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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.
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?
And also,
That summary was way too long, when I got to the end I had already forgotten what it was all about.
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 gets hashed and stored in a table. When there's a collision, a DejaVu exception is raised.
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.
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.
I'm still trying to figure out how they do the trick.
How do they pick the right card again?
I wish they would do a study on what a vodka and grapefruit juice after a long day does to my cognitive abilities.
Can someone please explain the trick to me? Is he picking the right card, or a card that looks like the right card? I mean, if you showed me six cards and I pick one and then you show me a different six cards, I'm going to remember what my card looked like, unless all twelve cards are very similar.
Oh crap, now I'm going to have to either go read the article or just call it a day and go to sleep. The wife's already in bed reading and it's 28 degrees here in Chicago, and the bed and wife are more beckoning than the article. Add this to the list of things I will probably never know.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Repressed or hidden memories are a physical impossibility based on the understanding we presently have of memory.
Yet many people tend to completely forget things, only to recall it later.
Recent example, of one of the US president hopefuls: "the government departments that I want to close are a, b, and euhm..." and a while later he remembered it again.
The memory was obviously still there, yet for a while couldn't be recovered. I have similar experiences myself, you surely have too. Like standing in front of an ATM and drawing a blank on your decade-old PIN code... try an hour later and it's back no problem. Why was that memory suddenly gone? How come later it's back again?
This sounds to me like "hidden memories" that need some kind of trigger to recover. And as you rightfully remark, impossible based on our current understanding of the workings of the brain. It's so mighty complex, our understanding of how it works is probably just the very beginning.
Can someone please explain the trick to me? Is he picking the right card, or a card that looks like the right card? I mean, if you showed me six cards and I pick one and then you show me a different six cards, I'm going to remember what my card looked like, unless all twelve cards are very similar.
The trick is that the magician, without ever knowing which card you picked, seems to have "magically" taken it out and replaced it with a different card. It relies on the fact that you won't remember the 5 cards you didn't pick, or else you'd notice that all of them were replaced.
However, the point of this study was determining whether you unconsciously did remember which cards were in the first set, even though you could only consciously remember the one you had chosen.
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)
The opposite, in fact, is true. Unconscious is actually the correct term, and would be used by educated (at least in psychology) people. Subconscious is imprecise and academically useless, and generally only used in casual conversation, or by pop-psychologists and New Agers.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Sometimes we remember things that didn't happen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I too found the description confusing as hell, and your attempts at clarifying it were hardly better (no offense). Let me try and see if I got this right:
1) magician shows 6 cards, you pick one
2) magician replaces his 5 cards in the hand with 5 different ones, all of which he knows what they are
3) you put the card back
4) since the magician knows the new 5 cards, he can easily see which one is not one of the ones he replaced.
I'm guessing this must be it, but why someone wouldn't just outright say so and instead hide the truth in some convoluted sentences I'll never know.
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"!
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!
Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read, ... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
I doubt that, just taking the massive raw amount of data we process from the nervous system it'd be completely absurd to store it all, even for the brain. We're doing a massive amount of fuzzy deduplication, like if you tell a person under hypnosis to say how that apple pie tasted like I think you're getting a generic memory of apple pies, not really that unique pie. Unless there was something particularly good/bad amount it, in which case it could have modifiers. Just because the brain doesn't throw a NullPointerException it's not that accurate.
The trick is recalling it. The subconscious mind manages recall, and, if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to serve that memory up, he won't. He may believe/know that remembering this would cause you extreme pain. Or he may be ticked off at you for some reason, sulking because you've been ignoring his best efforts to help you. (That's his job, that and to protect you, he takes it seriously and he does the very best he knows how at it.)
I think you over-anthropomorphize the subconscious, I think the brain is more of a parallel search algorithm and each thread is actually rather unreliable. It's just that most of the time you've got plenty of associations so that one or more of them get there anyway. Like if you're trying to recall face -> name, you might trigger face -> nickname -> name, face -> person with same first name -> name or face -> event where he was present -> introduction -> name. Too few links and you have a real chance of failing, without any "need" to protect you - even things you know really well.
That's one part, the other is when everything gets flooded. Like when you forget something that'll be embarrassing you start like a flash flood of thoughts and a wild search for any clue you can find. The result is usually just noise, your brain can't process the searches that makes sense because it's flooded with junk and "no match" returns. People in a panic can't remember shit, they need to be led by the nose to an emergency exit. Too bad you don't have one in conversations.
As for hidden/repressed memories, I think it's part of the brain's natural learning/self defense mechanisms. There's a Norwegian idiom that translated means "A burnt child fears the fire." which relates to physical injury and I think the logic is the same for painful memories, just like you no longer want to touch the fire you no longer want to touch those memories, before it reaches actual pain. That matches well to how some "trigger" memories, like they found an association that wasn't blocked off and so through it all the other memories came back.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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 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.
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).