First of all, fantastic story I absolutely loved the play on memory, extremely clever!
Secondly, I would love to see more tie ins because I'm interested in how the story tracks with Phobia. They're both fantastic stories!
Okay, now onto the fun science stuff. So, the basis of the neurological stuff comes from this concept stated here:
'Mu’en had found some articles on transcranial magnetic stimulation, and speculated that their apparatus had produced some specific EM field pattern which somehow prevented neurons from forming new memories'
So, let's talk about this!
Is it doable: well, kind of! Here's the thing. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is extremely cool. It can disrupt everything from speech to bouts of depression or even act as a treatment for Parkinsons, but memory alteration or erasing? Now that's trickier.
Let's talk about why real quick.
So, it's often said that the hippocampus is where memories are formed. This is kind of true, but not fully true. The hippocampus is responsible for initiation and facilitation of memory, but memory formation happens everywhere in the brain.
It's where the classic neuro phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together" comes into play. Every part of your brain involved in a different perceptive experience fire off together and when you experience that memory they fire again and again and again, solidifying the memory! It's amazing. Now I suppose you could inhibit the hippocampus and that would prevent a lack of memory formation, but that would be extremely targeted without impacting other brain regions. It's often when people who develop memory deficits from stroke tend have other strange discrepancies (my favorite is amusia, the inability to perceive music)
Now, that's where I think memory erasure gets tricky. I think you'd need something extremely precise to target just memory formation without for example: causing entire sensory disruptions, causing someone to black out entirely without any control over their body, or killing them as lower level processes completely shut down.
Now that's not to say it's impossible, but it is to say you'd need a device with some serious precision to only target firing associated with memory formation. Or this might lead to some memory echoes "I can describe this location to you, but I don't know why"
"I remember walking down a fire escape, but I don't know where"
"Oh I've heard your voice somewhere, you sound so familiar..."
Weird things like that
Disclaimer of course: this is speculation and let's be honest, in the world of sci-fi anything is possible after all, right? And I really liked this story!
All my neuro thoughts added to my feeling of "what absolutely mindblowimg powerful item could target the human brain so perfectly? Does it know? Is it doing it on purpose? Was it designed? Is it coincidence and if it is what does that mean about the universe?
Super freaky thoughts
(I am so sorry for this comment being as long as it is. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to think about this and thank you for listening.)
Thank you so much! This is super, super helpful. To be honest I didn't spend a whole lot of time researching transcranial magnetic stimulation, I just read the abstracts of a couple of papers and put it in as a hand-wavey speculative McGuffin. With the short-term memory loss, I was basing the behaviour more on the way someone with Alzheimer's behaves, like when there's an inability to form new memories properly, but for the story it had to be an effect that was caused by something specific to the locality of the thing that was being psychoflaged, and that didn't cause permanent damage so that when the person leaves the location their normal memory function resumes.
I really appreciate your taking the time to read and to respond in such detail! One of the things I absolutely love about this Substack community is the opportunity to interact like this! 🤩
Oh my goodness, do you work in the neuroscience field? This comment was so interesting to read! Also, I totally get having a “favorite” brain dysfunction. Mine is prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. Not because I would ever want that to happen to anyone, but just because I find it fascinating.
I do, yes! I'm working on a PhD in neuroscience currently so I spend a lot of time researching, reading, discussing topics around the brain 😅 I sweat I don't just jump into random comment sections and start spouting facts, we talked about this in advance!
Prosopagnosia is a fascinating one! I'm not sure if you've ever seen the therapeutics for it, but there was a clip of it on YouTube where a woman was being shown pictures of famous people and working through identifying them, and at the end of it was a picture of her mother and the way she absolutely stunned when the therapist had to tell her who it was just blew my mind. My heart also broke a little for her, but it's wild to think about how it could happen.
I remember that video! When I was in grad school for speech pathology, we watched it during one of our courses on stroke patients. So interesting, but so sad!
This is so fascinating! I was hooked from the very beginning. I had to look up what NIM stands for because my first thought was of the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (definitely different, although there’s an eerie connection in some ways). The mystery behind what exactly was happening and the conflicting motivations between the different characters made for an incredible story!
Yeah I wasn’t sure whether to put in an explanation of what NIM means, then decided not to so that the story wasn’t clogged with exposition, but maybe I should have put in a footnote?
I have no idea what NIM means, googled it and am none the wiser, but didn't feel a need to know while reading. Even a footnote can alter the flow of reading (if you use the footnote function SubStack has).
Okay wow so I have SOOOOOO many thoughts on this.
First of all, fantastic story I absolutely loved the play on memory, extremely clever!
