Because experiments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used static electricity to induce motion in the muscle of frogs, the early scientific consensus was that electricity must then reside in the muscle of frogs.
Just like electricity is not tied to frogs’ muscles only, memories as a specific form of information might not reside in the neural mass at all.
Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics, affirms that “our brains store and manipulate information in patterns of electrical activation”.
Well, not so fast, because according to Robert McIntyre of Nectome.com, “Long-term memory persists in enduring biochemical and structural arrangements, not in electrical patterns, brittle arrangements of individual molecules, or localized individual neurons.”
Writing about “A Mind At Play: How Claude Shannon Invented The Information Age”, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman qualify both assertions:
“Despite the progress of technology, we still have no clear understanding of how memories are stored in our own brains. Shannon’s principles of redundancy and error correction are no doubt involved in preserving memory, but how does the process work and why does it sometimes fail?”
The emphasis in the above quote is ours, since the assumption that memories are stored in the brain itself is just that, an assumption backed by no dedicated, conclusive, scientific proof. It’s always been out there, unchallenged, although it lurks around in discussions about the brain-mind dichotomy.
Back to MIT Professor Wilczek who points out that, “Effects without apparent causes inspire us to look at the world in new ways.”
And what exactly are those effects without apparent causes that we at n-fora.com have considered and made us to look at the world a bit differently? Out of many, for the sake of brevity, let’s mention the following three:
A) The retention of memories in people who survived temporary global ischemia or deep hypothermic circulatory arrest. Simply put, they were clinically dead. In the few cases that could be studied under scientific conditions no electrical patterns were recorded in the brain. However once resuscitated those individuals remembered not only who they were, but somehow retrieved the entire panoply of past feelings, images, and connections. Without the electrical markers associated with brain activity, where and how exactly did their memories survive?
B) Quantum entanglement under which two twin particles simultaneously display the same behavior while forcefully separated to different, far-away locations. How do the particles ‘communicate’ about each other’s behavior in order to instantaneously synchronize since they are tens, hundreds or thousands of miles away?
C) People with hyperthymesia are able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. They recall events all the way back to early childhood as well as public events that hold some personal significance to them, and can often do it in great detail, but their brains exhibit no significant deviation in size or activity from any other average brain.
What is the link between these apparently disjointed examples?
Information.
Which brings us to mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener’s assertion that ‘information is information, it is not energy and it is not matter’. As such, it ought to objectively reside in a medium/state/dimension that we call the universal (n)fora.
n-fora.com dramatically breaks away from the almost-unanimously held scientific consensus that memories reside within the brain itself and tries to reorient the scientific approach about memory formation and retention.
n-fora.com predicates its research and procedures on the axioms that (1) neural cell systems are a conduit to the storing and retrieving of information, including memories, toward and from the universal (n)fora, and (2) the understanding of the processes of information manipulation by the brain will eventually prove to be a key to our comprehensive understanding of the entire universe.
The word (n)fora is derived from the greek αόρατος, ‘aoratos’ meaning invisible.
“For if we haven’t seen it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there”, as the Torah wisely forewarned.
The word might conjure the Latin term for a certain type of container, the amphora, but instead of wines and oils the (n)fora stores information. Maybe we should call that (n)formation since it is a qualitatively different class. The similarity to the word ‘information’ is obvious.
The spelling allows (n) to be standing for the unknown, to be later determined, number of states/dimensions that it assumes.
In other words, there is not just one, all encompassing (n)fora, but any number of states/fields/dimensions to it.
Language, being the great sublimator of cultural intuitions gathered over many generations, offers an additional insight regarding the essence of what memories are. ‘Membrum’ is Latin for part, or organ of a body. Re-membering is then re-incorporating, re-integrating into the body what was temporarily placed outside of it, more specifically outside the brain.
Just to using another example, in German, a language conducive to the thinking of many of the world’s great philosophers, the word for remembering, ‘er-innern’ literally means re-internalizing, retrieving it to our innards.
Contemplated from this new perspective, the entanglement of two particles in example (B) is not the intrinsic result of their being material but rather of their (n)foric correlation. In order to wrap our minds around it we should therefore call it for what it truly is, (n)formational entanglement.
At a fundamental level, the brain uses the same type of processes to storing information. But instead of entangling it to another brain it entangles it to itself through the (n)fora, with redundancy, feed-back and error correction being applied. Information is ‘engraved’ in the (n)fora and thus becomes (n)formation. As such it always remains there for retrieval, either for the brain that survived temporary global ischemia or deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (A) or is consistent with hyperthymesia (C).
Entangling two brains goes a long, long way from entangling two particles (one shouldn’t only consider brains of humans in this context) although theoretically the process should be possible. (n)formational entanglement of the simplest neural cells is already, however, technologically possible.
It is, in fact, the main purpose and scope of our proposed research.
Oh, and one last point!
We at n-fora.com believe that sciences as well as arts are simply different points of view looking at what’s inside and around us, generally called the universe. Our quest is to integrate as many of these angular views as possible since the universe does not function in slices. A Beethoven symphony is probably as good a descriptor of a collision between clouds of cosmic gas as are stochastic models gathered from running models through quantum computers.
And don’t just take our word for it.
“Revolutionary ideas for neurotechnology can come from almost any discipline, so bringing new disciplines into neuroscience needs to be a constant endeavor. A collaborative network willing to work together to create new technologies and utilize them is essential. You might call neuroengineering an omnidisciplinary field of endeavor.”
Well said!
Edward Boyden is a Professor of Neurotechnology at MIT. Unfortunately he is not associated in any way with our project. We wish he would be. Just like Frank Wilczek and Robert McIntyre.