Conference hydra::dejavu

    Since I knew Topher could probably provide a start on this, I asked
    him in mail as well, and he sent the following reply in mail, with
    permission to post it.   
    
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Sorry, I don't have any technical citations on it.  For a while, maybe 20
years ago, pseudo-genetic/chemical theories of memory were all the rage.
The favorite culprit was RNA, although proteins figured in some theories.
The main impetus for this was some experiments whereby planaria worms were
trained in some simple task, ground up and fed to other planaria worms.
These canabalistic planaria were able, supposedly, to learn the task in
less time then their sacraficed brothers.  Unfortunately, the experiments
suffered from some methodological problems and could not be reproduced.
Memory is now generally viewed as being stored in some form of resonance
in the neural circuitry.  There is, of course, a chemical component there --
physio-chemical changes at the synapses are what creates the resonance,
but there is no pseudo-genetic direct encoding of information into an
individual molecule.

I don't particularly see what a genetic or pseudogenetic memory buy's one
in explaining glossalalial phenomenon.  Most such is "xenoglosia" where
the speaker bables in an unknown tongue, identified in religious settings
as the "language of the angels" or the "language of the kingdom of heaven".
Unfortunately this language tends to be strongly conditioned by the
phonetic rules of the speaker's native langauge.  Left over are some
cases where the language spoken is identifiable and is not consciously
known by the speaker.  This seems to be adequately dealt with by cryptonesia,
hidden memories, which does not seem to require any specific memory
mechanism.  What is spoken is fragments of the language assembled from
sources which have been forgotten by the speaker.  For example, I have
a case study at home where someone involved in past lives regression started
speaking French while reliving a past life as a WWI French flyer.  A
native French linguist concluded that what he was saying could have come
completely from comic books and old movies about WWI.

There is a very small remaining set of cases which are at least difficult
to explain by cryptonesia.  But these do not seem to particularly address
"ancestral" languages (in part because a language spoken by a grandparent
for example, could be too easily attributable to cryptonesia), so genetic
based memories do not seem to be a particularly clean way to deal with
this residue.

Feel free to post this reply and let me know how the discussion goes.

				Topher

    I thought that unknowable knowledge and tongues came from listening to
    the Akashic Record.
    
    karl

    re: Akashic Record
    
    Oh yeah.  I got it from Columbia House a few selections ago.
    Performed by 'Isis and the Great Mahatma Band' right ?
    
    Yesterday, after I posted the question, I found a reference to the RNA 
    memory theory in a strange place, a 20 year old book on Christian meditation
    I had with my hypnosis books.  Pretty interesting that they included
    an electrochemical theory of memory.  The gist was that proteins were
    supposed to be modified by an electrochemical process triggered by the
    neurons somehow, and that the RNA was the central focus for this.
    The book is called 'Meditation_The_Inward_Art.'
    
    Unfortunately, though it was a very general description and they 
    supplied no refererence.  It was apparently the 'common knowledge'
    scientific theory of the time I gather from the context.
    
    							todd

Hmmm, is it out on CD yet?

Todd, not in any way an answer to your question, but a notion floated
around a few years ago (maybe was even mentioned in this conference)
along the lines of: what would you get if you constructed DNA using
(somehow) the Torah or Koran as the gene sequence? Both of these works
are written in languages in which words come from three-letter roots
(as in three-nucleotide sequence = gene), and I'm told that the Koran
even has "checksums" built in to help preserve correct
transmission/transcription (I understand there's some sort of
redundancy in DNA, as well).

For the heck of it, I checked the molecular weight of typical genomes
(full DNA needed to describe such organisms as tapeworms, amoebae,
humans), and it turns out that all but the simplest organisms have more
DNA in them than the length of either the Torah or Koran. Still, food
for thought. I mean, it would be just too much if somebody actually
constructed a DNA sequence from the Torah and it lived and reproduced.
Could make believers out of some folks, no?

    re: Mike,
    Thanks for your thoughts.
    
    DNA bibles, that's even better than those postage stamp bibles they sell
    in the novelty cataloges !
    
    							todd

    Why worry? I've read somewhere that one can learn techniques to alter
    one's DNA retrospectively, to, for instance, double one's life-span.
    
