Thank you for the reference, I think it contributes to add the overview:
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
This came to mind when I saw the post. I work at an ayahuasca retreat center and these types of things are front and center here. Physical wounds can and do heal, but traumas ("energetic"/psychological wounds) remain fresh as the day they happened and influence us in immeasurable ways. The effects of ayahuasca often put a spotlight on them and it can be a rough ride until they are fully processed.
> but traumas ("energetic"/psychological wounds) remain fresh as the day they happened and influence us in immeasurable ways.
I experienced this in two occasions. First, when I was going to therapy, and somehow managed to reach these traumas, the second is in deep meditation, which Japanese call "meeting with the ghosts".
Traumas stay fresh until you face them again, and acknowledge them. The moment you accept that they have happened, you have the chance to heal them.
This doesn't mean the process is smooth, painless or easy. It's neither, but it's very possible.
Reminds me of this [1] SSC post. It briefly talks about a paper [2]:
> the paper is trying to explain what psychedelics do to the brain. It theorizes that they weaken high-level priors (in this case, you can think of these as the tendency to fit everything to an existing narrative), allowing things to be seen more as they are
> A corollary of relaxing high-level priors or beliefs under psychedelics is that ascending prediction errors from lower levels of the system (that are ordinarily unable to update beliefs due to the top-down suppressive influence of heavily-weighted priors) can find freer register in conscious experience
In the context of trauma, the trauma-induced unhealthy belief systems would be the high-level priors that have lodged themselves in strongly, and the effect of the psychedelics would help the person actually process and validate them against real world evidence (beyond the traumatic ones). I can imagine that actually having to do that - seeing all your trauma-based narratives and how they have shaped your view of things, and confronting how they clash with reality - being a pretty rough ride.
Except the "trauma informed ayahuasca ceremony" is $500 a pop with a minimum of 5 ceremonies. Plus you have to travel outside of the USA. Good cottage industry.
It's a different school of thought for sure. We find traditional therapy to be very synergistic with it. Sometimes one can cognitively know how to fix something, but despite that it still sticks in the body. Ayahuasca can help to "percolate" that knowing into the body/nervous system for great results.
I guess a primary source like myself doesn't count for much, but fwiw I have seen hundreds of people go through this. Those that have done a lot of therapy (and have little to no experience with psychedelics) often have a lot of tools they've accumulated over their journeys and tend to get a lot out of it.
This is precisely why peer reviewed studies are so valuable and sources so important. Folks can properly value anecdotes (which can be valuable, don’t get me wrong) against other sources of knowledge.
I'm very curious, from the perspective that you have based on your experience at the retreat, what it means to you when you talk about "processing" these traumas?
Maybe a very concrete way to ask would be: what's the difference between someone who undergoes the ayahuasca experience and successfully "processes" a trauma, vs someone who does not? Is there such a thing?
I don't think it can be covered in a general way, everyone's traumas are unique. Sometimes it involves going into the memory, reexperiencing parts of it (which can be a very visceral experience under the effects) from an objective place, really feeling them and letting go, forgiving, etc. It's usually more complicated than that- there are a lot of "hooks" that are created (relationships, places, the emotions felt going in/after an event). The most common traumas (sexual) create some downright awful patterns especially if it happened as a child (e.g. a parent who is supposed to be protecting you and providing safety...but is also doing bad things to you. There's a lot to undo there). It's usually not something taken care of in a single ceremony or even a weekend of ceremonies especially without a skilled practitioner.
Is there a difference between this and doing it another way? Hard to say. If the process resonates with you I think it can be done a lot faster and more completely this way. Some people can make little to no progress in therapy for years, dancing around the issue and constantly hitting defense mechanisms (often the memories of these things are blocked out and very hard to access under normal circumstances). A strong ayahuasca experience will put it front and center so you have no other choice than to deal with it. It's not easy, not some magic pill, and takes courage and willingness to go into it head on and do the work. It's absolutely not for everyone. I really love this modality so probably a bit biased- like asking a heart surgeon to heal your broken leg might get you a couple stents installed ;) it's very versatile but not always the best option.
