The Meaning Of The Life: UA-3846 The Hybrid

The Training Begins

LM-4321 typed as quickly as her fingers allowed her. She still had much information to classify after the class of today.

As a member of the storage department, better known as the long-term memory department, she felt a little happy knowing she didn't need to stay focused on every single detail that was happening in the outside world to process all that data and then send it to be classified as her friends from the short-term memory, but that did not change the fact that having to organize the information and then send it to its respective data record server could be a headache.

At that moment, a report regarding the functioning of ecosystems and food chains arrived on her computer.

LM-4321 quickly assigned them a register number and classified them as explicit declarative memory of the semantic type. Another thing that came with the data was a photography of a simple example of a food chain. It was, immediately, classified as explicit memory of the episodic type... particularly within the category of photographic memory.

Types of long-term memory:

These are divided into two types (Explicit declarative and Implicit non-declarative memories) that, in turn, are divided into two and five sub-classifications respectively.

Explicit declarative memory is divided into semantic memory: related to vocabulary and concepts, and episodic memory: related to events and visualization.

Non-explicit memory is divided into procedural memory: which controls the motor memories of the body, priming memory: which supports semantic memory when recovering damaged or forgotten data through related information, emotional memory: linked to behavior, non-associative learning memory: which helps the subject to stop overreacting to certain stimuli after getting used to them, and finally, the categorical learning memory: the process of establishing a concept trace that improves the efficiency of assigning new objects to contrast groups.

LM-4321 closed her eyes and allowed herself to sigh for a moment in relaxation as she waited for the next file to appear. If it weren't for something interesting always coming to her screen, regardless of whether she had seen it before or not, she probably would have gotten bored of this job a long time ago.

Because of course, given her great longevity as a neuron, she was, according to the perspective of normal cells, a living relic.

She had been there since the beginning and would probably also witness the end since, for genetic reasons, she and her companions were capable of living twice as long as the body itself... or perhaps even longer.

Neuronal birth, longevity, and death

Although the majority of neurons are already present in the brains by the time the bodies are born, there is evidence to support that neurogenesis is a lifelong process.

Once a neuron is born it has to travel to the place in the brain where it will do its work in two processes called migration and differentiation, however, large numbers of them may either die in the formation process or end up in places where they shouldn't have gotten to.

If they survive that initial process, neurons only die as a result of diseases, direct brain damage, or sleep-deprivation, and they will last as long as the body that contains them does. Some studies lead to think that they could continue existing forever if they got transplanted to another body each time the death arrives.

Although this could be considered a curse if it was seen from a certain perspective, the truth is that it was thanks to this that she had been able to meet many "entities" and other cells... although friendships with the latter ones sometimes felt as if they lasted as long as the simple process of blinking.