Lynn Margulis was a huge proponent of the idea that speciation happens mostly via symbiogenesis and cross-species gene transfer as opposed to natural selection. This virus-like cell, while admittedly still not well understood, seems like the kind of thing she would point to as an example of different forms of life merging to create new higher-level lifeforms.
Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules
#22This gets towards an answer to the question I've always posed to computer scientists seeking to emulate brain function in a program: what is the basic unit of memory? When you drill down to the fundamentals of computer science you get to the bit; all complex data is essentially a representation on top of bits. I've always wondered what the quantum of human memory is though. What's the smallest thing that you can reme…
Have you read "In Search of Memory" by Kandel? It's half autobiography half exploration of that question. His studies on this topic won him a Nobel, and his life story is fascinating to boot!
Re: Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules
#23This gets towards an answer to the question I've always posed to computer scientists seeking to emulate brain function in a program: what is the basic unit of memory? When you drill down to the fundamentals of computer science you get to the bit; all complex data is essentially a representation on top of bits. I've always wondered what the quantum of human memory is though. What's the smallest thing that you can reme…
How do you define memory?
If you mean, "knowledge of the past" then even the simple neural nets of today exhibit memory when they can recognize your face.
So where does this face recognizing neural net store information about eyes, ears, noses, etc? That information is part of the neural net but it's distributed across all the neurons.
This type of memory system is much closer to how memory in the real brain works.
Re: Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules
#24This gets towards an answer to the question I've always posed to computer scientists seeking to emulate brain function in a program: what is the basic unit of memory? When you drill down to the fundamentals of computer science you get to the bit; all complex data is essentially a representation on top of bits. I've always wondered what the quantum of human memory is though. What's the smallest thing that you can reme…
How do you define memory? If you mean, "knowledge of the past" then even the simple neural nets of today exhibit memory when they can recognize your face. So where does this face recognizing neural net store information about eyes, ears, noses, etc? That information is part of the neural net but it's distributed across all the neurons. This type of memory system is much closer to how memory in the real brain works.
But what if that's only one mechanism? What if some information is stored in DNA or RNA? And what if that can be copied and stored in other cells too? What if each neuron could store even kilobits of data in it's DNA? Capacity per neuron goes up by a few orders of magnitude.
Re: Brain Cells Share Information with Virus-Like Capsules
#25disclaimer: only read the abstract. The original paper, linked in the article mentions the mRNA messaging. Intuitively that roughly makes sense -- other cells might have the luxury of being able to directly talk to each other, through physical contact or proximity, but with neurons that is made more difficult due to the possibility of extending electric signals. So carrying information through mRNA might work, but I…
mRNA can be re-used by the target cells. It could be an amplification mechanism (assuming fan-out distribution).