The headline says working memory, not long-term episodic memory, but the comments (and headline) here don't seem to distinguish between the two. We can disrupt short term memories in a variety of ways. When memories consolidate, they move to different structures. We can hold a lot more information in long-term memories than in working memory.
Because I hear this hypothesis come up from time to time--it's unlikely consciousness or long-term memory are maintained by e-fields generated in the brain, or that they require continuous electrical activity. Stark evidence against it come from ischemia studies. Ischemia usually accompanies serious underlying issues, so more controlled examples are easier to reason about: surgeons may use deep hypothermic circulatory arrest as protection for the brain in procedures with extended ischemia time requirements. In these cases, achieving electrocerebral silence (flat EEG) is one of the checklist items for the procedure. Clinical cases are worth reviewing for any hypothesis that suggests that long-term memory depends on continuous electrical activity* of neurons in the brain.
Since the events of ischemia, brain flatlining, and brain death are so closely linked in time, it's easy to conflate them. After a cold stop+start, the brain doesn't immediately jump back to normal function--there are a variety of processes that are worth studying better to get back to normal brain waves and brain function. Ischemia-related damage is often from a metabolic problems than from a discontinuity of electrical function. The reason for the cooling is to maintain the local energy reserves of the cells--when that is lost, the cells may have too much difficulty getting back to normal when blood is later reintroduced, and that's where you see brain damage or death. This kind of procedure is not without serious risk factors.
* Of course, electrical activity is needed for recall, but the point that I'm making is that the memory is later available for recall even after a period of discontinuity in the EEG.
If it were electric fields, wouldn't we also expect the extreme EM fields generated by MRI machines, or even strong permanent magnets held near someone's skull to have some effect on memory?
A nearby lightning strike or overhead power line should also have some effect.
It would be quite amazing if the body were able to neutralize/counter such strong external electric fields.
Good observation. I would not be surprised if the answer to your question is, Yes. An MRI does have some effect on currently active memories and thought. It seems to a non-scientist like me that it would be difficult to use the usual tools to measure this inside an MRI tube, so maybe a hard question to answer for even the experts in measuring such things.
Plenty of folks who do not consider themselves claustrophobic just completely fritz out inside an MRI tube. Could their usual ability to reason about and maintain composure be reduced by just such interference?
The research suggests the EM fields and underlying neural networks work together,
i.e fields might provide a top-down energy-based attention mechanism while the network structures implement bottom-up agglomerations of information.
Blocking EM fields wouldn't destroy memory but might pause or disturb the learned activation flows of neurons.
"""
The researchers hypothesize that the field even appears to be a means the brain can employ to sculpt information flow to ensure the desired result. By imposing that a particular field emerge, it directs the activity of the participating neurons.
Indeed, that’s one of the next questions the scientists are investigating: Could electric fields be a means of controlling neurons?
“We are now using this work to ask whether information flows from the macroscale level of the electric field down to the microscale level of individual neurons,” Pinotsis says. “To make the analogy with the orchestra, we are now using this work to ask whether a conductor’s style changes the way an individual member of an orchestra plays her instrument.”
"""
It's possible that the field is a good proxy for underlying coherence in a redundant neural subnet that may be harder to measure directly. The field itself may or may not play a causal role---that would depend on whether the field could induce or reinforce neural activity. Even if the electrical field plays a role in marshaling the necessary neural activity, the representation must come to exist in the neurons in some way, since they are what are connected to the muscles that carry out intention.
> The headline says working memory, not long-term episodic memory, but the comments (and headline) here don't seem to distinguish between the two.
Please note, this is the press release headline and sub-headline:
“Neurons are fickle. Electric fields are more reliable for information.”
“A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome “representational drift,” or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons”
Is that really incompatible with information being held in e-fields? It's just that these fields are generated by group of neurons, which can indeed be "stoped and started back"?
In that case it’s unclear why you’d not refer to it as the information being encoded in the neurons. I don’t think anyone interprets that to mean the information is retrievable sans electrical field.
There was a story I heard about the autistic guy who volunteered for transcranial magnetic stimulation. Those have been known to temporarily shift someone autistic into a consciousness state that is more neurotypical. In his case (and it is the only documented case), it was permanent.
He wrote a book about it. His marriage ended because of it (he had been a reliable emotional support for his wife while autistic), but he also became a lot closer to his son.
I think we’re only scratching the surface here, and even that, there are wide-ranging implications.
