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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."
You needed the value of the index column, then you were able to retrieve the entire row. Simple as that.
how that mushy grey matter in the skull can "record" memories.. the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells right? can a slice of the brain be put under a microscope and analyzed to see what memories it holds? My instinct says no.. all you'll see is a bunch of dead cells. What the fuck is a memory anyways? Shit, I gotta lay off the ganja for the night.
Learning to forget is probably more beneficial to humanity in the long run. How many times have you sat around and wasted time thinking about things you wish you could forget (ex's, deceased family members, disturbing conversations, etc.). At times, learning to forget is exactly what we need to move on with our lives.
Only on /. does a joke comparing the brain to an Array, or anything in programming, get modding insightful...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Of course, I cannot speak about the research in much detail. Journals don't like that much
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.
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I think the article is implying that your memory of similiar, repetetive tasks goes to reduce to "index" of totals when trying to recall one. So if you only ever sky-dived once, you're gonna remember exactly how it went. But if you're a sky diving instructor, you'll have a hard time remembering any one jump in particular. So yeah, sumbitting stories does get A LITTLE repetetive after a few years and thus hard to remember lol
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I can still remember every step involved with installing a M-61A1 20MM Gatling gun into a Block 52 F-16. Every single step. I can recite from memory all the steps needed in functional checking a LAU-128 for an AIM-9\M missile, switch positions in the cockpit as well as the settings on the tester. However, I can not recall simple names for objects and tools I use on a day to day basis.
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.
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)