"some of your learning is stored in your nervous system outside of your brain seems compelling"
The keyword here is "your," as in what kind of organism we're talking about, and what kind of nervous system we're talking about. In organisms like worms, what we'd think of as a brain is obviously a few orders of magnitude less centralized and less specialized than ours. The nervous system plays a much larger role. Ditto starfish, the organisms famous for being brainless (literally). Starfish run entirely on distributed nervous systems, having nothing that passes for a brain.
It's very tough to draw comparisons between what happens in the nervous system of a worm and what happens in the nervous system of a human. Even rats, which we've been using for decades as neurological proxies in drug trials, are proving to be less than ideal as analogues for the human nervous system. It turns out that we're so much more advanced than other animals that there's a lot less common ground than traditionally assumed.
I disagree with the term 'more advanced', but there is a huge difference between the invertebrate and vertebrate nervous systems: we have myelin, which insulates the axons and allows signals to travel many times faster.
Without myelin, large bodies with centralized nervous systems are not possible. To illustrate the difference, take an example of stubbing your toe. It's a good example because it's unexpected, sudden and originates at the furthest point in your body away from the brain.
When you stub your toe, you feel two waves of pain. The first arrives quickly, within about a tenth of a second, and is a sharp stabbing pain. That signal travels by the A-delta fibres, which are myelinated and have a conduction speed of 2 to 30 m/s.
The second wave is delayed by 1-2 seconds and is a dull sort of pain. That signal is conveyed by the C fibres, which are unmyelinated and have a conduction speed of <2 m/s. If we did not have myelin, all of the signals to and from the extremities would be similarly delayed. It would be impossible to respond to stimulus or coordinate whole-body actions like walking.
> It turns out that we're so much more advanced than other animals that there's a lot less common ground than traditionally assumed.
Not sure the scientific consensus is "turning out" that way at all.
... new discoveries about animals’ cognitive and emotional complexity ... have blurred the bold lines traditionally drawn between humans and other species. Some animals are now known to exhibit a number of qualities once thought exclusively human, such as self-awareness, abstract thought, and altruism. -- Boston Globe, July 13, 2013
See the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness from last summer, or DDG any of the reporting on it for more points and counterpoints.
Extending memory storage onto a device might be more feasible / beneficial. Perhaps, someday, we would be able to begin this process and as the neurons die, let the natural system roll over to the "device".
One important thing to note here is there is a tendency (inertia?) to find deterministic explanations to observed phenomena. That's mainly because in order to have science, objective science, we need phenomena to be reproducible in a controlled environment.
However, psychology (generalize it as much as you will), hardly allows such approach. The psyche is capable of intentional behavior, which by its nature, is not deterministic. Thus you can not make predictions. Thus you can not falsify statements about it in the same way one does with statements in physics.
That's why many find the idea of soul (a imaterial substance responsible for our psychological features) repulsive. But this is only because they put forward, as an axiom, the need and the ability to make science with everything and anything. Including with my writing this comment.
What is a soul? Is it what guides a living object when it moves, like a human, dog, or worm?
If robots act autonomously, that is, without direct instruction from a living object, do they have souls?
What if the robot is merely a plastic frame, a motor attached to wheels, an Arduino with a motor shield, and an ultrasonic Ping distance sensor, but this assemblage can navigate a room without colliding with anything -- does it have a soul?
I say yes -- souls are the feedback loops which we have learned or been taught, and they motivate or dissuade us and robots alike. And programming is just teaching, providing instructions that will result in a desired outcome.
Soul, noun: social construct developed over millenia for purposes of group identification, specifically religious; sometimes used for political (crusades, justification of kings), even economical (selling of indulgences' scandal, the Protestant Ethic) purposes. This project didn't at the end obtain as much credibility as other (better built, with more interesting purposes) social constructs such as physics or mathematics; though not for lack of trying, from Plato to Kant and similar scholastics.
Now seriously, some terms are very ridiculously loaded, and IMO should be avoided in science. If you want to talk about a "feedback loop" that generates consciousness, go on, be my guest. Now, calling it "soul"... that's just openly inviting every faith in the world to, at best, hijack your theory with pious, well-meaning BS.
tldr; "Sensitive transplant patients may evidence personal changes that parallel the history of their donors ... We suggest that cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is a plausible explanation for these parallels."
A more reasonable hypothesis: the severance of the autonomous afferences coming from the heart affects the brain stem and / or hypothalamus, which in turns affects the rest of the brain.