    Laurie.

    re: .6 (Laurie)
    
          But unfortunately, "if true," won't do you much good.
    To double yours, you'd better keep up with every nutrition/health
    magazine you can find...
    
    Frederick
    

re: 1608.3 
DWOVAX::STARK 

>    Yesterday, after I posted the question, I found a reference to the RNA 
>    memory theory in a strange place, a 20 year old book on Christian meditation
>    I had with my hypnosis books.  Pretty interesting that they included
>    an electrochemical theory of memory.  The gist was that proteins were
>    supposed to be modified by an electrochemical process triggered by the
>    neurons somehow, and that the RNA was the central focus for this.
>    The book is called 'Meditation_The_Inward_Art.'

	The RNA encoding theory of memory was very popular in the late
	60's early 70's, partly because of some very interesting work
	done with flatworms.  Unfortunately, later researchers were
	unable to reproduce the results, and the theory that RNA strands
	per se were used for encoding fell into disfavor.  Current theory
	is that, while memory is probably related to electrochemically
	induced changes in synaptic junctions, a given memory most likely
	isn't confined to one region of the brain or one strand of any
	particular chemical.  In this sense, the act of remembering is
	more like "tuning" your whole brain to the proper channel to
	recover the memory, than like going to a post-box and finding
	a memory in it.  One rather radical theory even suggests that
	we don't really "remember" anything, but instead we simply
	imagine a "plausible past" as we need it.

	-Art

RE: .8 (Art)

>	One rather radical theory even suggests that
>	we don't really "remember" anything, but instead we simply
>	imagine a "plausible past" as we need it.

    Depending on what you mean by this, it is not generally considered
    radical -- their is virtually overwhelming evidence for it.  We appear
    to memorize only little bits of what is unexpected, then when we wish
    to remember something we reconstruct a "plausible past" and modulate it
    by the unexpected details.  Experiments where expectations are shifted
    between "memorization" and "recall" show this effect clearly, as do,
    less directly, experiments where what is remembered is too perceived
    too quickly or unclearly to allow the exceptions to be detected. 
    (Classic example: a sketch is flashed showing a caucasian man
    threatening an African-American man with a knife; on recall, guess who
    is threatening who).

					Topher

    	re: .8 (Art), .9 (Topher),
    Thanks for your replies !
    
    Psychologist Robert Ornstein, past author of the popular 'The Psychology of
    	Consciousness,' writes about this last theory of 
    	reconstructed memory in one of his more books, 
    	'THe Evolution of Consciousness,' where he derives various
    	aspects of consciousness from the perspective of biological
    	evolution, and this theory of memory is among them.
    
    						todd

    
    Roger Penrose has some interesting things to say in his book "The
    Emperor's New Mind - Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of
    Physics".  
    
    The last chapter is "Where lies the physics of the mind?"
    
    Penrose is a colleague of Stephen Hawking.
    
    Cindy

    Todd:
    
    There is another source worth checking: "Shuffle-Brain", by Paul
    Pietsch. Houghton Mifflin Co, 1981. ISBN: 0-395-29480-0.  If you need a
    summary of Pietch's findings, I'll need more time (or you can
    call)--I've got the book at work.  Suffice it to say that he determined
    a means by which information could be stored and then transmitted to
    another individual creature (worms, salamanders--not humans).  Don't
    know about glossslalia, though.
    
    Richard B
    DTN: 533-7742

    re: .11, Cindy,
    	Thanks !  Penrose has been on my pending list for a while
    	now.  I just need to take a week off to catch up on my
    	reading.  :-)
    
    re: .12, Richard,
    	So the plot thickens, eh ?  Thanks for the reference !
    
    							todd

    This amounts to a rumor, but I once heard that the reason for the
    apparent success of the early flatworm-RNA experiments was probably
    that the later flatworms were following slim-trails through the mazes,
    left by their predecessors.  It wasn't really important that the later
    flatworms had been fed the earlier ones.  Moral: Clean you lab-ware
    after every use.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    So an entire generation of memory theorists may have been outsmarted by 
    latent worm slime ?   I'm flabbergasted.  
    
    Shakes my whole faith in worm integrity.  They cheated !!
    