Our center is run in a traditional (Shipibo) fashion, ceremonies are at night (8p until about 1a). For preparation...it's definitely good to clean up your diet but the only major things to avoid are contraindicated medications; backing off from recreational drugs and alcohol for a bit prior is a good idea too. It's good to stop caffeine just so you aren't withdrawing for a few days while here as well. (Many places are overly strict in terms of this stuff. If you come for a master plant diet, you're getting a vomitivo/purgative at the start to clean you out regardless).
>As various approaches that can help people with PTSD are suggested by the author, the book would be more comprehensive if further empirical findings are provided to demonstrate their effectiveness and how readers can integrate them into practice
I clicked the top link (nlm) and the bottom link (some forum) - the top link is a a pretty positive review, and the bottom link is incomprehensible, and the second link is... reddit...? controversial.
>this is a very pre-replication crisis book. I don’t hold this against the author, I don’t think anyone’s really proud of what they believed pre-replication crisis, but it’s undoubtedly a product of its time. Mirror neurons, candidate genes, left- vs right-brained people, etc all make dramatic appearances. Nothing (except the genetics parts) are inexcusable or even certainly wrong, but all of them together concern me. And several of the book’s key studies are contradicted by later, larger studies. Van der Kolk talks about how childhood trauma decreases IQ, but some pretty good studies say it doesn’t. Even the studies that have passed the test of time look a little weird. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study found that obesity and other seemingly nonpsychiatric diseases were linked to child abuse, and recent studies confirm this – but the controls for socioeconomic status are always insufficient, and there’s surprisingly little shared environmental component. I’m biased about this, everyone’s biased, but part of the book was meant to prove that child abuse mattered shockingly more than you thought it possibly could, and that part was wasted on me.
emotionally difficult, he goes deeply into peoples trauma, so it gets into some extremely "triggering" areas, not much phases me but that book wasn't a super easy from a holding back tears perspective.
This study is specifically about "learning" that takes place without interacting with the brain.
It's learning in the same sense the immune system learns to fight of infections. The difference is that the mechanism by which cells record state is similar to one of the mechanisms also used by the brain at the cellular level, which you would expect.
The cells and structures that make up the brain evolved from simpler structures, so we would expect some reuse of mechanism.
The immune system is several systems. One of my favorite parts is the Thymus.
It's literally setup like a gauntlet. New immune cells from marrow come through the Thymus and are tested. They need to pass through and attack foreign cells then pass through and _not_ attack host cells. They are essentially tagged and filtered by this process.
Most cells are let go into the body, some cells are reserved as self regulatory cells, and the others that do not pass are destroyed.
It's a literal quality control and selection machine for your immune system.
The obvious-in-retrospect distinction is that memory is everywhere (even a footprintnin dirt is a memory), and selective (reinforced) memory is more complex (as in the OP example), and the combination and communication of memories and information is where the brain really outshines other objects.
Using the immune system as an analogy as another complexity layer of adversarial <-> learning/adaptation in relation to the context of both complexity theory / machine learning is tempting but almost is too easy. Plus the immune system is likely more complex than the analogy would hold up to.
This brings up the question about whether there are hereditary information transmission methods other than DNA. There are so many things we ascribe to “instinct” that might be information transmitted from parent to offspring in some encoded format.
Like songs that newborn songbirds know, migration routes that animals know without being shown, that a mother dog should break the amniotic sac to release the puppies inside, what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.
It seems it implausible to me that all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling; it seems to require much more complex encoding of information, pattern matching, templates, and/or memory.
> what body shapes should be considered more desirable for a mate out of an infinite variety of shapes.
However this specifically works in humans — and considering the diversity of actual human preferences includes, amongst many other things, non-existant dragons* — the first I heard of the term "superstimulus" was with the example of certain beetles that kept trying to copulate with beer bottles:
* Humans must have something guiding us, or we'd all be (a) bisexual and (b) equally often aroused by dragons as by those we could actually have a child with; the fact that dragons happen at all is simply an indication that our brains are likely using a very simple set of heuristics to get there, and simple heuristics is totally a thing that DNA could encode
Often human sexuality is rooted in power dynamics and these things are associations. I certainly am attracted to powerful women wearing whatever style of clothing my primary school teacher had...
Power is one of many aspects of human sexuality, but it's also part of much broader human social dynamics, and I have not seen evidence that power dynamics are unusually predominant in sexual vs non-sexual relationships.