This is interesting because I recently read of a theory that clinical depression is actually an altered state of consciousness, like dreaming or being under the influence of psychedelic drugs. It seems to explain a lot about depression as well as posing the question what other things might be an altered state of consciousness.
I predict if we're successful in creating general AI and/or artificial consciousness, we'll uncover a veritable zoo of different, altered states of consciousness much like how the standard model of particle physics revealed many more particles.
I could say a lot more about this, but this would slip into what people would consider as woo.
So without treading there, I am just going to say, I think this field-effect of neurons will lead to discoveries about field-effect of all cells, not just neurons; that consciousness is not exclusive to neurons; and how acupuncture (at a mechanical level) might work.
Regarding consciousness, I don't get why people who submit to consciousness being everywhere in the universe have problem with simply calling it the universe. It seems to make discussions much more productive.
As someone who slipped into depression ~15 years ago and has had limited success pulling out of it, I would definitely consider it to be an altered state of consciousness. I remember what I used to be like before, and how I used to behave, and the relationships people seemed to want to have with me. Even recently, I was able to experience a glimpse of that former life when I got a job and was able to hold it for a few months.
I think it definitely is an altered state, and it frustrates me to the verge of (re?)insanity that you can buy alcohol everywhere, but can't get generic SSRIs over the counter.
At the moment in the US, you can't get an SSRI prescription without going to a doctor every 6 months to let them look at you for 30 seconds, mispronounce your name, and then declare you ready to continue taking their medicine. And that's if you have insurance.
The US medical system is too paternalistic, imo.
I feel this is an overly simplistic view of depression.
I imagine there's a thousand reasons for a state like depression to emerge — some, but not all of them external. I think the Venn diagram of people with depression and people whose "lives suck for whatever reason" is not a single circle.
> People need a better life so they don't get depressed in the first place.
You know, I think I actually agree with you on that point, despite the rest of your post. I won't address the rest of what you said, because it'd just get nasty.
The problem, in my opinion, can be described by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the US (probably elsewhere too, just speaking for myself), the layer below physiological needs, like clean air, shelter, clothing, etc, is: "Get a job."
Without that, you're dead.
All thoughts are altered states of consciousness. A collection of self reinforcing thoughts that represent an instance of depression are a state of consciousness in the same way that experiencing sun on your skin is a state of consciousness. All is qualia and we move between states of qualia like fish through an ocean.
An ocean with large pockets of powerful currents that are very hard to swim against, to stay in the image. Yes, everything is qualia/sensation/thought, and I get the appeal of the concept of "OMG, by me writing this and you reading it I just literally changed your brain!". But not every state of our brain/consciousness is the same, not every state allows for the same movement of the fish.
There's a higher-level interpretation of what the term "state of consciousness" means to many people. Not a "state of the brain, like a state of a cellular automaton" but instead a section in the incredibly high-dimensional space of possible brain states that greatly facilitates going to other interesting positions, i.e. thoughts or experiences.
I would certainly hope that an AI would be void of emotions, which I consider to be a relic of our primitive past.
Well, it's not really a relic since it's actually the driving force behind our daily lives and society as a whole, sadly. They do more harm than good in a modern society with billions of individuals.
Robert Becker wrote a book about the em field on the effects of the body, though I don’t think the book talked much about its effect on the mind. He did write the book to raise the flag about the unintended consequence of electrifying everything.
If consciousness is not exclusive to neurons, then how much affect does the consciousness have on shaping the body … and how much does the body shape the mind?
> Citing this large body of research, more than 240 scientists who have published peer-reviewed research on the biologic and health effects of nonionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for stronger exposure limits. The appeal makes the following assertions:
“Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plant and animal life.”
The scientists who signed this appeal arguably constitute the majority of experts on the effects of nonionizing radiation. They have published more than 2,000 papers and letters on EMF in professional journals.
> The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.
> Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.
Because all of the dumb people I know think 5G is causing health issues and all of the smart people I know think it's not.
Perhaps realign your priorities to worry about something imminently catastrophic like climate change. And if it's theories you want to worry about, check this one out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
If you're still worried about Wifi, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, it is certainly possible that it affects health. However, since we decided to live with such technology as a society, we'll have to deal with it.
People living in cities (or anywhere really) don't complain much about the massive amount of exhaust from cars, which is definitely proven to be bad for everyone's health despite all attempts at reducing it. It's just there, we won't give up cars, so everyone just kind of ignores it.
Well, we didn’t complain about 70 years of leaded gasoline exhaust either … but maybe our society had collectively lost the capability to understand the damage.
