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Why Memory May Be Essential to Consciousness | Victoria Trumbull

Could memory be more fundamental to consciousness than we realize?

Victoria Trumbull revisits Augustine and Henri Bergson to explore memory as the continuity underlying mental life. She challenges the idea that remembering is simply retrieving stored information, examining how the past remains active in present experience and what this might reveal about the soul.

0:00 Rehabilitating the Philosophical Idea of the Soul 4:10 The Soul as Vital Activity Rather Than a Fixed Definition 6:53 Augustine, Bergson, and the Philosophy of Memory 11:33 Memory as a Foundation of Consciousness 14:10 How Memory Connects Past, Present, and Future 18:35 Memory Loss and the Limits of the Storage Model 22:52 Bergson’s Memory Images and Pure Memory.

Victoria Trumbull is a philosopher, researcher, and writer whose work concerns the nature of the mind and the relationship between time, memory, and the soul. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford and is the author of On the Memory of the Soul: Augustine and Bergson’s Metaphysics.

More from Victoria Trumbull on Closer To Truth: Closer To Truth: The Podcast: • Closer To Truth: The Podcast Understanding Consciousness — Closer To Truth — Core Topic: • Understanding Consciousness — Closer To Tr… Closer To Truth contributor page: https://closertotruth.com/contributor… to Closer To Truth: / @closertotruthtv Join the Community:

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Closer To Truth, created and hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence and sentience. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers. #CloserToTruth #Consciousness #VictoriaTrumbull #PhilosophyOfMemory #NatureOfTheSoul.

A 24-hour fast triggers a surprising repair response in the gut

Scientists have discovered that fasting for just 24 hours increases a beneficial gut bacterium that helps the intestines regenerate after radiation damage. The preclinical findings could pave the way for new treatments that protect healthy tissue during cancer therapy, potentially without requiring patients to fast.

Microbiome therapy shows promise for preventing deadly bloodstream infections in early trial

Researchers at City of Hope and collaborators have pioneered a new approach to preventing dangerous bloodstream infections in patients receiving donor stem cell transplants for blood cancers. The first-of-its-kind therapy delivers 16 carefully selected beneficial bacteria designed to restore the microbiome and fight harmful pathogens.

In the multicenter phase 1 clinical trial, scientists from City of Hope, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Seres Therapeutics found that the new therapy, called SER-155, was well tolerated with no treatment-related side effects. Patients who received the therapy also had fewer bloodstream infections and lower levels of harmful bacteria linked to infection.

The Seres Therapeutics–sponsored study, published in Nature Medicine, provides early evidence that live biotherapeutics—medicines made from beneficial bacteria—can be safely delivered to highly vulnerable patients and may help prevent serious infections, said senior author Marcel van den Brink, M.D., Ph.D., City of Hope chief physician executive and the Morgan and Helen Chu Presidential Chair of City of Hope National Medical Center.

Childhood cancer cells shape-shift to spread without genetic mutations

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UK) have proposed an explanation for why some childhood tumors spread aggressively around the body despite having relatively few genetic faults.

For years, experts believed cancers become more dangerous by accumulating genetic mutations that allow them to invade new tissues and evade treatment.

But a new paper published today shows how childhood cancers may not always need extra mutations to spread.

Modified zinc finger protein reduces brain plaques in Alzheimer’s mice

A KAIST-led research team has found that a protein involved in gene regulation can suppress the harmful aggregation of amyloid-beta, a peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The approach also reduced the toxicity of protein aggregates that had already formed. In experiments using a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, the treatment reduced protein accumulation in the brain and improved recognition memory, suggesting a possible route toward new therapeutics.

KAIST (President Choongsik Bae) announced on November 5 that the research team led by Professor Mi Hee Lim from the Department of Chemistry identified a new approach to controlling the aggregation and toxicity of amyloid-beta. The study was conducted in collaboration with Professor Seung Jae Lee’s team in the Department of Chemistry at Jeonbuk National University, Dr. Chul-Ho Lee and Dr. Kyoung-Shim Kim of the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB), Dr. Young-Ho Lee of the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI), and Dr. Jiyong Park of the Institute for Basic Science (IBS).

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the abnormal aggregation and accumulation of amyloid-beta in the brain. Toxic aggregates formed during this process can damage nerve cells. The team sought to suppress this harmful aggregation and reduce the toxicity of existing aggregates.

Caltech robot makes history by building a structure in space

For the first time, a robot has successfully assembled part of a structure in space without astronauts, demonstrating a technology that could dramatically change how large spacecraft and scientific instruments are built.

The robotic system was developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is part of DARPA’s Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program, an initiative exploring ways to manufacture and assemble enormous structures directly in space.

Rather than relying on astronauts to connect individual pieces, the robot uses an automated arm to retrieve structural tubes and connecting joints from nearby storage dispensers. It then joins the components into repeating sections, called bays, that form a larger supporting framework known as a truss.

The fastest levitated spinning magnet ever made might help physicists search for dark matter

Tiny levitated magnets are able to avoid contact friction, making them useful for detecting extremely weak forces and magnetic fields and acting as ultralow-noise quantum sensors and precision measurement tools. Combining levitation with extreme cold further reduces unwanted motion that can make faint signals hard to detect.

Spinning magnets have even better magnetic sensitivity, but levitated micromagnet experiments have so far mainly studied back-and-forth motion, rather than continuous spinning. And experiments with spinning magnets have thus far stayed in the macroscopic realm, with magnets around half a millimeter in diameter.

But now, researchers report the first experiments with a levitated spinning micromagnet, and this tiny magnet is much faster than the macroscopic version. The new study, published in Science Advances, describes how this microscopic rotor achieved record-breaking rotational speed and how it’s already helping in the search for dark matter particles.

Fabric molds could bring material-saving concrete beams within reach

Topology optimization is a computer design method that can help engineers design beams using reduced amounts of concrete and steel. But those intricate shapes produced from the tool are often too complex or expensive to pour into conventional rigid molds. The few that have been built have mostly relied on specialized equipment, such as concrete 3D printers or machine-carved molds, equipment that is out of reach in regions where new construction is expected to grow.

Now, MIT engineers have shown that highly efficient beams can be cast in something more accessible: sewn fabric. In a paper published in the Journal of Building Engineering, the team designed and built a 3-meter (about 10-foot) test beam using fabric molds created through an automated pattern-making process. Compared with a conventional beam designed to carry the same weight, the optimized beam used about one-third as much concrete and half as much steel reinforcement. When tested, its measured response was within about 2% of what the team’s computer model predicted.

Fabric formwork, in which concrete is poured into a mold made of textile, has been explored for years to create beams that vary in depth, rather than the rectangular shapes common in construction. But because fabric deforms under the weight of wet concrete, that flexibility has made the final shape hard to predict.