Posts Tagged ‘memory’
“But somewhere, beyond space and time / Is wetter water, slimier slime”*…
Scientist’s have long marvelled at the “intelligent” accomplishments of the humble slime mold (and here). Noting that certain slime molds can make decisions, solve mazes, and remember things, Matthew Sims ponders what we can learn from the blob…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people took up baking, others decided to get a dog; I chose to grow and observe slime mould. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became home to two cultures of Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime mould sometimes more casually referred to as ‘the blob’.
I began a series of experiments investigating how long it would take for two separated cell masses from the same bisected Physarum cell to stop fusing with one another upon reintroduction. Hours turned into days, and days into weeks, and, due to time constraints, the experiment eventually fizzled out around six weeks. This, however, was only the beginning. Over that following year (unbeknown to our unsuspecting neighbours), I conducted several more experiments. Although none of them were published, each inspired new philosophical questions – which to this day continue to shape my thinking. One of the core questions was: what can the behaviour of slime mould teach us about biological memory?
The differences between P polycephalum and humans may seem vast, but slime mould can reveal a remarkable amount about various aspects of how we remember. While many people might assume that our memories are primarily stored within our brains, some philosophers like myself argue that – along with some other aspects of cognition – memory can extend beyond the confines of the body to involve coupled interaction with structures in the environment. At least some of our cognitive processes, in short, loop out into our surroundings. Slime mould is an intriguing candidate to explore this idea because it doesn’t have a brain at all, yet in some cases can apparently ‘remember’ things without needing to store those associated memories within itself. In other cases, memories acquired via learning by one individual can even be acquired by a separate individual through physical contact. The behaviour of this strange form of life suggests that some of our ideas about how memories are acquired may need a rethink…
[Sims explains how slime mold “remembers”– via slime trails– and explores the questions that this raises…]
… So, what can slime mould teach us about biological memory? One lesson is that spatial memory needn’t be confined entirely within an organism (á la HEC). Moreover, what becomes memory traces when used (eg, extracellular slime) needn’t be the result of learning by the external trace-producer. Another takeaway is that, in some cases, an individual can acquire such memory without having engaged in learning itself. This raises an intriguing parallel in the human case. We do, after all, routinely read and act upon instructions, maps and manuals written by others, drawing on information acquired through their experiences, not our own. Although such externalised sources of information are typically declarative in structure – designed to represent facts explicitly – we often act upon them automatically, without needing to consciously recall or reflect on the information they convey. In this way, they guide behaviour in ways that functionally resemble non-declarative memory. While the analogy shouldn’t be pushed too far, both the human and slime mould cases illustrate how memory can become decoupled from individual learning, instead becoming accessible to others through environmental structures.
These conclusions, of course, remain contentious within traditional cognitive science and psychology where memory is often defined as the result of learning on the part of the same individual whose memory it is. Despite important concerns raised by the likes of Francis Crick in 1984, memory storage is still often attributed to synaptic plasticity – changes in strength of connection between neurons – quashing the very possibility of external memory traces. That said, some like the psychologist C Randy Gallistel – who has long argued that memory may also be stored in molecules like RNA within the brain – have remained vigilant in thinking outside the box. However, given the accumulating empirical evidence that memory-guided behaviour is exhibited in non-neuronal organisms like Physarum, then even this outside-the-box thinking remains firmly planted in traditional views about the requirements of brains for memory and the kind of strict internalism HEC suggests needn’t always be the case. Both HEC and memory without learning are not easy pills to swallow, but then again, neither is the very idea that a non-neuronal organism can learn in the first place – an idea that Physarum’sbehaviour unequivocally seems to support.
