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."
Why is my mouse pointer over the submit button? (Score:5, Funny)
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Give me a break Slashdot editors (Score:5, Funny)
The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
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You needed the value of the index column, then you were able to retrieve the entire row. Simple as that.
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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"
Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your memory is a series of tubes? (Score:2)
Computing and brain insights (Score:2)
Actually, I think computer science is a very good background for understanding the brain. If more pyschiatrists understood that, they might not still be fumbling around with the basics, and arguing that most mental conditions are is caused by brain chemistry (which is like saying that most software states are caused by an imbalance of 1s and 0s). It might be true, and it might sometimes s
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As a computer technician, I welcome our vaguely interpreted and rather imaginary methodology of fixing computers... err.... overlords.
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Only on
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.
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Ah yes... the good ol' linked mist!
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Normal memory things in an ad-hoc, unstructured fashion.
Mnemonic systems link things in a deliberate, structured way.
The latter method is slower and less flexible, but much more reliable.
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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 relevan
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Meant to by whom? God?
This doesn't necessarily assume a controlling intelligence. Cats aren't physically capable of human speech because they didn't evolve that way - they didn't need it, you could say they aren't meant to speak like we are. People haven't evolved to remember every single thing that ever happened to them; we aren't meant to be solely stores of information, we need to eat, work, play, etc.
I suppose someone could make it their goal to remember everything, to devote
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Pay attention. There's going to be a test.
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]
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Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
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:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:4, Interesting)
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A n
Rare medical conditions (Score:2)
Also see this post [slashdot.org]
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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.
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.
Oh yeah (Score:2)
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What kind of an idiotic fool would think anything so entirely stupid?!?
It's a public university meaning the public already fucking paid for it.
What kind of an insane rock do people like you crawl out from under?
Hey, you already paid for your car, so why shouldn't I be allowed to send you bills for it? That is identical to the situation proposing. Try thinking net time, don't just spout id
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Re:The question I've always had about memory... (Score:5, Interesting)
Recall (Score:2)
I've had lots of memory trouble lately as a symptom of chemobrain [blogspot.com]. I get chemotherapy two weeks per month and develop lots of holes in my memory of those chemo days. I also received intensive chemotherapy two years ago and have whole weeks missing from my memory.
But lately I've been getting lots of flashbacks [blogspot.com]. A scent or a sound associated with the missing memories will make them all come flooding back. And it's very powerful -- I recall all of the sights, smells, sounds, conversations, weather, even
Holographic memory (Score:2)
...information about an image point is distributed throughout the hologram, such that each piece of the hologram contains some information about the entire image...
And from The Holographic Universe [crystalinks.com] (which may or may not be hogwash):
Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through one gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.
Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross-correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.
(I know next to nothing about holograms and neuroscience, so take this for the speculative quote-cribbing it is)
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On the way in I realised, just as I was pushing the door open, that I'd unconciously remembered where my pass was and got it out and opened the door without thinking about it. In a similar vein I often end up at my home front door with my card in my hand and try to swipe my house keys at wo
I forgot what I was going to post (Score:5, Funny)
Memory (Score:1)
passes by .. takes note ... not anymore! (Score:2)
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.
i don't even understand (Score:2, Insightful)
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not too dissimilarly from how that magnetic dust on your HDD "records" a movie.
Imagine an OS that can edit its own hardware, and that continually customizes its own file allotment system. that's the brain.
holographic memories (Score:3, Interesting)
The book offered that memories are
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A study at University College London by Maguire et (2000) showed that part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than in the general public, and that more experienced drivers have bigger hippocampi.[4] Whether having a bigger hippocampus helps an individual to become a cab driver or finding shortcuts for a living makes an individual's hippocampus grow is yet to be elucidated. However, in that study Maguire et al. examined the correlation between si
Killing Antibrain = Growing Brain (Score:2)
Now we're seeing some confirmation by actual scientists.
Antibrain theorists also believed that abusing drugs
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.
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!"
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Old boyfriend? (Score:2, Funny)
Relevant words (Score:1)
Phrased the other way: Participants who concentrated on relevant words had an easier time remembering them.
Sleep plays an important role (Score:2, Interesting)
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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)
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Goatse
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Besides not calling her, whenever I would think of the number, I diverted my thoughts to anything else.
Throughout the years, I would half-tempt myself to try and recall the number. Each time, I diverted the thought.
At this moment, if I try to remember the number, I have this feeling that the number is inside my head somewhere, but all those years of training have removed any possibility of recalling it.
I also think if I wer
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Imagine you could accurately remember everything you've seen, heard, smelled, felt and touched since you were born but needed two hours to find back the exact moment you learn that 2+2=4, that's the real point here.
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.
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> Dear pompous moron:
That's "Doctor pompous moron", Mister Coward.
> They found activation in anterior cingulate cortex. Contemplate what this means.
It means they were paying attention to the something, probably the task. The subjects were doing something intentionally, as they should, or else they weren't following the instructions and their data is hosed. Since they obtained reports from the subjects as to the results of their memory task, we can safely assume they were in fac
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> Ear, nose, and throat?
And I thought the
[Well placed reference re: Cohen et al. noted]
> And ACC didn't just activate because participants were paying attention. This was surely controlled for in a baseline control task and subtracted away.
Not likely. An fMRI box car (conditions A, B, A, B repeated many times, a few seconds or so each) experiment design compares two conditions, and they've said what they are. To have b
Not for me! (Score:4, Funny)
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
Although real people... (Score:3, Insightful)
Francis Crick: REM sleep like simulated annealing (Score:5, Interesting)
The Finite Mind (Score:2, Interesting)
The findings should also reduce some of the anxiety surrounding "senior moments," researchers say. Some names, numbers and details are hard to retrieve not because memory is faltering, but because it is functioning just as it should.
Actually , it is likely both. As we age, this part of memory (forgetfulness) is functioning as it should, but it is carrying out this function more often because overall memory capacity is reduced.
The more I know (Score:2, Funny)
Sometime ago I had a t-shirt that had this written:
The more I study, the more I know.
The more I know, the more I forget...
The more I forget, the less I know.
So why study?
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
Finally, a good excuse... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I post on slashdot. Yes, I have a real, live, breathing girlfriend.
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Narator: Will Mike have sex with a real human being?
Left Hand Mike: What? I'm not a real human being?!?
Species.... (Score:2)
And is she human?
So, let me get this straight... (Score:2)
This one isn't going to fly guys! (Score:2)
Man: Ph! I read a great article on that the other day. It turns out the brain AUTOMATICALLY pushes less important memories for more important ones. So it turns out it is not my fault at all.
Woman: So.. what you are saying is the things I ask you to do are not important?
Man: Yes! Umm... er...
Try forgetting your wife's birthday (Score:2)
You won't forget, and neither will she.
Oblig Simpson's Quote (Score:2)
Marge: Homer, you were drunk!
Homer And how...
It's been known for a while by some.. (Score:2, Informative)
It's true. (Score:2, Informative)
You can't permanently memorize something in one go. Well, maybe if you've got an extremely unusual photographic memory or savant syndrome you can, but most of us cannot. We have to take it in multiple pass
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