In a couple of cases mentioned, the brain just picked up where it left off - just as if you had booted up your old Commodore 64 after a decade, and the information was still intact. One guy in a coma for 10 years was amazed that the son he thought was still only 3 years old was actually 13. His thoughts and memories picked up right as they were 10 years ago.
Does this mean the brain is hard-wired with data? Would this “re-boot” of the brain mean that a human brain, preserved against decomposition, could someday be “read”, like a computer hard drive?
I think the first articles overdramatized this story. I wondered about the significane of this note at the end of this initial article about him:
They also note that he could shake his head when asked, and count to 200. If he was entirely recovered and conversing with his family as if nothing had happened, I think those details would be insignificant. The doctor also said
After all, the other two people mentioned in these articles had one initial burst of clarity, and then never repeated it.
DMark, IANAD, but it’s far more variable than that - there are a lot of brain injuries where the ‘reboot’ can reset whole personality aspects.
Some people do just pick up. Others can lose all their memories. I think there was a good book touching this a few years ago, written for the lay person, called something like, “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me.”
Also, memory is one of the most difficult things to understand in neurophysiology. It’s been proved, AIUI, that short term and long term memories are stored in different parts of the brain - but how things get transferred from short to long term is poorly understood. And most of these processes are believed to be energy intensive - that is, without the brain respiring the memories go away.
Again, IANAD, I may be wrong, but I don’t think I’m too far wrong.
Read Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat for some interesting if anecdotal information on how brain damage affects memory and perception. Essentially, memory is stored and accessed in many different ways, and damage can impair or alter the way we remember information. Sometimes injured people will demonstrate temporary revival (as related in Sacks’ work with encephalitis lethargica patients in Awakenings) only to lapse back into unresponsiveness.
The brain is not a hard drive. It’s more like a New York City library in which little bespecticaled gnomes run around rearranging books, writing notes in the margins, and occasionally dropping a stack of books and randomly reordering them. They try to keep the card catalogue up to date but as it gets bigger the task is harder, and sometimes they lose a drawer, or the lights flicker, or some homeless person wanders in and starts flinging cards around and screaming that the end is nigh.
Sometimes, it’s suprising you can get any studying done in that place.
I do have a theory that the brain functions a bit like a hard drive when you sleep. Sleep, so my theory goes, is when the brain “optimizes the hard drive,” sorting, filing, and/or trashing all the bits that accumulated during the day. The “perception” part of your brain is where stuff is stored temporarily while it’s being moved, which is why dreams are so weird. They’re basically your attempt to perceive all the odd stuff you thought about during the day in random order.
Anyway, it’s just a personal, completely non-expert theory. Feel free to shatter my illusions.