It has the advantage of being testable.
Another (IMO less likely) possibility would be that the lack of brain-induced rhythm variations of the denerved heart has an influence on the brain.
Palatability is an unnecessarily pejorative shorthand for agreement with one's expectations of reality.
I don't read "speculation" as meaning anything other than that the object of speculation is as yet unproven, so speculation that makes an argument based on previously known physical principles can still fairly be called speculation. However, such speculation can rightly be given greater weight than speculation which draws no connection to prior knowledge.
For example, if one were to argue that fairies make plants grow, with no other information, then their argument can safely be ignored. On the other hand, if their argument includes a testable definition of a fairy, suggests a mechanism by which fairies add matter to plants, and provides a way of verifying that mechanism, then the detailed fairy argument should be given higher weight than the unsupported fairy argument, until evidence is available that either disproves the definition of a fairy, disproves the mechanism by which fairies make plants grow, or provides greater evidence for a different mechanism by which plants grow (mitosis, perhaps).
Based on the wording of the abstract, so are the study's authors. (That is, they say "we suggest" as opposed to "we hypothesized and provide supporting evidence." But, maybe they do in the full article, I don't know.)
Makes we wonder - if somehow we could train our bodies to transfer memories to other body parts... which leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities.
"Because starfish like to eat clams and oysters, fishermen who gather shellfish have tried for years to get rid of them. To kill the starfish, fishermen would catch them, slice them right in half, and throw them back in the ocean. However, because starfish can grow back parts of their bodies, they were actually increasing the number of starfish." - Wiki on Starfish
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish
Sure, on a message board topic about it, but generally you don't expect to run across spoilers for a popular show in a science article a mere 2 years after the episode aired. "If you're not caught up on every popular show you may be interested in within 2 years, screw you" seems kind of harsh.
Anyway, no need to continue this sub-thread, just thought it was unnecessary.
It will be interesting to see what happens with the first head transplants which are now possible. If memories are stored not only in the brain but also throughout the nervous system in the body, head transplant patients will have some of the memories of their new host body.
I'm wondering why is it that we will do absolutely anything to avoid pondering the hypothesis that the currently observable matter which constitues human body may only be a half of the answer, and that the other half may be, what we could approximately call some sort of energetic, perhaps electro-magnetic field, carrying the missing link to many of our puzzles.
How about the cases of patients who lost large portions of their brain, or people who were born with or have developed to most of their brain missing - the rest of their head filled with fluid - these people are usually way more functional than what any of our brain theories would suggest.
So perhaps the brain is only an antenna into this energetic field which is the other half of that what see and can detect and measure.
The question is why does this sound ridiculous to you.
You're privileging the hypothesis. Why half of the answer, not 1/3 or 2/3? Why energetic, not dark-matter? Why electro-magnetic?
But still, as far as I can tell, the "antenna" hypothesis was considered and rejected, because right now we can pin-point different processes within a brain using fMRIs, we can read out what an animal imagines out of its brain directly... and basically "brain as a computer" is a simpler and better fitting the data model than "brain as an antenna".
I hesitate to copy and paste the entire comment, lest I be flagged by an algorithm for spamming, but it uses Latin-like characters to write some typical spam about making money from home. Then, it has a link to the following site:
After that link, the comment continues with an extremely interesting tidbit that relates to the article, full of manual line breaks. I can't find it anywhere else online:
We replicated the results of a
similar experiment in a class I took in 1976, and also another one
that's even stranger. We trained planaria, killed them, dried them, and
fed them to untrained planaria. The training times for the untrained
planaria were shortened. Our experiments used planaria reactions to
light and subsequent electric shock, not food-finding behavior.
Is someone being paid to come up with original, relevant-sounding content to post alongside spam? That text does not look machine generated.
Perhaps someone has a malware infection that inserts spam into the comments they make online without them knowing. That would be a pretty slick way of getting around CAPTCHAs and possibly spam filters.
cusinemakaty also dropped a comment[1] 11 hours ago on Glenn Beck's site, consisting of the unicode-disguised spam followed by a normal comment. The normal comment text turns out to be lifted from a post[2] 15 hours ago by another commenter, Pachy Serrano.
The text doesn't seem machine generated in any of the comments I checked but this is certainly something organized. As other posters have said, perhaps malware.
Alternatively, the hypothesis that some of your learning is stored in your nervous system outside of your brain seems compelling.