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New Study Finds People Remember More Than They Think
An anonymous reader writes "A new study has shown that people subconsciously retain information about things they've seen even if they can't consciously remember. From the article: 'Luis Martinez of CSIC- Miguel Hernandez University in Spain and his team "read minds" with the Princess Card Trick, an act invented by magician Henry Hardin in 1905. Participants in the study mentally picked out a playing card from a group of six cards, which then disappeared. When a second group of cards appeared, the researchers had amazingly figured out which card a person had in mind and removed it. Very few people caught the trick: All of the cards in the second set were different, not just the card that people had chosen. This trick is well-known to confuse the masses, even via the Internet a magician's sleight of hand can make it seem as though he/she legitimately "read your mind" A few moments after viewing the two panels of cards, volunteers were asked which of two new cards was present in the first set of cards. None of the volunteers could actually recall which card was present. Despite claiming that they had no idea, when they were forced to choose, people got the right answer around 80 percent of the time. “People say they don’t know, but they do,” Martinez said. “The information is still there, and we can use it unconsciously if we are forced to.”'"
This doesn't surprise me at all. God chooses for us what we can and can't remember, and it is through His will that our memories come to us in the time we need them most. Yours in Christ, Jake
They remember me when they need a ride to and from the airport, but they can't remember to pay me back the money they've borrowed.
from the new-study-finds-already-known-stuff dept.
or is this really news to anyone?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I think more than I remember...
He did, He evolved some of us into computer makers, administrators, and software writers. the rest that didn't evolve we call users, sucks to be them.
It's possible that you have much more stored in your brain than you realize. Could you imagine the chaos in your head if it were to provide you with all of your brain's knowledge and wisdom on-demand? The Hollywood version would be cool because you'd be like a genius, but the downfalls to that ability are described in the Star Trek: TNG episode Tin Man. That guy who was born "gifted" was miserable, barely functional, and unstable because his telepathic mind had a low signal-noise ratio.
Take into account your dreams. How many of your dreams feature the most mundane, forgettable events you experienced that day? Do you believe that your psyche would delve into chaos if every little ass-wiping thoughout your life were constantly percolating to the surface of your conscious mind?
..what they are saying is that we remember more than we remember that we remember?
Or in other words, we have memories that we forgot we had?
Or is more like, we have the memories, but we forgot where we put them?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
They say the first thing to go is your memory and the second...well, dammit, I keep forgetting the second...
It's possible that you have much more stored in your brain than you realize. Could you imagine the chaos in your head if it were to provide you with all of your brain's knowledge and wisdom on-demand?
If you can't retrieve it, what exactly does "stored" mean?
Are they really remembering?
Or are they just making the same choice twice?
It gets hashed and stored in a table. When there's a collision, a DejaVu exception is raised.
Basically, you're running a FAT12 file system in your heads. Easily corrupted, with no maintenance, no metadata, nothing. The files are still there, but you can't access them. What they are saying is, people should upgrade to a modern file system. Ext4, Reiser4, LTFS, or maybe HAMMER.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'll bet that's more the reality, you think?
People do almost everything more than they think.
Even if that were true, 10 Hz over a super-cluster of 120 billion neurons is an effective speed of 1.2 THz.
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)
Ok, found it. Neurons operate at 200 Hz, not 10. That gives a brain speed of 24 THz.
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)
The Radiolab show on "Falling" had a bit on this. The "time stands still" experience you get from near death experiences is because later you can consciously remember far more than normal.
"Remember more than they think" implies that they think.
Unfortunately, such a direct comparison is reductionist to the point of being meaningless. You may like this related article: When will computer hardware match the human brain?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
While the human brain has many advantages over computers (at least right now), memory is not one of them. The human brain is pathetic in that regard. Why doesn't the god of evolution make us evolve to fix this?
Perhaps it is in the not suddenly remembering everything connected at once, rating it in relevance/importance which prevents us being paralyzed constantly and allowed to make decisions as simple as turning left, right or going straight. Make choices on little to no information is likely an important asset.
