PRUNING THE MIND

Arstechnica reported new findings on memory and sleep.

REM sleep is known to help solidify memories, but the mechanism for making memories more permanent is not well-understood. A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience shows that, during REM sleep, some of the structures neurons use to make connections with each other are pruned, while others are maintained and strengthened. The findings indicate that sleep's role in solidifying memories comes through allowing the brain time to selectively eliminate or maintain newly formed neural connections.

Dendritic spines are small outgrowths on a neuron’s dendrite, which is the portion of the neuron that receives chemical signals from other neurons. These spines enhance the strength of connections between neurons so they can play an important role in strengthening new neural circuits and solidifying new memories. These spines aren't permanent structures; instead, nerve cells can create new ones or get rid of existing ones (a process called pruning) as the importance of different connections shifts.

The new memories in this case were formed in mice, which were trained to complete a treadmill-like motor task. Then, the mice were either deprived of REM sleep or allowed to experience this form of sleep. The mice that were allowed REM showed significantly higher pruning of new dendritic spines compared to the mice that were REM sleep deprived. This difference in pruning was only seen for new dendritic spines, and previously existing dendritic spines were pruned at the same rate.

The researchers looked at how REM sleep influenced dendritic spine pruning at various points throughout the mice’s lives. They found that this neural pruning occurred while the mice were in REM sleep during their development (during the equivalent of mouse adolescence) but could also occur when the mice experienced REM sleep later in life after motor learning tasks. REM sleep increased the size of the spines that were retained, both during development and after motor learning tasks—these unpruned new spines were strengthened, reinforcing the developing neural circuitry.
In other words, during REM sleep, the brain selects which portions of new neural circuitry it wants to eliminate and which portions it wants to strengthen and enhance for future use.

The researchers then looked at the role calcium channels, which let calcium ions across membranes, may play in these decisions, as changes in the levels of calcium in cells is a normal part of brain activity. They found that sudden changes in the amount of calcium seen during REM sleep were critical for selective pruning and strengthening. When these calcium channels were blocked, the previously seen changes in dendritic spines no longer occurred.

Too little REM sleep during development is known to have detrimental effects on brain maturation, and this recent study provides new insight regarding the mechanisms that may be at play here.

Without sufficient REM sleep during development, juvenile and adolescent brains may not be able to adjust the connections among their neurons to hold on to what they've learned. Similarly, REM sleep is known to help with learning during all stages of development, including adulthood. In both cases, lack of REM sleep prevents the brain from eliminating unneeded spines generated during learning and prevents the strengthening of critical new spines that make newly learned tasks stick.

The interesting caveat to this study as it relates to LOST is that the main characters had a hard time grasping and retaining island knowledge. Many fans were upset when a group would return from a mission, the other castaways would not ask them basic questions of what happened to them. Other times, a character would continue to get manipulated, such as Locke. 

So were the main characters unable to retain knowledge because of sleep deprivation? We did not see extended periods of time when the characters were asleep, except for Jack when he was captured at the Hydra station. At that point, Jack was asking Juliet many pointed questions, but did not get the responses he wanted (and recognized it).

If the island was a metaphor for some other place, such as a medical research facility, could the characters have been test subjects in sleep and REM research? And if it is true that lack of sleep can effectively strip your brain's ability to make or break connections to retain important memories, could that have been the real power that Widmore and Ben wanted to control?

THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge is a treasure but practice is the key to it. - - - Thomas Fuller

I have always said that knowledge was power on LOST. Those characters who knew things could control things.

Eloise was probably the one person who knew the most since she had actual working knowledge of both worlds (island and sideways). It seems that she was able to connect to both worlds (and their seemingly same but different lives) as if the island was a gateway or portal to two dimensions. When Eloise conversed with Desmond in the clock shop, the essence of what she told him was that time was predetermined; that Desmond's life was predetermined; that Desmond's destiny was not to marry Penny but to sail off to his own demise. It was this erasure of a possibility of romance in the real world kept Desmond from awakening other characters, such as Daniel, for whom Eloise tried to shelter (in the after life).

