Brain Question

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It's weird as [censored]. There doesn't appear to be any single location in the brain for memories, and damage to different regions can affect memory in different ways. Memory storage is also a mystery, but it's clear some kind of "optimization" happens.

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Redundancy. I thought memories were stored holographically within the brain in different areas? Is this still speculation? This might be a defense against damage to one area, as you can draw a memory from multiple loci within the brain.

With an estimated 100 billion neurons, it's clear you have a lot of room for redundancy and potentially a huge number of combinations. And storing a single memory wouldn't take many of those combinations, even with several layers of redundancy.

Capacity? It shouldn't be infinite but it's pretty damn massive. Since you can reuse a neuron or set of neurons to store different memories with the same reference bases (specific colors, scents, etc.)

It's going to take technology/science a long time to decipher this, but it's amazing that nature evolved such a wonderful neural net on its own.

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The author of the book I am currently reading (Dr Melvin Morse in <u>Where God Lives</u> ) poses a provocative question on this topic.

Here's an excerpt with his question and conjectures:

"Can memory exist outside the body? This would seem to be a shocking question, yet no modern scientific or medical theory currently explains memory and where (or how) it is stored.
I was speaking at UCLA to a group of neuroscientists when the subject of the location of memory first presented itself as a valid question. A physician in the audience pointed out that if comatose patients can have NDEs and remember them, then we need to explain how a dying, dysfunctional brain can process a long-term memory. I knew from my transformation study that children not only remember their NDEs, they remember them all of their lives.
One simple answer is that perhaps memories are not stored in the brain. Although an outrageous statement, if true it would answer many questions associated with perception, including ghosts, angels, the origin of past lives, even false memory syndrome, in which people "remember" childhood events that never happened to them."

After that his next question is if reincarnation is the "tapping in" to a universal memory bank?

A very unusual conjecture. I would have never thought that memory could be outside the body and, of course, none of this is proven so its a pretty radical idea.