{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2692", "note": "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.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 2692, "subject": "Digest urth.v030.n132", "messages": 3, "voices": 3, "first": "2001-06-24T17:19:26+00:00", "last": "2001-06-25T12:57:09+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "BraveSaintCroix", "address": "bravesaintcroix at aol.com" }, "date": "2001-06-24T17:19:26+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The thing about the New Sun book that had always bugged me was the whole \nconcept of getting a person's memories by eating a piece of them. Perhaps \nsilly in context with some of the other miracles in the book, but it always \nseemed ridiculous to me. (It also bugged me in Herbert's later Dune books \nthat a clone, or ghola, could have its original's memories from just a few \ncells. . .) Anyway, maybe this has already been discussed, but I found an \ninteresting article in a book of \"fantastic facts\" that pertains to it:\n\nDuring experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan, \nscientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it \nto another. The experiment was conducted in the following manner. Over a \nperiod of time planarian worms were trained to behave in a particular way \nwhen exposed to light. These worms were then cut into pieces and fed to \nuntrained planarians, and the untrained worms were put through the same \nlearning paces as their predecessors. The second batch of worms, those that \nhad dined on the first, learned many times faster than the originals, \nindicating that knowledge had somehow been transferred through body tissue. \nSimilar experiments were later conducted at Baylor University: mice were \ntrained to run though a maze, and an extract was then made of their brains. \nThis extract was fed to untrained mice, which then learned the same maze \ntwice as fast as their predecessors. If placed in a different maze, the \nuntrained mice showed no particular aptitude for learning the layout. The \nimplication of these experiments is that memory can be transferred from one \nbeing to another somatically as well as experimentially.\n\n. . . Fascinating.\n\n-Steve" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "James Jordan", "address": "jbjordan4 at home.com" }, "date": "2001-06-24T22:50:23+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 01:19 PM 6/24/2001 -0400, you wrote:\nThe thing about the New Sun book that had always bugged me was the whole\nconcept of getting a person's memories by eating a piece of them. Perhaps\nsilly in context with some of the other miracles in the book, but it always\nseemed ridiculous to me. (It also bugged me in Herbert's later Dune books\nthat a clone, or ghola, could have its original's memories from just a few\ncells. . .) Anyway, maybe this has already been discussed, but I found an\ninteresting article in a book of \"fantastic facts\" that pertains to it:\n\nDuring experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan,\nscientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it\nto another. ....." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": " Wolfe may have had these experiments a bit in mind, but he's \nmainly dealing with the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion, which links \nbelievers with Christ and through Him with the whole body of saints, dead \nand alive, as believers in a mystery eat the flesh and drink the blood of \ntheir Savior. There are also a whole slew of baptisms in the New Sun books, \nbeginning with young Severian's first death and resurrection. So actually, \nin context of the book, these are the main miracles.\n\nNutria" } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Straight", "address": "straight at email.unc.edu" }, "date": "2001-06-25T12:57:09+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, James Jordan wrote:\n Wolfe may have had these experiments a bit in mind, but he's \nmainly dealing with the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I would have put it the other way around. Wolfe is probably also refering\nto Holy Communion, but the idea of getting memories from somehow consuming\nsomeone else's brains/RNA is an old sci-fi/fantasy trope, the RNA versions\nhave generally been inspired by that planarial worm experiment, I think. \n(Larry Niven used injections of RNA to allow people to learn new skills in\nA World Out of Time -- that's the only one I can remember off the top of\nmy head.)\n\n(Of course, the original fantasy/magical versions of this idea may have\nthemselves been inspired by the Eucharist...)\n\n-Rostrum" } ] } ] }