from Hacker News

Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds

by vivekd on 11/9/24, 1:53 PM with 115 comments

  • by neom on 11/9/24, 2:48 PM

    The Body Keeps the Score is a brilliant but difficult read. Do recommend it.

    https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score...

  • by ants_everywhere on 11/9/24, 4:46 PM

    This study is specifically about "learning" that takes place without interacting with the brain.

    It's learning in the same sense the immune system learns to fight of infections. The difference is that the mechanism by which cells record state is similar to one of the mechanisms also used by the brain at the cellular level, which you would expect.

    The cells and structures that make up the brain evolved from simpler structures, so we would expect some reuse of mechanism.

  • by cantrevealname on 11/9/24, 4:50 PM

    This brings up the question about whether there are hereditary information transmission methods other than DNA. There are so many things we ascribe to “instinct” that might be information transmitted from parent to offspring in some encoded format.

    Like songs that newborn songbirds know, migration routes that animals know without being shown, that a mother dog should break the amniotic sac to release the puppies inside, what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.

    It seems it implausible to me that all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling; it seems to require much more complex encoding of information, pattern matching, templates, and/or memory.

  • by filoeleven on 11/9/24, 6:00 PM

    This topic is related to the work of Michael Levin’s lab, which I only recently found out about and have been digging into. They’ve released a bunch of papers, and Michael has given plenty of in-depth interviews available on YouTube. They’re looking at low-level structures like cells and asking “what can be learned/achieved by viewing these structures as being intelligent agents?” The problem of memory is tied intricately with intelligence, and examples of it at these low levels are found throughout their work.

    The results of their experiments are surprising and intriguing: bringing cancer cells back into proper functioning, “anthrobots” self-assembling from throat tissue cells, malformed tadpoles becoming normal frogs, cells induced to make an eye by recruiting their neighbors…

    An excerpt from the link below: Our main model system is morphogenesis: the ability of multicellular bodies to self-assemble, repair, and improvise novel solutions to anatomical goals. We ask questions about the mechanisms required to achieve robust, multiscale, adaptive order in vivo, and about the algorithms sufficient to reproduce this capacity in other substrates. One of our unique specialties is the study of developmental bioelectricity: ways in which all cells connect in somatic electrical networks that store, process, and act on information to control large-scale body structure. Our lab creates and employs tools to read and edit the bioelectric code that guides the proto-cognitive computations of the body, much as neuroscientists are learning to read and write the mental content of the brain.

    https://drmichaellevin.org/

  • by Vecr on 11/9/24, 6:30 PM

    People are saying very weird things in the comments. To the extent that epigenetics transfers at all, they can't go very far.

    For past-life memories, uh no.

    For memories in non-brain tissues, there's a major detail problem there, if any of this pans out at all. For memories transferred from another person, it makes no sense. Your nerves don't transfer universal (between human) data files around, and your brain is a tangled mess. Memories won't transfer beyond, maybe, possibly, some stuff around personality, mood, and various neurotransmitter things.

    And I don't think it would be common, if it happens at all, without intentional development and use of new tech.

    For example it should theoretically be possible to recover the basic personality of a cryogenically vitrified brain, based quite a bit on genetics and some on brain structure, but beyond that I can't say. Unless you know many things I don't, and have carefully checked that you truly know them, you should not expect memory recovery, at least above the low double digits percentage.

    And that's assuming "full technology", I for sure don't know to even get started.

  • by whoisjuan on 11/9/24, 3:06 PM

    This is wild, but many studies have reached the same conclusion.

    I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.

  • by jbverschoor on 11/9/24, 6:27 PM

    Haven't read it myself, but heard about it many times. "The Body Remembers" ( https://www.amazon.com/Body-Remembers-Psychophysiology-Treat... )

  • by RaftPeople on 11/9/24, 3:36 PM

    This seems to make sense given that Purkinje cells in the brain have been shown to do this same type of thing in isolation (detect and respond to patterns of input).

