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Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process
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 primary study quoted supposedly shows less brain activity (in reality it shows less oxy/CO2 swapping, which is frequently mistaken for a measure of brain activity) when some memories are suppressed. Then they quote Anderson (U. of Oregon) who more properly identifies such suppression as active inhibition. Active inhibition is a form of activity. It should show up as a "lighting up" on the fMRI scan. In light of this, what the primary study shows is nothing. It's a failure to find active inhibition. Some results are notable by their absence. Saying your results show something when they in fact fail to is entirely different.
"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.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Wikipedia reports that that theory is currently discredited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_RNA/.
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, where there is no equivalent to 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.
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.
Yes, you are missing something here. ...8 649043).
In the past, Slashdot has been hit-and-run by dozens of "first post - first post" messages.
Nowadays, many slashdotters think that ANY post containing these words should be modded down to oblivion.
This applies to...
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I found out the hard way myself
(http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=229877&cid=1
Posting anonymous, as this post may be modded "off topic"
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. -- Sherlock Holmes, to Dr. Watson in "A Study in Scarlet"
As someone who has done a lot of memorization (specifically, a national-level Bible quizzer -- we memorize whole books until we can quote chapter after chapter; as you can imagine, there is a substantial time investment involved), I could have told you that forgetting is an important part of remembering.
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 passes.
First, you go over a short section until you know it to the point where you can repeat it back on the spot. This is very much short-term memory, and a few minutes later you won't be able to repeat it. Which is fine. You repeat this a couple of times, over the course of a day or so, and after about the third time (give or take, depending on the length of the passage and your ability level) you can retain it for a few minutes -- while going over another short section -- and still go back and repeat it. When you can do that, you are on your way to actually memorizing it.
The next step then is to start stretching the timeframe. You go for a few minutes at first, but you work your way up to hours and days. Each time you remember it slightly imperfectly, but you correct yourself. If your memorization ability is average, you'll probably mess up each and every word at least once at some point or another, before you get to the point where, coming back after several days since the last time you looked at it, you can say the thing perfectly.
Even then, you still have to review, because you eventually forget. But each time you can go a bit longer than the previous time between review sessions. Eventually you get to the point where you can recite it verbatim, easily, once a year or so, and that's enough to keep it. Even then, if you totally stop reviewing altogether, it will eventually start to fade.
Of course, if you do let it fade beyond the point where you can recall it, all you have to do is rememorize it. And rememorizing something you've once had really solidly memorized is MUCH easier and faster than memorizing it in the first place.
With all of that said, I'm not sure this is really what the article was talking about. I think it was talking more about filtering (i.e., choosing *what* to remember in the first place) than about forgetting. Nonetheless, both points (the one in the headline and the one in the article) are valid.
It is also worth pointing out that memorization is very much a learned skill. There _is_ a certain amount of natural ability, which makes the skill easier to learn for some people, but this matters a lot less than you might think. Someone who starts out having a rather hard time of it can put in a few dozen hours of memorization time and get to the point where they memorize faster than someone who started out being naturally fairly good at it. (There are, of course, always a few exceptional people -- on both ends of the spectrum -- but they are the exception, rather than the rule.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.