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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."
I hope I remember to smoke more pot.
Stop making excuses for dupes.
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?
I'm sure I will have remembered by the time the dupe gets here though
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
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.
An old couple both have Alzheimer's. One day they're watching TV and an ad for a burger place comes on.
Man says: "Hey, want to make some burgers?"
Woman says: "Sure, what to you want on yours?
Man: "I want lettuce, tomatoes and onions. Don't forget; lettuce, tomatoes and onions."
Woman: "Got it. Lettuce, tomatoes and onions."
A good hour goes by and she finally comes from the kitchen and hands her husband a plate of bacon and eggs. He says "You idiot! You forgot the toast!"
Trolling is a art,
"Remember when I took that home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?"
"That's because you were drunk!"
"And how!"
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
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.
Personally, I think that ...
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at Slashdot.Post(Slashdot.java:1061)
at Slashdot.Read(Slashdot.java:75)
at MyBrain.main(MyBrain.java:4038)
[Insert pithy quote here]
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.
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
I cannot remember that I have ever forgotten anything.
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.
Sometime ago I had a t-shirt that had this written:
The more I study, the more I know.
The more I know, the more I forget...
The more I forget, the less I know.
So why study?
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)
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.
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.
www.teslabox.com
Finally, a good excuse for forgetting my girlfriend's birthday: I'm remembering something "more important". Wait... that won't work.
:-P
Yes, I post on slashdot. Yes, I have a real, live, breathing girlfriend.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
which is like saying that most software states are caused by an imbalance of 1s and 0s
As a computer technician, I welcome our vaguely interpreted and rather imaginary methodology of fixing computers... err.... overlords.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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.