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It's Not Memory Loss - Older Minds May Just Be Fuller of Information
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Benedict Carey writes in the NYT that the idea that the brain slows with age is one of the strongest in all of psychology. But a new paper suggests that older adults' performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-processing, and not cognitive decline. A team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases. Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. When the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging 'deficits' largely disappeared. That is to say, the larger the library you have in your head, the longer it usually takes to find a particular word (or pair). 'What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,' says lead author Michael Ramscar but the simulations 'fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn't need to invoke decline at all.' The new report will very likely add to a growing skepticism about how steep age-related decline really is. Scientists who study thinking and memory often make a broad distinction between 'fluid' and 'crystallized' intelligence. The former includes short-term memory, like holding a phone number in mind, analytical reasoning, and the ability to tune out distractions, like ambient conversation. The latter is accumulated knowledge, vocabulary and expertise. 'In essence, what Ramscar's group is arguing is that an increase in crystallized intelligence can account for a decrease in fluid intelligence,' says Zach Hambrick, In the meantime the new digital-era challenge to 'cognitive decline' can serve as a ready-made explanation for blank moments, whether senior or otherwise (PDF). 'It's not that you're slow,' says Carey. 'It's that you know so much.'"
What *I* find "interesting" is that even though old grandparents have always been saying things like "It's not that grandma's getting stupid, sweetie, it's just that when you're my age you know so much that it takes awhile to remember what you know", none of that matters if the newest generation hasn't climbed out of their dungeons to announce that they simulated the same thing on a computer. Relevance, anyone? Reverence, maybe?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Wow talk about a huge coincidence. I was thinking about this yesterday.
Elok
Wrote, I was so amazed when they talked about... Wait, what was this about again?
You need to keep a tidy attic if you want to find things.
And that's my experience - too many names to keep track of, too much information inflow to filter makes me forget names of people even though I recognize their faces.
The big problem with age is that your mind gets filled up with information, and it's hard to intentionally forget stuff. Sometimes it's easier to remember old stuff than new. If there only was a way to forget some bad old stuff to make room for new...
One way to improve the situation is to lower the time spent watching TV since that's a giant information feed. And lack of sleep impacts the memory capacity too.
Also realize that the human brain has evolved to be an information store and an association processor to pick out a good solution for a problem based on what seems to be insufficient data. This is of course not always a blessing - it's a curse too, and that's what causes the balance between a genius and a mad man. I would like to extend the quote by Arthur Schopenhauer: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see." to also add "A mad man sees a target that isn't there."
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
IMHO, their "advanced learning models" does a poor job simulating the reality. That results in "shocking results". The reality is that physical damage in the aging brain can be seen, low memory recovery and basic IQ can be measured. They forgot to add to their model known degradation. other than that it looks nice and, more important, politically correct. It's somewhat similar to the idea that brain size doesn't matter. :) The problem is that in sports for some mysterious reasons men and women are separated...
For requiring me to take a course on Victorian-era English literature as part of my engineering degree graduation requirements? By forcing me to take the course, they literally filled my brain up with useless stuff which will accelerate the onset of age-related dementia.
Someone had to do it.
Jeff Hawkins pointed out that the game "twenty questions" is popular and significant. In twenty yes/no questions you can identify one million objects or concepts (2^20 = 1024*1024).
He conjectured that the reason the game isn't "twenty five questions" or any other number is that the data capacity of the human brain is about this much. By the anthropic principle, we use twenty questions because a game with any other number would be too easy or hard.
(Perhaps the game is interesting because our brains hold 2 million concepts, giving the game a 50% chance of success. While arguable, this is still predicts a range of "about a million" concepts for the fully loaded brain.)
This number (and the conjecture) has stuck with me. The idea that you can build a culturally literate mind - with the ability to understand a political speech, read a newspaper article, apply for a job - would take an understanding of only about a million concepts.
Corporations can erase employees' memories in the name of efficiency?
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.
... because my massive vernacular forbids me from uttering, "first post."
When I was a kid I snapped out fast answers and interrupted everyone because I knew I was right.
I'm coming close to being half a century old, and yes, I do stop and try to dumb things down for my nephews.
My parents were dumb when I was a kid, and now they show me how i might of been a bit less smarter than I thought I was. With age comes wisdom.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
otherwise known as the kelly bundy effect.
With all the brainwashes we get from ads, TV, reality shows and political meetings, how could we be "information fuller"?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
is not causation.
