musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

I’ll note you in my book of memory


As I rattle slowly through the years, I find that I am spending increasing time with my memories. I’m told that even the best ones change the more they are recalled -they are not videotapes, or even photographs stored in albums inside my head- but still, they will suffice. I do not need much detail -more the feeling that I get when I realize that I was not always like I am today; that there really was a past in which I lived and not just the prison of the eternal present that dictates the current movements of my body. I suppose it’s sad, though, that memories are as fickle as they seem to be; I would have hoped for a more reliable anthology of what I have experienced, a better depository in my head than what I got.

Of course there are other storage units -I still have muscle memories, I guess; my fingers know where to stand on a piano keyboard when my eyes decode the notes on a staff for them. But alas, like the memory in my head, they do not  usually know what to make of what they’re told. It’s memory of a sort, though; I can no longer blame its loss merely on my failing brain.

The idea of alternate sources of memory banks is still intriguing however, don’t you think? It’s hard to know how independent they really are, or whether they’re only franchised out from the Central Source. But nevertheless they do exist, and like childless divorced couples, seem to live independent lives. I wonder, though, how far down the chain of command one can travel before the thread that links them breaks. Are muscles really the end points, or just the ones most obvious to us? Muscles are big, and they do big things. But what about, say, the individual cells themselves? Are there some things they could remember -or anything, for that matter? Is it really ‘turtles all the way down’?

I’m reminded (an interesting word, given the context) of that documentary of a man, blind from birth, who used sound to echolocate, or those similarly afflicted others who can somehow transfer what amounts to ‘sight’ to their fingers. It would seem that many functions can be delegated to other parts of the body when required -so what about memory? Can it be delegated?

There are examples out there that memory can, indeed, also be assigned to other places: the Planaria flatworm (Planaria torva) that I dissected in my university biology courses, is famous for being able regenerate any part when cut up -including the brain. The regeneration would seem to be due to the stem cells in their tissues which can grow a new brain, but it’s more difficult to explain the memory that is also regenerated -the complex neural circuits that would have to be exactly reconstituted to restore the memories learned before the dissection when its old head and brain is gone and a new one is formed. So where did the old memories reside?

As you can tell, the subject fascinates me but I suppose not enough that I would remember to Google it as the days wore down. Fortunately serendipity is sometimes on my side -as it often is, if you live long enough- and I happened upon an interesting essay by Thomas R Verny, a psychiatrist with an impressive set of credentials: he has taught at Harvard, the University of Toronto, York University, St. Mary’s University in Minneapolis, and the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute.

The title of one of his books, The Embodied Mind seems to hint at what I have been curious about: the possibility of embodied cellular memory, https://aeon.co/essays/how-memories-persist-where-bodies-and-even-brains-do-not

Some animals hibernate and ‘undergo massive pruning of their cerebral neurons during the cold months… when they recover their strength and health in the spring, many of their previously learned behaviours return.’ And, ‘Caterpillars… go through five stages of growth. Memories formed in these animals in their earliest embryonic states survive extensive remodelling of their bodies including their brains.’

Verny’s essay goes on to describe these seemingly inexplicable feats in some detail, conceding that many of the explanations remain controversial. But I have to wonder if that is because, when confronted with what may be considered a paradigm-shift, many of the experts that have invested their lives and careers in the conventional explanations might be suspicious of new approaches.

Verny, I think, is very careful in his approach and recognizes the difficulties swirling around memory in non-human animals. ‘Can stable memories really remain intact in animals, including humans, who undergo massive loss and rearrangement of their cerebral neurons? … It seems credible to conclude that memory, in addition to being stored in the brain, must also be encoded in other cells and tissues in the body. In other words, we are all endowed with both somatic and cognitive memory systems that mutually support each other… the evidence suggests that aspects of intelligence and consciousness traditionally attributed to the brain have another source as well. Our memories, our tastes, our life knowledge, might owe just as much to embodied cells and tissues using the same molecular mechanisms for memory as the brain itself. The mind, I conclude, is fluid and adaptable, embodied but not enskulled.’

But is it only the stem cells that carry this burden, or are they using information that is available to all cells? Common cells have essentially the same chromosome sequence, albeit not all switched on in the same way or for the same reasons, as do the stem cells.

After all, what is a memory? Isn’t it just something that allows animals (or humans) to store reactions to experiences that have happened in their worlds for future use -things to which, by extension, all the body’s cells are in one way or another also privy? Why wouldn’t the body’s cells, then share the kind of memory that might enable them either to react, or at least temporarily modify some of their functions? How else to explain the ability of pigment cells to prevent UV damage to the otherwise unguarded skin, or of tissue to switch to a healing mode when traumatized?

I’m not advocating woo-woo science here. I’m just wondering whether it says something about cellular memory…

Somebody has to wonder, don’t you think?

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gozzter

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