Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132

From: BraveSaintCroix <bravesaintcroix at aol.com>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 17:19:26 +0000

The thing about the New Sun book that had always bugged me was the whole 
concept of getting a person's memories by eating a piece of them.  Perhaps 
silly in context with some of the other miracles in the book, but it always 
seemed ridiculous to me.  (It also bugged me in Herbert's later Dune books 
that a clone, or ghola, could have its original's memories from just a few 
cells. . .)  Anyway, maybe this has already been discussed, but I found an 
interesting article in a book of "fantastic facts" that pertains to it:

During experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan, 
scientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it 
to another.  The experiment was conducted in the following manner.  Over a 
period of time planarian worms were trained to behave in a particular way 
when exposed to light.  These worms were then cut into pieces and fed to 
untrained planarians, and the untrained worms were put through the same 
learning paces as their predecessors.  The second batch of worms, those that 
had dined on the first, learned many times faster than the originals, 
indicating that knowledge had somehow been transferred through body tissue.  
Similar experiments were later conducted at Baylor University: mice were 
trained to run though a maze, and an extract was then made of their brains.  
This extract was fed to untrained mice, which then learned the same maze 
twice as fast as their predecessors.  If placed in a different maze, the 
untrained mice showed no particular aptitude for learning the layout.  The 
implication of these experiments is that memory can be transferred from one 
being to another somatically as well as experimentially.

. . . Fascinating.

-Steve

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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From: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at home.com>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 22:50:23 +0000

At 01:19 PM 6/24/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>to another. .....

         Wolfe may have had these experiments a bit in mind, but he's 
mainly dealing with the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion, which links 
believers with Christ and through Him with the whole body of saints, dead 
and alive, as believers in a mystery eat the flesh and drink the blood of 
their Savior. There are also a whole slew of baptisms in the New Sun books, 
beginning with young Severian's first death and resurrection. So actually, 
in context of the book, these are the main miracles.

Nutria

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:57:09 +0000

On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, James Jordan wrote:

> mainly dealing with the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion

I would have put it the other way around.  Wolfe is probably also refering
to Holy Communion, but the idea of getting memories from somehow consuming
someone else's brains/RNA is an old sci-fi/fantasy trope, the RNA versions
have generally been inspired by that planarial worm experiment, I think.  
(Larry Niven used injections of RNA to allow people to learn new skills in
A World Out of Time -- that's the only one I can remember off the top of
my head.)

(Of course, the original fantasy/magical versions of this idea may have
themselves been inspired by the Eucharist...)

-Rostrum