We’re ready to hyperventilate about spent nuclear fuel stored hundreds of miles away at the bottom of a vault under a desert, so I don’t think we’ve collectively lost the ability to be persuaded by charismatic people.
It seemed to me we are getting rid of exhaust gases in big cities, via stricter regulations on engine emissions, exhaust gas recirculation, catalytic converters, stop and go systems, lower speed limits, car free areas, electrification, etc, with very visible results.
So the car analogy seems a bad exemple to discourage progress.
As I said, it's not enough. As long as they exist, they're causing health problems. You just can't filter enough of the gases. But moving to full electric can solve that quite well (putting the dangerous emissions far away).
That only strengthens my theory that why most of the autistics and neurodivergent people are considered disabled is because of neurotypicals. When a ND isn't precise with their words, expect us to read into context, and then get angry when we don't understand - that's on them, not us.
NTs can either read in to context or willfully ignore it (choose to act as if they haven't noticed), while autistic people always have to act without that information. It is kind of like wheelchairs and ramps - people who can climb stairs are strictly better off than people who can only go up ramps, but a society with ramps isn't any less capable than one where you have to climb a ladder to get to your office.
> NTs can either read in to context or willfully ignore it (choose to act as if they haven't noticed)
This makes some assumptions about the nature of real-time cognition though...it is possible that any given individual can do this for a given scenario, but the likelihood depends on many variables, many likely unknown.
There is a very well-articulated argument by an autistic woman that, the clinical definitions for autism are framed from the disruption and impact to neurotypical society, but does not adequately address what’s going on for the autistic person.
For example, the author herself is diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Her social impact on others is miminal enough where it qualifies for “high functioning”, but having executive dysfunction means she is highly dependent on someone in her life to help her. Our medical and social system does not provide adequate services because she is “high functioning”.
She then talked about other people with a different blend of autistic traits who are considered low functioning (high impact on neurotypical social interactions), but don’t have the executive dysfunction like the author. Her example was someone who is non-verbal, yet has a well-developed intellect.
I too, thought the idea that “autistic people are disabled because neurotypical people considers autism is a disability” was not very convincing. This author’s argument reframed it in a way that makes more sense to me, and that is, us neurotypicals are only seeing autism only from the lens of how autism impacts us, and we frame the discussion, diagnoses, and public policies along those lines.
I'm going to assume that when you say "our medical system" you are referring to the US medical system.
And let me tell you, it's a WHOLE lot more bleak than that. The US medical system does not provide adequate services for ANYONE other than perhaps children (in some cases).
As soon as someone with a special need becomes an adult, nearly all public provided support is torn away. If you aren't 65, then when your child hits 26, they have no guarantee of being able to stay on your insurance. You might be able to make a deal with your employer and health insurance provider but that is by no means a given.
Now think of what that means in terms of estate planning.
It's possible for your child with special needs to qualify for social security and medicaid but their household income needs to be below poverty levels (with pretty crazy strict means testing). There's a reason so many people with mental disabilities often end up homeless.
The fact is, some individuals will need 24/7 care for the rest of their lives. However, because taxes and government are bad and "they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps" or whatever, the US and many state government are setup to instead worry about keeping them off the benches when they end up homeless.
Yes, I have a child with autism, and yes one thing that keeps me up at night is worrying what will happen to them after I'm gone.
I think it'd be reasonable to say that if humans didn't have eyes (and didn't have any other sensory enhancements beyond what sighted humans have today), and then a new human was born with eyes, that new human would be strictly "better off" than the old humans without eyes. Certainly the new human wouldn't say the old humans were "disabled", but at the very least, the new human would not have trouble communicating with the old humans, or doing anything that the old humans could do.
But if everyone were autistic (as we define it today), and then someone was born that we would consider "neurotypical" (in this world, of course, they would be neurodivergent!), then that "non-autistic" person would probably be at a huge disadvantage (socially) in that society, so it'd be reasonable to call that person "disabled", even though we'd consider that person typical.
So yes, "disabled" is just a term we use to describe people in the minority, who have some sort of condition (physical or mental) that could confer a disadvantage upon them in our current society.
So to your statement:
> I too, thought the idea that “autistic people are disabled because neurotypical people considers autism is a disability” was not very convincing.
