X-Message-Number: 26287 Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 08:48:18 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: comments to all readers re 2 brain msgs Hi everyone! For Coetzee: Larry Squire, his books and his work, have gotten discussion in PERIASTRON for some time. However the work you discuss does not tell us where long term personal memories are stored; it would be more accurate to say that it gives one brain area in which they are NOT permanently stored. Squire, who has access to many brain-injured human patients, has made good use of that access to answer questions about how our memories work. The work you quote is another good example. Lots of questions remain here. Do we store parts of such memories in brain regions controlling different senses (ie. visual parts in our visual system, noises in our hearing areas, etc etc) or in one place where they're all linked together? If they are stored separately in different sensory regions, what system joins them together; if they are stored together, what system(s) connect them with the sense impressions involved? As most cryonicists should know, many of our memories are newly reconstructed when we remember them: a fact well-known to lawyers and judges (at least some) who know that anyone who claims to remember an incident needs to be questioned carefully to tell how much of that memory may actually be falsely reconstructed. At the same time we can sometimes have vivid and correct personal memories, particularly when our feelings and person were actually involved. Just how such differences in accuracy of memories arise remains yet another question. Naturally it's normal to believe that our memories are always completely accurate. To Jonathan: One problem cryonicists have which most brain researchers don't have is that our resources are small and numbers are relatively few. I peronally would strongly agree that an Allen Brain Map would help a lot in recovering brain-damaged patients --- probably not enough to be identified with means to recovery, but still a great deal. It will likely tell us how to rebuild fragments of neurons, and give them connections close to those they originally had. These would be valuable steps toward recovering memories, for instance; but a little thought will also tell us that they may well not be enough for total recovery, or even recovery of a high proportion. We will probably need to know close to a detailed version of the connections of an individual person's brain, which necessarily must differ in detail from the connections of any other person's brain. The memories of each person are somehow stored in the connections of their brain cells, and therefore those connections will differ. A very thorough brain map, of course, would not just give a map in the sense of a map of a town, but also information about how a synapse between 2 different neurons (of the same or different kinds) changes the chemistry of each one. Such information, if available, would considerably help recover memories. Should cryonicists actually contribute to such studies? Given our resources, at least for now, we'll have to leave such studies to neuroscientists with much more funding to do them. Nothing prevents us, of course, from watching with intense interest and knowledge of neuroscience to mach that interest. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26287