Whether it’s the subject of experiments carried out in a lab (or in a cramped study of an Edinburgh tenement flat) or it’s the subject of empirically informed, armchair philosophising, Physarum provides a valuable model organism to inspect, challenge and refine some of our most fundamental biological concepts – concepts like memory…
Fascinating: “Memories without brains,” from @philosobio.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
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As we reckon with recall, we might send microscopic birthday greetings to Carl Woese; he was born on this date in 1928. A microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining, in 1977, the Archaea (a new domain of life, distinct from the previously-recognized two domains of bacteria and life other than bacteria). To accomplish this feat, he pioneered phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. Microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg of Stanford said “The 1977 paper is one of the most influential in microbiology and arguably, all of biology. It ranks with the works of Watson and Crick and Darwin, providing an evolutionary framework for the incredible diversity of the microbial world.”
Woese originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. And he also speculated about an era of rapid evolution in which considerable horizontal gene transfer occurred between organisms. With regard to Woese’s work on horizontal gene transfer as a primary evolutionary process, Professor Norman R. Pace of the University of Colorado at Boulder said, “I think Woese has done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin… There’s a lot more to learn, and he’s been interpreting the emerging story brilliantly.”
“Archive as if the future depends on it”*…
UbuWeb, an open online collection of avant garde materials created by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, went live almost 30 years ago…
Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never even come close. UbuWeb functions on no money—we don’t take it, we don’t pay it, we don’t touch it; you’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. We’ve never applied for a grant or accepted a sponsorship; we remain happily unaffiliated, keeping us free and clean, allowing us to do what we want to do, the way we want to do it. Most important, UbuWeb has always been and will always be free and open to all: there are no memberships or passwords required. All labor is volunteered; our server space and bandwidth are donated by a likeminded group of intellectual custodians who believe in free access to knowledge. A gift economy of plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education, UbuWeb is visited daily by tens of thousands of people from every continent. We’re on numerous syllabuses, ranging from those for kindergarteners studying pattern poetry to those for postgraduates listening to hours of Jacques Lacan’s Séminaires. When the site goes down from time to time, as most sites do, we’re inundated by emails from panicked faculty wondering how they are going to teach their courses that week.
The site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists better known for other things—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham, the hip-hop of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the films of John Lennon, the radio plays of Ulrike Meinhof, the symphonies of Hanne Darboven, the country music of Julian Schnabel—most of which were originally put out in tiny editions, were critically ignored, and quickly vanished. However, the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video, sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say, painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art history based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, hyped, or market-based center…
… These days there’s a lot of support for the way we go about things. Many think of UbuWeb as an institution. Artists both well established and lesser known try to contact us asking to be on the site. But it wasn’t always this way; for a long time many people despised UbuWeb, fearing that it was contributing to the erosion of long-standing hierarchies in the avant-garde world, fearing that it was leading to the decimation of certain art forms, fearing that it would tank entire art-based economies. Of course, none of that happened. We just happened to be there at the beginning of the web and had to ride the choppy currents of change as each successive wave washed over. Whereas we once used to receive daily cease-and-desist letters, today we rarely get any. It’s not that we’re doing anything different; it’s just that people’s attitudes toward copyright and distribution have evolved as the web has evolved.
By the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our internet service provider (ISP) pulls the plug, we get sued, or we simply grow tired of it. Beggars can’t be choosers, and we gladly take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; more often than not, the already small group of volunteers dwindles to a team of one. But that’s the beauty of it: UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise even ourselves…
And indeed, in January of last year, UbuWeb announced it was no longer active, posting: “As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.”
But last month, the site reappeared…
A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.
(Image above: source)
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As we celebrate collective memory, we might (make ourselves) remember that it was on this date in 1933 that Nazi Germany opened its first and longest-operaating concentration camp, Dachau. Initially intended to intern (then still Chancellor) Hitler’s political opponents (communists, social democrats, and other dissidents), it seeded what became a network of more than a thousand concentration camps, including subcamps, on Germany’s own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment.
“Even though our lives wander, our memories remain in one place”*…
Your correspondent’s fascination with the “memory palace,” the age-old technique of memorization, has shown up in (R)D many times before (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here :) That it works has been long understood– but how it works, not so much. Ingrid Wickelgren reports on research that may offer a clue…
After shuffling the cards in a standard 52-card deck, Alex Mullen, a three-time world memory champion, can memorize their order in under 20 seconds. As he flips though the cards, he takes a mental walk through a house. At each point in his journey — the mailbox, front door, staircase and so on — he attaches a card. To recall the cards, he relives the trip.