I wouldn't say it's predominant. It just influences it, and for some people it's all about that and much less about anything like appearance or the sex itself.
I recall hearing about newborn birdsongs being learned "in utero" (not sure if quite the right term but lets go with that). In that case the channel for transmission was sound. It was apparently used as a shibboleth against brood parasite egg replacement. If the baby didn't sing the song that was being sung to it then the baby got abandoned by presumably disappointed parents. I suppose it could also be a 'health test' of sorts since sufficiently deformed or disabled offspring would also fail.
Parental teaching and learning is a spectrum and not a binary. We've found with relocating deer (to similar but not identical environments) doing worse until learning occurs over a few generations and they catch up. Animals may not be as intelligent as us but their ability to learn and adapt should not be underestimated.
You might be interested in epigenetic inheritence. We do know that some epigenetic marks are passed down but its still very much unknown how much heritable information is encoded in epigenetics.
While histones and methylation aren't DNA themselves, they're certainly incapable of functioning without DNA. I'd assume the parent poster was referring to further still mechanics.
> Does the fundamental limit of the amount of classical information encodable in the human genome (even with epigenetics & simultaneous encoding) imply a vast capacity for learning survival-beneficial patterns in very little time, with very few biasing priors?
> [Fundamental 'gbit' requirement 1: “No Simultaneous Encoding”:] if a gbit is used to perfectly encode one classical bit, it cannot simultaneously encode any further information. Two close variants of this are Zeilinger’s Principle (10) and Information Causality (11).
> Is there a proved presumption that genes only code in sequential combinations? Still overestimating the size of the powerset of all [totally-ordered] nonlocal combinations?
Still trying to understand counterfactuals in re: constructor theory
Observe the human response to dandelions; are they weeds or are they edible?
Do they have lobed leaves? What [neurons,] do mammals have to heuristically generalize according to visual and gustatory-olfactory features, and counterfactually which don't they have?
Or it's entirely learned, and then the coding for the substrate is still relevant
Any sexual hereditary information needs to be passed via germ line cells. So if it’s not encoded within a single sperm or egg cell, then it can’t be passed down via sexual heredity.
Information that might be passed from parent to offspring after conception is not hereditary by definition, and would be a type of learning, (ie birds singing to babies in eggs, antibody transferring from mother to baby)
Everything else you mention is very easily passed down via genetics which is not chemical signaling, but actual information encoding. And simple rules can lead to complex behavior.
Edit: Here’s an example to better illustrate the genes power of information encoding. Camouflage, which is a genetically heritable trait, can be incredibly complex. We can think of the information encoded in the genes for camouflage as a visual description of the environment that the animal evolved in. So the gene’s have actually encoded what the dessert environment looks like, or the sea floor, or the vegetation. That’s a single example, but every animal carries such complex information (how to navigate certain landscapes, how to survive current living pathogens in the environment, etc) within their genes.
Human babies pick up prosody in the womb from their mothers. Here's a random, seemingly comprehensive article about that that I haven't read yet (I know about this from other sources.)
You might enjoy the research of Dr. Ian Stevenson. It's his research that got me deep down the rabbit hole on this subject many years ago. (I have 1 vivid memory that I would call a "past life memory") - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson
When I imagine, the "videos" are devoid of emotion or feeling, unlike my memories. This specific "thing" has a strong feeling and emotion connected to it, unlike the other thinking that is very sterile, it's the only thing I carry that I know I've not experienced but it has the association of memory qualia.
> all of these things can be encoded as chemical signalling
Why do you presume they are chemical signals?
> pattern matching
Psychedelics show the absurd power of layered pattern matching in our brains and what happens when you disrupt those mechanisms. I would not discount it so readily.
It's a statistical guess, as with most phenomena. When individuals, alone, consistently travel toward direction without observable prompting, it's expected there is another stimuli. This may be an unseen force (birds following magnetic fields). However, it appears there is a genetic component.
Notably: "They also inherit from their parents the directions in which they need to fly in the autumn and spring, and if the parents each have different genetically encoded directions, their offspring will end up with an intermediate direction."
> They have at least three different compasses at their disposal: one allows them to extract information from the position of the sun in the sky, another uses the patterns of the stars at night, and the third is based on Earth’s ever present magnetic field.
