Linguistics, Memory, & Neuroscience
A repository linking descriptions/observations in linguistics to mapped neuroscience discoveries of memory recovery.
"Katie Hafner: All right, but here's the real question. Did she manage to change people's minds about nativism?
Samia Bouzid: Well she did gain some traction, because emergentism started out as this really pretty unpopular theory, and eventually it became a well established alternative to nativism. But she never really won the debate. It's actually still not settled.
But that’s okay. This intellectual, academic debate–this was really just one piece of her career. She was doing work that had a lot of real tangible impacts too. Like, she was coming up with techniques for measuring children's language skills, and that had a real impact because it made it easier to spot possible language disorders early on. And one of her biggest discoveries was showing just how plastic the brain is when it comes to language. How young children can recover from really serious brain injuries and go on to speak as well as anyone else.
Katie Hafner: Like that child with the hole in her head.
Samia Bouzid: Yep, exactly. So Liz’s work reached pretty far and wide. And she also pushed people to look past their own narrow fields.
Mike Tomasello: What I loved about her was that she had this, a little bit of a revolutionary streak, always wanting to think about the bigger picture and what it means for the bigger picture.
Samia Bouzid: Liz didn't think that you could understand the brain just by studying the brain. She was absolutely interested in how our brains are wired, but she was also interested in context, and the way things changed over time. Whether that was over a lifetime, over our evolutionary history, she was interested in how every crumb of knowledge and experience we gain from our environment literally changes us by reshaping our brains.
Mike Tomasello: She always had this dynamic, historical, evolutionary, developmental perspective, and a big-ideas-theoretical person. And that's what made her so interesting."
Bates, E., & Roe, K. (2001). "Language development in children with unilateral brain injury. [tables] In C.A. Nelson & M. Luciana (Eds.), Handbook of developmental cognitive neuroscience (pp. 281-307). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press." https://crl.ucsd.edu/bates/papers/pdf/bates-roe-inpress.pdf
https://crl.ucsd.edu/bates/papers/index.php
Cognition, memory and Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_e99qbJ4U David Eagleman
"Unusual Mathematical Approaches to Nervous Dynamics" Authors: Arturo Tozzi" https://vixra.org/pdf/2201.0184v1.pdf
"Nevertheless, recently discovered microscopic entities screw up the paradigm of random neural networks. Tunneling nanotubes (TNTs) are F-actin-based, transient tubular connections that allow active cell-to-cell transfer of vesicles, organelles and small molecules (Ariazi et al., 2017; Sartori-Rupp et al., 2019) and are involved in human diseases (Goodman et al., 2019; Tardivel et al., 2016). TNTs in primary neurons and astrocytes are possibly correlated with shortrange transmission of electrical signals (Wang and Gerdes, 2012; Austefjord et al., 2014) and long-range transfer of electrical messages involving gap junctions (Abounit and Zurzolo, 2012). Developing neurons form transient TNTs that enhance electrical coupling with distant astrocytes and allow transfer of polyglutamine aggregates among neuronal cells (Costanzo et al., 2013). TNTs can be dynamically regulated, since their lengths vary as the connected cells migrate and the distance among them modifies (Austefjord et al., 2014). Their lifetime ranges from a few minutes up to several hours (Gurke et al., 2008; Seyed-Razavi et al., 2013). These features change the idea of a human connectome made of stable nodes/edges and equipped with stochastic, long-standing connexions among brain areas (Van Essen et al., 2013). TNTs might provide a multidimensional inter-cellular transient neural network with peculiar features: the nodes are not stable; the edges appear, modify themselves and vanish with time passing. TNTs can be open on both ends, challenging the dogma of a cell as detectable individual unit (Sartori-Rupp et al., 2019). The recent developments dictated by TNTs start to unveil that the nervous tissue displays a holistic behavior, acting like a system with long-range, multidimensional interactions that does not take into account stochastic issues. A non-stochastic narrative of connectome dynamics also provides an alternative explanation to the observation that some network branches of the brain modules are more visited than others."
Memory loss from brain injuries and subsequent recovery can be explained by alternative routes of electrical signalling.
In the case of the surprising recovery from a brain injury, the paradigm of a connectome losing access to long-term memories can be analogized to a a central throughfare being closed off to traffic due to construction or an accident (E.G Francis Scott Key Bridge).
With a detour route, a tunneling nanotube might be a small side street that takes much longer to reach across (especially a bay/river), but nonetheless able to form new alternate routes on a semi-permanent basis, until recovery (if any) of main throughfares are complete.
A computer science analogy would be accessing a backup from "cold storage" (i.e disks that are not usually accessed frequently but are relied upon when a central memory is unavailable or maxed out (e.g. RAM switching to swap space).
from p.7:
"However, a trivial observation points towards a different conclusion: the human mind does not perceive topological findings of visual images. Look at Figure 2A depicting a curtain design: how many spots can be detected? A human individual usually locates fifteen spots (Figure 2B). However, by a topological standpoint, the shapes located in the lower part of the picture belong to a single shape, therefore they are connected (Figure 2C). This means that the number of spots detected by our brain during visual perception does not correspond to the real topological number of shapes. If our perception would work according to topological rules, we could count a different number of spots, i.e., nine instead of fifteen (Figure 2D). Several Authors have suggested that rules from algebraic and network topology might underlie the neuronal mechanisms, contributing to generate the functions and activities of the human brain (Babichev et al., 2019). However, our simple, rather naive experimental observation suggests that topology plays no role, at least when coping with the macroscopic level of visual perception. This implies that our brain builds internal representations of the external world independent of the topological features subtending visual images."
(p.6 of Tozzi)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/ Quantum cognition possibilities via pyrophosphate: "Fisher has identified just one credible candidate for storing quantum information in the brain: phosphorus atoms, which are the only common biological element other than hydrogen with a spin of one-half, a low number that makes possible longer coherence times."
https://twitter.com/SterlingCooley/status/1757805260289282502