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."
The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:3, Interesting)
Meant to by whom? God?
Personally, I prefer intelligent adaptation. This discovery (though it hardly sounds modern, I remember reading a summary of a hypothesis along these lines written by Freud) suggests that the problem isn't one if reducing a limitation or pushing a boundary so much as more intelligently directing a heuristic. The brain suppresses memories that it deems irrelevant to the task at hand, which is a good thing. The problem comes when it mis-assesses the relevance value of certain bits of information. The questions we should be asking are, "what might cause that mis-assessment, and how can it be remedied once it is caused?"
My hypothesis would be that there are two causes of the mis-assessment:
1) Some unrelated thoughts that are simultaneously happening in the brain cause the recall operation to favor a different set of relevancies.
2) Some inappropriate associations are linking the desired information with something that is very irrelevant to the data at hand, thus causing it to be "drug down."
Based on this hypothesis, responding to a drawn-blank would involve two steps:
1) Consciously clear your mind (this takes practice...study zen...it helps) and re-state the question you are trying to answer (state it out loud, that helps too).
2) Try to think of (and out loud ask yourself) questions about things that would clearly be associated with the desired bit of information. If you are trying to remember a phone number, think of things like the face of the person who you are trying to call, the image of a telephone on which you previously called the person, perhaps the image of the place where you stored the number previously (post-it note or PDA or whatever).
Don't work harder, work smarter!
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sleep plays an important role (Score:2, 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]
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of a short story (Score:3, Interesting)
Jorge Luis Borges wrote this story about a man who had an accident that left him unable to forget anything. He ended up living the rest of his life in a darkened room, unable to cope with the deluge of detail the outside world had for him, and unable to file the memories he had accumulated and put them in a context in his mind.
Funes, the Memorious
By Jorge Luis Borges
I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make maté tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental; I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887. . . .
That all those who knew him should write something about him seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb - an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.
Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, "an untamed and vernacular Zarathustra"; I do not doubt it, but one must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.
My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.
I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other's three-sided reply.
He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of Maria Clementina Funes, an ironi
Francis Crick: REM sleep like simulated annealing (Score:5, Interesting)
The Finite Mind (Score:2, Interesting)
State recall (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
holographic memories (Score:3, Interesting)
The book offered that memories are stored as holograms - everywhere all at once, and not just in the physical structures of the brain. I'm away from my library at the moment, and the title eluded me for quite some time, but I was able to pick up the thread (as words to search for on Amazon), and I think it was Radin's Entangled Minds. Upon further consideration, I'm certain that it was this book.
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.
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.
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:1, Interesting)
Good thing i don't have a linked (or even a doubly linked) list memory, then to remember what i did a few years ago, i would have to go through every single memory from now until then. With linked mist, it's like i insert a piece of memory, and get back other memories that it's linked to, and then from them i can continue to follow the links, deeper into the mist...