I've never really thought about it that way. My understanding would be more like "autistic people are disabled because their condition puts them at a disadvantage when interacting with the neurotypical world". And I think that jives with how we should think about disability: it's something that makes it harder for someone to interact (physically, socially, etc.) with the world as it is. We may try to make the world easier on disabled people -- ramps for those who cannot walk, audible signals for those who cannot see, attempts to change how we communicate with those who are neurodivergent -- but at the end of the day those people still have a disability, as there will always be parts of the world that they'll be unable to navigate the way a "non-disabled" person could.
I think the root of the word "disability" is where I have issues with.
Disability is a dis- (opposite of, or not) and an ability. If I cannot see, then vision is a disability. I wouldn't have it, but others would. Same if I was deaf, or had various types of mechanical physical problems.
Autism is different. Many types, depending on what's going on, isn't a dis-ability. Unlike me not having something that would allow me to perceive or do actions, this "disability" is instead of how other non-autistics treat us. I'm not lacking anything. Instead, I'm told I am defective because of the way neurotypicals treat us.
I use accurate language, and NT's assume that I'm talking in coded language... That's because NT's do just that. Or that I can hyperfocus. Most NT's cant. And worse yet, NT's make fun of us hyperfocusing. And being in IT, hyperfocusing is a powerful positive trait that puts me ahead of NTs.
Unlike other mechanical disabilities, this "disability" is primarily rooted in *others* treating us badly, over perceived badness.
As for me, I consider myself superior to that of most NT's. In fact, I feel sad for those humans who can't get the joy of deeply digging into an area of study, and then learning how other topics connect to it, and becoming an adept in a very short time. It might be an arrogant view, but I've seen NT's struggle with basic concepts time and again.
If this is correct, might it explain how and why electroconvulsive therapy works and how it can lead to the loss of memory. Presumably it would completely disrupt the stable memory field, even if it left the physical structures intact. The brain woul be reconstructing the field from first principles.
Whether or not this is true, ECT memory loss is not hard to believe. I don't mean that the mechanism is obvious (it isn't), but only that the result is not very surprising.
Neurons communicate via electric signals. There are multiple reasonnable ways to implement a memory based on that substrate, but the interface is almost certainly going to be through axons.
There must be a way, whatever it may be, to query and to alter the brain's memory through its interface. We don't have to know precisely how the system works to predict that fuzzing the interface might result in adverse effects.
That remains true whether the underlying storage is in the field, in synapses, a more complicated change in gene expression, or some other property of the cell.
There was a pretty fun Radiolab episode (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91569...) that suggested that the process of recall changes memories, and that they are susceptible to change while the memory is being recalled. I'm sure ECT is disruptive in many ways, including just through damage and toxicity to the cells. But, in your fuzzing idea--a hypothesis might be that recall is triggered, and while the memory is susceptible, it's disrupted permanently. Another possibility is that the memory is still there, but the proper mapping to it is lost. Reality is probably a combination of many factors.
Although it is a very interesting paper, and I am by no means qualified to even understand half of it, while reading up representational drift I was much more convinced by another (and a bit more recent) paper portraying the phenomenon as a way for the brain to switch up the physical layout of the firing neurons in a redundant population without altering the output. All that possibly for biological reasons (ie dead neurons or perhaps repairs). Saying information is stored in electrical fields just doesn't sit right with me. I have a hard time imagining them being more robust than spikes, or really usable inside the brain because of the physics involved.
It came out about a month ago, and I've just started reading it. But it talks about neural drift, and they actually were able to create a model for it.
"Dr O’Leary, Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering, said the study emphasises the idea that “drift” may arise from continual learning.
“There is a huge unanswered challenge in artificial intelligence, namely the problem of building algorithms that can learn continually without corrupting previously learned information,” he said. “The brain manifestly achieves this, and this work is a step in the direction of finding algorithms that can do the same.”"
I'm not sure exactly what you believe, but since you're talking about information storage, can I ask if you mean for working memory or for long-term memory? For long-term memory, the storage is durable and mostly static, while recall is dynamic (and may even affect the storage after further consolidation). For working memory, I imagine it's a pretty dynamic process for both storage and recall. The top-level link seems to only be about working memory, so the title of the HN post should probably be changed to avoid confusion.
This paper makes a lot of sense. As a doc, I've seen literally several hundred patients with portions of their brain removed or damaged, some of them very extensive (>20% of the brain). Yet many are completely asymptomatic, and many others regain full function and memory with time and physical therapy. It's led me to conclude that the function of the brain isn't tied 1:1 to the structure of the brain as we had all been taught.
