words, memory has been physically located for the first time.
Now, this experiment focused on the short term memory of the patients. However it does indicate that it might be similar for long term memory. When a distant memory is provoked and comes to mind it is now probable to predict that those neurons that were most active when the event happened are the ones that fire up during the recollection.
Now, I am not a brain scientist so I cannot comprehend much more than the significance of the study. The long term significance is transformational.. Combining it with all the innovation and breakthroughs going on in neuroscience, micro chip manufacture and nanotechnology there are some predictable breakthroughs ahead in the coming decades. If we know that a human has a high probability of developing Alzheimer’s disease or that someone is entering an age triggered time of senility, we might well be able to extract the memories, back them up if you will, on an external – or internal - device, to keep all that person’s memories alive.
Expand that vision to a family, nation or global level and we can begin to capture the collective memory of humanity. No longer will experienced events of the past become ruled by interpretive historians, they can be relived through the memories of those that actually lived through the experiences. By 2025 well should be able to catalogue human memories so that, in centuries in the future, people will be able to experientially understand and relive the times of our children and grandchildren.
It is breakthrough research projects like this that truly point the way to the human transformation that lies ahead in this new Shift Age.
My theory is that what to us are memories are stored as physical relationships, patterns, structures, or sort of sculptures of neuron firings among the billions of electro-chemical sights of our nervous system connected to the act of memory. In other words, a "memory" is a pattern or sculpture of neuron firings which symbolized at the time, and continue to symbolize perceptual information that occurred. So, instead of a particular memory being "stored" like a text-file or treasure located around a particular location of the brain (impossible, right?), memories are instead symbolized in cognizant matter by a physical sculpture of firings, a unique relationship of firings, among base pieces - each unique memory being symbolized by a unique web of lit neurons in a unique spatial relationship. I became interested in the physical nature of memory after attending the Body Worlds exhibit on the brain and seeing a digital artists rendition of synapse firings - looked basically like millions of spider web galaxies being lit with electricity depending on the movement of thought or perceptual intake i assume. My thinking then went like: "Well if none of these particular cells, (axons, and what-not) or electricities can have any INHERENT value, (i.e. no axon can mean "dog" or "tree" or take the shape of a dog or tree in our noggins) then personal memory and thus the value, self, distinction, temporal relationships and weight ascribed to the perceived things must then be ascribed value via and interconnected webs and patterns of interrelated and connected firings. It's not stagnant you see. Memory must be more like, well "This MOVEMENT of energy in space symbolizes X in this head, while this movement of energy in space symbolizes Y" ... this movement of firings in this particular formation followed by these symbolizes x followed by y, followed by z, followed by, a.... a memory with temporal value.
I would encourage the researchers maybe to test this theory by, now that memory has been located physically of sorts, to go further by assuming memory in a sense "symbolized" physically, like writing, by spatial electro-chemical relationships on the relatively blank canvas of matter called our brain. To test, perhaps do the same sort of study but analyze the relationships among the areas of the brain that fire for a certain memory. Perhaps these relationships are how memory is stored, given value, and actually "remembered".
The Hua-Yen Buddhist Interpretation of the Physical Nature of Memory: This idea, if true, would be highly engaging to certain Buddhist philosophies that hold that existence is essentially empty of agency or a self-originating quality that we percieve and take for granted: In this sense they say the Buddha said "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." The idea here is that, in the enlightened perspective, it is realized that the things, ideas, and really everything that exists - from money and social relationships, to actual objects, personal thoughts and what we think of as our Self - is actually so interconnected with everything else that it does not actually have an existence besides / these things exist only in and through relationship with other things. Hua-Yen Buddhists believe the universe is a simultaneously interconnected mutually interdependent phenomenon where everything reflects everything else, and where one thing is simultaneously created by and creating the whole cosmos. So, about memory, to me the idea that our perception, our cherished exerience passing by moment to moment, is simply SYMBOLIZED by patterns of relationships in our brain, the idea rings jarringly familiar to this philosophy, it is empty and yet the only way it can work... ?