Knowledge that the sideways world was a purgatory time line where people could continue to live out their imaginary dream lives is a powerful tool especially when one can communicate back to the living world to manipulate people to keep the fantasy world's status quo.

As most religions teach, what one does in the world of the living has consequences in judgment in the next world. By manipulating the actions of living human beings in the island world, Eloise could construct an elaborate alternative fantasy world where the characters would not need to rejoin and "remember" their old lives which would destroy the egg shell dream family situation Eloise created in her sideways vision.

But how can Eloise be a puppet master in two worlds. She somehow mentally connected herself with Daniel, her son, in both worlds. This theme of having a "constant" may have actually meant the mental connection between the living and the dead. Eloise was a medium who could actually affect events.

She forced her son to give up music in order to study and master highly theoretical physics, including the manipulation of time. Why? Perhaps so Eloise could go back in time herself to stop her young self from killing her own time traveling son. If Daniel "remembered" that his own mother killed him, that would destroy the happy family sideways dream world Eloise had created for herself. That shattered dream would mean that her "heaven" would be gone, and she would either go to hell or worse, just fade away from all conscious existence.

So the stakes for Eloise would be extremely high. It was her manipulation of Daniel in order to control the island which led to the unintended consequences of her shooting her own son. A lifetime of guilt both in the living world and sideways realm had a mother trying to do anything to make things better. In order to protect her vision of her happy family, she would communicate to her living self - - - which led to Widmore's anger and revenge motivations to destroy everyone on the island. By doing so, those souls would not remember or awaken Daniel from his dream state.

One could say Eloise was trying to maintain a complex dream support system for a critically mentally unstable patient, Daniel.  If this was the unstated premise of the series, I think most fans would have accepted it as a reasonable explanation for Season 6 and tie back the previous five years.

SENTIENCE

If you are secular and scientific in your view of how mankind has evolved on this planet, the dreadnaught moment has to be when we became sentient.

Sentient means to be able to perceive or feel things such as a woman who had been instructed from birth in the equality of all sentient life forms.

There was a recent comic strip that had a religious figure shut the door on all other lower life forms when he became sentient. He found his self-awareness and declared himself to be alone in the world.

I always said that on LOST knowledge was power. Those characters who controlled things knew how the island operated and used personal information to gain an advantage.

Those characters (Ben, Widmore, Eloise) clearly dominated characters who were more emotionally based such as Jack, Sun, Michael, Hurley, Sayid, Kate and Locke, who at some point felt that they were alone in the world.

The ability to perceive that one is not truly alone, even in the midst of personal despair, depression or loneliness, is one explanation of the theory that the show was merely a "character study" and not a drama. If one looks at the series as a quilt of personal relationship studies, like medical studies for the observation of new treatments, then when if at all did the characters come to the understanding of where they fit in the world?

Clearly, some of the characters never matured in any fashion, like Shannon.
Clearly, some of the characters continued to be haunted by their past actions, such as Sayid.
Clearly, some of the characters never wanted to take responsibility and grow up, like Kate and even Hurley.
Clearly, some characters were motivated by revenge which took away any pursuit of happiness, like with Sawyer and Ben.
And clearly, some characters took on leadership duties which caused them to become isolated and lonely, like Jack.

The plots merely swirled the characters personality traits and flaws in a primordial soup to see if anyone would evolve beyond their faults. Most of them continued to believe that they were vacant islands in the world. They were loners who only had to deal with others at arms length. It would be an open debate on whether anyone did evolve.

Kate continued to be runaway Kate through the bitter end at the sideways church.
Jack continued to be flawed Jack as he wound back up with broken Kate in the end.
Why Hurley and Sayid would become soul mates with women that they only met for weeks before their demise is a puzzling fiction - - - or is it an emotional lesson that the last person you cared about is the only person who will ever matter in eternity? That seems not to be a perception, but desperate clinging to someone you could not have. That sort of explains Sawyer and Juliet.

Many viewers had their emotional attachments to certain characters and certain storylines (such as Desmond and Penny relationship) which was enough to perceive LOST as a great show (for them). Perhaps, that is why many people are satisfied with the ending because their favorite lonely characters found some form of happiness in the end.