When I was in college I thought I was doing poorly in a chemistry class and considered dropping it so I could focus on other classes. I gave chemistry one last chance, sat down and decided to write down everything I knew. Turned out I knew a lot more than I didn't know, so stayed in the class, finishing with top marks. We're pretty good at telling ourselves we can't do something or, like Barbie, some subject is hard and then being so stupid as to believe it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, the brain is analogous to a multicore processor, except that it's more complicated. You can think multiple things at once providing they don't need to make simultaneous use of the same structures. Where the brain really shines is that it has structures that have evolved to very efficiently handle certain types of information.
Also, the brain doesn't have to route a message across the entire brain the way that a processor generally does a signal across the chip, and so some things can and do happen more quickly than others.
Some people do upgrade to a modern filesystem, what do you think gets people on death row?
I see that all the time at work. The problem is that unlike a computer our memory isn't a binary affair, we can half or quarter know things whereas a computer will either have a file or not. There will occasionally be semi-corrupted files, but those are basically junk. The human brain can make use of those half correct memories to reconstruct ones that are reasonable within some degree of accuracy.
Which isn't really surprising as we can't just assert whenever our memory doesn't agree with the memory of an associate or with the other two people who witnessed an event.
“The information is still there, and we can use it unconsciously if we are forced to.” -- Educated people should know the difference between unconscious and subconscious.
I'd mod the parent up if they weren't already at +5. Anyway, posting anon for obvious reasons.
I have the problem described by the parent. Not the telepathy, mind you, but the constant recollection of events throughout my life all the time, on demand, with a tiny signal to noise ratio. I am considered *extremely* gifted, and I am in my mid 20's.
Usually, when something like that happens, you are afflicted with a mental illness, as in my case. You are extremely miserable. Extremely. I take a handful of pills every morning and every night, and that gets the thoughts to quiet down. The pills make you sleepy, unable to think, unable to speak well, they dampen your critical thinking skills, etc. I lost almost all of my extemporaneous speaking ability when I got sick.
I had a professor who said to me, "Perfect is the enemy of good enough." He was applying those words to the semiconductor lithography process–but really, they hold true for humans as well.
I'd rather be more "normal" (IQ in the 120-140 range) than have to deal with all the crap I have to deal with day in and day out. I don't really want an IQ of 160+ because all that comes with it makes me miserable.
(I'm just using the IQ an arbitrary test of intelligence, you could replace it with ability to read and play music or ability to make beautiful art. Most people on slashdot know what an IQ is, so I used it as my toy case.)
UC Berkeley has already demonstrated that they can read your mind and see what you see by hooking up electrodes to your brain.
The brain is a machine, so reductionism works just fine. What I did not say, and needs to be taken into account, is that you cannot parallelize a process further than it can be reduced into wholly independent steps. (Interdependent steps should be split into the dependent and independent components, with suitable barrier operations to synchronize them.) Further, any parallel architecture, brain included, is subject to Amdahl's Law.
Computer hardware is capable of matching the human brain today, at least at the level of computation power. You can build a cluster of the required number of nodes, linked together via a hypercube network topology. You'd be bankrupt if you did, but you can do it. Nobody would have the faintest idea of how to program a supercomputer on that scale - you might not have noticed, but parallel programming is a highly arcane art. SIMD is about the only design anyone knows how to program on these proto-Deep Thoughts, but the brain isn't SIMD. It's MIMD. The total number of MIMD engineers out there is less than the total number of Perl 6 gurus. Put them in front of a machine with a few billion nodes and their brains will explode. It'd make a great Halloween video, but it's useless for Strong AI.
Lets say you could find a MIMD guru with the wizardry and dark arts expertise to program where angels fear to tread. Would that match the human brain? Well, still no. We don't have a specification for intelligence and you can't program Strong AI by guesswork alone. Strong AI proponents have tried and it doesn't work.
