From: BraveSaintCroix@AOL.COM
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 13:19:26 EDT

The thing about the New Sun book that had always bugged me was the whole 
concept of getting a person's memories by eating a piece of them.  Perhaps 
silly in context with some of the other miracles in the book, but it always 
seemed ridiculous to me.  (It also bugged me in Herbert's later Dune books 
that a clone, or ghola, could have its original's memories from just a few 
cells. . .)  Anyway, maybe this has already been discussed, but I found an 
interesting article in a book of "fantastic facts" that pertains to it:

During experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan, 
scientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it 
to another.  The experiment was conducted in the following manner.  Over a 
period of time planarian worms were trained to behave in a particular way 
when exposed to light.  These worms were then cut into pieces and fed to 
untrained planarians, and the untrained worms were put through the same 
learning paces as their predecessors.  The second batch of worms, those that 
had dined on the first, learned many times faster than the originals, 
indicating that knowledge had somehow been transferred through body tissue.  
Similar experiments were later conducted at Baylor University: mice were 
trained to run though a maze, and an extract was then made of their brains.  
This extract was fed to untrained mice, which then learned the same maze 
twice as fast as their predecessors.  If placed in a different maze, the 
untrained mice showed no particular aptitude for learning the layout.  The 
implication of these experiments is that memory can be transferred from one 
being to another somatically as well as experimentially.

. . . Fascinating.

-Steve

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/