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Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jun 06, 2007 11:11 PM
from the what-was-I-talking-about dept.
from the what-was-I-talking-about dept.
CFTM writes "The New York Times is running an interesting article about how human memory works and the theorized adaptive nature of forgetfulness". From the article, "Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people's brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required."
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Why is my mouse pointer over the submit button? (Score:5, Funny)
Give me a break Slashdot editors (Score:5, Funny)
The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
As to your question, I could tell you a lot about why this is so. 1st, cued recall is much easier than free recall. The cue helps stimulate the appropriate associative networks facilitating recall. In particular, a primary focus of mine is cued recall, or recognition. I use the dual process model of recognition: Recollection and Familiarity.
Familiarity, as experienced, is the feeling of familiarity we get when we see something that we've seen before, aside from actually remembering anything about it, which is recollection.
I highly recommend the seminal: Yonelinas. A.P. (2002). The nature of recollection and familiarity: A review of 30 years of research. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 441-517.
You can get it here: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/Yonelinas/index _files/page0003.htm [ucdavis.edu]
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a scientist and a researcher working at a (public??) university but can't speak about what you do. What's wrong with this picture? Rampant unchecked capitalism is little better than rampant unchecked communism.
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Informative)
You're a scientist and a researcher working at a (public??) university but can't speak about what you do.
That's an overstatement. The poster was referring to a specific study that has been submitted to a journal. Journals consider their mission to publish original data and findings, and won't accept stuff that has been previously published. Some interpret "prior publication" quite broadly to include many forms of dissemination of findings, including stuff posted on the web. (This is prevalent in psychology [apa.org], where there is no equivalent to arXiv.org [arxiv.org] for preprints.) It's not right, and it's changing slowly, but until it gets better researchers have to play along.
Moreover, there are potential ethical issues with disseminating findings that have not yet been subjected to peer review. Many scientists consider peer review to be an integral part of the scientific process, because it provides a form of quality control and ensures a minimum standard for findings and conclusions that the scientific community will communicate the the public. Some publicity-hungry researchers violate this, but many others do care about it.
Once the study in question has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, I'm sure the poster will be happy to tell you all about it.
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
The ethical issues are still the same though. Most "blind" review is not blind after a little googling, although preprints of the work do make that a little easier. Work in CS doesn't have such a binary quality control. There is an ordering between the different types of publications, but it isn't as important as the quality of the venue. I can think of some really prestigious workshops with 60:1 acceptance ratios against some pretty crappy journals that are 3:1.
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Funny)
SELECT what_happened FROM drunken_weekend_haze WHERE night = 'saturday';
It's followed immediately by OMG I did what!!!!!! Followed in turn by
DELETE FROM drunken_weekend_haze WHERE embarrassing_episode = True;
Then when people say "Good weekend?" I can almost truthfully respond "Yeah but I got pissed and I can't remember a whole lot of it"
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
The assumption is that any given item of information can only be reliably retrieved if it is linked to something already known.
In computer science, the concept of the linked mist is probably most analogous.
Clearly an index plays a vital role in such a system.
Parent
I forgot what I was going to post (Score:5, Funny)
Psychology I gleaned from Computer Science (Score:4, Interesting)
If you spend processes on thinking, you can lose your process of memory. Ie: You can get distracted if something comes up and you forget what you were doing. Or you walk into a room thinking about the football game, and forget why you came into the room to begin with. I think smart people who are in a constant line of thought as such they sacrifice less important parts of their memory and only remember big things. Now this article makes me even happier because I always think and hardly take time to remember.
Want to hear the funny part? I don't remember what the article actually says. I think it said that if you forget trivial stuff that the more important stuff will be easier to remember. I'll go re-read it now.
Reminds me of an old joke (Score:5, Funny)
An old couple both have Alzheimer's. One day they're watching TV and an ad for a burger place comes on.
Man says: "Hey, want to make some burgers?"
Woman says: "Sure, what to you want on yours?
Man: "I want lettuce, tomatoes and onions. Don't forget; lettuce, tomatoes and onions."
Woman: "Got it. Lettuce, tomatoes and onions."
A good hour goes by and she finally comes from the kitchen and hands her husband a plate of bacon and eggs. He says "You idiot! You forgot the toast!"
Simpsons (Score:4, Funny)
"That's because you were drunk!"
"And how!"
Important Post (Score:4, Funny)
Exception in thread "Surf" java.lang.NullPointerException
at Slashdot.Post(Slashdot.java:1061)
at Slashdot.Read(Slashdot.java:75)
at MyBrain.main(MyBrain.java:4038)
Evolutionary Adaption? (Score:5, Insightful)
Contradiction (Score:4, Informative)
"Recall" itself is a misleading term. We don't recall anything. We reconstruct. All memories are in some part false because they're generally fast-as-possible good-enough guesses by the brain. Keeping that in mind helps one understand that the creation of memories requires both active agglomeration of relevant components and active inhibition of the irrelevant. Once you grasp that, then you can try to figure out how the hell that lump of meat knows what's relevant and what's irrelevant when it's trying to put together what we perceive as memories before we get to perceive them, and you can then be as woefully ignorant about what's really going on as the people in the article as well as myself.
Not for me! (Score:4, Funny)
Francis Crick: REM sleep like simulated annealing (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, a good excuse... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I post on slashdot. Yes, I have a real, live, breathing girlfriend.
Re:State recall (Score:5, Informative)
It's called state dependent learning and it's a widely known concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_lear
I believe you can, in fact, learn to be a better drunk driver.
Parent