X-Message-Number: 26287
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 08:48:18 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: comments to all readers re 2 brain msgs

Hi everyone!

For Coetzee:

Larry Squire, his books and his work, have gotten discussion in PERIASTRON
for some time. However the work you discuss does not tell us where 
long term personal memories are stored; it would be more accurate to say
that it gives one brain area in which they are NOT permanently stored.
Squire, who has access to many brain-injured human patients, has made
good use of that access to answer questions about how our memories work.
The work you quote is another good example.

Lots of questions remain here. Do we store parts of such memories in 
brain regions controlling different senses (ie. visual parts in our 
visual system, noises in our hearing areas, etc etc) or in one place
where they're all linked together? If they are stored separately in 
different sensory regions, what system joins them together; if they
are stored together, what system(s) connect them with the sense
impressions involved? As most cryonicists should know, many of our
memories are newly reconstructed when we remember them: a fact well-known
to lawyers and judges (at least some) who know that anyone who claims
to remember an incident needs to be questioned carefully to tell how
much of that memory may actually be falsely reconstructed. At the 
same time we can sometimes have vivid and correct personal memories,
particularly when our feelings and person were actually involved. Just
how such differences in accuracy of memories arise remains yet another
question. Naturally it's normal to believe that our memories are 
always completely accurate.

To Jonathan:

One problem cryonicists have which most brain researchers don't have
is that our resources are small and numbers are relatively few. I
peronally would strongly agree that an Allen Brain Map would help
a lot in recovering brain-damaged patients --- probably not enough to
be identified with means to recovery, but still a great deal. It
will likely tell us how to rebuild fragments of neurons, and 
give them connections close to those they originally had. These would
be valuable steps toward recovering memories, for instance; but
a little thought will also tell us that they may well not be enough
for total recovery, or even recovery of a high proportion. We will
probably need to know close to a detailed version of the connections
of an individual person's brain, which necessarily must differ in
detail from the connections of any other person's brain. The memories
of each person are somehow stored in the connections of their 
brain cells, and therefore those connections will differ. A very
thorough brain map, of course, would not just give a map in the
sense of a map of a town, but also information about how a synapse
between 2 different neurons (of the same or different kinds) changes
the chemistry of each one. Such information, if available, would 
considerably help recover memories.

Should cryonicists actually contribute to such studies? Given our
resources, at least for now, we'll have to leave such studies to
neuroscientists with much more funding to do them. Nothing prevents us,
of course, from watching with intense interest and knowledge of 
neuroscience to mach that interest.

              Best wishes and long long life to all,

                   Thomas Donaldson

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