Once again misleading title. They did some modeling that shows that it might be possible to use CaMK2 to store information on microtubule lattices. That's purely simulations that show possible interactions between two proteins. No experiments were performed and they did not set out to break the brain code. There are no experiments that show information encoding in microtubules. CaMK2 is known to be involved in plasticity (in spine shape modifications via actin dynamics), but microtubules are assumed to be in the dendritic shafts only thus isolated from phosphorylated CaMK2. It would be worth to investigate further though.
FTFA: Hameroff, senior author on the study, said "...We MAY have a GLIMPSE of the brain's biomolecular code for memory."
I know Hacker News prefers the original headline, but there has to be an exception for ScienceDaily, PhysOrg, and any other blog that tries to write linkbait summaries of peer-reviewed research articles.
If it's any consolation, my flag link vanished a long time ago after I went on a "purge all the self-promotional infidels" jihad last year.
I consider it a badge of honor to have restricted features but still have a working account. They care enough to limit us, but they don't want us completely gone.
I'm torn on the subject of sciencedaily. Without the linkbait-y headline, I doubt this paper would have any attention here. They should turn into a HN-like site with links to articles, then give each link a short (under 100 words) lay person description not just copy/pasted from the article (maybe even with linkbait conclusions). Sometimes you have to bend the truth (i.e. marketing) if you want people to get excited about your work.
>I consider it a badge of honor to have restricted features but still have a working account. They care enough to limit us, but they don't want us completely gone.
Hey, that's a nice way of looking at it.. I lost my flag link during "bitcoin week" last summer.
I guess loss of flagging rights might be due to flagging highly upvoted articles. Maybe searching for less popular articles from these spammy sources, and flagging those, would be a viable strategy.
The headline of the submission seems misleading. It sounds like scientists have theorized a plausible model for how the brain stores information, not that they actually tested this in vivo.
FTA: [S]ynaptic components are short-lived while memories last lifetimes. This suggests synaptic information is encoded and hard-wired at a deeper, finer-grained molecular scale.
It suggests nothing of the sort. It just as easily could mean that memories are stored at a shallower, coarser-grained scale. Raindrops are short-lived, yet rivers last thousands of years. Does that mean we can't model hydrodynamics without accounting for quantum mechanics in the H2O molecule?
Pretty cool. I cant wait for bio-hardware to become the norm. The day of a laptop that has never ending storage that self heals (assuming there are no nasty laptop eating viruses/bacteria around) could be very handy.
Do you want a laptop that remembers what you want or that _approximately_ remembers what you want ? Photos, Movies and songs may make good storage media for bio-hardware, but documents and other information critical stuff can not be replaced by biology.
But you can turn a hard drive off and stop having to feed it power, then come back to it months later to recover the data. You can't stop feeding biohardware, it would decay and decompose.
We're actually building a giant brain; the Internet /is/ a global collective consciousness. You should check out Serial Experiments Lain and Eden of the East :)
We're actually building a giant brain; the Internet /is/ a global collective consciousness.
Well, we WERE building a global collective consciousness in the form of the internet, but the World Wide Web, and especially cat videos, put an end to it.
Or what if, instead of connecting biochemical to hardware, you connect hardware to your biochemical body. Add wifi and you're connected to everything, anytime you want.
Exactly - you just need to think "What's the square root of 459683" this queries the internet returns the result and the answer is instantly relayed to your mind. Just imagine you could think (open the garage door) and it would happen.
Having to formulate the query is too primitive ;) When you need to know the result, the brain probably does a memory "lookup" subconsciously (if I see e.g. 3x3, I know the result without having to calculate it), so that could be routed through the digital system and the result returned as if it was a memory. You'd just "know".
after some of the days i feel we all go though, it concerns me that people might know how many times i wanted to stab someone...
lets shelve this, we're already failing at online privacy...this wont help...unless i can think "this is a private thought" and it actually be private haha
Prepare to be assimilated. Resistance is futile!
--
On a serious note, I love the technology like any other guy. But there will be this nagging issues about privacy. We would need to give up some parts of our lives, but who draws the line and where..
I was just about to comment upon the inclusion of Hameroff in the author list. Penrose and Hameroff are pushing a notion that the brain utilizes quantum coherence to perform computation inside these microtubules, resulting in human consciousness.
There is very little evidence for this conjecture, but Penrose and Hameroff are convinced. Make sure to keep Hameroff's bias in mind when reading this paper...
Regarding bias, I read somewhere that Numenta claims that the can built conciousness.. however regardless of that it's still quite interesting to see progress in Neural Networks.
They say: They found the key for a new learning algorithm that automatically finds patterns in streams of data and predicts what is likely to occur next.
