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Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

picower.mit.edu

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Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#31

Post by plutonorm »

gryn wrote: post #19

this reminds of a brain fart I had long time ago back when I was taking an EE course about electromagnetic compatibility & interference. how resilient is the brain and it's surrounding casing to outside electromagnetic interference ? can there one day be some jamming tool strong enough to just crash a brain without doing physical damage first ? where it would just brick a human, but a physician examining it would fin…

I read a paper a long time ago that recorded the brain waves from one person doing a skilled task and then played that recording to an unskilled person as they performed the same task. They replayed the electromagnetic field of the skilled person on the outside of the skull of an unskilled person.

They found that there was an improvement in skill levels in the untrained person. Intriguing.

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#32

Post by Angostura »

If this is correct, might it explain how and why electroconvulsive therapy works and how it can lead to the loss of memory. Presumably it would completely disrupt the stable memory field, even if it left the physical structures intact. The brain woul be reconstructing the field from first principles.

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#33

Post by shepardrtc »

mateo1 wrote: post #27

Although it is a very interesting paper, and I am by no means qualified to even understand half of it, while reading up representational drift I was much more convinced by another (and a bit more recent) paper portraying the phenomenon as a way for the brain to switch up the physical layout of the firing neurons in a redundant population without altering the output. All that possibly for biological reasons (ie dead n…

Was this the paper you're speaking of?

"Self-healing codes: How stable neural populations can track continually reconfiguring neural representations": https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2106692119

It came out about a month ago, and I've just started reading it. But it talks about neural drift, and they actually were able to create a model for it.

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#34

Post by shaky-carrousel »

taberiand wrote: post #18
miamalkova wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electric field is generated by neurons as they fire action potentials, but it is rather the aggregate electrical activity that is used to represent memories, rather than the summative signals from individual neurons.

And if I understood the article correctly, the important idea is that the field is (relatively) stable even as the underlying neurons involved change and they don't even have to be the same neurons involved for the same memory field. The illusion of a stable single entity emergent from the constant flux of billions of individual living units linked through trillions of connections is in my opinion the answer to the q…

Neurons don't know they form part of a consciousness. On the other hand, we can't communicate with our neurons. It could be that an emergent consciousness exists for which we are the neurons and neither it knows we exist or we know it exists.

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#35

Post by broose_goose »

plutonorm wrote: post #31
gryn wrote: post #19

this reminds of a brain fart I had long time ago back when I was taking an EE course about electromagnetic compatibility & interference. how resilient is the brain and it's surrounding casing to outside electromagnetic interference ? can there one day be some jamming tool strong enough to just crash a brain without doing physical damage first ? where it would just brick a human, but a physician examining it would fin…

I read a paper a long time ago that recorded the brain waves from one person doing a skilled task and then played that recording to an unskilled person as they performed the same task. They replayed the electromagnetic field of the skilled person on the outside of the skull of an unskilled person. They found that there was an improvement in skill levels in the untrained person. Intriguing.

Does this imply that the brain might communicate with other parts of the brain “asynchronously over a network” through EMF?

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#36

Post by porkbrain »

gryn wrote: post #19

this reminds of a brain fart I had long time ago back when I was taking an EE course about electromagnetic compatibility & interference. how resilient is the brain and it's surrounding casing to outside electromagnetic interference ? can there one day be some jamming tool strong enough to just crash a brain without doing physical damage first ? where it would just brick a human, but a physician examining it would fin…

There's a behavioural neuroscience method you might be interested in:

> Watch Nancy's brain get zapped with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Measuring neural activity (with fMRI, MEG, ERPs, etc) cannot tell you which brain regions or neural responses are necessary for a given aspect of perception or cognition. To find out if a region is necessary, you have to mess with it. One method to do this in humans is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

http://nancysbraintalks.mit.edu/video/watch-nancys-brain-get...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimul...

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#37

Post by akomtu »

A probably related observation found on the wikipedia page about sonoluminescene that oscillations driven by an external periodic force often have a more stable period than the external force. In this case a neuron is a driving force and the magnetic field is the oscillating "water" that has a period more stable, and thus preserves information better than the neuron itself.

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#38

Post by _yoqn »

This may be too meta for this forum, but I would like to point out that the brain theory as a whole has become so incomprehensibly complex that I am beginning to think that the brain has little to do with intention and memory storage.

Point in fact: as we are now hundreds of years into medical research and we still can't figure out how the brain stores memory. Or what physical structure a memory even is. And I am supposed to believe this all happened by accident? Who is driving the upward development of life if the physical universe tends toward chaos?

Re: Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study

#40

Post by picture »

_yoqn wrote: post #38

This may be too meta for this forum, but I would like to point out that the brain theory as a whole has become so incomprehensibly complex that I am beginning to think that the brain has little to do with intention and memory storage . Point in fact: as we are now hundreds of years into medical research and we still can't figure out how the brain stores memory. Or what physical structure a memory even is. And I am su…

Do you suggest intention and memory storage arise from soul or other non physical phenomena?
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