A story is told about ichthyologist David Scott Jordan. Jordan and a colleague were walking across campus one day when a student asked Dr. Jordan a question, which, upon answering, Jordan asked the student's name. Jordan's colleague asked him why he didn't remember his student's names. Jordan replied, "Every time I remember the name of a student, I forget the name of a fish!"
And this is a big surprise? The brain functions as a large associated mesh. The more memories you have, the more associates you have. By the time your old, what you have is tantamount to a rats nest or a Windows XP Update chain list. The most amazing thing to me isn't that this is all true. What amazing to me is that people rarely lock-up the way computers do when suddenly bogged down with a large network of associations.
If not obvious, I don't mean an infinite loop but merely anything that takes an incredibly long period of time (say, hours) relative to the expected interval (say, a second or two tops). One could argue we have a good watch dog timer or that as one gets older the watch dog timer is less relevant evolutionarily--granny getting forgetful and dying won't matter as much to our genes as one in their procreative years. Or perhaps it's all the on-event threading in our heads that break us out of that stuff? Whatever it is, it wouldn't be a bad thing to model such a thing on computers precisely because the biggest complaint I still have about just about every GUI I've ever used is precisely these lock-ups.
But, then, I'm digressing. I only really tend to because unlike the whole Windows XP Update chain list, there's no way to expunge/consolidate memories in the brain. Or if there is, it's likely a wholly extant biological process that can at best be enhanced by drugs or whatever. To that end, I imagine it's only partially successful. That is, you end up having dangling associations, mis-associations, and generally still way too many associations which even through a reference counting loop (presume that neurons that recently fired are charged or neurotransmitter empty and can't be restimulated for a time) you're still mostly in the same mess. That is, the very nature of the network has bad time complexity which at that point has noticeable negative real time effects. Meanwhile, you can at least rewrite the Windows XP update tool to use a better algorithm for the task.
... as I get older I find that I get wiser. But it also fills up with useless information. The next time someone says to me, "You're full of shit," they may be accurate for a change.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Note that it is not a fact. It's only that some activation model that is sensitive to the number of items in word memory is compatible with slowing down with age. That's interesting, but the paper does not present a working model of human lexical memory, as it basically selects words based on trigrams and some mysterious weight parameter. This does not seem to be compatible with the literature on priming, interference, or multilingualism without heavy modification (which will undoubtedly change the outcome of these simulations). The model also presupposes that you never lose words from memory, which (AFAIK) is not an established fact.
Note that even if this model would be right, it is only for lexical memory, and doesn't necessarily generalize to other memory. Actually, the effect should be different in episodic memory.
Not all memories are equal, forgetting(or never bothering to remember) name of "that guy" is one thing, happens to young people just the same. Forgetting name of say your daughter, now this is entirely different thing. Or forgetting what year it is, or where you live... Sure having to shift through more memories is probably a factor, but I doubt it explains away age-related cognitive decline. Now sitting before your TV for years and years, waiting for your pension check, this might make a better explanation. Lets face it, anyone's brain will turn to mush if you barely use it at all and do whole lot of nothing for years and years. Retiring should not mean you stop doing anything with your life. Unfortunately that is exactly how many pensioners take life. Maybe for many people going to work in the morning and coming home in the evening is is the only reason to flex their gray matter? Take that away and there is simply nothing left.
Some scientist need to invent the "clear cache" button for our brains. Problem solved.
Why is the sky blue?
Grade school student - because it is.
High school student - dust.
Undergraduate - Rayleigh scattering
Postgraduate - an answer that spans a few dozen pages.
We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
I play Scrabble.
Both in my native language (Estonian) and in English.
I am much much MUCH faster in English Scrabble than in Estonian one. I believe the reason to be the same. Picking a word from my limited English vocab is fast. Working through all resources of my native language takes time.
As a result, I can beat most native English speakers in a timed game simply because of my speed, whereas my native Scrabble skills are mediocre at best.
Glacial intellect here I come. Can I be a "ignorant" teenager again already? For a insomniac cynic, I was way more optimistic and slept far better only knowing what I did then. Wasn't really wrong then either, just less excruciating detail regarding how fucked everything was. Here I thought I'd forget.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
Maybe they just need to find a way to delete unwanted or unneeded info then defrag and reindex the brain.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
The summary makes it sound like the brain's database needs a better index.
