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Brain's Cache Memory Found
Shipud writes "Electrical activity in a single section of the brain has been linked to very short-term
working memory, as is
reported at Nature. Very short-term working memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a larger cache speeds processing time, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills. The localization of this ability is a surprising finding, as until now it was believed that STWM was diffused throughout the cortex, rather than localized."
Is this going to lead to benchmarking people?
Employer: I'm sorry sir you don't have a big enough cache for our needs. We are going to have to let you go.
Employee: Man this blows i would be really upset but i forgot what you just said.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
Does the article mention anything about expansion modules? I'd read it myself, but I can't remember what we're talking about here...
What was I saying again?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
What are we linking to?
I always thought prefrontemporal was short-term. Is this anything new?
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
good news for pr0n hounds.
too bad it's addicting
just short-term memory?
Then the cache gets written to the hard drive for permanent storage so after you turn yourself off (in bed), the data is there the next day.
That CSS file that blocks ads
It's interesting how we use rudimentary digital computing analogies to explain the workings of our brain. Like in most theories, I suppose one can extend this analogy only to a certain extent. Which, in this case, shouldn't be suprising considering how comlex the brain is...
No Monkeys for RAM No Monkeys for RAM This DDRRAM has not been tested on animals
Perhaps this explains why my head gets extremely hot when I do my Calculus exams.
Interestingly, both groups of researchers were working strictly with visual memory. I wonder whether the working memory used by programmers, mathematicians, etc. will be in the same place, or a different area altogether?
And what about the famous "magic number", 7 +/- 2? These people seem to be offering 4 +1/-2.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hmm.. Makes you wonder if it's possible to overclock your own brain. Some kind of implant with electric stimuli.. Or maybe some kind of chemical. Only, I can't quite figure out how to make a decent cooling solution, and I absolutely refuse to walk around with a heatsink attached to my forehead! ..Or if you find out how to stimulate that part, maybe some good oldfashioned brain exercise to increase your cache and speed. On second thought.. Nah.. Not really geeky enough ;)
There has been plenty of studies showing that people tend to remember things incorrectly. Could this very short term memory be part of the final proof needed to invalidate witness statements in legal cases? Or perhaps they can use the line and dots test on witnesses and see how likely they are to remember something that happens in a glance. If they check high on the test, they might be more likely to be able to remember an incident correct.
Apple built a platform for their ideas, Google built one for everyone's.
I wonder what would happen if they just injected some stem cells around there?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
This post leaves very little to discuss.
Which is why:
Imagine, if you will, a Beowul....
Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, ...
Did it not also depend on what kind of (was it) chunks you store (if this is at all what is stored in should it perhaps be ultra-) STM ?
Where it "started":
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller
originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
If Brain has a cache somewhere, his less mentally endowed partner in crime should still get a cut.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm reading Kandel & Squire's Memory.
Wonderful book.
Anyway, this is just the "visuospatial sketchpad" as the authors call it. There's also the phonological loop dealing with meaningful sounds, among other types of working memory. So this isn't the be-all and end-all of even immediate memory.
Increasing your cache memory is clearly beneficial: it can only decrease access time to memory. Increasing STM, however, isn't necessarily good: if you remember more things simultaneously, your brain likely has to make associations between more things at a time. Whether it can or cannot depends on other parts of the brain.
In fact, it seems likely that cause and effect are reversed: it seems likely that "higher intelligence" probably causes a larger STM rather than the other way around--the size of the STM would adapt to the needs of the rest of the brain rather than the other way around.
It's not too surprising that the brain's short-term visual cache would be closer to the visual cortex. What I would like to know is how closely the visual cache is related to intelligence. Does it need actual visual input, instead of just imagined, and if so... <facetious>do you become marginally dumber when you close your eyes?</facetious>
From reading Synaptic Self, the "general" cache and CPU area would seem to be the prefrontal cortex. It can activate memories to work on (the closer the current emotional state it was recorded in, the better), and hold a few things to work on. Perhaps there are many more specializations yet to be uncovered, but I'm struck at the sheer relative size of brain required to actively think and plan a next move. Considering that even a worm brain can get its owner around, you'd think our capacity for juggling thoughts would be encyclopaedic.
