A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions • Hacker News Board

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#51

Post by daniel-cussen » Tue, May 03, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

exitheone wrote: post #40

phantompeace wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Created an account to say that this post has probably changed my life. What an extremely interesting thought.

Keep in mind that this comment is in no way even a tiny bit compatible with our current understanding of how the brain works. Treat it as a good sci-fi plot.

Yeah well that's what I did, but by sci-fi plot standards it had a huge amount of merit and originality.

This isn't a peer-reviewed journal, nor the Bible. And your comment contributes too, by pointing out it isn't consistent with Western medicine. You're helping the reader who happened to buy into that, not to try combining it with scientific mainstream things, not talk about it at the water cooler, and not talk about it for instance when being psychologically evaluated. Like even if the psych likes you if you say things like that it's out of his hands and he has to flunk you. That's the mistake Feynman made, he talks about flunking a psych exam for the military, but like full-on full F, like they used special words to describe how poor they judged his mind to be, and then he replied to them accepting the F and asking to be flunked harder on the basis it was clearly crazy to write them that letter.

And he was constantly thinking about the fabric of the universe, entertained many wild theories to arrive at sound ones, I'm sure of that.

But yeah, thanks for saying that, in case readers didn't take that comment with a grain of salt. Yours was the grain of salt.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#52

Post by IIAOPSW » Tue, May 03, 2022, 11:56 PM UTC

miika wrote: post #27

There is also another model about memory which I totally love. In that memory is not stored but brain is more like an antenna which can retrieve information from the space time coordinates where events actually took place. Because everything is constantly moving around something each event in the universe probably has unique location, a real physical place where it happened. So, the idea is that as we’re moving throu…

This is quantum woo fueled neo cartesian dualist bullocks. Sorry not sorry. For starters, if events in space and any point in time are accessible as "memories", the laws of physics that enable that shouldn't constrain the only application to memory. The same physical mechanism would have to enable telepathy and even time travel. Secondly, it violates the whole "no hidden variables" results from recent Bell inequality QM experiments. Third of all, it requires long term stable room temperature entanglement basically everywhere (HAHAHA LOL NO). Fourth, it flies in the face of what we do know about how neurons compute things vis a vis signal spikes and activation potentials. Fifth, it fails to account for the numerous, reproducible experiments demonstrating the creation of erroneous memories made from whole cloth. Need I go on?

I can't believe this comment isn't buried. Its one thing to engage in a bit of rank speculation outside your specialty, but this is straight-up crackpot science.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#53

Post by sva_ » Wed, May 04, 2022, 12:20 AM UTC

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #14

axg11 wrote: post #4

Disclaimer: I know brain != deep learning neural nets. We do have a lot of evidence that the brain is _some_ type of network with analogue qualities. Does it even make sense to say that a memory is stored somewhere in a specific region, if the brain is an analogue network? A property of analogue networks is that all nodes make a contribution, even if many of the contributions are infinitesimally small. The equivalent…

I don't have any clear answers for you, but one interesting note here is that a recent paper showed that it took a deep neural net to be able to simulate the "IO" of a single cortical neuron. So that should give you some idea of the complexity involved compared to artificial neural nets, Re: your disclaimer. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08966...

> A temporally convolutional DNN with five to eight layers was required to capture the I/O mapping of a realistic model of a layer 5 cortical pyramidal cell (L5PC).

> When NMDA receptors were removed, a much simpler network (fully connected neural network with one hidden layer) was sufficient to fit the model.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#54

Post by Eldt » Wed, May 04, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

daniel-cussen wrote: post #51

exitheone wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that this comment is in no way even a tiny bit compatible with our current understanding of how the brain works. Treat it as a good sci-fi plot.

Yeah well that's what I did, but by sci-fi plot standards it had a huge amount of merit and originality. This isn't a peer-reviewed journal, nor the Bible. And your comment contributes too, by pointing out it isn't consistent with Western medicine. You're helping the reader who happened to buy into that, not to try combining it with scientific mainstream things, not talk about it at the water cooler, and not talk abo…

I don't think science, and the application of the scientific method, can be fairly categorised as "western medicine". We all have shower thoughts but I keep mine to myself, at least until I can actually demonstrate something with it.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#55

Post by sfink » Wed, May 04, 2022, 1:00 AM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #22

I've long suspected that memory storage in brains is holograph-like, with each neuron storing bits of many memories.

Same here. But I wouldn't use the word 'holographic', since it's now too associated with junk science and New Age crap. Even if it does happen to nicely capture the meaning.

Put simply: if you have two related concepts, say "car" and "truck", then it makes a lot more sense to me that they'd be represented by similar weights among a collection of neurons, than if each concept got its own single neuron (or handful of distinct neurons scattered throughout various functional parts of the brain.) If you did that, you'd need to explicitly encode the various similarities and differences. It would take time for priming to travel from one thing to all the related things. There would be no or limited redundancy. Forking off a concept (eg with language, learning a synonym) would have to be some explicit process.