Secondly, I would love to see more tie ins because I'm interested in how the story tracks with Phobia. They're both fantastic stories!
Okay, now onto the fun science stuff. So, the basis of the neurological stuff comes from this concept stated here:
'Mu’en had found some articles on transcranial magnetic stimulation, and speculated that their apparatus had produced some specific EM field pattern which somehow prevented neurons from forming new memories'
So, let's talk about this!
Is it doable: well, kind of! Here's the thing. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is extremely cool. It can disrupt everything from speech to bouts of depression or even act as a treatment for Parkinsons, but memory alteration or erasing? Now that's trickier.
Let's talk about why real quick.
So, it's often said that the hippocampus is where memories are formed. This is kind of true, but not fully true. The hippocampus is responsible for initiation and facilitation of memory, but memory formation happens everywhere in the brain.
It's where the classic neuro phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together" comes into play. Every part of your brain involved in a different perceptive experience fire off together and when you experience that memory they fire again and again and again, solidifying the memory! It's amazing. Now I suppose you could inhibit the hippocampus and that would prevent a lack of memory formation, but that would be extremely targeted without impacting other brain regions. It's often when people who develop memory deficits from stroke tend have other strange discrepancies (my favorite is amusia, the inability to perceive music)
Now, that's where I think memory erasure gets tricky. I think you'd need something extremely precise to target just memory formation without for example: causing entire sensory disruptions, causing someone to black out entirely without any control over their body, or killing them as lower level processes completely shut down.
Now that's not to say it's impossible, but it is to say you'd need a device with some serious precision to only target firing associated with memory formation. Or this might lead to some memory echoes "I can describe this location to you, but I don't know why"
"I remember walking down a fire escape, but I don't know where"
"Oh I've heard your voice somewhere, you sound so familiar..."
Weird things like that
Disclaimer of course: this is speculation and let's be honest, in the world of sci-fi anything is possible after all, right? And I really liked this story!
All my neuro thoughts added to my feeling of "what absolutely mindblowimg powerful item could target the human brain so perfectly? Does it know? Is it doing it on purpose? Was it designed? Is it coincidence and if it is what does that mean about the universe?
Super freaky thoughts
(I am so sorry for this comment being as long as it is. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to think about this and thank you for listening.)
Thank you so much! This is super, super helpful. To be honest I didn't spend a whole lot of time researching transcranial magnetic stimulation, I just read the abstracts of a couple of papers and put it in as a hand-wavey speculative McGuffin. With the short-term memory loss, I was basing the behaviour more on the way someone with Alzheimer's behaves, like when there's an inability to form new memories properly, but for the story it had to be an effect that was caused by something specific to the locality of the thing that was being psychoflaged, and that didn't cause permanent damage so that when the person leaves the location their normal memory function resumes.
I really appreciate your taking the time to read and to respond in such detail! One of the things I absolutely love about this Substack community is the opportunity to interact like this! 🤩
Oh my goodness, do you work in the neuroscience field? This comment was so interesting to read! Also, I totally get having a “favorite” brain dysfunction. Mine is prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. Not because I would ever want that to happen to anyone, but just because I find it fascinating.
I do, yes! I'm working on a PhD in neuroscience currently so I spend a lot of time researching, reading, discussing topics around the brain 😅 I sweat I don't just jump into random comment sections and start spouting facts, we talked about this in advance!
Prosopagnosia is a fascinating one! I'm not sure if you've ever seen the therapeutics for it, but there was a clip of it on YouTube where a woman was being shown pictures of famous people and working through identifying them, and at the end of it was a picture of her mother and the way she absolutely stunned when the therapist had to tell her who it was just blew my mind. My heart also broke a little for her, but it's wild to think about how it could happen.
I remember that video! When I was in grad school for speech pathology, we watched it during one of our courses on stroke patients. So interesting, but so sad!
This is so fascinating! I was hooked from the very beginning. I had to look up what NIM stands for because my first thought was of the book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (definitely different, although there’s an eerie connection in some ways). The mystery behind what exactly was happening and the conflicting motivations between the different characters made for an incredible story!
Yeah I wasn’t sure whether to put in an explanation of what NIM means, then decided not to so that the story wasn’t clogged with exposition, but maybe I should have put in a footnote?
I have no idea what NIM means, googled it and am none the wiser, but didn't feel a need to know while reading. Even a footnote can alter the flow of reading (if you use the footnote function SubStack has).
Gripping read, thanks 🙂
Thanks, that’s good to know!!
I think it reads fine without it! It mainly gave me pause because of the similarity to NIMH.