I'd be curious as to what connections this area has to the prefrontal cortex - I've heard of the spots tests before - I don't recall it being related to general intelligence.
Addressing the question of how cache gets spat out to hard drive, as it were, to keep thoughts in slightly longer-term storage, it looks like thoughts have to be put through the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, where they will slowly get rewired (indexed?) over the course of about two weeks - about the length of memories you can lose under strong electroshock therapy.
So many small functional pieces of the brain; I'm struck by how independent the sections of the brain are, by and large. Large-scale coordination has to go through a secondary 'chemical drip' system, from neuromodulators released by non-connecting nerves throughout the brain. It's that level of coordination required to put your brain to sleep or wake it up, amongst other things.
I'm looking forward to more decoding of the brain's structures - narrowing down specific activities to a small area of the brain like they did is fantastic.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
Does scientific Confirmation-Bias exist in the Hippocampus too?
The peer review of this "OLD" psychological ability to "chunk" information for 7 +-2 episodic memories is not a problem solving based semantic thought process.
What about parallel distributed processing models of the brain, perhaps this irresponsible researcher had a case study that defied all statistics and the 35 years of PET scans, MRI data, and REAL SCIENTIFIC STUDY. Note too that the "chunking" ability is not a static number, and has been proven to be a learned skill (go from 5 to 80 chunks with some practice). Note also, that proactive and retroactive memories interfere with long-term memories, suggesting a gold fish's 5-second buffer may outwit this scientist with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder that obviously missed most of the confounding variables including the episodic memory of the university lectures and statistical research.
BTW: Do flash-bulb memories of traumatic events make people smarter? No, this has been proven to actually cause memory deficits. Psychology is for scientists, not a lamer with a bad case of priori and a tainted research bias.
GO BACK TO A GOOD UNIVERSITY AND GET A REAL DEGREE!
YOUR INTERNET DEGREE HOLDS NO WEIGHT HERE!
What would be interesting to know is if the brain is able to shift this function to other parts of the brain in case of some kind of brain damage, and what are the consequences of the damage if it is unable to do that.
Uh, it was 640kb. If you're going to bash BillG, at least get it right. ;-)
Well, there's the obvious. Use it. A lot. The human machine is built around building up what gets "stressed." That goes for the brain too. For short term working memory exercise make references. Read a book, history or something like that, where you're bit over your head. Keep Google going while you do it and every time you hit something you don't understand do a search, follow the search to whatever else interesting it might lead to, bounce back and forth from the book to search materials.
/. on the side.
Now do it with two books, maybe even on different but related subjects, while you keep an eye on
This is pure "cache" work. Don't try to memorize any of it. That's a different "brain muscle." Isolate what you're exercising. You're just trying to keep the different threads of thought all going without losing them.
Now, remember what I said about getting stressed? Don't. Really, the biggest killer of working short term memory is any sort of tension. Tension is an attention grabber, and you only have a limited amount of attention at any one time. Learn to relax. Let it flow of its own accord. If you pick it it will never heal.
It's one of those zen things, where you hit the target by not being aware that the target is even there. The arrow releases itself.
Oh, and here's the nasty part. Just like stressing muscles to build strength, it's a use it or lose it deal. Yes, you can improve your short term working memory, but when you stop using it, the improvment will fade.
I really hate that part.
KFG
I first read it as "Brian's cache memory found." and I thought 'hey, good for Brian.'
I'm at work right now. It's a good thing I don't need to be fully alert for my job.
The emperor is naked.
Setting aside the fact that drawing analogies between digital hardware and human wetware is somewhat dodgy... I'd have thought the equivalent of short term memory would run nearer 8GB than 8MB.