They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.
> They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.
The link identifies it as genetic. If there were no genetic component, there would be consistency, regardless of genetic lineage.
> They clearly do not "know" paths anymore than water "knows" what gravity is.
Knowing is a soft term, for which I provided a definition to answer a second order question. Diving into any further classification of "knowing", is a separate issue. The topic under discussion is not definitional knowing for other organisms. The topic is the genetic transfer of information, as per this article. Hence, graciously, it can be assumed that "knowing" is shorthand for this concept.
Yeah, there’s fundamental stuff that animals just don't know. Like cats have the instinct to hunt, and are good at that - but unless they’ve seen another cat eating prey, they don’t realise that that’s a thing that they can do, and you’d think that would be a pretty core learning to pass on.
Isn’t this the whole plot behind Assassin’s Creed’s Animus where they are able to look into (and “interact “) with the past based on information in the cells/DNA.
This topic is related to the work of Michael Levin’s lab, which I only recently found out about and have been digging into. They’ve released a bunch of papers, and Michael has given plenty of in-depth interviews available on YouTube. They’re looking at low-level structures like cells and asking “what can be learned/achieved by viewing these structures as being intelligent agents?” The problem of memory is tied intricately with intelligence, and examples of it at these low levels are found throughout their work.
The results of their experiments are surprising and intriguing: bringing cancer cells back into proper functioning, “anthrobots” self-assembling from throat tissue cells, malformed tadpoles becoming normal frogs, cells induced to make an eye by recruiting their neighbors…
An excerpt from the link below: Our main model system is morphogenesis: the ability of multicellular bodies to self-assemble, repair, and improvise novel solutions to anatomical goals. We ask questions about the mechanisms required to achieve robust, multiscale, adaptive order in vivo, and about the algorithms sufficient to reproduce this capacity in other substrates. One of our unique specialties is the study of developmental bioelectricity: ways in which all cells connect in somatic electrical networks that store, process, and act on information to control large-scale body structure. Our lab creates and employs tools to read and edit the bioelectric code that guides the proto-cognitive computations of the body, much as neuroscientists are learning to read and write the mental content of the brain.
As a sidenote, Peter Reddien's lab did other studies on planaria (videos are on youtube) and found cells that are supposedly dedicated to map the whole body and indicate how differentiation should go in that area (basically one input to the morphogenesis of this animal). It was, after levin's work, another eye openener, as you kinda approach biology as an information problem... everything happening has a piece of data that explains it, we just didn't look everywhere.
People are saying very weird things in the comments. To the extent that epigenetics transfers at all, they can't go very far.
For past-life memories, uh no.
For memories in non-brain tissues, there's a major detail problem there, if any of this pans out at all. For memories transferred from another person, it makes no sense. Your nerves don't transfer universal (between human) data files around, and your brain is a tangled mess. Memories won't transfer beyond, maybe, possibly, some stuff around personality, mood, and various neurotransmitter things.
And I don't think it would be common, if it happens at all, without intentional development and use of new tech.
For example it should theoretically be possible to recover the basic personality of a cryogenically vitrified brain, based quite a bit on genetics and some on brain structure, but beyond that I can't say. Unless you know many things I don't, and have carefully checked that you truly know them, you should not expect memory recovery, at least above the low double digits percentage.
And that's assuming "full technology", I for sure don't know to even get started.
I don't think saying past-life memories are incredibly suspicious is unscientific. Things start breaking down at probabilities that low. In theory you shouldn't disregard that stuff (and for good reasons), but practically I'm not sure how I would approach it.
This is wild, but many studies have reached the same conclusion.
I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.
A theory I have seen is that we tend to mix up cause and effect.
So, for example, a dangerous situation causes stress and stress causes the heart to beat faster, all normal. But make the heart beat faster through external means and it will also cause stress. So it is not clear which one is the cause and which one is the effect, probably some weird combination, with all sorts of feedbacks. Life is messy.
So get a heart that isn't yours and it will not beat in a familiar way, which, in turn may be interpreted as changing emotions. And even if memories are entirely contained within the brain, what if the heartbeat is part of these memories, with a heart that reacts differently, the meaning of these memories may change.
