Splatulance t1_is7ylyu wrote on October 13, 2022 at 11:20 PM

Every single thought you have has a physical process behind it. Ideas are collaborations between neurons and groups of neurons to model the world.

An idea can be as simple as a small line at a 32 degree angle, in an image. The neurons responsible for detecting lines at precisely that angle have no concept of what a line is. They respond to a specific pattern of stimulus from other cells, and emit their own responses when that stimulus fits the pattern.

Knowing what pattern to respond to is a form of memory.

There is a specialized "memory region" (it does considerably more than that) in the center of your brain called the hippocampus which doesn't "store all your data", so much as a significant portion of its neurons are dedicated to coordinating activity in the rest of your brain so that you can learn, remember, and abstract ideas. It emits signals which propagate through most of the brain and signify whether or not information is in the past, present, or future.

Memory as we commonly discuss it is a simulation of the past. It's a rough approximate replay of coordinated activity pulsing through the brain. When your mind wanders, and when you sleep the hippocampus recruits other areas of your brain to replay past events. There seem to be two primary reasons for this:

To abstract/compress/refine the data. A little chaos is "injected" into the data by "loosening restrictions", which in statistical terms helps to avoid overfitting and promote generalization. Basically your brain wants to learn general patterns and ideas rather than extremely situationally specific ones. This is the heart of abstraction
To encourage individual neurons and networks to reinforce and remember ideas

Over time connections which enable/facilitate the recall/replay of patterns degrade if they aren't replayed. We don't remember everything forever, we barely even process most of the information our senses receive.

To answer your question then... volatile. However the rate of information decay is going to vary directly with the rate of physical decay, with special importance placed (for non procedural memory) on the hippocampus (edit: and part of the prefrontal cortex), but there is a lot of memory all over the brain.

Josysclei OP t1_is85xvn wrote on October 14, 2022 at 12:17 AM

For example, the bilionaires that freeze their brans in hope of future tech being able to clone their minds. Once a brain loses all it's electrical impulses, can your "mind" survive that? Is our brain like RAM on our PCs that lose everything once shutoff or like a SSD?

Splatulance t1_is873ji wrote on October 14, 2022 at 12:26 AM

The rate of information decay is going to vary directly with the rate of physical decay, with special importance placed (for non procedural memory) on the hippocampus (edit: and part of the prefrontal cortex), but there is a lot of memory all over the brain.

Which means that the extent to which the neurons are damaged/destroyed is going to determine the extent to which function is lost. Function and memory are the same thing.

Think of it this way: it's impossible to imagine throwing a ball without using regions of your brain responsible for actually throwing a ball. When you remember throwing a ball the neurons involved in throwing that ball are active.

If you damage the region responsible for remembering the sequence of events that led to you throwing the ball, and/or the regions involved in ball throwing, you won't be able to run the "I threw a ball one time" program.

Regarding freezing and thawing: I don't know but I imagine ice crystals would create some very serious issues.

BrindianBriskey t1_ismxfmi wrote on October 17, 2022 at 4:22 AM

This was really interesting to read, thanks. It would make sense that there would be great utility behind the brain’s constant replaying and abstraction of past events, as it attempts to squeeze every last bit of relevance and meaning from each experience.

I think this idea also exemplifies the difference between knowledge and wisdom; a young person may know a lot of things, but an older person has had time to generalize their knowledge and experiences, allowing for a broader perspective and the ability to draw more disparate and meaningful connections.