An extremely silly memory post

First, the not-so-silly bit:  an article about how "working memory" works:

In a study in PLOS Computational Biology, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory compared measurements of brain cell activity in an animal performing a working memory task with the output of various computer models representing two theories of the underlying mechanism for holding information in mind. The results strongly favored the newer notion that a network of neurons stores the information by making short-lived changes in the pattern of their connections, or synapses, and contradicted the traditional alternative that memory is maintained by neurons remaining persistently active (like an idling engine).

While both models allowed for information to be held in mind, only the versions that allowed for synapses to transiently change connections ("short-term synaptic plasticity") produced neural activity patterns that mimicked what was actually observed in real brains at work. The idea that brain cells maintain memories by being always "on" may be simpler, acknowledged senior author Earl K. Miller, but it doesn't represent what nature is doing and can't produce the sophisticated flexibility of thought that can arise from intermittent neural activity backed up by short-term synaptic plasticity.

Sounds like synapses must reconfigure themselves very, very quickly, then.   How do they do that, I wonder?

Anyway, now for the silly bit.  For some reason, every now and then a memory of a bit of music written for just one episode of Lost in Space, and which I haven't heard for decades, bubbles up to my awareness.    This happened yesterday, and it's the "groovy" music that nearly brainwashes poor Penny (girls being much more susceptible to such things), but fails to win over good old, sensible boy Will Robinson.

Actually, I had trouble remembering the context in full until I went to Youtube.  For a while I wondered if it was from Get Smart, as I had an idea that it featured an episode with hypnotic hippy music too.   But the internet sorted me out - the Get Smart episode has a track with the message to kill, kill, kill the dean, and bump off a square.  (How could I forget that!)

It turns out that someone has gone to the trouble of editing together and fiddling with the various dance bits from the Lost in Space episode in question ("The Promised Planet") to make a whole video of the track, and it's exquisitely silly:

 

If you don't like this self made clip, there is this alternative, which is also repetitive but maybe better? 

I like this comment following:

I needed this video...that weird Penny Dance has haunted me for years and needed to see it like this...a 10 hour cut would be epic...this song is my Ring Tone by the way...

And wow - the audio track is up on Youtube too and I guess I could convert it to a ringtone too?   I have never bothered with silly ringtones, but I am tempted.

As for the whole story of that episode of Lost in Space (season 3, when they were getting desperate for ideas), I have a watched some guy's commentary on it to refresh my memory.  The Robinsons think they have landed on Alpha Centauri, but the station is run by teenagers, who turn out to be aliens who cannot turn into adults even though they want to.   Before I re-watched the end scene, I remembered how at age 9 or 10 I thought the line "all I wanted to do is be able to shave" was sort of poignant: 

Lost in Space was sometimes like that:   the execution may be very, very silly, but sometimes there was the hint of an idea that might make for something decent if told another way.   

Anyway, I wonder why my brain is dredging this up for my attention every now and then? Must be something about the strength of the synaptic connections made when 9 years old!

Update:  I just remembered that there's another track last heard by me about 50 years ago, which I remember bits of every now and then:  a cover version on some cheapo LP of  this "psychedelic" song by a German band that I don't think was ever played in Australia.  My mother bought the LP, not me.