Typically I am put off by analogies but consider…
Scientific symmetry demands that there should be a fourth fundamental circuit element to compliment resistors, capacitors and inductors. The fourth circuit, which would make it possible to build more complex electronic devices was theorized to exist by Leon Chua, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and called a “memristor” (memory resistor), that registers [remembers?] how much current flowed through a device.
Stan Williams, who heads up the Information and Quantum Systems lab at HP Labs, thinks that they have found it and how it works. – Nature, April 30, 2008 –
Forget all the sophisticated electronics and chemistry which should launch a new programming branch in a move away from silicon. Instead, imagine, if you will, that this discovery is analogous to how memory works neurologically. Sounds like blasphemy buy consider it for a bit. Without staining the logic, consider a memristor-like functioning of sets of neuorchemical – electrochemical flow rather than memory being a place or network of neural areas.
A memristor stores information based on changers of the resistance when an electrical current is applied. Memristors can have a high level of resistance, interpreted as a “1” in data terms, and a low level interpreted as a “0.” Thus, information [data] is electronically recorded (– absorbed – present, whatever new diction describes it) by controlling current. The memristor acts as a variable resistor that, through changes in its own resistance, reflects its own history, according to Williams of HP.
In an analogous scheme being suggested here for organisms, memories occur due to the flow and patterns of resistance changes in the 100 billion neurons in the brain factored by other billions of interconnections of neuro-electrical impulses that exist throughout the brain and central nervous system.
The amount of energy required to push around a very small number of atomic vacancies in a crystalline material to get memristors to work parallels what would be required to move electrical impulses throughout the nervous system net that is hypothesized to be what memories are. Williams said. “We can switch it [current] very fast, faster than we can measure” which is just what is experienced when evoked potential recordings are captured in neural recordings which makes them almost useless considering the number and speed of the differing neurotransmitters.
Memristor chips will be designed function like flash memory and retain data even after a computer is turned off, just like happens to some neural areas during sleep, conscious attention and the flow of moving in an out of the “zone” at work, play or when focused on any value-laden activities in life.
Just a thought.
This was written after an article in CNet.com www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9932054-7.html?tag=nefd.top
Wow! That is such a great concept with ramifications for future technologies.
What interests me just as much is your signoff “Just a thought.”
I represent author Susan Hanshaw and her upcoming book “Inner Architect: How To Build The Life You Were Designed To Live.”
The power of the mind, specifically our thoughts, are the building blocks of our desired reality:
http://innerarchitect.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/the-power-of-your-mind-supporting-your-reality-one-thought-at-a-time/
Great information!
dean and susan
It doesn’t seem too tough to implement. Are they actually going to demonstrate it?
If there’s a dream of building a computer based on this, that dream is still a long ways off. Programming this set up would be a beast…
we gotta start somewhere though.
when does something stop being an analogy and turn into a nice design blueprint?
Actually, i was referring to the analogy between a technological process of ‘memristors’ and how we remember or how memory works in organisms.
Of course, there are other analogies:
1) that electronic process just discovered to memory
2) memory in an electronic byte to memory in a biological organism
3) biological memory to a dualistic term of a representation of something that happened in the environment going somewhere to ‘be’
Yes, if it is of value it will be a nice place to start for both the electronic ‘hole’ it could fill but also the conceptual ‘hole’ that could bring new technologies and for this person, a new and improved way to reference how information in organisms is processed. Memory research in general has been dead and dull due to a lack of a model that explains what how we relate things that aren’t there and how we use the information that no one can see.
Perhaps something stops being an analogy when it can communicate a bit of information beyond what the reference to another process did in the beginning. There are none that come to mind… our language morphs thru nuances and subtleties as we use it and that leads to additive changes faster than extinction of words or phrases… don’t you agree??!