I don't know about you, but I'm a 'visual' thinker, and its all pretty much 3D images that come to mind. For example, reference to recent discussion invokes images of the actual conversation, not just the content. OK, human memory is pretty good at eliding details and interpolating from previous experience (analagous to heavy JPEG compression maybe?), but even 10minutes of pottering about the house must equate to a huge 'dataset'.
May be... But still I'm afraid that the size of your STWM is not going to impress your girlfriend.
- Back off man. I am a scientist
...you're assuming that the brain processes information like a P4. this isn't the case!
Because I often go upstairs and can't remember what I went there for.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
im a programmer and when working on larger projects i cant keep all the details in my head. the solution for me is to write everything down and keep them in lists (workhour-lists, todo-lists, next version features-lists, problem-lists, idea-lists, ...). this alone would not help a lot but i devoloped a system to arrange this lists and usually i find things when im looking for them not through memory but through logical organisation.
... thats what i think is intelligence.
my point is that "the capability your brain-cache" (nonscientifically spoken) is just a factor. how you use it and what you do if it isnt sufficient
God made my brain cache out of Rambus memory. Everyone else's is on DDR, the world has passed me by...
Memory bottleneck limits intelligence
Single spot in brain determines size of visual scratch pad.
15 April 2004
TANGUY CHOUARD
The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain.
The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say.
"This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.
Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such as a collection of coloured dots, or lines in different orientations. If shown a similar image a second later, they will be able to recognise whether three or four of these spots and lines are identical to the first set or not.
But some people can only catch one or two things in a glance, while others can capture up to five.
This very short-term memory capacity is thought to be related to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can crank through problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads are expected to have better reasoning and problem-solving skills.
A person's working memory capacity can be determined using simple psychological tests. But now two teams of researchers report in Nature that they can see it in brain scans too.
Keep it in mind
One of the teams, led by Edward Vogel of the University of Oregon in Eugene, found that the electrical activity in a single section of the brain, as detected through electrodes attached to the scalp, is directly related to short-term working memory1.
The team first tested subjects with an image of two coloured dots, waiting a second between flashes and asking the subjects if the image had changed. They then ramped up the test to four dots.
A large increase in the subject's brain activity on the four-dot test indicated that his or her memory capacity had not been pushed to its limit. No increase in electrical activity indicated that his or her working memory had topped out on the two-dot test. By graphing these responses, the team worked out the exact size of each subject's working memory.
A second team, led by René Marois of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, used functional magnetic resonance imaging during similar tasks to accurately locate the part of the brain being used for short-term visual memory2.
Both teams concluded that everything depended on the same tiny spot in the posterior parietal cortex.
"It is amazing that both groups should converge on the same area in the end," says Duncan. Since the task involves remembering many different aspects of each object, including spatial position, orientation and colour, most people thought that several parts of the brain would be involved, he says.
There are still many other aspects to human intelligence that are governed by other parts of the brain, the authors of both studies warn. But the capacity of one's working memory may form a bottleneck for certain kinds of intelligence, they say.
Tanguy Chouard is a senior biological sciences editor at Nature
References
Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. . Nature, 428, 748 - 751, doi:10.1038/nature02447 (2004).
Todd, J. J. & Marois, R. . Nature, 428, 751 - 754, doi:10.1038/nature02466 (2004).
With great power comes great electricity bills.
The type of memory being considered here is distinct from short term memory. Working memory is used for things like holding a phone number in your head while you dial it, or recognising the difference between two phrases in a tune. We can hold a small amount of one type of thing in working memory at a time, a number, a sentence, an image and so on. As soon as a new piece of data enters working memory the previous piece of data is lost.
Working memory is used in problem solving, hence the link with intelligence. For example, people who can hold nine digits in working memory will tend to be better at doing calculations than those that have a digit span of five. Short term memory holds a lot more than working memory and can be recalled, or in your case not.
doesn't that invalidate some patents on CPU caches, like recently mentioned Intergraph's (from their Clipper CPU) patent, which caused significant grief to Intel and AMD ?
