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| stickers communicating with each other |
I guess the easiest way to describe this is “distributed memory?”
I’ll cut directly from the article:
“When an entire population is
observed, rather than individual cells, the bacteria appear to develop a kind
of collective memory. In populations exposed to a warning event, survival
rates upon a second exposure two hours after the warning are higher than in
populations not previously exposed. Using computational modelling, the
scientists explained this phenomenon in terms of a combination of two factors.
Firstly, salt stress causes a delay in cell division, leading to
synchronization of cell cycles; secondly, survival probability depends on the
individual bacterial cell's position in the cell cycle at the time of the
second exposure. As a result of the cell cycle synchronization, the sensitivity
of the population changes over time. Previously exposed populations may be more
tolerant to future stress events, but they may sometimes even be more sensitive
than populations with no previous exposure.”
So what this is saying is that the population has a memory. Not the
individual cells, but the population as a whole. In other words, a collective
memory, distributed, remembers what happened last time, and behaves
accordingly. Behaves? Cells don’t behave, or at least we don’t normally say
things like that. But alas, cells – plural – behave.
In the trendy field of sociothermodynamics, people are treated not even
like cells but like molecules bouncing around. This idea of a collective memory
changes the way we may think about these “molecules.” It seems kind of silly,
we know humans have memory – individual memories inside our brains and a form
of collective memory in the form of … cultural products, i.e., art,
architecture, writing, etc.? – and we have theories about collective memory
and the Noosphere, via Carl Jung and Tielhard de Chardin. But there’s
no real metrics behind this stuff, it’s all theory. For now. Combining models
of sociothermodynamics with the kind of work presented above may shed new light
on human behavior, we’ll see.
Notes:
March 2016, phys.org
Interlinks to things about the
Noosphere and such:
SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 2012
THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2013
THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2013
WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2011
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