Couldn't it be that the brain has an extremely good redundancy setup? Memories stored in several parts of the brain, and recoverable if a part gets damaged?
There are many people who did have permanent memory loss from various TBI (traumatic brain injury), especially gunshot wounds, and many who recovered theirs slowly.
Kind of like restoring data from an archive, or rebuilding a RAID array, as an analogy.
As five-year survival rate has been improved during cancer patients, we have seen more and more patients with multiple brain tumors. Recently we got awarded a NIH grant on a multi brain tumor SRS treatment platform. This might not be directly related with surgery of removal portion of the brain, but definitely SRS will act just like surgery (but with radiation).
This month we are actually asked by NIH to have an interview program to talk with people who are interested in SRS, so in case you are interested in our project, you could schedule a 20-mins quick meeting with me at your convenience:
I think it's also interesting to figure out what exactly is memory. I don't know anything about medical research but my gut feeling is that memory is more of a "feeling" than concrete snapshots such as computer memory.
this reminds of a brain fart I had long time ago back when I was taking an EE course about electromagnetic compatibility & interference.
how resilient is the brain and it's surrounding casing to outside electromagnetic interference ?
can there one day be some jamming tool strong enough to just crash a brain without doing physical damage first ? where it would just brick a human, but a physician examining it would find relatively nothing wrong at the physical layer .
I read a paper a long time ago that recorded the brain waves from one person doing a skilled task and then played that recording to an unskilled person as they performed the same task. They replayed the electromagnetic field of the skilled person on the outside of the skull of an unskilled person.
They found that there was an improvement in skill levels in the untrained person. Intriguing.
There's a behavioural neuroscience method you might be interested in:
> Watch Nancy's brain get zapped with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Measuring neural activity (with fMRI, MEG, ERPs, etc) cannot tell you which brain regions or neural responses are necessary for a given aspect of perception or cognition. To find out if a region is necessary, you have to mess with it. One method to do this in humans is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
A probably related observation found on the wikipedia page about sonoluminescene that oscillations driven by an external periodic force often have a more stable period than the external force. In this case a neuron is a driving force and the magnetic field is the oscillating "water" that has a period more stable, and thus preserves information better than the neuron itself.
Hm. The actual work where the data used was collected is here.[1] (The details are paywalled, unfortunately.) This paper is here.[2]
The first paper, about predicting where eyes will point next, is based on actual data recorded by the experimenters from two monkeys. The authors of that paper report positive but narrow results. They write about simple visual target info persisting for a few seconds. The second paper re-analyzes that data and draws much broader conclusions, less well justified by the data.
No electric fields were actually measured in that work. They're being imputed from voltages from neuron probes and EEG pickups. So the statements about fields are somewhat iffy.
It's recently become possible to image electric fields.[3] NASA work in 2015. A field-effect transistor with an open gate is an electric field sensor, and an array of them is an imager. A linear array was constructed and scanned mechanically to 2D image various objects, including a human. That paper has what is claimed to be the first image of the electric field of a human. Resolution was low, but it works. Might be useful for scanners at checkpoints and such, they claim.
So the technology exists to start to measure such fields directly. With enough interest and money, someone could probably construct an IC with a large array of open gate FETs and the readout circuitry to get an image from them. It's a non-intrusive passive sensor, which is nice for human experimentation. If there's anything going with the brain's electric field at high resolution or high frequency, it should be possible to pick that up. It's not clear how useful this is, but the electronics part looks possible.
I know it’s not a similar mechanism but I can’t help but think how this parallels the discovery made by of main character in the short story Exhalation by Ted Chiang
So essentially the brain serves as an antenna receiving data to render this reality/simulation. Soon we will discover how exactly it is tuned in to the akashic records and perhaps we will understand the mechanics of the quantum fields more intimately, as well as how to dial up to the higher consciousness.
"Something electrical floating around your cells" isn't just the mind either, it's also how the organism coordinates its development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XheAMrS8Q1c
Presumably you were resuscitated before the electrical activity in your brain stopped? My understanding is that's how we define brain death, as the cessation of electrical activity in the brain.
You have a point. Medically induced coma such as with pentobarbital can “flatline” the brain, eliminating electrical fields. After weaning the pentobarbital patients have their memories intact.
The electric field is generated by neurons as they fire action potentials, but it is rather the aggregate electrical activity that is used to represent memories, rather than the summative signals from individual neurons.
And if I understood the article correctly, the important idea is that the field is (relatively) stable even as the underlying neurons involved change and they don't even have to be the same neurons involved for the same memory field.
