A crucial part of what make you "you", may not be really a part of you

I remember when this picture was taken. We celebrated my Sister’s birthday. She came for a visit from New York with her family, after they haven’t been to Israel for many years. It was in the summer of 2006, and at the time this picture was taken, what became to be known as “the second Lebanon war” was already in the making. Few days later, the IDF forces crossed the border into Lebanon, while the north of Israel was attacked by hundreds of rockets, fired by Hizbullah. Few weeks after this picture was taken, a mid range rocket, fired to “Beyond and beyond Haifa”, as Hizbullah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah put it, fell right at the same place.

BTW, I apologize for the quality of the picture. It was taken by a 2006 mobile phone camera. It’s only 200x200 pixels, and as you can see. I used it as my LinkedIn profile image for a while.

To be able to tell you the story above, I had to use my episodic memory. That’s the part of the brain’s memory function that enable each of us to recollect past events as we personally and intimately remember them. The episodic memory function is crucial for our sense of self because it helps us differentiate ourselves from our surrounding environment through the recollection of subjective reactions to what we experience. They seem to be the biological phenomenon behind Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum”.

The building blocks of episodic recollections are fragments of past events, stored in the actual plastic structure of the brain. In the way neural connections form, evolve and die over time. Scientists have known for a while, that a protein called, “the Arc protein” is crucial for this process to occur. However, a recent study reveals a mind boggling fact about the Arc protein - It may not be a meer protein, but a virus, introduced into our brains from an external source.

The idea that some of our biology is made of entities which are actually other living creatures is not new to biologists. The most familiar example of this idea are cell mitochondria - the cell organelles that are responsible for energy conversion and have their own distinct DNA. The Arc protein does not include DNA, but it has the same structure as a retrovirus, that is of RNA enclosed inside a capsid.

And so it turns out that a crucial component of what makes us into ourselves is not really a part of ourselves. Maybe that’s my very personal reaction, but it makes me feel a little less selfish.