> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
"Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain. A discovery that helped explain those changes has earned neuroscientist Oswald Steward one of science’s highest honors.
Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories."
And that's what it took. One comment on hackernews and the prize was retracted. HN at its best! ;)
Well, it does seem that memories may be embedded in the nervous system as well as the brain, so I don’t think the OP is wrong. You sometimes hear of heart transplant patients having other people’s memories / preferences. So, it’s not good evidence, but it’s a possibility.
> Personality changes have been reported following organ transplantation. Most commonly, such changes have been described among heart transplant recipients. [...] A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 47 participants (23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients) completed an online survey. In this study, 89% of all transplant recipients reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery, which was similar for heart and other organ recipients.
Who knows the cause though, could be anything I suppose, not necessarily that "memory sits in tissue".
It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine's arsenal.
And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.
> if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
that's not obvious on the face of it from a mechanical standpoint. I'd you're sick enough to need one, wouldn't we just give you a mechanical temporary replacement, and keep that one going as high as possible instead as low as possible?
AFAIK mechanical hearts can be prone to creating blood clots and can put more stress on other parts of the body, so it's not necessarily the safest option to just run it flat out.
Just 47 participants in the online study and a wide variety of psychological issues: “depression, anxiety, psychosis, and sexual dysfunction.”. A few of them found religion.
Is anyone surprised that surviving traumatic surgery with a long debilitating recovery time causes mental stress?
> Is anyone surprised that surviving traumatic surgery with a long debilitating recovery time causes mental stress?
No, but some of the references reports and studies (referenced in the above study), if truthful, would be too much of a coincidence, no?
> a heart and lung transplant at Yale-New Haven hospital in 1988. Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets”
> a 5-year-old boy received the heart of a 3-year-old boy but was not informed about his donor’s age or cause of death. Despite this lack of information, he provided a vivid description of his donor after the surgery: “He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore though” (p. 70, [8]). Subsequently it was reported that his donor had died after falling from an apartment window while trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen onto the window ledge. After receiving his new heart, the recipient refused to touch or play with Power Rangers
I'm sure there might be other explanations to all of these, but at least people are trying to study it more.
Drugs can alter taste. I've had experience with cancer patients, and a side effect of the treament is that food starts to taste differently. Would not be surprised if the drug+treatment combo of traumatic surgery might result in something similar in some percentage of the patients.
Having a suddenly functioning heart probably does wonders for hormone levels and consequently personality.
I once realized that the “snowball” of dread/fear in my chest was likely a minor irregular heartbeat (that I’ve always had) exacerbated in stressful situations.
what do we know about memory other we think in our brains so that's where consciousness must be stored? What do we know about memory that makes that necessarily a leap? What is so special about semantic memory?
Flatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system.
Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
That's interesting, but bear in mind that sensory neurons are basically just transducers that sense something and convert it into a neural output. It makes sense that a woman's brain would find it useful to know when she is ovulating.
AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures.
The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
“A memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain” as truth statement is a basic fallacy of naive physicalism. There is no falsifiable way to ascertain in which direction causality points, nor is natural science even intended provide a definitive answer—it is designed to make predictions and any models that arise in the process are necessarily faulty and do not describe the true nature of underlying reality, which this ultimately comes down to.
Another flatworms-are-fun story: If you irradiate a flatworm using a nuclear reactor, to kill off its stem-cell equivalents, it sort of "rots" as other cells eventually die and aren't being replaced. If after zap, you insert donor stems, its life can instead proceed normally, and the entire body is eventually refreshed. So ship of Theseus like, you have an individual flatworm, swimming through its life, which ends up being genetically unrelated to its earlier self.
People love to bring this up, but while yes, all cells have some form of memory mechanism or another, with quite the number of nerves outside the brain, we are still a cognitively top-eown organism and quite unlike simpler organisms where the line is blurry.
In machine learning terms, we've basically got a layer or two of neurons responsible for physical memory stored outside the brain, sure. But it's out of dozens if not hundreds total.
This discovery fully validates the organic system side of Peter Putnam's theory on induction, the Neuro Conditioned Reflex Principle, that requires changing state at synapses over time to select the nested Relative Dominance feedback winner in a given Conditioned Reflex feedback loop. Its quite incredible that the functionality of induction proposed by Putnam in 1963 has been consistently validated since then. [1]
I think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982...
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
It used to be slower in software development as well. The internet and the exponentially increasing number of software developers accelerated it. And of course new hardware that made things practical that were only a theoretical possibility before.
True, that said, I downloaded and compiled Perl in 1987 from comp.sources.misc, even back then, things moved at light speed compared to health and medical.
I think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system is noisy, the experiments are slow and the implications may not be obvious until other pieces of the puzzle show up
It's amazing after all these years we're still so bad at improving an average person's recall, even by 50%. It feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and all we can do is spaced repetition systems, the memory palace, strong associative scents, etc
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
Great result on the biochemistry of memory storage. Then they venture into philosophy: "They still struggle to explain the spark that transforms information into insight."
Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
It still surprises me that people can complain about LLMs making things up (i.e. hallucinating), and simultaneously complain that they never produce anything original.
Creativity can be thought of as a combination of two things: A random idea generator, and a nonsense filter. Generate new random results ideas, filter out the nonsense ones, and you’ve generated good ideas.
Creativity also requires information. And Information is discovered. We can only generate random ideas from what we know. We can't imagine something we've never sensed, or know. You can't imagine a color you've never seen without recalling known colors. You can freely mix ideas due to your imagination.
But when we discover new information, we must decide whether the information is useful. Otherwise the information is considered noise.
We give weight to decisions: time spent pondering, considering, and the more weight we give, the better the decision. Almost always the idea is measured in usefulness.
IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.
One could argue from a religious standpoint that creativity requires a spark of divinity.
One could argue from a naturalist standpoint that natural selection has been a creative process in which nature tries random things until they stick for no purpose that we can directly observe.
One could argue from a platonic standpoint that creativity in this realm of existence is merely the process of approximating ideal forms.
I'd wager that creativity is a human construct and therefore up to interpretation. Kinda like how the ancient greeks didn't have as many colors words as we did. Was it because they couldn't see all the colors we could see? No, it was because in their opinion only certain color words were necessary to discuss what was important.
Yeah you should really familiarize yourself with the history of scientific achievements, it will quickly disabuse you of this notion. What separates is often a thin line and dogged persistence, hardly the chasm you make it seem.
> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
"Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain. A discovery that helped explain those changes has earned neuroscientist Oswald Steward one of science’s highest honors.
Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories."
And that's what it took. One comment on hackernews and the prize was retracted. HN at its best! ;)
Well, it does seem that memories may be embedded in the nervous system as well as the brain, so I don’t think the OP is wrong. You sometimes hear of heart transplant patients having other people’s memories / preferences. So, it’s not good evidence, but it’s a possibility.
That's quite a leap. The idea that _semantic_ memories are encoded so as to be transmissible via blobs of neural tissue stretches plausibility.
It doesn't seem so implausible: Personality Changes Associated with Organ Transplants (https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/12)
> Personality changes have been reported following organ transplantation. Most commonly, such changes have been described among heart transplant recipients. [...] A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 47 participants (23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients) completed an online survey. In this study, 89% of all transplant recipients reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery, which was similar for heart and other organ recipients.
Who knows the cause though, could be anything I suppose, not necessarily that "memory sits in tissue".
It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine's arsenal.
And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.
> if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
that's not obvious on the face of it from a mechanical standpoint. I'd you're sick enough to need one, wouldn't we just give you a mechanical temporary replacement, and keep that one going as high as possible instead as low as possible?
By the time you're that sick, you've likely had years of compromised health. That's going to affect personality to some extent.
AFAIK mechanical hearts can be prone to creating blood clots and can put more stress on other parts of the body, so it's not necessarily the safest option to just run it flat out.
Just 47 participants in the online study and a wide variety of psychological issues: “depression, anxiety, psychosis, and sexual dysfunction.”. A few of them found religion.
Is anyone surprised that surviving traumatic surgery with a long debilitating recovery time causes mental stress?
> Is anyone surprised that surviving traumatic surgery with a long debilitating recovery time causes mental stress?
No, but some of the references reports and studies (referenced in the above study), if truthful, would be too much of a coincidence, no?
> a heart and lung transplant at Yale-New Haven hospital in 1988. Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets”
> a 5-year-old boy received the heart of a 3-year-old boy but was not informed about his donor’s age or cause of death. Despite this lack of information, he provided a vivid description of his donor after the surgery: “He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore though” (p. 70, [8]). Subsequently it was reported that his donor had died after falling from an apartment window while trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen onto the window ledge. After receiving his new heart, the recipient refused to touch or play with Power Rangers
I'm sure there might be other explanations to all of these, but at least people are trying to study it more.
Drugs can alter taste. I've had experience with cancer patients, and a side effect of the treament is that food starts to taste differently. Would not be surprised if the drug+treatment combo of traumatic surgery might result in something similar in some percentage of the patients.
But this doesn't seem to be just "taste changed", but literally "taste changed to what the donor had", that's a bit different, at least in my mind.
Again, not claiming "memory sits in the heart", just that it wouldn't be surprising if there was more to it than just in the brain itself.
Having a suddenly functioning heart probably does wonders for hormone levels and consequently personality.
I once realized that the “snowball” of dread/fear in my chest was likely a minor irregular heartbeat (that I’ve always had) exacerbated in stressful situations.
what do we know about memory other we think in our brains so that's where consciousness must be stored? What do we know about memory that makes that necessarily a leap? What is so special about semantic memory?
Er no. That doesn't happen.
Memory stored in RNA is a known thing:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711021v1
https://www.sciencealert.com/worms-can-share-memories-of-a-b...
