“The Persistence of Memory” is one of artist Salvador Dali’s most recognizable paintings. The surrealist style is perfectly adapted to depicting the ways our minds preserve our memories — they are suggestive, dreamlike, warpable. For however imperfect or relativistic our memories might be, we owe them for much of our sense of identity.
How we humans evolved the ability to have our brains store and use memories is still being worked out by evolutionary scientists, but one gene in particular has been getting a lot of attention as of late: this is the Arc (“activity regulated cytoskeletal”) gene. Bizarrely, Arc might have originated from a virus and evolved to become part of our bodies.
Through studies of mice and DNA, scientists have discovered that Arc plays a critical role in long-term memory development — without it, mice cannot find their way around mazes they regularly frequent. Humans with a deficiency of Arc protein are associated with disorders like autism and diseases like Alzheimer’s.
The Arc genes transport their information from nerve cells to nerve cells in the brain in capsules — behaving like a virus. And the speculation by many scientists is that a long time ago a “retrovirus” (a type of virus that attaches itself to its host’s DNA, thus forcing the host to use its own genetic machinery to replicate) joined with our ancestral DNA in a symbiotic relationship . . . The virus got resurrected as part of our genes that lead to memory processing.
These elusive bits of evidence that hint at the long evolutionary processes that created our complex minds can seem as surreal as the melting watches of Dali.
Source(s): _LiveScience.com_, “An ancient virus may be responsible for human consciousness,” Ravi Letzer, Feb 2, 2018. _Some Assembly Required_, by Neil Shubin, 2020, Pantheon. Image from 1931 painting Wikipedia.
