Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • What I like about this story is how physical the problem is
    by MarceliusK
  • 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.

    by Animats
  • So I'd say diffusion models make the philosophy less mystical but not necessarily solved
    by MarceliusK
  • i'm sorry, I cannot agree that anything like that can create "originality".
    by project2501a
  • 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

    by kator
  • 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
    by MarceliusK
  • 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.
    by layer8
  • 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...

    by gibsonf1
  • 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.

    by unsupp0rted
  • > 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...

    by bambax
  • I think the evidence is strong, here. Quite difficult to form new memories without a brain!
    by boston_clone
  • We found that some kind of gigant unicelular life can remember where was food.
    by Zardoz84
  • 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.

    by Llamamoe
  • At least spinal cord has a kind of memory related to movement, but that's something else than episodic memory obviously.
    by IsTom
  • 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.
    by mncharity
  • “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.
    by strogonoff
  • 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.

    by Earw0rm
  • "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! ;)

    by abc123abc123