Ok, let's conjure up a specification. NOW can we match the human brain? Alan Turing proved the answer to that is yes. The brain is a Turing Complete machine, the computer is a Turing Complete machine, either can do the work of the other. You have to allow for the fact that brain cell DNA is self-modifying and that brain wiring is also self-modifying, producing an amazingly powerful and flexible system. You also have to allow for the fact that inter-neuron communication uses analogue or discrete signals, whereas computers are limited to binary, and the brain is incredibly small (reduced distances for signals). A computer with this many nodes would be multiple football stadia in size.
But, yeah, if we could solve the problem of not knowing what the hell intelligence even was, we could build an artificial brain equal to (but slower than) the human brain.
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)
You can think multiple things at once providing they don't need to make simultaneous use of the same structures.
That's seems like an assumption to me. Why couldn't two patterns of neural activity coexist in the same neurons (like superpositions of waves, and no I don't mean quantum mechanics)?
If you read his message three times backwards. ALL YOUR BASES ARE BELONG TO HIM.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
On the other hand, fat12 has /far/ better undelete capibilities than, say, EXT4. So it's not a total loss...
Don't we all have moments where we say 'Oh I know that but can't remember'. But some time later we recall that. What I'm interested in is some research on how we recall things and how it is related to stress/age/sex/sleep etc.
Could you imagine the chaos in your head if it were to provide you with all of your brain's knowledge and wisdom on-demand? Do you believe that your psyche would delve into chaos if every little ass-wiping thoughout your life were constantly percolating to the surface of your conscious mind?
Interestingly enough I just read a book dealing with this very premise, except it concerned itself more with sensations than memories. Basically, someone's system of nerves was acutely enhanced, but the brain was quickly overwhelmed by the new information since the nervous system wasn't filtering it for him. The sensations involved in a drop of water on skin led to a headache; multiple drops would lead to a coma. The solution? Implanting extra processors to offload thinking, of course!
I have met the author but it's a self-published affair and he didn't ask me to promote it.
Sometimes we remember things that didn't happen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Three recent examplea to the contrary come to mind. Perry fumbled with the third department he'd shut down, correct? I just want to make sure we are talking about the same thing before I say yes or no. Herman Cain had a memory lapse on Libya, and definitely didn't remember more than we thought. The third case, no that was a different one. Sorry, got all this stuff twirling in my head. What was TFA about again?
I read about this somewhere but I can't seem to remember where...
Moravec's estimate on the computational power of the human neural system is too low by about an order of magnitude since he considers the basic building block to the the synapse, whereas it is actually the synaptic vesicles, which do not act in unison and are significantly differentiated. Synapses have complex state.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
If my brain is only 80% sure that a remembered fact is accurate, I'm glad the result is "I don't know" when I try to remember it. People don't "remember more than they think", but the brain apparently stores a lot of junk that doesn't meet it's built-in (or trained) criteria for proper remembrance. Big surprise there...
What would be interesting is to see how the level of certainty needed to remember something changes over time and whether it is actually something that is taught or inherently built into the brain's structure.
They remember me when they need a ride to and from the airport, but they can't remember to pay me back the money they've borrowed.
"Ante el vicio de pedir, la virtud de no dar."
My English try: "When asking becomes a vice, not giving becomes a virtue."
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Yes, the brain is analogous to a multicore processor
No. It's so different you can't even draw an analogy between them. Animal brains are neural sub-symbolic systems with nothing in common with von neumann architecture.
Any comparison is utterly meaningless.
Is it possible to remember more than you think? Put differently can you recall something you haven't previously thought about?
Err what? You have this very wrong.
Maybe your 'self-modifying DNA' is malfunctioning.
there are known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
Do you believe that your psyche would delve into chaos if every little ass-wiping thoughout your life were constantly percolating to the surface of your conscious mind?