Apparently we form all sorts of new brainmatter all the time. So now I kinda wonder... The more Go problems I do (any brainteasers apply); the better I get at problem solving in general. This is definitely something that's been improving sharply since I started playing Go. I was theorizing that the game is just getting me in the habit of thinking ahead, but now I wonder if it isn't helping me grow a better braincache. Fascinating.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
From the article I found very weak the conclusion that this brain section act like a cache. This can be a multiplexer that connect a processing section the the memory section. Or more simply registers that hold intermediate informations.
All the 3 systems have in common that there are build with memory cells, but there are different in terms of the way the memory are used and the associativity. Registers and caches hold encoded informations; multiplexer don't care of the encoding. registers don't have any associativity between a tag and tne information stored, only cache have that.
All tree systems generate heat and consum power that the brain camera see. Really, I see nothing that assert this is a cache.
Sound like the author want to use high-tech buzz word, without any prof.
Scams in the forms of SAT/ACT tests and IQ tests.
All of these are used to sort people, suposedly people with higher scores on these are somehow smarter, despite obvious instances of people who do not perform according to their 'score'.
That's nothing...
I can visualise the entire bits sequence of the resulting object whilst coding... I 'see' how the processor pointers will behave, even when programming in a high-level language like obfuscated Perl.
I can draw perfect circles by mentally calculating pi with a precision of 150 digits.
I can mentally render complex fractals, from the basic Mandelbrot set to a more complex Newton's Method in the Complex Plane.
And, yes, I can do crypto backwards. Triple-DES is very easy to do mentally. Doing it backwards is just a tiny bit harder.
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Sgt. Friday: "Are you sure this is the woman you saw in the post office?"
Burns: "Absolutely! Who could forget such a monstrous visage? She has the sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career criminal."
Smithers: "Uh, Sir? Phrenology was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago."
Burns: (measuring Smither's head) "Of course you'd say that... you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!"
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Both the Nature article and the posting here on /. are exceedingly misleading (I don't blame the poster... he/she just reported what the Nature article said)
All that the two articles *may* have found is the location of a part of VISUAL working memory. This would be the area that tracks objects through space and binds features that are processed seperately by the visual system (say color and form) into the same object. This is NOT the seat of all intelligence.
There are many different aspects to working memory: people have hypothesized that there is a phonological working memory, one involved in the spelling process, one involved in computing things like syntactic relations, etc. And yes, there is probably such a thing as a general-purpose working memory. All they may have found is the location of the visual-spatial component of working memory. This is a far cry from finding anything that limits one's intelligence, unless you define intelligence as "visual-spatial ability".
In fact, it is quite wrong to even suggest that the visual-spatial working memory is somehow related to intelligence. There are many instances of people with working memory deficits who are able to function quite normally in other domains.
For the sake of brevity I won't go into the finer about the studies themselves (one of the studies used the ERP recording technique, which is *awful* at localization) because the main point is that in and of themselves the studies are fine. It's this conclusion that they've somehow found "the RAM" or the thing that would limit intelligence that's exceedingly problematic.
Just put a Barium tracer in a bottle of tequila and drink a large quantity of it. The tequila goes straight to the short term cache and immediately erases it.
I haven't seen anyone bring this up, on this story or otherwise...but I read in New Scientist last year about functional MRI being the phrenology of our time. I can't find reference to it on the website, but a google returns this among others.
Could anyone here shed any light on this?
Often I find myself going to type in the URL of a website, manage to get distracted by four things on the way to focusing on the location dialogue, and by the time I'm read to type, I've completely forgotten where I was going to go.
However, if at that point I just 'let my fingers go', they can usually type out the first 5 letters of whatever it was I was going to go to, even if they weren't in typing position.
This is extremely handy. Any idea what it's called?
It seems that some of the brain's activity is devoted to INHIBITING functions. Sometimes people with limited brain functions display extraordinary capabilities, i.e. called idiot-savants- because regular inhibition is missing. A second example is that people with intentional or accidental lobotemies (e.g. press secretary James Brady) have trouble controling their emotions. Photographic memory may not be due to improved memory, but defective *forgetting*. So my hypothesis is that this memory cache could be improved by removing the appropriate inhibitory cells.