For a tech analogy, in order to record a video game session, it is common to only record player input. If the game is deterministic, you just need to run the game with the recorded inputs and the session will be faithfully reproduced. It is much more compact than something like a video. Now imagine we change the game engine so that it responds slightly differently to inputs, now, when replayed, the game will appear different. If we imagine memories are "replays" and the engine is our body, than altering our body will also alter our memories.
> I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.
Wild. Doesn't necessarily surprise me too much that the body stores some memories outside the brain, but it seems _very_ surprising that another body/brain can read and understand ones created by another. I'd assume that the whole mind and memory system is one big correlated mess, not essentially composed of data files in a ~standard encoding.
It would be hasty to assume that any memories would be transferable in such a way. If your hypothesis is that transplant recipients can have their memories altered by interpreting information carried by foreign organ cells, start by assuming they're reading junk data that they cannot decipher. Brains are great at turning junk data into something that feels real.
I would probably ascribe it to the procedure itself. Like I imagine if you put someone under, opened up their chest, took their heart out and then... put it back in - that the stress of that whole thing would be enough to seriously mess with your head.
That was my followup question, are the memories accurate (even as much as normal memories are), or are they nonsense? Or even better, it'd be fun if they're not completely nonsense, but corrupted in some understandable way (like people/places are substituted for instance). There's no way at all that memories are encoded as essentially mpeg files, so _something_ has to be wrong with them.
But yeah, you're right, odds seem good that they're just nonsense, but even then it just feels weird that the body can even interpret them as memories in the slightest.
Maybe it's all about encoding and it IS pretty standard? Brain can decode vision through tongue nerves [1] as long as it looks like vision data and is correlated with head movements. There were experiments with other senses sent through different means or whole new sense (magnetic [2] and echolocation [3]). Looks like brain is so flexible, that anything resembling sensible information will be decoded.
> In addition to changes in preferences, some recipients describe new aversions after receiving a donor heart. For example, a 5-year-old boy received the heart of a 3-year-old boy but was not informed about his donor’s age or cause of death. Despite this lack of information, he provided a vivid description of his donor after the surgery: “He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore though” (p. 70, [8]). Subsequently it was reported that his donor had died after falling from an apartment window while trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen onto the window ledge. After receiving his new heart, the recipient refused to touch or play with Power Rangers
This is the most fascinating thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the link
There’s a similar story I’ve read before in a different paper regarding about an organ donor who drowned and then the recipient developed an extreme aversion to water.
I don’t recall what the exact title or link to the article was though.
This seems to make sense given that Purkinje cells in the brain have been shown to do this same type of thing in isolation (detect and respond to patterns of input).
It meant there was some low level mechanism lurking inside at least those cells, so not too surprising it's more general.
For example, if a female first has sex with very large virile males and absorbs their sperm packages and then gets fertilized by a tiny frail male, the offspring's size is on the larger side, determined by the previous sexual encounters.
Not sure if there has been any followup on this research.
The headline is nonsense. That the body "remembers" things is not news. My immune system remembers the cold I got.
The source study states:
> Our findings show that canonical features of memory do not necessarily depend on neural circuitry, but can be embedded in the dynamics of signaling cascades conserved across different cell types.
Which is why it is important to eat right and listen to the body.
Memories can be activated without awareness, anywhere in the head, modulating the deliberate cognitive processing as well as whatever happens "in the back of the head".
Of course cells and tissues react to external stimuli, that's part of the homeostasis process, and a fundamental part of our adaptivity or we'd die with minimal changes in the environment. Calling it memory is the same as saying a bruise is my body having a memory of me hitting the corner of the table. Well toned bodies are the memories of the weight lifting exercises they've performed in the past, and so on.
But I can only imagine the extrapolations that alternative medicine people will make with this.
I read the paper and I didn't think that is what they're talking about. The molecular systems for temporal pattern detection where previously thought to be specialized to neurons, but this article indicates that they exists in other cell types. Bruising is a response to physical trauma, lacking any temporal pattern sensitivity? Molecular mechanism related to learning and memory formation, ERK and CREB signaling are known to be crucial for memory formation in neurons. I think what the paper is showing that this specific molecular machinery for detecting and responding to temporal patterns isn't unique to neurons https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x
there's an interesting trauma release meditation where your limbs are asked to remember things. It's pretty interesting what comes up, then you're asked to let it go and when you do, some weird extra deep relaxation sets in
Memories seem in this context to mean state that isn't immediately physiologically apparent. But yes, I think your definition is reasonable too, if not very useful for communication.
