Memory Coding

Aftert reading this article by Joe Tsien at Scientific American, I have to confess that I find myself very taken with the view of memory encoding as categorical and hierarchical. For one thing, it would make sense why certain situations have a negative flavor even before a person has articulated why -- the event can be triggering a particular neural clique into action by having X number of common factors.

The presence of neural cliques indicates that certain paths and connections are strengthened by repeated exposures/uses. CBT, pay attention! With the news that specific memories can be erased, we're hitting a brave new world of mental manipulation. A data-efficient system of memory encoding that can be computationally reproduced is certainly something interesting -- back up, copy, read/write privileges, transmission... all sorts of uses and abuses are certainly possible.

A final and delicious fillip: I'll note that the author threw in a transhumanist reference as a farewell note. I am not a transhumanist in the sense that I seek to prolong my life, but I find the movement fascinating.