If only I Could Have Done an fMRI on Forest God ...

 

If only I Could Have Done an fMRI on Forest God ...

... I would have answered a philosophical conundrum.

If a tree fell in a forest and no one saw or heard it fall, did the tree really fall?

An unattributed (the unctuous The Hindu Bureau as the writer cuts no ice with me) article on March 23^rd says that fMRIs (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) done on infants four to 25 months old indicate that their seat of memory registers individual events (that is, I balanced myself today or I urinated in the temple this evening) but would not be able to recall these in later years.

These are the kinds of research that makes me bang my head against the wall. For an adult, balancing oneself standing is an automated response of the body to gravitation, the fact that the brain spent special effort sometime in the remote past is of no significance. Even an adult brain forgets events in the past; isn’t that why we load our Wedding Photo Album with photographs that we may not remember posing for, or post on Instagram the lunch you hosted for your friend at your neighbourhood greasy joint ... That event will–we have already decided–fade away (remember the movie Back to the Future), if not rapidly, at least by the time of the next lunch (if not your next wedding!).

What this kind of research does is create conclusions from half-baked hypotheses based on semi-literate research. Apparently it has been demonstrated that infants do carry imprints of what we could attribute to some sort of memory–conditioned responses, imitation, and recognition of familiar stimuli–but really not hippocampus–based memory of an adult.

Memory but not memory at all!

The scientists appear to give themselves an exit ramp – hippocampus may not be fully developed. If you would understand how research progresses, you recognised the next application of research funding–the time-history of the development of hippocampus!

That is a pretzel that I would avoid like the plague. I would prefer a scientist, when explaining her research says just, “This is what we observe; we need to do more studies to know what these results could possibly indicate.” The hint for more research is no more an implication. It is a full fledged begging-bowl statement.

The researchers used on infants methods designed for adults. Ouch! It could be the fault of The Hindu Bureau to skip mentioning whether the method was recalibrated for infants, and if so, how. Perhaps that is too much detail to offer in a mainstream newspaper, but the hint could have been given. There are details of the results on similar parameters, like the difference between infants of one year and those aged between 12 and 25 months.

Infants can encode episodic memory but cannot recall, because the hippocampus is developing.

To go back to the forest conundrum, someone was nearing the forest but could hear or see the tree falling only if she went slightly nearer.

How “slightly”? That is for further research!

The Forest God to be fMRIed soon.

Raghuram Ekambaram