Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Memories stored in the brain

Gerry Quinn · 15 Jul 2013, 10:46 · from 2013-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 11:46:34 +0100
Subject: (urth) Memories stored in the brain
In-Reply-To: <BAY174-W45FE2761F9F41235417B6092660 at phx.gbl>
References: <mailman.11374.1373829875.1486.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<BAY174-W45FE2761F9F41235417B6092660 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <609D2757001148D49C3FFE6F7A056017@Rover>



From: Ashley Crill

> > I assume the connection would be that memories traditionally considered
> > to be stored on the brain were in this case stored elsewhere in the
> > body. That seems to be a key Wolfean conceit and one presumably
> > necessary for the alzabo effect, unless the animal always eats the brain
> > before it mimics its dead prey. However, there may be other ways to
> > explain this behavior in planaria.

> I understood it to be the opposite.
>
> The 'Wolfean' idea represented seems to be that memories can only be
> transmitted by eating a certain part of the brain.
>
> Reference Severian's gruesome accession to the Autarchy as an example.

The way I understood it, both work - but eating the brain, rather than the 
body, and probably using a higher-quality elixir compared to whatever 
Vodalus was able to brew, works better and probably has fewer side effects.

- Gerry Quinn


An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net