I find the methodology of their research much more interesting than their results. I've done quite a bit of work in this area, including my dissertation, and from the very high level description of the tasks involved their results need to be interpreted in a much more limited sense than they are being presented.
The task that you are given for a specified stimulus is going to very much influence your performance on later tasks. If you are presented a slide and asked to count the number of dots, then later asked whether or not the number of dots on a particular slide was even / odd, then you are likely to do fairly well. But what if you are presented a slide and asked if there was a blue dot on the slide or not, how is your performance going to be on the even / odd task later on? What kind of curve are you going to get for each task when you vary the number of dots and can you really then imply a limit to the theory of memory?
Obviously, you need more details than is presented in the shorter article. The last paragraph below is particularly interesting, since such generalizations don't seem to follow very well from the methods described.
I also would wish people would stop making analogies between the mind and the computer. It is a useful analogy for teaching undergrads and for articles in pop psych magazines, but is very restricting in terms of actual research directions.
Included below is additional text related to the story:
"Visual short-term memory is a key component of many perceptual and cognitive functions and is supported by a broad neural network, but it has a very limited storage capacity," Marois said. "Though we have the impression we are taking in a great deal of information from a visual scene, we are actually very poor at describing its contents in detail once it is gone from our sight."
Previous findings have determined that an extensive network of brain regions supports visual short-term memory. In their study, Todd and Marois showed that the severely limited storage capacity of visual short-term memory is primarily associated with just one of these regions, the posterior parietal cortex.
Todd and Marois used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that reveals the brain regions active in a given mental task by registering changes in blood flow and oxygenation in these regions, to identify where the capacity limit of visual short-term memory occurs.
The brains of research participants were scanned with fMRI while they were shown scenes containing one to eight colored objects. After a delay of just over a second, the subjects were queried about the scene they had just viewed.
While the subjects were good at remembering all of the objects in scenes containing four or fewer objects, they frequently made mistakes describing displays containing a larger number of objects, indicating that the storage capacity of visual short-term memory is about four.
Be a real man! Increase your cache memory by 300.5GigaCells. Order today!
Your girlfriend will say, "Are you hot? Or is that a gun in your brain?"
It isn't in the greatest detail composited like that, but I do it all day long.
Inside my mind with no visual input, I can get really detailed - all senses, large landscapes. I've always attributed this to what I call my "concept driver", a piece of wetware that tells my visual cortex a tree is here, here and here, allowing me to zip through them on a speeder-bike (just a f'rinstance - not all these vistas are SF-oriented). But I don't need to see detail down to the bark texture and ants crawling up the tree. I *can*, but not always at "60fps".
I really feel for people who can't do this - I think this ability, coupled with my excellent reasoning/troubleshooting skills have led me where I am in my career.
I also dream in full sensory detail, and contrary to what people have said, I've dreamed my death (by gunshot-to-head) TWICE. Once in a combat situation and once under uncertain curcumstances. Both times I heard a bang and felt an impact like a lead pipe. Kinda like something rang my head like a bell.
And no, there was nothing afterwards...I also dreamt a presumably-fatal fall complete with impact. I shook so hard on the landing I woke me and my wife up!
Can you do people's voices? I can usually hear a voice once or twice and I can almost always "sim" the person, voice, and sometimes accent. I do it a lot to prepare for meetings or team conflicts. Strangely, while I can do a whole original scene of Friends in my noggin, I almost never get lip-sync. I have to focus really hard to do it. I think the "concept driver" just tells the wetware to not worry about it and get on with the fun.
GTRacer
- I like to fly this way too
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
ENLARGE YOUR SHORT TERM MEMORY
If you're reading this, you know that men with small short term memory don't get ahead....
