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Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-was-I-talking-about dept.

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."

10 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. The question I've always had about memory... by Scoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      perhaps we're not meant to?

      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 relevance value of certain bits of information. The questions we should be asking are, "what might cause that mis-assessment, and how can it be remedied once it is caused?"

      My hypothesis would be that there are two causes of the mis-assessment:

      1) Some unrelated thoughts that are simultaneously happening in the brain cause the recall operation to favor a different set of relevancies.
      2) Some inappropriate associations are linking the desired information with something that is very irrelevant to the data at hand, thus causing it to be "drug down."

      Based on this hypothesis, responding to a drawn-blank would involve two steps:

      1) Consciously clear your mind (this takes practice...study zen...it helps) and re-state the question you are trying to answer (state it out loud, that helps too).

      2) Try to think of (and out loud ask yourself) questions about things that would clearly be associated with the desired bit of information. If you are trying to remember a phone number, think of things like the face of the person who you are trying to call, the image of a telephone on which you previously called the person, perhaps the image of the place where you stored the number previously (post-it note or PDA or whatever).

      Don't work harder, work smarter!

    2. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by buswolley · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I happen to be a memory researcher at a major University. I also happen to be on a project very similar to the one in the article. However, we are doing the fMRI imaging with children of different ages, as a developmental study. We also piloted adults, and replicating results similar to the ones in the article. Interesting. Of course, I cannot speak about the research in much detail. Journals don't like that much.

      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

      --

      A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.

    3. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by SeekerDarksteel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In artificial neural networks, there are structures called auto-associative memory networks. The networks are "trained" on certain patterns, then when it receives one of those patterns as input, it outputs a pattern closer to the pattern it was trained on. If you make it recursive (and your network is good enough), you can take as input a pattern that contains only a fragment of one of the patterns it was trained on and get as output the pattern you trained on. It's quite likely that something like that is going on inside our brains to store memories in some fashion, but on a far more complex scale than we can describe at this point.

      --
      The laws of probability forbid it!
    4. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by buswolley · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Of course, I agree wholeheartedly. Researchers could speak of it all they want, but doing so may jeopardize their chances of being published. Journals like to have the first press release.

      --

      A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.

    5. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by Torvaun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Now, that makes all sorts of sense. My brother, my father and I are all ADHD. We are also the kings of pretty much any trivia contest you care to mention. I can recall massive selections of dialogue from movies verbatim after a single viewing. I've been going off of the assumption that it was the result of random hyperfocusing, but it could be the failure to forget.

      --
      I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
    6. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by smallfries · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Although it also depends on the subject. In CS it is common to publish work three times, firstly at a workshop, then at a conference, and finally at a journal. Each level of the pyramid is happy as long as the work hasn't been that high before. Even before any of these it is common to release a tech report or an eprint to "get a flag in the ground". Part of the difference in culture comes from the turn around time on research.

      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.

      --
      Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
    7. Re:The question I've always had about memory... by replicant108 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      In any mnemonic system, linking is a key component.

      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.

  2. Psychology I gleaned from Computer Science by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. Francis Crick: REM sleep like simulated annealing by MarkWatson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.