I guess it can all be explained if you consider the human brain to be a Windows machine running Access.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The post is fine and all, but I wish they would post a story about a study into the age effects on the brain.
rewriting history since 2109
How I wish I had mod points today, although not sure if I'd mod it funny or insightful ;)
We'll take amnesia pills every 5-6 decades or so.
I saw this once on a t-shirt:
"I really do know it all.
I just can't remember it all at once."
I'll be 61 in a few weeks, and I don't know it all yet. But I'm close, really close now!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fuller
I love to read the little young snerts sounding so clever in their cock-sure certainty that in their Peter Pan worlds they can ridicule and mock those of greater age with impunity.
Guess what, snotty? You are nothing but a geezer in training, awaiting your inevitable turn. The only escape? Premature death.
How's that aging thing working for ya?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
"What shocked me, to be honest.."
So is he saying that most of the time he is *not* honest?
or does that just come with age?
Obligatory Simpsons:
Homer:Marge, every time I learn something new it pushes something old out of my brain, Remember that time I learned how to make wine and forgot how to drive?
Marge:Thats because you were drunk.
Homer:And how
That was intended as send-up of an older Married With Children episode (from back when Christina Applegate had boobs): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/quotes?ref_=tt_ql_3
Bud Bundy: You have to understand, Kelly's brain can hold anything. But there are some things you have to know. One: that it's totally empty.
Al: Woudn't you know it.
Bud Bundy: And two: that you can't just shove information into her head. You have to be careful. Feed her information slowly, bit by bit, drop by drop, until she's full.
Al: Full?
Bud Bundy: Oh, yeah. Kelly's brain can actually get full with information. And then you got to be really careful. Because each new thought after that will totally replace an old one. That's why Kelly forgot to wear a blouse on the day she went to take her drivers ed exam.
So from the data collected they should be able to calculate the big-O order of growth of the brain when it searches for words?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Fuller of information?
Is it just me, or did that topic title make you cringe? So I guess my mind treats information like a fuller treats wool?
Here is an article about fullers:
Wool industry
Also, things cannot be 'fuller' than full. Things are full or they are not. And even then, it would be 'more full' not fuller.
The real reason you don't remember as many new things as you get older, is that you realize just how useless most of the stuff you already remember is.
My brain is full
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Once during demo of a memory-techniques school, they made the audience learn a sequence of 20 or 30 words by creating a story based on visualizing those objects in your mind while they interact in the desired sequence (like a video).
In a book another described technique is to visit places (outdoor and indoor) to get used to them and create a DB of places to fill with the things you want to memorize.
If the proportion between a word and an image/video is similar in computers and brains... how faster than normal would a person fill her own memory? Will we be 40 and remember the shopping list of every week in the last 20 years, but won't be able to memorize anything new?
memcached and some better indexing will fix that.
"Ah, the power of the uncluttered mind!"
Isn't it about time that we develop a neural storage device to store some of our memories(music, movies, fantasies, useless things) and at the same time wipe or format those same neurons ready for storing new information.
This reminds me of a section of Jeff Hawkins' books On Intelligence. In chapter 6, How the Cortex Works, on p. 115 he says,
"Think about information flowing from your eyes, ears, and skin into the neocortex. Each region of the neocortex tries to understand what this information means. Each region tries to understand the input in terms of the sequences it knows. If it does understand the input, it says, "I understand this, it is just part of the object I am already seeing. I won't pass on the details." If a region doesn't understand the current input, it passes it up the hierarchy until some higher region does. However, a pattern that is truly novel will escalate further and further up the hierarchy. Each successively higher region says, "I don't know what this is, I didn't anticipate it, why don't you higher-ups look at it?" The net effect is that when you get to the top of the cortical pyramid, what you have left is information that can't be understood by previous experience. You are left with the part of the input that is truly new and unexpected.
In a typical day we encounter many new things that make it to the top— for example, a story in the newspaper, the name of the person you met this morning, and the car accident you saw on the way home. It is these unexplained and unanticipated remainders, the new stuff, that enter the hippocampus and are stored there. This information won't be stored forever. Either it will be transferred down into the cortex below or it will eventually be lost.
I have noticed that, as I get older, I have trouble remembering new things. For example, my children remember the details of most of the theatrical plays they have seen in the last year. I can't. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many plays in my life that rarely do I see anything truly new. New plays fit into memories of past plays, and the information just doesn't make it to my hippocampus. For my children, each play is more novel and does reach the hippocampus. If this is true, we could say the more you know, the less you remember."
My brain is full.
