{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2695",
    "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": 2695,
    "subject": "eating memories in the real world (Ray Bradbury spoiler)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-06-25T23:13:17+00:00",
    "last": "2001-06-25T23:13:17+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0506@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "William Ansley",
        "address": "wansley at warwick.net"
      },
      "date": "2001-06-25T23:13:17+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (urth) eating memories in the real world (Ray Bradbury spoiler)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Warning! I have a spoiler for a Ray Bradbury short story at the end \nof this message."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At 1:19 PM -0400 6/24/01, BraveSaintCroix at aol.com 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": "..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "The implication of these experiments is that memory can be \ntransferred from one being to another somatically as well as \nexperimentially.\n\n. . . Fascinating.\n\n-Steve"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "At 10:27 AM +0100 6/25/01, Joshua A. Solomon wrote:\nevidence summarised below:\n\nhttp://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/R24652-28994-/Network-News/bionet/cellbiol/9310.newsm"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Even though Joshua provided us all with a wonderfully apropos link to \na discussion of this very question among real neurobiologists (well, \nat least one of them is) I think that the gist of what you will find \nif you follow his link bears repeating. To wit, these memory transfer \nexperiments did not prove to be reproducible. Therefore there is \nevery reason to doubt that this phenomenon actually exists. I quote \nfrom the discussion linked to by Joshua Solomon below:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "The most recent reference to the whole memory-transfer business\nthat I could find was in _Basic Neurochemistry_, 4th edition,\nSiegel et al., eds., Raven Press, NY, 1989.  p. 924.\nIn it, Bernard Agranoff writes, \"The claims in the 1960s of memory\ntransfer via injection of RNA or of protein have long since\nsubsided for want of evidence.\""
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Steve Matheson   Program in Neuroscience   University of Arizona\nsfm at neurobio.arizona.edu"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "There have been SF stories based specifically on this research (I can \nremember one definite example, anyway, even though I cannot bring the \nauthor or title to mind at this moment*) but they are almost \ncertainly all as inaccurate as stories that portray Mercury as having \nthe same side always facing the sun."
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "William Ansley\n\n*It involved a giant, mutant planaria eating a young boy and then \ncoming to the breakfast table (as a blob) and asking for french toast \nin the boy's voice or something similar. The last line was a direct \nrip-off of the last line of a famous Ray Bradbury story involving a \nman whose skeleton was removed."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}