With an aggregate representation, you get all of that automatically. When you're thinking "car", you're 70% also thinking "truck". You can evolve your understanding freely without breaking anything, you can split and merge representations, etc.

It kind of seems obvious to me, which is no proof that it's correct. I'm reading Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" right now, and it's a brilliant book yet I feel like this representation would convert many of his puzzled observations into unavoidable consequences.

Separately, I think there's less of a distinction between memory, recall, and actual experience than this paper makes out. They feel the same because in the brain, they are (mostly) the same. And there's more of a distinction between memories of different things. I expect to find very different brain regions involved in memories of pain vs movement vs vision vs procedural knowledge etc., because much of the memory will be in the neurons directly linked to the relevant sensors or actuators. (As above, the memory is the experience, or at least it overlaps substantially.) Sure, there will be overlap across all those, but that's not because it's the One True Memory Region, it's just that there's a generic component to any memory (or rather, anything that we would refer to as "a memory".)

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#56

Post by eyelidlessness » Wed, May 04, 2022, 1:20 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #52

miika wrote: post #27

There is also another model about memory which I totally love. In that memory is not stored but brain is more like an antenna which can retrieve information from the space time coordinates where events actually took place. Because everything is constantly moving around something each event in the universe probably has unique location, a real physical place where it happened. So, the idea is that as we’re moving throu…

This is quantum woo fueled neo cartesian dualist bullocks. Sorry not sorry. For starters, if events in space and any point in time are accessible as "memories", the laws of physics that enable that shouldn't constrain the only application to memory. The same physical mechanism would have to enable telepathy and even time travel. Secondly, it violates the whole "no hidden variables" results from recent Bell inequality…

This would be a much more valuable and informative comment if it wasn’t so wrapped in self-aware rude delivery. Saying so as someone who is prone to make that mistake.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#57

Post by astrange » Wed, May 04, 2022, 1:28 AM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #39

lm28469 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As developer I think it would make most sense to only save references rather than trying store all events inside everyones brains. That would be huge waste of resources and just damn stupid. > And probably the way we humans have built our computers also reflects how the universe really works, because after all we are bits of the universe doing whatever the universe is doing. I think this is way too simplistic. Just…

Helicopters kind of fly like birds don’t they?

They're more like maple seeds.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#58

Post by jerry1979 » Wed, May 04, 2022, 2:20 AM UTC

Eldt wrote: post #54

daniel-cussen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah well that's what I did, but by sci-fi plot standards it had a huge amount of merit and originality. This isn't a peer-reviewed journal, nor the Bible. And your comment contributes too, by pointing out it isn't consistent with Western medicine. You're helping the reader who happened to buy into that, not to try combining it with scientific mainstream things, not talk about it at the water cooler, and not talk abo…

I don't think science, and the application of the scientific method, can be fairly categorised as "western medicine". We all have shower thoughts but I keep mine to myself, at least until I can actually demonstrate something with it.

Do you at least write them down for yourself?

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#59

Post by taosx » Wed, May 04, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #56

IIAOPSW wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quantum woo fueled neo cartesian dualist bullocks. Sorry not sorry. For starters, if events in space and any point in time are accessible as "memories", the laws of physics that enable that shouldn't constrain the only application to memory. The same physical mechanism would have to enable telepathy and even time travel. Secondly, it violates the whole "no hidden variables" results from recent Bell inequality…

This would be a much more valuable and informative comment if it wasn’t so wrapped in self-aware rude delivery. Saying so as someone who is prone to make that mistake.

The value and information of @IIAOPSW comment is just gold when you compare it to the primary one. The delivery brings additional value corresponding to the absurdity of the post.

Re: A single memory is stored across many connected brain regions

#60

Post by IIAOPSW » Wed, May 04, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #56

IIAOPSW wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quantum woo fueled neo cartesian dualist bullocks. Sorry not sorry. For starters, if events in space and any point in time are accessible as "memories", the laws of physics that enable that shouldn't constrain the only application to memory. The same physical mechanism would have to enable telepathy and even time travel. Secondly, it violates the whole "no hidden variables" results from recent Bell inequality…

This would be a much more valuable and informative comment if it wasn’t so wrapped in self-aware rude delivery. Saying so as someone who is prone to make that mistake.

Its one thing to make an honest mistake, its another thing to make half-baked conjectures about entire swaths of research fields where people have made careers and wrote full-baked PhD thesis's. Its frankly disrespectful to everyone's time when someone who hasn't even tried to be reasonably informed makes up some random explanation for everything and presents it as if their "insight" is worth anything whatsoever. My rudeness is on par and in response to rudeness. Failing to make bullshit feel unwelcome in the most uncertain terms is nothing more than an invitation for more bullshit.