Based on the way old people vote, I highly doubt they have an abundance of information.
Years ago, I read about a theory that stated the 'mind' only has a finite memory capacity. So at aged 10, e.g., it looks like this
|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|
Each year gets condensed into an even smaller space as you get older - the longer you live, the more the brain condenses the information - and it is not stupid, it only saves the 'memorable' stuff such as the first time you had sex, got drunk, broke a leg etc.
So by the time you are fifty, you have 50 years crammed in that small space - and a lot of info is dropped.
The bigger the hard-drive and more full it is, the longer it takes to retrieve information. Especially information that is seldom used...because it's not in our cached memory space. I've also noticed when I'm heavily subjected to completely new subject material, I will dream about the new subject material. As these dreams subside, I feel like I have a greater understanding of the subject as a whole. Sort of a defrag process but it doesn't involve the entire contents of my brain - just the most recently acquired files.
The older I get, the more the world catches up with me.
(A highly ambiguous statement full of multiple truths at multiple levels - some good, some bad.)
What *I* find "interesting" is that even though old grandparents have always been saying things like "It's not that grandma's getting stupid, sweetie, it's just that when you're my age you know so much that it takes awhile to remember what you know", none of that matters if the newest generation hasn't climbed out of their dungeons to announce that they simulated the same thing on a computer. Relevance, anyone? Reverence, maybe?
I was unfamiliar with the principle that whatever an old person says must be considered correct, and that we don't need to do any scientific verification of it.
Quick! Someone tell the national weather service to get on top of caterpillar-based forecasting.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The counterargument would be to pit healthy 20-somethings against other healthy 20-somethings with vastly different amounts of accumulated knowledge. Does a young rabbi who can recite the whole Torah verbatim have less fluid intelligence than someone who never read a book? Do trained London cabbies with immense knowledge about routes (and who have objectively larger brain structures after they commit all this rote memorization) have less fluid intelligence than their age-peers? The "old people just know more" argument won't hold up if people the same age with verifiably different knowledge stores don't show differences in fluid tasks.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I've said for years that I have a steel trap mind, I remember everything. Unfortunately, eventually the pores in that trap become full and data starts overflowing without sticking. I need a pill to selectively forget stuff that's now useless like how to code in Fortran and COBOL or who pitched in the 1972 World Series.
Not to make any conclusions but It seems that all they do is run a bunch of simulations on a computer then pull this sweeping hypothesis from nowhere without an ounce of biological data or actual study of real humans.
You know how it goes with simple words or names that you have trouble remembering repeatedly? You get the wrong associations with people and objects end every time you can't find a word and you go through these wrong associations again you're actually reinforcing these pathways. So, next time you can't find the word or name, stop thinking! Or you may be stuck with a permanent misassociation.
Reminds me of a passage in the book "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins. There's an Irish character in the book who talks about the effects of alcohol on the human brains. He essentially likens the effects to the pruning a gardener does. You prune out the overgrowth, and the garden flourishes. Likewise with the synapses destroyed by alcohol. It removes all the tangles and unproductive regions, and lets the pruned-back brain function more efficiently. Drink up, /.ers!!!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
I am NOT lazy mom. I am just saving space for my elder years.
Agree. Unless "fill up" is interpreted this way, you might similarly say of the claim that "my computer RAM has literally filled up and there are zero bytes free" that there has been no physical cavity within the RAM chips which have decreased in volume due to contents physically occupying volume.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I was also bothered by this misuse of the world fuller. This article has NOTHING to do with a person who fulls cloth!
It makes you forgot details you probably won't need (and if you do, eventually it's still there in the back burner, until it is permanently wiped out).
Taking vacations isn't about physical rest, it's about brain recovery from burn-out that happens in cogintively intensive work
To most people "education" is about memorization of disparate crap.
Smart people make connections and arrange data in a dynamic and efficient way. Stupid people just memorize. It's not hard to tell the difference, and not surprising that a mind full of garbage piled haphazardly fills up and overflows.
Easy answers are what advertising and entertainment is all about. Let's see a study that logs the relationship between people's immersion in garbage vs. people who actually have some comprehension of the interrelatedness of things.
Pretty sure you'll find that the way information is arranged is more significant than the volume of it.
Add to that the two different learning process that have taken place over the last 20 years. Therefore the information has to be processed through two different file sharing areas in the mind. My son tells me we are processing on twin sequential turbos.
soon,
brain defrag and memory zapping services to keep your mind young
Young or old