Re: Men more likely than women to have problems with memory and other thinking skills, symptoms considered to be an early stage of dementia, research suggests.

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:31:58 -0700, Islander <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Florida wrote:
On Apr 18, 11:20 am, Islander <nos...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Florida wrote:
---[snip]---
:^) Crux of the problem. We have started to have the
occasional conversation which starts "Remember I told you, you
forgot...." - as if one couldn't also forget serially, with as much
ease as one forgot the first time. Personally I'm counting on
minicomputers to help pick up our marbles when we start losing them.
Not so far fetched as we might think. There has been on-going research
for over a decade on "personal assistants" which are carried on our
person and which keep track of what is going on in our lives, including
reminding us of things that we might have forgotten.

My sci-fi-assisted imagination immediately projects this as a
dangerously double-edged tool. On the one hand, those who need it are
assisted with the deficits of aging. On the other, people who didn't
have all their marbles in the first place will have a false sense of
competence and the absolute certainty which comes of having given
their lives over to a lower power. Semi-droids, as it were,
corporeally human but conceptually programmed. Okay, I guess that's
not much different from what we have now.

Ah, but just think of the potential for some hacker programming in a
Trojan horse in a popular personal assistant appliance. Just when you
become very confident in the information that you are getting from this
device, along comes a trigger event where a subtle piece of
misinformation is produced. A way to produce millions of neo-Manchurian
Candidates?

Nearly 30 years ago, a friend of mine who worked in the field of
Artificial Intelligence speculated on Knowledge Wars where countries
became critically dependent on computerized knowledge-based systems. An
enemy might find a way to insert a clever piece of corrupted knowledge
in your system that would cause you to act in a way that favored your
adversary. How would you even know until it was too late?



I've often said I'd like a computer implanted in my brain, with
pads my neurons could hook up to so that my brain could
"learn" how to use it. I've immediately added that I'd be afraid
of what might be programmed into it by government operatives
who couldn't and/or wouldn't resist the temptation of
"protecting" me by inserting some "safeguards" though.
Originally, I used Ronald Reagan as the villain who might be
"protecting" me, so I guess that was the era in which I originally
started saying the above.




An important part of this research is the issue of assuring that
whatever this device does, that it *not* accelerate the loss of memory
by allowing whatever capability that we still have to atrophy.

Does memory really work that way, do you think? I'm not
challenging your statement, I really don't know.

If you are interested in the mechanics of memory, you might enjoy
reading "In Search of Memory" by Eric Kandel. He won the Nobel Prize in
Physiology in 2000 for his amazing work in figuring out the physical
mechanisms of memory. Very readable.

The short answer to your question is that memory is stored in the
synapses that serve as connector nodes in the interconnections between
the neurons in the brain. We program the synapses by repeating stimulus
on a particular pathway. A few times and we have short term memory and
many times and we have long term memory. But, the synaptic connections
can deteriorate over time, sometimes due to disease or chemical process,
but mostly just do to not being used. We don't know why some pathways
seem to persist much longer than others unless it is because the brain
works by constantly running many parallel simulations of whatever
happens to be going on in our lives, constantly drawing upon our
previous experiences. Even dreams can be renewing old pathways in
unpredictable ways. (How scary is that?)



Scary? Not scary at all! I've long thought that dreams must
be good for something other than random entertainment of
which we're not even usually conscious. I read somewhere,
long ago so it's not a new idea, that sifting the chaff out of the
wheat amid the synaptic connections might be the main thing
that dreams do. The idea that dreams rebalance us might be
a conjecture for one reason that people get disoriented if they
don't get enough sleep, though that subconjecture is not
necessary to the main conjecture.





So, use it or lose it!

We know that memory can be improved throughout our lives (as long as we
do no fall victim to certain diseases), but like anything else, we need
to keep exercising it.

Speaking of exercise, I even saw one recent study that claimed that
physical exercise was necessary to improve memory.

Rats. Here I thought "muscle memory" was for jocks so we
computer addicts could give strenuous exercise a miss. You know:
"look, I exercise my brain online every day!"



"Muscle memory" is really "nerve memory", and the brain is just
a big mess of nerves, so it seems perfectly reasonable that the
nerves distributed through the body have powers along the same
lines. All pianists know that if you can't remember something you
used to play, just play it, and your fingers will likely "remember"
it. I guess that's more likely due to "unconscious" versus
"conscious" knowledge in the brain itself, but the idea that some
knowledge might be stored in the nerves of your arms and fingers
and not directly accessible to the main brain perhaps shouldn't
be dismissed too quickly.

One of the herbivorous dinosaurs with plates on its back
had a brain at the base of its tail, to operate the tail and hind
legs,that was bigger than the brain in its head. Of course, we
are talking about dinosaurs here, walnut-sized brains for
multi-ton animals.




Now, if I could just remember why I went into the next room...

:^) Pretty much every day, here. I try to rationalize that as
focus upon Higher Things rather than mundane detail.

Ah, that makes sense...

.

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