Me? No.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
not suddenly remembering everything connected at once
Why remember everything at once rather than what you choose to remember?
rating it in relevance/importance
How does that work?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
That's been pretty thoroughly established. It's probably something that you've been observed yourself. Sort of like if you're trying to count and somebody starts yelling out random numbers. Likewise, it's doubtful that you can read a book while listening to somebody without losing comprehension of one or the other.
Any supersitioning of waves in that respect would require an amazing amount of error correction and for the reasons I've already pointed out that's not the case. We can do one thing with a structure at a time, trying to do any more than that at once leads to the same sort of scheduling problems that you generally see in computers.
Right and my post is where it all breaks down, right? If you're going to post something like that you really ought to address it to the person that's trying to compare the two in the first place.
And no, claiming that they have nothing in common is bullshit. Just like the brain you can't use a portion of the processor to do more than one thing at the same time. Whether that includes the entire chip, unit or core is going to depend greatly on the architecture, but you're not going to be using the same gates at the same time.
Also, it's a perfectly valid comparison to make they both serve the same purpose, you make it sound like I'm comparing bats to the 1937 Yankees which have essentially nothing in common.
The brain is a Turing Complete machine, the computer is a Turing Complete machine, either can do the work of the other.
This assumes that the brain is a turing complete machine and nothing else. It is yet to be shown that the brain does not have any other functionality which another turing complete computer could not perform.
I talked to a girl once who described her photographic memory to me, and some of the problems it had caused. Especially when she ever head to repeat something, like rereading a book. She'd remember the original reading, plus the new reading, plus layer upon layer of thinking about each reading, plus other times when she'd remembered the readings, or thought about remembering, or remembered thinking about it, etc. Said it gave her serious headaches for a while before she learned how to deal with it.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I tried upgrading my brain to Reiser4, but then my wife disappeared.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It can be retrieved, you just need the right input senquence.
Rethinking email
They say more than they remember...
Couldn't read the article, was the right answer none of them that 80% got right?
Also, it's a perfectly valid comparison to make they both serve the same purpose, you make it sound like I'm comparing bats to the 1937 Yankees which have essentially nothing in common.
No, So much no that the word 'No' doesn't even start to cover it. The only thing they have in common is that they are both made out of matter and at a very low level follow the laws of physics of this universe.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying you are an idiot. I'm just that that you have a commonly held but very wrong idea.
Most people do many other things more than they think. In fact, thinking is probably one of those activities people do least.
That is all.
I am a scientist (i.e., experimental psychologist) who studies human memory. What is described here is simply the difference between a recall task and a recognition task. Roughly: in a recall task, you have to produce information from memory given some cue; in a recognition task, you are given the information and you have to judge whether it was previously encountered. It is extremely well-know and well-documented in the scientific literature that recognition performance is almost always better than recall performance. In everyday terms, you may not be able to recall the name of a childhood friend, but you may be able to recognize that name among a list of alternatives. The difference between recall and recognition performance is just one kind of demonstration that the entirety of information stored in human memory is indeed much greater than what can be accessed at any given time.
Turing-complete computers can perform anything. You might get further if you attack the claim that the brain is Turing-complete. Neurons can be configured into a Turing-complete arrangement (in fact it only takes a few layers of neurons to do so), but it's not necessarily as clear that we're configured that way. People just assume it is.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Your point is correct in general, but you greatly over-estimate the computational power of an individual neuron. They only compute one function: sum inputs, multiply by adjustable weights, emit signal if adjustable threshold is exceeded. A neuron is more like a fuzzy and transistor than a processor. (Also, as 1s44c said, neurons are not capable of modifying their genomes.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I read a fascinating book on the topic, called "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions" - highly recommend it - the authors investigate what happens from a neurological perspective when magicians perform tricks, and also how we routinely deceive ourselves about the "reality" we think we perceive (deceptions which magicians routinely rely upon).