The illusion of a stable single entity emergent from the constant flux of billions of individual living units linked through trillions of connections is in my opinion the answer to the question of consciousness (and also an answer to the question 'can machines ever be conscious', which is without a doubt - yes).
It might also pose the question then, could humanity as a whole - as a global connection of billions of individuals - be thought of as a conscious entity? Well, maybe not - where's the stable field?
Neurons don't know they form part of a consciousness. On the other hand, we can't communicate with our neurons. It could be that an emergent consciousness exists for which we are the neurons and neither it knows we exist or we know it exists.
This may be too meta for this forum, but I would like to point out that the brain theory as a whole has become so incomprehensibly complex that I am beginning to think that the brain has little to do with intention and memory storage.
Point in fact: as we are now hundreds of years into medical research and we still can't figure out how the brain stores memory. Or what physical structure a memory even is. And I am supposed to believe this all happened by accident? Who is driving the upward development of life if the physical universe tends toward chaos?
Point in fact: we have learned more about brain physiology in the past 30 years than all of history before that. Will our knowledge keep growing or plateau? I don't know, but it is way to early to state that research is at a dead end.
> Who is driving the upward development of life ...
This is begging the question. It presumes a both a who and an intention.
Also, "upward" is an odd take -- spiders / sharks / humans are all equally evolved in that they can trace their lineage to a common ancestor and have been evolving all that time. It seems upward only if one is thinking like that cliched monkey -> caveman -> human illustration.
> ... the physical universe tends toward chaos
It tends toward increasing entropy, not chaos. For sure, there are local pockets of organization, but they are all temporary.
There’s no upward development of life. We think we’re super clever and advanced for building cars and lightbulbs and such, but there’s nothing beyond us saying that’s good or praiseworthy. Looking at our impact on biodiversity, the atmosphere, and the oceans, and throw in a huge dose of micro plastics and rogue hormones in the water supply and we don’t look so clever. Evolution improves fitness for reproduction, there’s not a handy chart or whatever that shows markers for more or less evolved.
Disagree. Look at our solar system or any other planet. There is no life anywhere. This beautiful blue planet is brimming with life.
Yes we are screwing our planet but that is because we as collective have not become fully conscious about it. There were horrific things done in past by humanity but once a sufficient amount of population reached that point of consciousness where we recognise something is bad we shutdown those things.
I know we are screwing this planet bad but life on this planet continues and it's been this way for millions of years.
I don't think that's the point the parent was trying to make. We've evolved intelligence presumably because it was selected for as a trait that made it more likely we'd survive and reproduce. That doesn't mean we're any more "upward" than any other species on the planet that does an equally good job surviving and reproducing.
Yes, we've defined human evolution as "upward" as opposed to other life on Earth, but that's purely our self-description, not anything inherently true about the universe.
I reversed a life-long case of Prosopagnosia after doing some n-of-1 experiments with replenishing my gut bacteria, so it seems plausible to me that losing intestines could impact this.
I also have a friend had her intestines removed due to Crohn's disease. She had an infection from the surgery that put her in a coma she woke up unable to picture things in her head. Hard to say what caused it.
Because I hear this hypothesis come up from time to time--it's unlikely consciousness or long-term memory are maintained by e-fields generated in the brain, or that they require continuous electrical activity. Stark evidence against it come from ischemia studies. Ischemia usually accompanies serious underlying issues, so more controlled examples are easier to reason about: surgeons may use deep hypothermic circulatory arrest as protection for the brain in procedures with extended ischemia time requirements. In these cases, achieving electrocerebral silence (flat EEG) is one of the checklist items for the procedure. Clinical cases are worth reviewing for any hypothesis that suggests that long-term memory depends on continuous electrical activity* of neurons in the brain.
Since the events of ischemia, brain flatlining, and brain death are so closely linked in time, it's easy to conflate them. After a cold stop+start, the brain doesn't immediately jump back to normal function--there are a variety of processes that are worth studying better to get back to normal brain waves and brain function. Ischemia-related damage is often from a metabolic problems than from a discontinuity of electrical function. The reason for the cooling is to maintain the local energy reserves of the cells--when that is lost, the cells may have too much difficulty getting back to normal when blood is later reintroduced, and that's where you see brain damage or death. This kind of procedure is not without serious risk factors.
* Of course, electrical activity is needed for recall, but the point that I'm making is that the memory is later available for recall even after a period of discontinuity in the EEG.