MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory.
via MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons | ExtremeTech.
HT to Tom via Fb for this.
This is really, really cool and no doubt will help to fight certain diseases. Could this mean, then, that we could harvest these neurons from the dead and incubate them into live brains and have the memories kept safe?
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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The question that I have is how might memory contamination or corruption play into our visualizations of memories and how might that undermine attempts to store them beyond our bodies, since our memories are no doubt subject to our perceptions. Or, conversely, do these stored memories provide exact detail about the events? This is what I wonder.