> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
"Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain. A discovery that helped explain those changes has earned neuroscientist Oswald Steward one of science’s highest honors.
Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories."
And that's what it took. One comment on hackernews and the prize was retracted. HN at its best! ;)
Well, it does seem that memories may be embedded in the nervous system as well as the brain, so I don’t think the OP is wrong. You sometimes hear of heart transplant patients having other people’s memories / preferences. So, it’s not good evidence, but it’s a possibility.
dboreham 16 minutes ago [-]
Er no. That doesn't happen.
Earw0rm 2 hours ago [-]
That's quite a leap. The idea that _semantic_ memories are encoded so as to be transmissible via blobs of neural tissue stretches plausibility.
> Personality changes have been reported following organ transplantation. Most commonly, such changes have been described among heart transplant recipients. [...] A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 47 participants (23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients) completed an online survey. In this study, 89% of all transplant recipients reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery, which was similar for heart and other organ recipients.
Who knows the cause though, could be anything I suppose, not necessarily that "memory sits in tissue".
Earw0rm 2 hours ago [-]
It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine's arsenal.
And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.
2 hours ago [-]
Earw0rm 7 hours ago [-]
Flatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system.
Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
Roark66 6 hours ago [-]
Did you know human overies contain neurons? I suppose memories are not stored there :-) but still the fact is rather surprising.
HarHarVeryFunny 52 minutes ago [-]
That's interesting, but bear in mind that sensory neurons are basically just transducers that sense something and convert it into a neural output. It makes sense that a woman's brain would find it useful to know when she is ovulating.
adrianN 4 hours ago [-]
I believe there are tastebuds in your colon too.
Earw0rm 2 hours ago [-]
AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures.
The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
j45 6 hours ago [-]
The heart has neurons in it too.
IsTom 7 hours ago [-]
At least spinal cord has a kind of memory related to movement, but that's something else than episodic memory obviously.
Zardoz84 4 hours ago [-]
We found that some kind of gigant unicelular life can remember where was food.
boston_clone 7 hours ago [-]
I think the evidence is strong, here. Quite difficult to form new memories without a brain!
unsupp0rted 1 hours ago [-]
It's amazing after all these years we're still so bad at improving an average person's recall, even by 50%. It feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and all we can do is spaced repetition systems, the memory palace, strong associative scents, etc
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
kator 4 hours ago [-]
I think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982...
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
It used to be slower in software development as well. The internet and the exponentially increasing number of software developers accelerated it. And of course new hardware that made things practical that were only a theoretical possibility before.
kator 3 hours ago [-]
True, that said, I downloaded and compiled Perl in 1987 from comp.sources.misc, even back then, things moved at light speed compared to health and medical.
Animats 8 hours ago [-]
Great result on the biochemistry of memory storage. Then they venture into philosophy: "They still struggle to explain the spark that transforms information into insight."
Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
project2501a 8 hours ago [-]
i'm sorry, I cannot agree that anything like that can create "originality".
coldtea 5 hours ago [-]
As opposed to what? Water and tissue?
ProllyInfamous 2 hours ago [-]
>>They're made out of meat...
>>>They're made out of weights...
taneq 7 hours ago [-]
Creativity can be thought of as a combination of two things: A random idea generator, and a nonsense filter. Generate new random results ideas, filter out the nonsense ones, and you’ve generated good ideas.
itsalwaysgood 4 hours ago [-]
Creativity also requires information. And Information is discovered. We can only generate random ideas from what we know. We can't imagine something we've never sensed, or know. You can't imagine a color you've never seen without recalling known colors. You can freely mix ideas due to your imagination.
But when we discover new information, we must decide whether the information is useful. Otherwise the information is considered noise.
We give weight to decisions: time spent pondering, considering, and the more weight we give, the better the decision. Almost always the idea is measured in usefulness.
Sound familiar?
Earw0rm 2 hours ago [-]
IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.
goodmythical 1 hours ago [-]
That's just an anthropomorphic viewpoint though.
One could argue from a religious standpoint that creativity requires a spark of divinity.
One could argue from a naturalist standpoint that natural selection has been a creative process in which nature tries random things until they stick for no purpose that we can directly observe.
One could argue from a platonic standpoint that creativity in this realm of existence is merely the process of approximating ideal forms.
I'd wager that creativity is a human construct and therefore up to interpretation. Kinda like how the ancient greeks didn't have as many colors words as we did. Was it because they couldn't see all the colors we could see? No, it was because in their opinion only certain color words were necessary to discuss what was important.
boston_clone 7 hours ago [-]
A massive chasm exists between good, creative ideas and ideas that aren’t nonsense.
coldtea 5 hours ago [-]
Not that massive.
A lot of good, creative ideas have been called out and derived as nonsense or crazy. Many still are.
CrimsonRain 7 hours ago [-]
That's why most people are not creative, and tbqh, rather dumb
stefantalpalaru 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 15:06:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
Steward received the 2026 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, a USD 1 million award and one of science’s most prestigious awards, for research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the brain learns and stores memories."
And that's what it took. One comment on hackernews and the prize was retracted. HN at its best! ;)
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711021v1
https://www.sciencealert.com/worms-can-share-memories-of-a-b...
> Personality changes have been reported following organ transplantation. Most commonly, such changes have been described among heart transplant recipients. [...] A cross-sectional study was conducted in which 47 participants (23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients) completed an online survey. In this study, 89% of all transplant recipients reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery, which was similar for heart and other organ recipients.
Who knows the cause though, could be anything I suppose, not necessarily that "memory sits in tissue".
And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.
It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.
Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
Weak.
If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things.
[1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf
Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
>>>They're made out of weights...
But when we discover new information, we must decide whether the information is useful. Otherwise the information is considered noise.
We give weight to decisions: time spent pondering, considering, and the more weight we give, the better the decision. Almost always the idea is measured in usefulness.
Sound familiar?
One could argue from a religious standpoint that creativity requires a spark of divinity.
One could argue from a naturalist standpoint that natural selection has been a creative process in which nature tries random things until they stick for no purpose that we can directly observe.
One could argue from a platonic standpoint that creativity in this realm of existence is merely the process of approximating ideal forms.
I'd wager that creativity is a human construct and therefore up to interpretation. Kinda like how the ancient greeks didn't have as many colors words as we did. Was it because they couldn't see all the colors we could see? No, it was because in their opinion only certain color words were necessary to discuss what was important.
A lot of good, creative ideas have been called out and derived as nonsense or crazy. Many still are.