What's funnier is the implication under which the "objection" is stated, as if those researchers didn't/couldn't know it.
Flatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system.
Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
Did you know human overies contain neurons? I suppose memories are not stored there :-) but still the fact is rather surprising.
That's interesting, but bear in mind that sensory neurons are basically just transducers that sense something and convert it into a neural output. It makes sense that a woman's brain would find it useful to know when she is ovulating.
I believe there are tastebuds in your colon too.
AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures.
The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
The heart has neurons in it too.
“A memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain” as truth statement is a basic fallacy of naive physicalism. There is no falsifiable way to ascertain in which direction causality points, nor is natural science even intended provide a definitive answer—it is designed to make predictions and any models that arise in the process are necessarily faulty and do not describe the true nature of underlying reality, which this ultimately comes down to.
Another flatworms-are-fun story: If you irradiate a flatworm using a nuclear reactor, to kill off its stem-cell equivalents, it sort of "rots" as other cells eventually die and aren't being replaced. If after zap, you insert donor stems, its life can instead proceed normally, and the entire body is eventually refreshed. So ship of Theseus like, you have an individual flatworm, swimming through its life, which ends up being genetically unrelated to its earlier self.
At least spinal cord has a kind of memory related to movement, but that's something else than episodic memory obviously.
People love to bring this up, but while yes, all cells have some form of memory mechanism or another, with quite the number of nerves outside the brain, we are still a cognitively top-eown organism and quite unlike simpler organisms where the line is blurry.
In machine learning terms, we've basically got a layer or two of neurons responsible for physical memory stored outside the brain, sure. But it's out of dozens if not hundreds total.
We found that some kind of gigant unicelular life can remember where was food.
I think the evidence is strong, here. Quite difficult to form new memories without a brain!
This discovery fully validates the organic system side of Peter Putnam's theory on induction, the Neuro Conditioned Reflex Principle, that requires changing state at synapses over time to select the nested Relative Dominance feedback winner in a given Conditioned Reflex feedback loop. Its quite incredible that the functionality of induction proposed by Putnam in 1963 has been consistently validated since then. [1]
[1] https://www.peterputnam.org/outline-of-a-functional-model-of...
I think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982...
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf
It used to be slower in software development as well. The internet and the exponentially increasing number of software developers accelerated it. And of course new hardware that made things practical that were only a theoretical possibility before.
True, that said, I downloaded and compiled Perl in 1987 from comp.sources.misc, even back then, things moved at light speed compared to health and medical.
A lot of "rapid adoption" in software is really the result of unusually cheap distribution and feedback loops
I think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system is noisy, the experiments are slow and the implications may not be obvious until other pieces of the puzzle show up
It's amazing after all these years we're still so bad at improving an average person's recall, even by 50%. It feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and all we can do is spaced repetition systems, the memory palace, strong associative scents, etc
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
[dead]
Great result on the biochemistry of memory storage. Then they venture into philosophy: "They still struggle to explain the spark that transforms information into insight."
Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
i'm sorry, I cannot agree that anything like that can create "originality".
It still surprises me that people can complain about LLMs making things up (i.e. hallucinating), and simultaneously complain that they never produce anything original.
As opposed to what? Water and tissue?
>>They're made out of meat...
>>>They're made out of weights...
Creativity can be thought of as a combination of two things: A random idea generator, and a nonsense filter. Generate new random results ideas, filter out the nonsense ones, and you’ve generated good ideas.
Creativity also requires information. And Information is discovered. We can only generate random ideas from what we know. We can't imagine something we've never sensed, or know. You can't imagine a color you've never seen without recalling known colors. You can freely mix ideas due to your imagination.
But when we discover new information, we must decide whether the information is useful. Otherwise the information is considered noise.
We give weight to decisions: time spent pondering, considering, and the more weight we give, the better the decision. Almost always the idea is measured in usefulness.
Sound familiar?
IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.
That's just an anthropomorphic viewpoint though.
One could argue from a religious standpoint that creativity requires a spark of divinity.
One could argue from a naturalist standpoint that natural selection has been a creative process in which nature tries random things until they stick for no purpose that we can directly observe.
One could argue from a platonic standpoint that creativity in this realm of existence is merely the process of approximating ideal forms.
I'd wager that creativity is a human construct and therefore up to interpretation. Kinda like how the ancient greeks didn't have as many colors words as we did. Was it because they couldn't see all the colors we could see? No, it was because in their opinion only certain color words were necessary to discuss what was important.
A massive chasm exists between good, creative ideas and ideas that aren’t nonsense.
Not that massive.
A lot of good, creative ideas have been called out and derived as nonsense or crazy. Many still are.
Yeah you should really familiarize yourself with the history of scientific achievements, it will quickly disabuse you of this notion. What separates is often a thin line and dogged persistence, hardly the chasm you make it seem.
That's why most people are not creative, and tbqh, rather dumb
So I'd say diffusion models make the philosophy less mystical but not necessarily solved
What I like about this story is how physical the problem is
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