I have a copy of the research paper that claims each brain cell modifies its own genetic code independently of any other cell up to 3000 times in a lifetime. This is now established science. Each cell in your brain has a unique genome.
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)
That turns out not to be correct even in general.
Specifically for humans, retrotransposition turns out to be commonplace.
About 3,000 times over a lifetime commonplace.
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)
Methylation is an epigenetic form of regulation. While it involves the modification of the chromosomes, calling it modification of DNA is generally considered underhanded.
Transposons are independent parasites that manipulate DNA on their own. We don't really have evidence that the cell does anything more than tolerate them.
The Nature blog article, however, is quite something, and I'll concede the point based on it.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
If you have a copy, then a citation would be most useful for your interlocutors.
If you're interested in the original paper, the authors sent me a copy. E-mail me your e-mail address and I'll forward it to you.
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)
"Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain", Nature (2011), 30/10/2011, Baille, J. K., Barnet, M. W., et al
E-mail me your e-mail address and I'll forward it to you.
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)
That's quite okay; I've got university access to most publications. :)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Turing-complete computers can perform anything.
that is algorithmic.
What I said as a possibility: the brain is Turing complete and possibly something else undefined outside of that (e.g. something not algorithmic) . This results in another Turing Complete machine being only able to simulate a part of the brain's function.
Or, as you suggest: that the brain is not Turing Complete at all shows that claiming a Turing Complete machine could simulate it would lead to a false assumption.
I think both angles have to be demonstrated. Of course, we may eventually find that a Turing Complete machine is exactly what the brain is.
Molecular dynamics is algorithmic. The brain is implemented in molecular dynamics. Hence, a Turing machine can simulate the brain, even if only very inefficiently. The brain can only either be Turing complete or less than Turing complete. Most (if not all) of the non-Turing-compatible problems we know of are either uncomputable tautologies or rapidly approach infinite complexity.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I suppose the brain itself is implemented with molecular dynamics, my mistake. What I should have said was the mind; there are still philosophers that are not sure that everything associated with our "will" derives only from molecular dynamics in the brain..
The credibility of those philosophies went out the window when we clearly established that humans haven't been around since the dawn of time. Occam's razor doesn't like the idea that we evolved to hook into a magic API in the fabric of the universe that lets us think, especially when we now have all these other species (chimps, ravens, parrots, babies...) that appear to have intermediate levels of intelligence and self-awareness.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Point taken, however, I'm not necessarily subscribing to the idea of a god-given free will. I'm also not saying mindful intelligence is only for humans. There are still those who are not convinced that the mind is subject to only what could be computed or simulated; for example, qualia is a concept yet to modeled by computation. While it seems more people are leaning towards arguments that a sufficiently complex computer could simulate qualia these days, this is not a topic that we have just tossed out the window like "flat vs. spherical Earth".
Admittedly, that one looks like it'll take a while to sort out. If you haven't done so already, I might recommend stumbling aimlessly through this sprawling beast of a Wikipedia article, which is really more of a review of the relevant literature.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Oh, I have. I've read a number of books on the topic because I find it fascinating! I still don't have a conclusion for myself. Everything could very well be a Turing complete molecular dynamics machine. Or, we may have the false assumption you posed. Or, there may be other functions out there that we simply have not figured out how to describe accurately.
Thank you for your comments, this has been the best conversation I've ever had on slashdot.
Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim at Brown University is a good introduction book; although I can't say I necessarily understood all of it!
The human brain is a processor. It can process multiple things at the same time, so thinking of it as "multithreaded" is reasonable. However, it's a dynamic number of cores, with the cores distributed on the motherboard. Sometimes the cores are at the visual cortex other times, they are in long-term memory, depending on the task. When computers have 20 smaller general purpose CPUs distributed around the motherboard (what does the northbridge and southbridge matter when there are CPUs on both sides of the chipset?) then we'll have computing approaching the flexibility and complexity of the human brain. All we need then if dynamic traces that can connect any pin on any chip to any other dynamically, based on usage.
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