Why should our memories be
stored solely in our specialized brain?
In theory they could be stuck throughout your body in any cell of choice
to be accessed as needed. What we have
failed to grasp is that our opinion was merely a reasonable assumption that did
not have to be true.
In this case, the organism regrew
its processing center and then was able to recover information distributed
throughout the rest of the body.
It is even plausible that the
body stores information as very long term backup in the event of catastrophic
loss.
Again, this is much unexpected
and gives new meaning to the ideas of chakras.
By the way, if your body clearly remembers a state of health, can memory
restoration lead to health restoration?
Worms regrow their decapitated
heads, along with the memories inside
By Jacob
Kastrenakes on July 10, 2013
Some memories just won't die — and some can
even be transferred to a whole new brain. Researchers at Tufts University have
determined that a small, yellow worm known as a planarian, which has long been
studied for its regenerative properties, is able to grow back a lot more than
just its body parts: after the worm's small, snake-like head and neck are
removed, its body will even regrow a brain that's capable of quickly relearning
its lost skills.
The researchers
tested the memory of planarians by measuring how long it took for them to reach
food in a controlled setting. The small worms dislike open spaces and bright
lights — but they had been trained to ignore it so that they could find their
meals. Even after decapitation, worms that had gone through training were able
to overcome their fears and start eating much faster than worms that hadn't
been trained. However, the memories didn't come back immediately. Each worm
still had to be reminded of its earlier knowledge, though it only took a single
lesson for it to all come back.
Why this happens is still unclear.
Planarians' brains control their behavior, but the researchers suggest that
some of their memories might be stored elsewhere in their body. Alternatively,
they suggest that the worms' original brain may have modified their nervous
systems, and their nervous systems may have then altered how the new brains
formed during regrowth.
The researchers' findings appears in The
Journal of Experimental Biology. They say that more work needs to be done
to nail down the specifics of how planarians recover their memory, but the hope
is that the worms can be used as a way to study how memory and learning work.
That may sound complicated for a seemingly basic creature, but existing studies
are already using them to research drug addiction and withdrawal.
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