Anyway, for those who might be interested, here's a brief rundown of the weird little worms that I like to work with that are somewhat related to this subject:
They're called planaria, and they're interesting and scientifically relevant in a whole bunch of ways, but particularly promising for cell regeneration or to observe cell migration. Why? Because when you chop one of them in half, the head side grows a new tail and the tail side grows a new head. This can be repeated quite a lot to reproduce the planaria, and they regenerate at a pretty good speed. Also, they're technically immortal: if you feed them and keep them happy, they tend not to "age."
Anyway, there's a point to this:
A while back, some scientist did an experiment with the planaria where he would flash a light on them and then zap them with electricity. This was done over and over, until the planaria seemed to believe that the flash of light was connected to the electricity. Soon, he only needed to flash the light to get a clear reaction from a planarian that he conditioned in this way.
Now, according to him, if he took the planaria that had learned to fear the light and chopped it in half, the new planaria that resulted from the regeneration on the tail-end would also react to the light, as though it retained the memories of the intact organism. If my memory serves correctly, he reported that this happened even when he chopped them up into smaller planaria.
Here is where he got extra crazy about it: he took brand new planaria that had not been trained by the light trick, ground the conditioned planaria up into tiny little bits, and then fed them to the new planaria. He then reported that the planaria that had eaten the pieces of the conditioned planaria suddenly began to react to light as though they had been conditioned, as well.
Now, obviously, if this were all completely true, it would be a huge leap in our understanding of how memories work. However, many of his peers chalked this up to observation bias and other criticisms, and his experiments have been largely ignored. Some scientists wisely pointed out that planaria don't really like light being shined in their faces anyway, so it is not a well-controlled experiment.
There's a man in our labs who has reworked his experiment in order to get around that "light" problem and hopefully around the rest of the criticisms. I'm not going to tell the whole internet his precise method, because that'd be awful of me, but as far as I can tell, it is solid. I think he is somewhere in the final stages of his experiment, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
But, for my money, it was a fun experiment and an interesting thought that probably will prove of little relevance to our understanding of memories. But I could be wrong.
Point is, this idea that suki is talking about isn't entirely unheard of (as in it isn't like this is the first time someone tried to say that), but to say it's likely or demonstrated is silly, and definitely the way that it is presented in the article and in the summary of it is more than absurd and clearly nonsense.
Still, interesting stuff, I guess.
That's intetesting.
Topic: Forgive my ignorance