Fringe's Misplaced Memory Science: Sci Fi Fact vs Fiction
December 13th 2009 01:07
From: Popular Mechanics - would you believe?
Last week, we pondered the medicinal powers of parasitic worms. In this week's "Gray Matters," the Fringe team investigates strange brain experiments, and the possibility that memories can be extracted and implanted at will. Neurologist Steven Novella helps us think it over.
By Allie Townsend
FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, along with Dr Walter Bishop and son Peter rushed to solve one of the best plot lines yet: Three patients who underwent the risky surgery to correct their insanity. All three had brain pieces removed – pieces, it turned out, that weren't originally from their own brains. They were implants, stolen from Walter's brain (which if you've been watching, explains a lot). But these weren't just any bits of Walter's brain. They were three very specific parts of his hippocampus, said to contain the answers to opening the door to the Other Side.
Villain and Other Sider Thomas Newton is behind the intentional implanting of Walter's brain pieces, an attempt at transferring the memories to other patients. However, Newton's plan failed. The pieces would need to be re-implanted into Walter for the memories to be recovered.
Can brain tissue be implanted and reconnected successfully?
"You can't just transplant a piece of brain like you're implanting a computer chip," says Steven Novella, clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine. "If you remove a piece of brain you severe all of the connections to it. It's like smashing up a computer and then piling up the pieces. It wouldn't work."
Though surgeons have made some headway with stem cell implants, Novella says this is because stem cells are immature cells that haven't already formed complex connections to other cells. "Even then, they're not really making connections," he says. "We're just putting out chemicals we want them to."
How about locating a specific memory within the brain? Also not possible, says Novella. "Complex memories are stored in a network of neurons, not in one place they could recover," he says. Though scientists can see which section of the cortex a person is using to access a certain memory during a CT scan (that section of light ups), memories don't just come from single place inside the brain.
Even if locating the piece of the brain containing specific information, keeping that tissue alive would be nearly impossible. "When you transplant an organ, you hook up the blood supply," he says. "Just putting a mass of tissue in another body doesn't ensure survival. Brain cells are very sensitive to blood flow. They die within minutes without blood or glucose."
But perhaps Fringe's biggest error is its tampering with the hippocampus. The hippocampus stores short-term memories, and Walter's memories of the connection to the Other Side would be stored in his long-term memory, Novella says.
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