[eggie]

> neurons appear to serve as both CPU and memory storage

I'm not sure this is really certain. But that uncertainty is more because it's hard to prove that there isn't another means of recording memory than something we know.

There has been speculation that there might be some genetic or biopolymer based system in the hippocampus, but I'm not familiar with anything more than speculation on that topic.

[MayeulC]

While there might be other mechanisms at play, plasticity is a form of memory: If each synapse can store weights, read them, and change them, it could be seen as a memory.

For me, an analogy that is quite adequate in computer science would be LUTs in an FPGA: they are memory+compute units, and can be used as both.

To go a bit further, any memory could indeed be considered a computation unit, or vice-versa: consider a results cache, for instance. The difference I see between memory and computation is that memory accesses are, if not instantaneous, at least constant-time. If you want more precision, this can be computed: the necessary memory footprint is extended trough time as well as space (if you only use a results LUT, you'd have to make it bigger to gain precision).

[polyterative]

Can it be that the neural structure itself is the memory? The weak/strong relationships maybe form the memories themselves, reconsructing a vivid image like seeds for procedural algorithms.

[polyterative]

This still doesn't explain our sense of time in memories. We always remember when other than what, even if some knowledge has no time positioning

[eggie]

It seems unlikely to me that biological systems wouldn't exploit digital (e.g. genomic/DNA/RNA) kinds of memory storage, given that the materials are there and the energy costs of maintaining and accessing that kind of storage can be fantastically low. Keeping memory alive in neural circuits would seem much more difficult. Surely that's happening to a large degree though. I'm just highlighting the possibility of an alternative basis for certain kinds of memory in the brain.

[HPsquared]

That method of storage doesn't even need to be in the brain - could be anywhere!