This technique, called “method of loci” or “memory palace,” is effective because it mirrors the way the brain naturally constructs narrative memories: Mullen’s memory for the card order is built on the scaffold of a familiar journey. We all do something similar every day, as we use familiar sequences of events, such as the repeated steps that unfold during a meal at a restaurant or a trip through the airport, as a home for specific details — an exceptional appetizer or an object flagged at security. The general narrative makes the noteworthy features easier to recall later.
“You are taking these details and connecting them to this prior knowledge,” said Christopher Baldassano, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University. “We think this is how you create your autobiographical memories.”
Psychologists empirically introduced this theory some 50 years ago, but proof of such scaffolds in the brain was missing. Then, in 2018, Baldassano found it: neural fingerprints of narrative experience, derived from brain scans, that replay sequentially during standard life events. He believes that the brain builds a rich library of scripts for expected scenarios — restaurant or airport, business deal or marriage proposal — over a person’s lifetime.
These standardized scripts, and departures from them, influence how and how well we remember specific instances of these event types, his lab has found. And recently, in a paper published in Current Biology in fall 2024, they showed that individuals can select a dominant script for a complex, real-world event — for example, while watching a marriage proposal in a restaurant, we might opt, subconsciously, for either a proposal or a restaurant script — which determines what details we remember…
The fascinating details of how, by screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences: “How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories,” from @iwickelgren in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* Marcel Proust
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As we remember (and lest we forget), we might recall that it was on this date in 1920 that Adolf Hitler, the propaganda head of the German Worker’s Party (DAP) gave a speech (now known as “Hitler’s Hofbräuhaus speech”) to 2,000 followers at a Munich beer hall announcing the change in the party’s name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“National Socialist German Workers’ Party”, or Nazi Party). It was then that the party officially announced that only persons of “pure Aryan descent” could become members and that their spouses had to be “racially pure” as well.
Oh, and on this date in 1868, an American President (Andrew Johnson) was impeached for the first time.
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world”*…
Long-time readers of (R)D will know of your correspondent’s affection for– and commitment to– archives and archiving: see, e.g., here, here, here, here, or here. As the new administration is sytematically scrubbing government websites of public data and threatening the National Archive, it’s a painfully-timely concern.
Digital pioneer Mark Pesce weighs in with a reminder that our archiving efforts should be broad– and that we shouldn’t neglect the personal…
When moving house a few months back I found several heavy plastic tubs that, upon inspection, I saw contained my life’s work in print. They were full of articles, magazines, books and book chapters.
That informal archive represents only a small portion of my total output. I’ve been writing on and for the web pretty much since it came into existence outside of CERN, so have more than 30 years’ worth of material online.
Those plastic tubs are therefore a proverbial iceberg that represent perhaps a tenth of my output, the rest of which is submerged on networks.
I had wanted to write about how to make our invisible digital lives more visible; then two horrible events – one personal, the other of global significance – reset my compass.
Earlier this month I lost my good friend Tony Kastanos to lung cancer. I’d always known him as an artist – musician, painter, provocateur – but it wasn’t until he was gone that I learned from his collaborators that he’d also released three albums of electronic music, produced with collaborator Tim Gruchy, who showed me how to find it on iTunes and Spotify.
I’d known Tony for two decades, but he’d never told me about his electronica work. Nor had he told me about his award-winning stop-motion video animation, Amerika Amerika.
Tim wondered aloud how to ensure that their collaborations would continue to be available. It’s an essential question confronting any creative talent working in the digital era: How do we continue to offer our contributions to the generations that follow, when we’re no longer around to spruik them?
The Internet Archive has a pivotal role to play here – not just because of its immunity to the commercial mutability of a Spotify or an Apple Music, but because its very existence and name imply a promise to maintain a long-term archive of all online creative works. Tim – and all of Tony’s other collaborators – could be putting copies of all their works into a Tony-Kastanos-archive-within-The-Archive. If that happens, my friend won’t disappear completely.
