[acrefoot]

The headline says working memory, not long-term episodic memory, but the comments (and headline) here don't seem to distinguish between the two. We can disrupt short term memories in a variety of ways. When memories consolidate, they move to different structures. We can hold a lot more information in long-term memories than in working memory.

Because I hear this hypothesis come up from time to time--it's unlikely consciousness or long-term memory are maintained by e-fields generated in the brain, or that they require continuous electrical activity. Stark evidence against it come from ischemia studies. Ischemia usually accompanies serious underlying issues, so more controlled examples are easier to reason about: surgeons may use deep hypothermic circulatory arrest as protection for the brain in procedures with extended ischemia time requirements. In these cases, achieving electrocerebral silence (flat EEG) is one of the checklist items for the procedure. Clinical cases are worth reviewing for any hypothesis that suggests that long-term memory depends on continuous electrical activity* of neurons in the brain.

Since the events of ischemia, brain flatlining, and brain death are so closely linked in time, it's easy to conflate them. After a cold stop+start, the brain doesn't immediately jump back to normal function--there are a variety of processes that are worth studying better to get back to normal brain waves and brain function. Ischemia-related damage is often from a metabolic problems than from a discontinuity of electrical function. The reason for the cooling is to maintain the local energy reserves of the cells--when that is lost, the cells may have too much difficulty getting back to normal when blood is later reintroduced, and that's where you see brain damage or death. This kind of procedure is not without serious risk factors.

* Of course, electrical activity is needed for recall, but the point that I'm making is that the memory is later available for recall even after a period of discontinuity in the EEG.

[aeternum]

If it were electric fields, wouldn't we also expect the extreme EM fields generated by MRI machines, or even strong permanent magnets held near someone's skull to have some effect on memory?

A nearby lightning strike or overhead power line should also have some effect.

It would be quite amazing if the body were able to neutralize/counter such strong external electric fields.

[sleightofmind]

Good observation. I would not be surprised if the answer to your question is, Yes. An MRI does have some effect on currently active memories and thought. It seems to a non-scientist like me that it would be difficult to use the usual tools to measure this inside an MRI tube, so maybe a hard question to answer for even the experts in measuring such things.

Plenty of folks who do not consider themselves claustrophobic just completely fritz out inside an MRI tube. Could their usual ability to reason about and maintain composure be reduced by just such interference?

[lukeplato]

The research suggests the EM fields and underlying neural networks work together, i.e fields might provide a top-down energy-based attention mechanism while the network structures implement bottom-up agglomerations of information. Blocking EM fields wouldn't destroy memory but might pause or disturb the learned activation flows of neurons.

""" The researchers hypothesize that the field even appears to be a means the brain can employ to sculpt information flow to ensure the desired result. By imposing that a particular field emerge, it directs the activity of the participating neurons.

Indeed, that’s one of the next questions the scientists are investigating: Could electric fields be a means of controlling neurons?

“We are now using this work to ask whether information flows from the macroscale level of the electric field down to the microscale level of individual neurons,” Pinotsis says. “To make the analogy with the orchestra, we are now using this work to ask whether a conductor’s style changes the way an individual member of an orchestra plays her instrument.” """

[vannevar]

It's possible that the field is a good proxy for underlying coherence in a redundant neural subnet that may be harder to measure directly. The field itself may or may not play a causal role---that would depend on whether the field could induce or reinforce neural activity. Even if the electrical field plays a role in marshaling the necessary neural activity, the representation must come to exist in the neurons in some way, since they are what are connected to the muscles that carry out intention.

[hhs]

> The headline says working memory, not long-term episodic memory, but the comments (and headline) here don't seem to distinguish between the two.

Please note, this is the press release headline and sub-headline:

“Neurons are fickle. Electric fields are more reliable for information.”

“A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome “representational drift,” or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons”

[tarsinge]

Is that really incompatible with information being held in e-fields? It's just that these fields are generated by group of neurons, which can indeed be "stoped and started back"?

[ethanbond]

In that case it’s unclear why you’d not refer to it as the information being encoded in the neurons. I don’t think anyone interprets that to mean the information is retrievable sans electrical field.