    Pound for pound, the amoeba may be the most vicious
    animal on earth, but the worm may well be the craftiest.
    
    							todd

    Many thanks to Richard Bradley for taking the time to send me this
    excerpt from "Shuffle-Brain", by Paul Pietsch. Houghton Mifflin Co, 1981. 
    ISBN: 0-395-29480-0.   Both Richard and I would be very interested in
    any comments on the subject !
							todd
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From: Chapter 1: Quest of Hologramic Memory

Pg. 6 "Hologramic theory not only stirred my prejudice, it also seemed highly 
vulnerable to the very experiments I was planning:  shuffling neuroanatomy, 
reorganizing the brain, scrambling the sets and subsets tht I theorized were 
the carriers of neural programs.  I fully expected to retire hologramic theory 
to the boneyard of meaningless ideas.  I'd begun licking my canine teeth like 
a mink who has cornered a chicken.  I even began considering which scientific 
meetings would be best for the announcement  of my theory.  I should have 
awaited Nature's answers.  For hologramic theory was to survive every trial, 
and my own theory went down to utter defeat."

Pg. 8 "Setting philosphy aside, I am still unwilling to delare hologramic 
theory true.  Do I believe the theory?  Yes, of course, or I wouldn't be 
writing a book about it.  But belief has an irrational component built in.  As 
a logic professor of mine used to insist, "the routes to certitude and 
certainty pass through different territories."  The reader is entitled to find 
his or her own certitude.  Science does not elevate its practitioners above 
mortality and fallibility, not even in judging the implications of scientific 
data.  Only the writer with this thought in the prow of the mind may guide a 
reader to a brand-new universe of understanding; and only as another mortal 
can I make shufflebrain a window on the hologramic mind."

From Chapter Two: The Mind-Brain Conundrum

Pg. 37 "Holism does not rest its case on the structuralists dubious 
dialectical position, but on prima facie evidence from some of the finest 
research ever conducted in psychology or biology--thirty years of exhaustive, 
imaginative, and carefully controlled laboratory investigations by Karl 
Lashley, the founder of the entire field of physiological psychology.

...Lashley found that destruction of 20 percent or more of a rat's cerebrum 
could dim its memory of the maze.  And increasing the damage would 
proportionately decrease the animal's recall.  But (and this is the single 
biggest "but" in the history of brain research!) the critical thing was not 
where he made the wound but how much of the area he destroyed.  Lashley got 
the same results by destroying the same percentages of different lobes.  
Anticipating hologramic theory, he even analogized memory to interference 
patterns, examples of which the reader can find on pages 154-160 of this book.  
He had borrowed the name of the prinicple--equipotentiality--from the 
embryologist Hans Driesch.  The term means that engrams, or memory traces, are 
distributed all over the region."

Pg. 40 "As a general theory, derived from the generic phase principle, 
hologramic theory does not make champions of the holists and chumps of the 
structuralists. Instead, hologramic theory breaks the mind-brain conundrum by 
showing that one need not choose between holism and structuralism.  Hologramic 
theory will supply us with the missing idea--the thought that Hegel would have 
said allows thesis and antithesis to become synthesis." 

From Chapter 8

Pg. 151 "What then is memory?  Transferring the principles we have developed 
to hologramic theory, and using the language we have developed thus far, we 
can define a specific memory as a particular spectrum of D's in transform 
space.  What are D's? They are phase differences--relative values, 
relationships between and among constituents of the storage medium, the brain.  
Thus, in hologramic theory, the brain stores mind not as cells, chemicals, 
electrical currents, or any other entities of perceptual space, but as 
relationships at least as abstract as any information housed in the transform 
space of a physical hologram.  The parts and mechanisms of the brain do count: 
but the D's they establish in transform space are what make memory what it is.  
If we try to visualize stored mind by literal comparisons with experience, we 
surrender the chance of forming any valid concept at all of hologramic mind, 
and quite possibly yield all hope of ever establishing the existence of the 
noumenon where brain stores thought."

[There, that's the punch line.  To fully understand the previous sentences you 
may have to review Wave Theory and Fourier Analysis/Synthesis.  There are 
simplified explanations in Pietsch's book, but this is general mathematical 
knowledge, available in many places.  I remember seeing this discussion in 
"Stalking the Wild Pendulum", by Itzhak Bentov, and in an article about Karl 
Pribram, in Psychology Today magazine.]

It's certainly okay to re-post this in Dejavu.  

    ...
    
Richard Bradley