Half an hour after I’d learned of Tony’s passing, a friend in Los Angeles sent me a long, harrowing text message expressing fear the fires battering the city could claim their home.
A week later, they were relieved to find their home intact – but many others did not.
Within a few days, a story began to circulate about one of the structures that did not survive: The building housing the archive of the Theosophical Society.
A century ago, Theosophists stood at the forefront of what today we’d call the “New Age” movement. Although the society’s star has dimmed in the decades since, their influence on religion, philosophy and culture remains profound. Their archive housed most the papers and correspondence of the founders and main movers of the Theosophical Society – its genesis and history.
As Errol Morris has said, “People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.” The best defense is wide distribution (per the full Aaron Swartz quote, below).
Where are the comprehensive archives to protect digital works, or allow us to memorialize friends? “Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise,” from @mpesce.arvr.social.ap.brid.gy in @theregister.com.
See also: “Century-Scale Storage” from Maxwell Neely-Cohen and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School
Oh, and now is a good time to visit– and support– the Internet Archive.
* “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks… With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.” — Aaron Swartz
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As we prioritize protection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1497 that Dominican friar and populist agitator Girolamo Savonarola, having convinced the citizenry of Florence to expel the Medici and recruited the city-state’s youth in a puritanical campaign, presided over “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” the public burning of art works, books, cosmetics, and other items deemed to be vessels of personal aggrandizement. Many art historians, relying on Vasari‘s account, believe that Botticelli, a partisan of Savonarola, consigned several of his paintings to the flames (and then “fell into very great distress”). Others are not so certain. In any case, it seems sure that the fire consumed works by Fra Bartolomeo, Lorenzo di Credi, and many other painters, along with books by Boccaccio, manuscripts of secular songs, a number of statues, and other antiquities.
“So much of performing is a mind game”*…
As John Seamon explains, in describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory…
… Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.
Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text. In his book “Acting in Film,” actor Michael Caine described this process well:
You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously…
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Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use this strategy to enhance everyday retention. In picking up an apple at the grocers, for example, you can look at its color and size, you can say its name, and you can think of its nutritional value and use in a favorite recipe. Focusing on these visual, acoustic, and conceptual aspects of the apple correspond to shallow, moderate, and deep levels of processing, and the depth of processing that is devoted to an item or event affects its memorability. Memory is typically enhanced when we engage in deep processing that provides meaning for an item or event, rather than shallow processing. Given a list of common nouns to read, people recall more words on a surprise memory test if they previously attended to the meaning of each word than if they focused on each word’s font or sound.
Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known. Retention is enhanced because elaboration produces more meaningful associations than does shallow processing — links that can serve as potential cues for later remembering. For example, your ease of recalling the name of a specific dwarf in Walt Disney’s animated film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” depends on the cue and its associated meaning:
Try to recall the name of the dwarf that begins with the letter B.
People often have a hard time coming up with the correct name with this cue because many common names begin with the letter B and all of them are wrong. Try it again with a more meaningful cue:
Recall the name of the dwarf whose name is synonymous with shyness.
If you know the Disney film, this time the answer is easy. Meaningful associations help us remember, and elaborative processing produces more semantic associations than does shallow processing. This is why the meaningful cue produces the name Bashful…
On the art of recall: “How Actors Remember Their Lines,” an excerpt from Seamon’s book, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us About Memory, from @mitpress.
* Joshua Bell
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As we recollect, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that Guiding Light (AKA The Guiding Light) transferred from CBS Radio to CBS Television… and, as while radio actors could read from scripts, tv performers couldn’t, an enormous new occasion for the memorization of lines was created.
And indeed, there were lots and lots of lines to remember: with 72 years of radio and television runs (18,262 episodes), Guiding Light remains the longest-running soap opera, ahead of General Hospital, and is the fifth-longest-running program in all of global broadcast history.
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