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Kawoomba comments on Open Thread, January 16-31, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Interesting article about this study:
Lots of implications e.g. about life extensions not being identity preserving without memory augmentation. Someone write a discussion post on the study. Hey you, you do it. Don't look behind you, I mean you.
It's a mouse study, and genetically tweaked mice at that... From the sound of the summary, it sounds like it should be directly examined in humans. Until there's a human confirmation, I don't think it's worth a discussion post.
Not exactly something that's easy to confirm in humans. Of course the mice were genetically tweaked, it would be ... hard to measure an effect of a genetic factor without having experimental groups differing in that factor in a closely defined way.
Is the conclusion speculative? Absolutely. Then again, so is a lot of what we're discussing around here, and there is a reason the study made it into Nature (Impact Factor of 36).
Ioannidis suggests that better journals produce less accurate research. A separate effect is that generalist journals are spread too a thin and can't competently referee. (eg, one editor can be highly biased towards his friends without the other editors being able to tell)
The statistician Andrew Gelman likes calling Science and Nature "the tabloids" because they attract the sort of research which is most exciting (and hence the most unexpected and most likely to be false).
Memory interference should be measurable just from timings. The more neurobiological claim of there being a lack of synapse downregulation... I'm not sure. Maybe some imaging approach like PET can show it.
Here, have a look. And that's just measuring a surrogate parameter, blood flow. Anything with a neuron-level resolution requires electrodes stuck into the brain.
As for memory interference being measured just from timings, can you elaborate on that? The question is on the role of certain genetic factors, do you mean a study with a large number of genetically screened subjects? That may work. I'm still waiting for the sequencing cost to come down further ... it's the great medical bottleneck of our time.