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.
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?
>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.
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...
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
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
> 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."
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.
> 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
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.
Readit News
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Body_Keeps_the_Score...
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.
> 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.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/ [2] REBUS And The Anarchic Brain: Toward A Unified Model Of The Brain Action Of Psychedelics
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?
In peru?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-k...
>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
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8418154/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ptsd/comments/plskph/warning_the_bo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/08/02/body-keeps-s...
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/body-keeps-score-trauma/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-again...
https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/analysis-of-the-bod...
A Critical Evaluation of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score By Francine Tan
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8418154/
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
* 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
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.
Methods of intergenerational transfer: DNA, RNA, bacteria, fungi, verbal latencies, explicit training
From https://x.com/westurner/status/1213675095513878528 :
> 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
Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
(quantum) Counterfactuals reasoning: https://www.google.com/search?q=(quantum)+*Counterfactual*+r... :
> Counterfactual reasoning is the process of considering events that could have happened but didn't.
Counterfactual definiteness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_definiteness
Quantum discord; there are multiple types of quantum entropy; entanglement and non-entanglement entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_discord
N-ary entanglement,
Collective unconscious > See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious
FWIU memories are stored in the cortex and also in the hippocampus; "Brain found to store three copies of every memory" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41352124
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.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-fetuses-learn-to-talk-while-theyr...
McConnell, J. (1962). Memory transfer via cannibalism in planaria. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 3, 1-42.
How do you know they "know" them?
> 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.
https://archive.is/vt6rU#selection-797.2-797.236
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."
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.
https://drmichaellevin.org/
Probably already aware of methods like:
- Tissue Nanotransfection : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_nanotransfection
- "Direct neuronal reprogramming by temporal identity factors" (2023) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122168120#abstract
... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36912925
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.
Dead Comment
I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.
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.
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.
This is the most fascinating thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the link
Deleted Comment
It meant there was some low level mechanism lurking inside at least those cells, so not too surprising it's more general.