The article, and the researchers in the article are making an assumption about intelligence: they're assuming raw information processing power IS intelligence. I would argue that a more substantial defining factor is recall of previously processed information and the clarity of that recall. In school, the Cram -->Take Test --> Brain Dump method works but doesn't foster leaning in the way that creates "intelligence" by my definition. If everyone were to re-take their final exams from their senior year of high school/college TODAY I would argue that those doing the best overall were the most intelligent, particularly if their school-age years were long ago.
than the others I've seen here is that, since it is localized instead of distributed, getting to the point of injecting signals into this cache and thus effecting one's view of immediate reality may be much easier than thought before. Say, 30-40 years away instead of over 100.
Actually though, I'm not sure why they would have thought this was spread about. Neural pathways are very slow in general. It seems like localization of highly related data such as the components of an image would be necessary due to that fact alone.
Surely the V5 area of the visual cortex is the actual cached short-term memory store?
The entire area is a nest of feedback loops - with the visual information looping round in that area through several layers of neurons both above and below.
It could be that there are two caches: the visual cache is in the V5 layer, and the semantic cache is this one that they've found with the MRI.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The more advanced (creepy alphas, we don't hang around with them) carry PDAs.
Of course, an aid can become a crutch. I recall a story told me by a friend of mine. Her grandmother, an unlettered immigrant from Lithuania, has, perforce, a phenomenal memory, never needs shopping lists, etc. She rails against this new generation that has to write everything down.
Similarly, during classical times, there were widely practiced memory techniques that we modern barbarians have largely forgotten. See here.
I don't think you would see any difference. The primary "bottleneck" in nerve signal propagation is the chemical signals. neurons are not hardwired to other neurons, there are gaps where the electical signal is converted to a chemical signal, gap is crossed, where the other side converts the chemical signal back to an electrical one (this is off the top of my head, I'm not sure how accurate it is, but that is the just of it) And you don't want to get rid of the gap for direct electical wiring because these chemical interactions are complex and probably contribute alot to brain functionality. Alot of drugs work by messing with chemical receptors.
"Short term memory" is a concept, nothing more. This is a case of deciding on an architecture in advance and presenting only that evidence that appears to support it. It comes from the current thinking about computer design which is in turn assumed to be equivalent to hardware concepts, which have nothing to do with how the brain actually works. At best, computers have tried to imitate the brain on occasion (at least the many imperfect concepts concerning the brain).
There is no credible evidence proving the existence of short-term memory, including this article. Sure it seems to be plausible, but that isn't proof and many myths throughout history have been perpetuated the same way.
It's all long-term memory - the only difference is whether you can find it after you stored it. Memory techniques help to cross-reference items so you can find them later, that's all. "Short-term memory" is a concept invented during the phony Drug Wars to make marijuana a bad thing where little else can be said against it, and the idea stuck and became an ingrained myth. Substitute "attention span" for "short term memory" and you get the equivalent outcome, therefore the popular presumption of short-term memory remains unproven.
Note that proving a thing and disproving it are two different things - I am doing neither here - I am merely debunking the arguments that attempt to demonstrate a favored idea. It lacks sufficient evidence, but it just happens to be a myth that people like to believe. Throughout history many such myths have existed, and myth-followers go to great length to defend their favorite ones, as if the truth lacks the ability to stand up for itself.
This would fall in line with the fact that very smart people like Einstein, Feynman, and the like are/were able to visualize complex systems and ideas easily. 'Visual thinking' comes naturally to them. I'm not sure why this doesn't always translate into high mathematical talent. I've noticed that some very smart people are not able to calculate quickly or perform large calcuations without the help of paper or a computer They are able to plan out and model complex software systems in their heads, or design and understand complex mechanical systems and engineering problems easily. It seems like some people fall into the 'good at numbers' camp and others are in the 'good at language' camp. Not sure if this is related to their 'cache' size.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Well, in the case of blind people, the visual system of their brain is taken over by their auditory system. They end up processing sound they way sight is usually processed, allowing them to "see" with whatever limited audio cues are given to them. It's amazing how adaptive the brain is.
Not completely surprising - since the human brain also does some echolocation (and other processing of sound redundancies and missing energy in particular bands into information about nearby objects).
