Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process 191
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."
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:3, Insightful)
You needed the value of the index column, then you were able to retrieve the entire row. Simple as that.
i don't even understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Evolutionary Adaption? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Give me a break Slashdot editors (Score:0, Insightful)
Memory vs. Useless information vs. Muscle Memory (Score:2, Insightful)
It has been twelve years since I got out of the USAF, but it seems a large portion of my memory is being used up by things I will never use again.
One thing I noticed in the article was one of the researchers noting that brain activity decreased as tasks got more repetitive. Muscle memory is something that practice makes permanent, not perfect. If you practice a movement long enough, and you do it wrong, you will always do it that way. Be it shooting a rifle, hitting a golf ball, using Chopsticks, or typing.
Take touch typing for example, I am a decent typist (80 WPM), but I learned how to type without formal training, so I tend to use the "wrong" fingers for hitting certain keys. I suppose I could retrain myself but it would take alot of time and effort.
Memory is pretty complicated, I hope that they can do more research and shed more light on the process.
Although real people... (Score:3, Insightful)
People with synesthesia suffer from cross-wired senses and ergo get more information than is actually present and in effect this can rapidly become massively overloading. (It is unclear to me what happens when someone is both autistic AND a synesthete, although it's certain it happens. My guess is that the extreme overloading would be almost impossible for the person.)
Those with tetrachromatic vision have an enlarged visual cortex to deal with the extra data, but the increased volume of visual data must place some stress on the rest of the brain, though it's unclear if anyone has ever done the research to find out what.
Other disorders that increase sensory data certainly exist and again there's going to be a point where that data is beyond overwhelming and supersaturates the brain's ability to model the world and process the data.
Getting back to the original article, if forgetting is as important as is implied, then it must be MORE important for those with any of the above disorders, because you would need to temporarily block more in order to free up an equivalent level of mental capacity. Is this what we find, in practice?
The answer, at first glance, is maybe no. Computer programmers are frequently on the autistic spectrum but have phenomenal memories for technical stuff and usually an astonishing learning speed. These are indications of efficient relationship mapping (something anyone who uses mnemonic memorization techniques can attest to) and minimal stacking (the brain has a hard limit of about 7 items on the mental stack at a time. Those who can recite long strings of numbers, such as the digits of Pi, do so by placing a mnemonic at the end of the stack that links onto another stack).
In science, you learn more by examining the exceptions than by looking at the rule. Besides, the rule is just a simplification of a greater rule that includes those exceptions. If you want to truly understand remembering and forgetting, you are wasting your time to look at when they "work". You must study when things break down, when normal mechanisms fail, when you cannot extrapolate that far from the standard model. It is then that you will be able to draw meaningful conclusions and upgrade the standard model to a more accurate depiction of reality.