

Scientists Claim Brain Memory Code Cracked - 6 bit bytes - edderly
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120309103701.htm

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zerostar07
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.

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treeface
As is often the case, a Reddit comment is more illuminating than the article:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qqg5y/scientists_cl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/qqg5y/scientists_claim_brain_memory_code_cracked/c3zns04)

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pak
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.

This is the dingding step of the eternally true
<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174>

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Mizza
Extremely exciting! It's in PLoS, so the paper should be freely available as
well.

Interesting that it's 6 dimensional, this figure shows up often in the brain:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell>

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seiji
The full article text is at
[http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002421)
(yay PLoS!) -- read the inline Abstract and Author Summary to get a better
description than the sciencedaily spam.

Sadly, nobody can crack the thought process of whoever designed
sciencedaily.com (three equal width columns? 10% content and 90% blogvomit?).

~~~
sbierwagen
Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet? Anybody know?

Incidentally, I've flagged so many physorg submissions that the flag link has
been disabled for my account.

~~~
seiji
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.

~~~
bhousel
_> 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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I lost mine recently too. I'd been trying to keep the number of political
stories down as they very rarely have any useful discussion.

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notJim
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.

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pslam
The most interesting bit for me is the estimate for total capacity, which is
~10^19 bits.

That's about 2^63 bits, 2^60 8-bit bytes, 1 exabyte, or (probably) the sum of
all Google data centers, in one brain.

~~~
moe
Which means in a couple decades it will fit on a thumbdrive.

~~~
ramblerman
Except it will actually be a _thumb_ drive

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vannevar
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?

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mathattack
Wow! Unclear if this is fact but 2 things surprised me.

\- I wasn't convinced it would be base 2.

\- I thought if it was, base 8 made more intuitive sense.

The former mistaken opinion was a caution against viewing the world as
computable. The latter was not heeding the caution.

Mother nature works in mysterious ways.

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verelo
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.

~~~
MichaelApproved
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.

~~~
kenrikm
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.

~~~
verelo
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

~~~
MichaelApproved
I'd say everything is private by default and we actively have to make
something public. Like sand boxing. Oh man, never mind.

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alinajaf
It would be significantly more interesting if they were 6 _qubit_ bytes.

~~~
sharkbot
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...

~~~
X4
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.

more <http://t.co/cVXRj0F6> and <http://t.co/seWjurbW>

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tybris
So my brain uses base64 encoding? Didn't see that coming.