Both systems involve communication between processed sensory information and a model of the surrounding space. This implies that they might have evolved from a common system, whcih might make it easier for the nerve cells able to retarget from one to the other if one is hampered by lack of input. (Alternatively, lack of input in one system and expanded use of the other might make the heavily-used system grow or recruit more untargeted cells.)
Regarding echolocation: Try it. Go into a quiet empty room - preferably an empty one with hard walls and not much soft furniture and curtains - and close your eyes. Make a clicking sound with your mouth - or walk in shoes that make a sharp sound when they hit the floor. You'll be able to "feel" the walls as you approach them, and get a sense of the size of the room. Sound reflecting or absorbing objects may also be noticable.
Of course blind people make more use of this system. There was one case of a blind kid who could ride a bicycle on quiet streets using it - making clicking sounds with his mouth as the illumination.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It could be short term memory if you have a habit of spelling words out when you think of them. But more likely you've spelled that website name so many times that its stored somewhere as long term nondeclarative memory. Then the ability to type what you were thinking of when you don't remember, is probably caused by *priming*.
When you think of a website i guess you're subconsciously planning ahead the movement of your fingers. sometimes when i think of words that start with S, my middle finger on my left hand almost twitches.
I believe you've typed the particular website name so many times that somewhere between your premotor cortex and possibly broca's area you have a "linked list" of letters to type to get to that particular website, as well as many others. For example, I might have a S->L->A->S->H->D->O>T "linked list" that is primed when I think of slashdot. That list may remain primed even after my short term memory forgets about slashdot.
The reason why you can't remember the name even though you have it primed, is because you have primed a linked list of motor commands rather than something that goes into wernick's area.
[I don't have a slashdot account - neocortex is my name]
They did not map STWM, they mapped ONE visual-only application of one part of STWM, the visuo-spatial "scratchpad". They did not test spatial relationships, so they did not test the entirety of V-S STWM. There is no reason to assume that had they tested spatial memory, the result would have been in the same place. For that matter there's no reason to assume that if the stimuli were words instead of dots the result would be the same.
They also did not test the auditory portion of STWM, the "phonological loop". Nor did they test the functional control mechanism that operates these, the "central executive".
One particular application of STWM might appear this localized. There's no reason to expect a different application to be in the same place. In fact, it'd be ridiculous to expect it. It's far more likely that, given all the possible localizations that could be found for the various tasks STWM can tackle, the outcome would be exactly the opposite of what's stated: STWM *is* distributed around the cortex.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Anyways, before everyone gets excited about the brain's "cache", it's important to remember that computer processors and neural networks like our brain process information in entirely different ways. You get similar results some of the time, but for different reasons. The key difference is that our brain processes information in parallel, on a massive scale.
People talk about the computer-brain analogy being useful on a general level, but it's actually entirely wrong on any level. When it comes to memory, this is especially important. Our brains work by sloshing around activity through enormous numbers of neurons across interconnected layers; basically, this leads to two types of memory: active memory (patterns of activity that are actively maintained across time) and weight-based memory (adjusting the connections between neurons to influence the future processing of activity.) Usually such "short term" memory as that is being discussed in the article is referring to active memory.
Anyhow, the important bit to take away from all of this is that active memory in the brain is something that requires a lot of upkeep. It's not like computer memory that holds specific information that can be erased or retrieved--rather, it biases current processing based on a pattern of activity that resulted from past processing. Without going into too much detail, in the case of remembering dots positioned on a screen, you can imagine that seeing the dots spreads activity through the cortex, including both the spatial processing areas and some "active maintainer" area that is able to lock in patterns of activity. In the context of the test, the representation of the dots in the spatial layer activates another pattern of activity in the "active maintainer," which sort of "locks on" to the activity in the maintainer that corresponds to the the represenation of the dots in the spatial layer. When recall time comes, the active maintainer sends activation to the dots representation in the spatial layer--you can then visualize what you just saw a moment ago (literally activating the same neurons). This depends on the quality of the represenation in the active maintainer, of course, and is really oversimplified, but you can sort of get an idea of the complexity involved.