    It meant there was some low level mechanism lurking inside at least those cells, so not too surprising it's more general.

  • by trallnag on 11/9/24, 7:56 PM

    Interesting, reminds me of this article "Previous sexual partners affect offspring": https://time.com/3461485/how-previous-sexual-partners-affect...

    For example, if a female first has sex with very large virile males and absorbs their sperm packages and then gets fertilized by a tiny frail male, the offspring's size is on the larger side, determined by the previous sexual encounters.

    Not sure if there has been any followup on this research.

    https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12373

  • by mmooss on 11/9/24, 6:24 PM

  • by 66yatman on 11/20/24, 2:19 PM

    If you cut off your legs will you forget part of your life?

  • by nitwit005 on 11/9/24, 7:14 PM

    The headline is nonsense. That the body "remembers" things is not news. My immune system remembers the cold I got.

    The source study states:

    > Our findings show that canonical features of memory do not necessarily depend on neural circuitry, but can be embedded in the dynamics of signaling cascades conserved across different cell types.

  • by alyx on 11/9/24, 10:46 PM

    The physical body is what the mental state (ex, memories) "looks like" from a third person perspective.

  • by the__alchemist on 11/9/24, 2:54 PM

    I'm having a hard time garnering a mechanism from the article, but I think DNA methylation is a good candidate.

  • by readthenotes1 on 11/9/24, 5:58 PM

    "massed space effect" Obfuscation of cramming vs repetition (like graduated recall interval) training

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34519968/

  • by numewhodis on 11/9/24, 6:33 PM

    Which is why it is important to eat right and listen to the body. Memories can be activated without awareness, anywhere in the head, modulating the deliberate cognitive processing as well as whatever happens "in the back of the head".

  • by bookstore-romeo on 11/9/24, 9:36 PM

    Past conversation [0] on a SciAm article about basal cognition. I highly recommend the article [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127028

  • by pvaldes on 11/10/24, 2:30 PM

    The article does not talk about what most people would call memory, really.

    Is also written in an obfuscated way, that is often a red flag. Some of the phrases seem more created by AI than for humans.

  • by chapulin on 11/12/24, 9:22 PM

    The Embodied Mind by Thomas Verny is another great read on this theme. It's about cellular memory/cognition.

  • by htk on 11/9/24, 3:39 PM

    Of course cells and tissues react to external stimuli, that's part of the homeostasis process, and a fundamental part of our adaptivity or we'd die with minimal changes in the environment. Calling it memory is the same as saying a bruise is my body having a memory of me hitting the corner of the table. Well toned bodies are the memories of the weight lifting exercises they've performed in the past, and so on.

    But I can only imagine the extrapolations that alternative medicine people will make with this.

  • by mettamage on 11/9/24, 8:34 PM

    Mitochondria are alive (also on the front page), memories are not only in the brain

    What's next?

    Exciting titles, I wonder what's behind them.

  • by soared on 11/9/24, 4:00 PM

    It does not seem like the article supports the title. The study seems more focused on spaced repetition?

  • by grugagag on 11/9/24, 3:39 PM

    Is muscle memory real then?

  • by transfire on 11/9/24, 7:11 PM

    Well L. Ron got that one right.

  • by dabinat on 11/10/24, 12:12 AM

    I had a 6-hour surgery a few years ago, for which I was unconscious. When I awoke, my butt hurt (that’s not where the surgery was) such that it was difficult to sit on hard chairs for 3 or 4 days. It was explained to me that although I was unconscious, my body still knew what was going on and was tensing up during the surgery. I thought it was interesting that my body had trauma from an event that my brain couldn’t remember.

  • by szundi on 11/9/24, 5:11 PM

    Is this epigenetics?

  • by xyst on 11/9/24, 7:30 PM

    In so many words, this study basically described the immune system. Similar mechanism to how immune system is able to identify foreign bodies (virus, bacteria) and issue the appropriate response.

    Fundamental building blocks for vaccines.