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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 question I've always had is more along the lines of the filing system - there are times that I can't remember any part of something until someone reminds me of some small part, and it all comes flooding back. That means it was all in there somewhere, I just couldn't find it. I'm wondering what might cause that, and what might be done to improve it. Or, as the article is saying, perhaps we're not meant to?
This is all stuff I figured out. Despite the fact I thought it up, it could still be wrong.
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.
God spoke to me.
An interesting article on the role sleep plays in saving/discarding memories. Even if it seems like you've forgotten an event during the day, it isn't really gone until your next period of REM sleep.
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
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
In the late 1980s, I participated for about a year on the DARPA neural network tools panel. If I remember correctly (ha :-) it was Francis Crick who suggested that REM sleep was like simulated annealing; that is, serving the function of adding some randomness to a neural network so that we could forget meaningless things that happened to us during the day.
I am(not officially) a subject for memory studies having to do with alcholol. The wierd thing is that when I am completely sober I cannot remember many things from when I was previously drunk off my ass, but, if that drunk off my ass state is re-introduced, I can remember everthing.
I read of a researcher who spent his entire career trying to find out where memories were stored in mice brains. He'd teach the mouse to run a maze, then cut out a portion of the mouse brain, with the assumption that the mouse's mental map of the maze was stored in some specific location, and by removing the mouse's maze map, it would be unable to navigate the passages. But after having chopped every region of the brain out, the mice always remembered how to run the maze.
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.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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