Do you think memories weigh anything?

[Lozenger]

I was having a conversation with someone about this -and we really don't get how pictures, sounds and smells are physically stored in our brain cells without them ever weighing anything.

The cells that store the memories weigh something right? So technically, does that mean that your memory can actually have a weight?

I just want to know what you think about this?

X

[Mish]

It may simply change properties from one form to another

[Lipp]

They're just memories of a special kind of sensory input that we have previously received. It's not as if we take a sample of each thing and store it in a compartment.

[Rollerderby]

Everything is electricity. My aunt practiced Reiki, and she has this theory how the human body is just slow moving energy, and that we aren't even really physical.

[Yggdrasil]

A philosophical question. I love U for that.

Here I go:

What seems to be a single memory is actually a complex construction.

If you think of an object -- say, a pen -- your brain retrieves the object's name, its shape, its function, the sound when it scratches across the page. Each part of the memory of what a "pen" is comes from a different region of the brain. The entire image of "pen" is actively reconstructed by the brain from many different areas. Neurologists are only beginning to understand how the parts are reassembled into a coherent whole.

If you're riding a bike, the memory of how to operate the bike comes from one set of brain cells; the memory of how to get from here to the end of the block comes from another; the memory of biking safety rules from another; and that nervous feeling you get when a car veers dangerously close, from still another. Yet you're never aware of these separate mental experiences, nor that they're coming from all different parts of your brain, because they all work together so well. In fact, experts tell us there is no firm distinction between how you remember and how you think.

Encoding is the first step in creating a memory. It's a biological phenomenon, rooted in the senses, that begins with perception. Consider, for example, the memory of the first person you ever fell in love with. When you met that person, your visual system likely registered physical features, such as the color of their eyes and hair. Your auditory system may have picked up the sound of their laugh. You probably noticed the scent of their perfume or cologne. You may even have felt the touch of their hand. Each of these separate sensations traveled to the part of your brain called the hippocampus, which integrated these perceptions as they were occurring into one single experience -- your experience of that specific person.

Experts believe that the hippocampus, along with another part of the brain called the frontal cortex, is responsible for analyzing these various sensory inputs and deciding if they're worth remembering. If they are, they may become part of your long-term memory. As indicated earlier, these various bits of information are then stored in different parts of the brain. How these bits and pieces are later identified and retrieved to form a cohesive memory, however, is not yet known.

Although a memory begins with perception, it is encoded and stored using the language of electricity and chemicals. Here's how it works: Nerve cells connect with other cells at a point called a synapse. All the action in your brain occurs at these synapses, where electrical pulses carrying messages leap across gaps between cells.

The electrical firing of a pulse across the gap triggers the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters diffuse across the spaces between cells, attaching themselves to neighboring cells. Each brain cell can form thousands of links like this, giving a typical brain about 100 trillion synapses. The parts of the brain cells that receive these electric impulses are called dendrites, feathery tips of brain cells that reach out to neighboring brain cells.

The connections between brain cells aren't set in concrete -- they change all the time. Brain cells work together in a network, organizing themselves into groups that specialize in different kinds of information processing. As one brain cell sends signals to another, the synapse between the two gets stronger. The more signals sent between them, the stronger the connection grows. Thus, with each new experience, your brain slightly rewires its physical structure. In fact, how you use your brain helps determine how your brain is organized. It is this flexibility, which scientists call plasticity, that can help your brain rewire itself if it is ever damaged.

As you learn and experience the world and changes occur at the synapses and dendrites, more connections in your brain are created. The brain organizes and reorganizes itself in response to your experiences, forming memories triggered by the effects of outside input prompted by experience, education, or training.

The question you are asking is basicaly the same as asking: how much does electricity weigh?

The answer to that one would be: as much as the electrons and protons which make up the electric charge.

Electrons and protons are point particles. A point particle (or point-like particle, often spelled pointlike particle) is an idealized object heavily used in physics. Its defining feature is that it lacks spatial extension: being zero-dimensional, it does not take up space. They also have an infinite small mass called point mass.

The same could be said for the chemicals that make up for the neurotransmitters.

Therefore, in my opinion, it would be appropreate to conclude that memories have infinite small mass.

Of course, my opinion is highly debatable

[Indignant]

how can one make memory better or make brain think sharper?

[Mish]

how can one make memory better or make brain think sharper?

Through practice. Do memory exercises and solve puzzles. Play chess, have your mind always solving something, learn new languages, learn musical instruments, memorize poetry like in School... things like that.

[Rollerderby]

Yggdrasil, that was fantasic. It makes sense that the charge of electricity would have a small point mass.

It makes me wonder how hypnotherapy can truly influence the brain so much more than we are aware. If all those different parts of the brain are firing, and let's say you have experienced a trauma, every time you fire down those lines, the trauma is being re-visited.

[url]http://www.innerselfcenter.com/[/url] <--- I commissioned this guy for some work.

The brain is so cool.

[Lozenger]

WOW! YGGDRASIL, That was really interesting to read thanks!
Lol a lot of people have said that i am rather philosophical for my age but it's just so interesting

And ROLLERDERBY, that is a really interesting thought - i kinda like that idea

[doppelgaenger]

es gibt viele bücher darüber. lies ein so!

[Yggdrasil]

how can one make memory better or make brain think sharper?

One of the most effective ways of improving memory and using the brain more efficiently is called mindfulness (or awareness) training.

That's however not where it ends. Mindfulness training also is a powerfull tool to help cope with anxiety, depression, trauma, pain and illness.

A pioneer in this field is Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

He received his Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1971 from MIT where he studied under Salvador Luria, Nobel Laureate in medicine. Kabat-Zinn has made significant contributions to modern health care with his research which focused on mind/body interactions for healing, and on various clinical applications of mindfulness meditation training for people with chronic pain and/or stress-related disorders.