The research goes beyond observing spaced repetition it shows that essential features of memory formation like encoding and retention of temporal patterns occur outside the nervous system.
That was my conclusion too after reading it. I was always wondering how the brain could send all needed info to the muscles fast enough when someone is playing piano or typing 120 characters a minute.
Mh, I'm neither a Neurologist, nor any level of good at being a musician.
But it goes further than that. Now after a few years, I start to recognize patterns in songs and this removes a huge amount of cognitive overhead. For example, there are very classical rhythms in rock and metal. These were very intimidating two or three years ago, because it's so many notes to look at and a lot of them fast and it's just a lot of stuff to look at.
Now, on a guitar, I just recognize 18 bars of gallop-rhythm on string two and my right hand just does that, at least at the speeds I can do. Or you can recognize how a song is in a certain key and my left hand is just used to what happens in such keys. Sure, you need to learn the notes, but the physical motions are largely set already.
Similar things on a keyboard. In complex sections, a lot of thought can go into hand position and which finger to use to press a key, because you may need to prepare movement of your hand a few notes early or you can't hit a certain transition. I've noticed that something other than conscious thought optimizes that as well.
My biggest takeaway is that music is hard, and the human kinematic system is entirely amazing.
Muscles and nerves adapt to physical challenges to make higher intensity efforts easier in three ways: better effort coordination, higher demand signaling, and higher force produced by muscle fibers.
(We tend to think of just the latter, but all three significantly impact “strength”.)
Each of these has mechanisms of maintenance and faster recovery after use lapses. Which can all be described as memory.
First, the spinal cord and motor cortex learn more effective coordination. Proper coordination of muscles impacts strength by ensuring our different muscles cooperate effectively to apply force where we need it. We imagine simple movements as simple efforts, but they are really a series of coordinated multiple muscle response.
This can be considered “normal” neural/cognitive learning and memory in the brain, spinal coord and nervous system.
Second, our nervous system learns to send higher intensity demand signals to the muscles.
I don’t know what the mechanism is here. Maybe higher coordination of simultaneous signals within the muscle? Maybe an increase in signal strengths? An increase in nerve cells? A combination? In any case, once learned, this learning is mostly maintained despite loss of stimulus and relearned quickly.
This creates a common source of injury. After a workout hiatus, our ability to demand intense muscle response can exceed the abilities of our reduced muscle’s capabilities. It can feel too easy to push our bodies hard again, resulting in injuries that abort the attempt to restart training.
Restart weight lifting programs with patience and caution, until muscles catch up with the renewed overload, hypertrophy and recovery cycle.
The third very long term memory mechanism in muscle cells is quite interesting: myonuclear accretion. Support cells merge with muscle cells permanently giving them multiple nuclei, permanently increasing their ability and speed to create the proteins we need for hypertrophy (muscle growth) and recovery (repair and energy store recuperation).
Myonuclear accretion allows muscle cells to grow far beyond their original limits. And accounts for why previously trained muscles can retain a modestly higher level of strength and size, even after training regimen lapses.
All three memory mechanisms account for why regaining previous high levels of strength happens faster, with less effort, than it took to gain any level of strength the first time.
Aother memory mechanism include higher interoception, prioperception, kinematics, and higher level learning regarding exercise form, workout discipline, workout organization, body limitations, injury warnings, positive associations with making effort, etc. that are all result in long term increased strength and ability recover and accumulate it.
I had a 6-hour surgery a few years ago, for which I was unconscious. When I awoke, my butt hurt (that’s not where the surgery was) such that it was difficult to sit on hard chairs for 3 or 4 days. It was explained to me that although I was unconscious, my body still knew what was going on and was tensing up during the surgery. I thought it was interesting that my body had trauma from an event that my brain couldn’t remember.
In so many words, this study basically described the immune system. Similar mechanism to how immune system is able to identify foreign bodies (virus, bacteria) and issue the appropriate response.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score...
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