# Planaria and the consumption of brains *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 04 Nov 1999* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### David Duffy *04 Nov 1999, 07:27* You shouldn't be completely dismissive of this. It was replicated up as high as cats (trooly rooly), but the effects were never really big. Just recently they've found there are a few hundred new neurons appearing in the human brain every day (maybe via the diet;)): it's been suggested they might represent laying down of new memories. So it can definitely be used as a scientific fiction to explain how eating your enemies' or relatives' brains works after all. WRT SF antecedents, Damon Knight has a giant amoeba with a similar habit to the alzabo. Riffing on race memory, Greg Bear has DNA, (or was it microtubule based computers?), storing all one's ancestors' experiences in _Blood Music_. David Duffy. ---