Digest urth.v030.n132

BraveSaintCroix · 24 Jun 2001, 17:19 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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From: BraveSaintCroix at AOL.COM
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 13:19:26 EDT
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0498 at digest.urth.net>
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The thing about the New Sun book that had always bugged me was the whole=20
concept of getting a person's memories by eating a piece of them.  Perhaps=20
silly in context with some of the other miracles in the book, but it always=20
seemed ridiculous to me.  (It also bugged me in Herbert's later Dune books=20
that a clone, or ghola, could have its original's memories from just a few=20
cells. . .)  Anyway, maybe this has already been discussed, but I found an=20
interesting article in a book of "fantastic facts" that pertains to it:

During experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan,=20
scientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it=20
to another.  The experiment was conducted in the following manner.  Over a=20
period of time planarian worms were trained to behave in a particular way=20
when exposed to light.  These worms were then cut into pieces and fed to=20
untrained planarians, and the untrained worms were put through the same=20
learning paces as their predecessors.  The second batch of worms, those tha=
t=20
had dined on the first, learned many times faster than the originals,=20
indicating that knowledge had somehow been transferred through body tissue.=
 =20
Similar experiments were later conducted at Baylor University: mice were=20
trained to run though a maze, and an extract was then made of their brains.=
 =20
This extract was fed to untrained mice, which then learned the same maze=20
twice as fast as their predecessors.  If placed in a different maze, the=20
untrained mice showed no particular aptitude for learning the layout.  The=20
implication of these experiments is that memory can be transferred from one=20
being to another somatically as well as experimentially.

. . . Fascinating.

-Steve

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