Anyways, there's already a lot of evidence that the prefrontal cortex is heavily involved in actively maintaining a set pattern of activity in the face of distraction, but since prettymuch all distinctions in the brain are gradual and not absolute anyways, it wouldn't be too surprising to find that another part of cortex could be more specifically involved in maintaing representations in the spatial processing part of the brain.
As for cognition and intelligence, there's no question that active memory is important for intelligence--if you don't have it (if you are lobotomized, removing the entire prefrontal cortex), you can't direct your thoughts to reflect anything that came before, and you become a vegetable. But as to the contribution of this specific brain area, that's clearly going to be speculation at this point.
Please keep in mind that your average Slashdotter couldn't bike more than a few miles without being close to a heart attack.
Nonesense, possibly on two scores. The first, reading other peoples's posts suggests to me that there are quite a number of Slashdotters who ride bikes and could keep up with me just fine.
But the second is the important one. If they can't bike more than a few miles without having a heart attack it's due to ignorance, not lack of fitness. I could teach nearly all of them how to do it within a week. An 11 year old girl, with no previous athtletic accomplishments, bicycled across America. It's really not that great a feat, if you still have the capacity to make it to the fridge for that last slice of last night's pizza you can bicycle a few miles just fine, but as in all things you have to properly understand what you are doing. Being able to balance a bicycle is not the same as knowing how to ride one properly.
It's true about the computer nerd thingy though, and I'm not a computer nerd, as I've written before. I'm an old style geek, which is rather a different beasty. Cycling, martial arts, squash, cross country skiing, mountaineering, all traditional pursuits of the traditional Anglo-American geek. The jocks went for football and rugby, the so called "contact" sports, whereas the geek was perhaps more inclined to make his contact with the point of an epee.
I really don't understand shunning exercise any more than I understand anti-intellectualism. Mind and body are inseperable. You can worry yourself sick, and exercise yourself unworried. And what are you doing to occupy your time while out on an eight hour bike ride?
You think a lot.
When properly done exercise is complimentary with thinking, nor does it take any time away from thinking. You don them both at the same time.
Gymnasium just means "Place to hang out, like, naked and shit." You might wrestle in the gym, or you might just argue natural philosophy for hours. . . and then settle the issue with three falls or a submission.
As per your last sentence, which is apropos to the other poster's comments, athletic accomplishment is a relative feat, not an absolute one. See the guys at the back of the marathon field? The one's who take six hours to finish instead of two and change? They're slower than the winner, but they're working just as hard as the winner did, for that entire six hours.
Some of the guys who win couldn't do that without having a heart attack.
Hawking is a great athlete, it's just that his athletic skills and accomplishments aren't readily visible to those without the right means of percieving them.
KFG
It usually goes something like this:
1. I think "oooh, I need to recompile that kernel module on host foo."
2. I turn on the computer monitor to find Slashdot or something else distracting already up on the screen.
3. I start a MP3 stream, read a couple of articles... get generally distracted.
4. I think "What was I going to do?". I then just relax and let myself do whatever comes naturally, and which point I launch my SSH client, log into the host and get about half way to the task when I remember where I was going with it and "consciously" continue from where I managed to get myself without thinking about it.
I know, that sounds a bit odd.. but I'm serious- that's how it happens! And it happens more and more as I get older. (I'm almost 30.)
I attribute it to "muscle memory"... It feels exactly the same as being able to play the first part of a song on piano or guitar before remembering what it is I'm playing, which I'm sure any musician can relate to.
I figure I started planning the familiar sequence of computer events in my head back when I thought "I need to...", so I'm able to just plow through that sequence naturally and observe it to get clues where it was I was going with that action. God that still sounds odd, but that's exactly how it happens.
Of course, I drive my car in the same fasion... once again more and more as I get older, and it drives my girlfriend CRAZY.
"Ooops... sorry... everywhere else I drive starts with that sequence of turns."
{sigh}