"They said it was me who sucked the slime off that rock yesterday. Funny, but I have no memory whatsoever of it."
Posted on 05/16/2018 9:18:58 AM PDT by ETL
A new study strongly suggests that at least some memories are stored in genetic code, and that genetic code can act like memory soup. Suck it out of one animal and stick the code in a second animal, and that second animal can remember things that only the first animal knew.
That might sound like science fiction or remind some readers of debunked ideas from decades past. But it's serious science: In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) extracted RNA, a genetic messenger molecule, from one snail and implanted it in another snail. Then, for good measure, they dribbled that same RNA over a bundle of loose neurons in a petri dish.
In both experiments, the recipient — either the snail or the petri-neurons — remembered something the donor snail had experienced.
The memory was simple, the kind of thing even a snail's reflex-based, brainless nervous system can hold onto: the shock of an electric zap in the butt.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
"They said it was me who sucked the slime off that rock yesterday. Funny, but I have no memory whatsoever of it."
this has many horrifying implications
Snails? Can’t imagine waiting around for the snail to move far enough to demonstrate that it remembered something- talk about boring- couldn’t they have picked a road runner or something?
Snail gets mugged by two slugs.
Police ask him to describe his attackers.
“I don’t know. It all happened so fast!”
That it do.
Cloning, artificial intelligence, etc, etc.
Would be great if we could jump forward a thousand or so years and see what these various breakthroughs will lead to.
It explains many things we already knew but could not believe. For instance, perhaps preferences and prejudices our ancestors learned from experience might be hardwired into us. And why not, such an ability to pass learned information to our offspring would confer a competitive advantage in the race for survival
What did the snail say when he jumped on the
tortoise’s back?
“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”
What about as a way of extracting the truth from a criminal suspect's brain.
Add salt.
It would have been an interesting confirmation to repeat the experiment by feeding the invertebrates from their own kind who learned a different maze, to see if that impacted negatively on their learning ability.
Slow day at the lab.
Ah, but did the second snail learn the way through the maze quicker because of added brainpower.
Some day they may be able to transfer the entire contents of someone’s brain to another person, or computer.
Eloi and Morlocks.
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