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memory

WHAT IF: Everyone Could Remember Everything They’ve Ever Done?

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memory - pixabay

Every Wednesday, we’re asking a what-if question – how would our world be different if something were changed? Today’s question is from QSFer Scott: What if everyone could remember everything they have ever done? How would that change society? How would people cope? It’s called hyperthymesia: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/hyperthymesia Share your serious scientific analyses, your off-color jokes, and random thoughts on the topic on our FB and MeWe Groups: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

SCIENCE: You Can Remember Up to 10,000 Faces

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faces - pixabay

How many faces do you retain in your memory? If you add up your immediate and extended family, schoolmates, friends, co-workers, and celebrities that you know through movies, television and the internet, you might easily be able to list a few hundred faces that you’d recognize on sight. But the real number of faces stored in your brain may be much higher than that. For the first time, researchers have pinned down the number of faces that people remember; the findings come from a small study of 25 people ages 18 to 61 years old. The answer: 5,000 on average … Read more

SCIENCE: Transferring Memory

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A new study strongly suggests that at least some memories are stored in genetic code, and that genetic code can act like memory soup. Suck it out of one animal and stick the code in a second animal, and that second animal can remember things that only the first animal knew. That might sound like science fiction or remind some readers of debunked ideas from decades past. But it’s serious science: In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) extracted RNA, a genetic messenger molecule, from one snail and implanted it in another snail. Then, … Read more

For Writers: Storing Info in DNA

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DNA Storage

Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Freddy MacKay: Freddy flagged this article for us: http://m.phys.org/news/2016-04-team-digital-images-dnaand-perfectly.html All the movies, images, emails and other digital data from more than 600 basic smartphones (10,000 gigabytes) can be stored in the faint pink smear of DNA at the end of this test tube. Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard. But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart … Read more