His life work has been largely dedicated to bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society.

Mindfulness is mental state, characterized by calm awareness of one's body functions, feelings, content of consciousness, or consciousness itself.

Mindfulness is an activity that can be done at any time; it does not require sitting, or focusing on the breath, but rather simply realizing what is happening in the present moment is mental content, including simply noticing the mind's usual "commentary".

Any activity done mindfully is a form of meditation, and mindfulness is possible practically all the time.

In addition to various forms of meditation based around specific sessions, there are mindfulness training exercises that develop awareness throughout the day using designated environmental cues. The aim is to make mindfulness essentially continuous.

Examples of such cues are the hourly chimes of clocks, red lights at traffic junctions and crossing the threshold of doors. The mindfulness itself can take the form of nothing more than taking three successive breaths while remembering they are a conscious experience of body activity within mind. This approach is particularly helpful when it is difficult to establish a regular meditation practice.

Don't be fooled though: mindfulness doesn't mean you'll become a Tibetan monk or so. It's a way of living, in a state were one is contineously an observer of ones thoughts, actions and feelings as well as ones surroundings.

If your are still reading and it still sounds interesting you, you may benefit from this 1 hour 12 minute long video:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc[/ame]

[Mish]

Mindfulness is mental state, characterized by calm awareness of one's body functions, feelings, content of consciousness, or consciousness itself.

Mindfulness is an activity that can be done at any time; it does not require sitting, or focusing on the breath, but rather simply realizing what is happening in the present moment is mental content, including simply noticing the mind's usual "commentary".

Funny you say this because I've only recently started to notice how blissfully unaware we are most of the time. I used to think that I'm aware of my surroundings, but I'm not. I go into these mental loops and holes at home or at work. Sometimes I talk to my co-workers, but they don't hear, they are glued to their computer screens stuck in their own personal loops in some wierd time space breaching portal. The mind focuses on something and blocks out everything else, that everything else no longer exists, it's no longer part of our reality.

Since this realization, I'm trying to be more aware of my surroundings and of my actions as persistently as possible. I found that it makes a huge difference in my interactions with others. I feel a much greater presence when I'm aware. Whereas before I felt more as an outsider looking in.

[IndiReloaded]

Nothing.

Of course, one needs to define whether one is referring to the actual physical chemicals composing a memory (which is the specific mass of the neurotransmitters involved), or the experience of having one.

So, assuming you mean the latter (which is what most people mean when they use this word) I am going to respectfully disagree with Yggie. While memories do seem composed of chemicals (and their constituent atoms & electrongs), I think the correct answer is a bit like comparing the mass of water to the *experience* of drinking water. Also, if one says it is the chemicals themselves, then one has the problem that those chemicals tend to be used for multiple things in the brain. Not just memory formation.

So, how much does the *experience* of drinking water weigh?

Likewise, how much does the *experience* of certain chemicals acting at receptors at the cellular level weigh (the synapses Ygg mentions)?

BTW, this is a good question, but may not be the right one. Typically in science, when one can't determine mass of a process, this means one should really be looking at *energy*. Gravity doesn't weigh anything either (that we know) but we can calculate the energy effects of gravity very precisely.

[lovesjoyajm]

I was having a conversation with someone about this -and we really don't get how pictures, sounds and smells are physically stored in our brain cells without them ever weighing anything.

The cells that store the memories weigh something right? So technically, does that mean that your memory can actually have a weight?

Isn't that analogous (obviously with major flaws in the analogy, as there are in any analogy) to asking whether the data stored on a disk/CD changes the weight of the disk/CD?

In which case, I would answer (with absolutely no knowledge of how the HECK data is saved on disks! magic?) that the thing that possesses the property of "weight" (the memory/the disk/the individual units within it) is already in existence. It is altered by the "thought" or "data" itself, but the property that is altered is not its weight but its "configuration".

Does that make sense?

[Yggdrasil]

BTW, this is a good question, but may not be the right one. Typically in science, when one can't determine mass of a process, this means one should really be looking at *energy*. Gravity doesn't weigh anything either (that we know) but we can calculate the energy effects of gravity very precisely.

Thank you for your input.

Looking at the energy used is certainly another way of looking at it. As I stated in my post, it's my opinion and as such highly debatable.

I however would like to add something to this which may at first sound strange, but at closer examination may shed more light into this question:

In physics, mass–energy equivalence is the concept that mass and energy are the same thing, so that every mass has an energy equivalent and vice versa. This relationship is expressed using the formula E=MC^2 (I use the symbol "^" here to indicate "to the power of"). I believe this formula sounds familiar to most of us. A gentlemen called Einstein formulated this.

Expressed in words: energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

Mass–energy equivalence was proposed in Albert Einstein's 1905 paper, "Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?", one of his Annus Mirabilis ("Miraculous Year") Papers. Einstein was not the first to propose a mass–energy relationship, and various similar formulas appeared before Einstein's theory with incorrect numerical coefficients and an incomplete interpretation. Einstein was the first to propose the simple formula and the first to interpret it correctly: as a general principle which follows from the relativistic symmetries of space and time.

In the formula, c^2 is the conversion factor required to convert from units of mass to units of energy. The formula does not depend on a specific system of units.

In quantum chromodynamics (the modern theory of the nuclear force), most of the mass of the proton and the neutron is explained by special relativity. The mass of the proton is about twenty times greater than the sum of the rest masses of the quarks that make it up, while the gluons have infinite small point mass. The extra energy of the quarks and gluons in a region with a proton, as compared to the energy of the quarks and gluons in the QCD vacuum, accounts for 95% of the mass.

I again hope this makes sense and as usual, all this is highly debatable