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Film still from "The Brain That Wouldn't Die", Sterling Productions
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The flatworm can regenerate its entire brain in only a few
days, and so scientists decapitate them, but the worms retain memory of a
previous experiment, despite having lost their head, and how this works is
unexplained, although it implies that information is stored somewhere else
besides the head.
Smells are encoded into memory via the limbic system, and
this means recording body-states along with the smells. Our body remembers the
way it felt the last time that smell was received. We know that a phantom limb
remains in the brain, despite its having been amputated, but does a memory
remain in the body despite having lost its head? It should be interesting to
note here that odor receptors are all over the body, in organs and even in
muscle tissue.
-source:
phys.org, August 2013
"An automated training paradigm reveals long-term
memory in planaria and its persistence through head regeneration" Journal
of Experimental Biology jeb.087809 First posted online July 2, 2013, DOI:
10.1242/jeb.087809
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