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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
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.
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.
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.
Nah, just need to keep notes on where you put things.
Have the location of the notes tattooed on your left wrist.
Have the words ”other wrist ” tattooed on your right wrist.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
... 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!
I accept there is a correlation between test results and perceived IQ, but since the very definition of intelligence is already controversial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Definitions) and tests are probably applied most of the time to measure younger people (career planning etc.), and also the time spent on a single test is very limited, it seems quite conceivable to me that some people might be good at solving more complex real live (common sense: display higher intelligence) while they suck at short tasks. From personal experience (older colleagues) I'd say there is a bias towards this type of people in older people.
Trolling is a art!
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...
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!"
I keep a notes pointer on both sides. I have a Redundant Array of Independent Wrists.
... 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.
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!*
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!
Dual core ARM chips?
rewriting history since 2109
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!
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.
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.
The reality is that physical damage in the aging brain can be seen, low memory recovery and basic IQ can be measured.
Whoah, careful there! Modern academia doesn't allow researchers to admit such ideas as "IQ" even exist anymore.
Despite the fact that you have a near perfect correlation between "big number = scary-smary" and "small number = catches flies with open mouth", instead we have to consider nuances... Like how your brain surgeon might not do well on formal tests, but since he stayed inside the lines when coloring in the anterior cingulate gyrus, we gave him a first place trophy (though the whole class got one of those, of course) and traded his crayon for a scalpel.
Then you go talking about measurable damage like amyloid plaques, and you might just get yourself branded an ageist!
They forgot to add to their model known degradation
In other words they took a fresh look at it, rather than designing the studies so that they simply confirmed already known "facts". What kind of a way is that to do science? Next thing you know they'll be using some cockamamie notion of quantized EM energy to explain black body radiation, when we already know that's not the way it works.
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.
Actually this research shows why age discrimination should be illegal, and the laws against it should actually be enforced. Therefore fwd.us will be spending lots of money to refute this research.
The brain functions as a large associated mesh. The more memories you have ...
In other words, you're proud of your ignorance.
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.
It's not about the storage, it's all about the index lookup speeds.
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!"
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."
I think you need a defrag...
I was fairly certain this was called sleep.
basic IQ can be measured.
And it is subject to the Flynn effect. So saying "It can be measured" hardly invalidates the idea that a better model of intelligence for aged brains will incorporate the various other things that are affecting the measurement.
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 skillful 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.
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.
I think it's a little of both, I've never believed that memory is infinite, but it is amazingly massive. .. very unimportant things, relatively speaking, in the overall scheme of life. I've learned so much since then, in IT and music, and yet my memory still held on to trivial things such as that. The brain is amazing.
It's startling what we can remember, and how much gets jammed into our brains day after day, month after month, year after year, not just knowledge, but trivial day to day events.. but yeah, eventually that build up has to have some repercussions.
Example of memory: just yesterday, I got my eBay purchase of SNES "Donkey Kong Country" for my son; now, I hadn't played it since 1995 (I sold all my consoles and games back then).. so, here it is, 19 years later, and we're playing together, and I find myself remembering where certain secret areas were, stuff like that
No wonder older people can get overwhelmed. At 51, I sometimes think I'm starting to feel it already.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
While I agree with you in general, Richard Feynman scored in the 120s on IQ tests. I score in the 160s. I am nowhere near as smart in any practical sense as Feynman was.
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."
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]
Except that Holmes was almost certainly twitting Watson with that. Watson had been trying to measure Holmes' areas of knowledge, and Holmes presumably was aware. In the later stories, Holmes exhibits a wide array of knowledge, such that Ballarat was in Australia, or the significance of the spelling "plow" in conjunction with a mention of artesian wells.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
I get stuff like this all the time, remembering completely trivial, unimportant things from years ago, and forgetting important, pertinent things. I do know a lot, as I spend most of my free time learning, but I am only 20. Although, I do have a schizophrenia spectrum disorder, and a multitude of other mental problems, so it's more likely not because I know too much. In any case, I don't buy the "knowing too much" theory. I think it's pretty well known that as people age, telomeres shorten and the body becomes less and less capable of performing functions up to standard. That makes a lot more sense for this phenomenon than people simply knowing too many things. As we already know, the brain is not like a hard drive or ROM that can just fill up, or be easily erased.
Your knowledge of the world will be a thousand times greater when you are able to learn and understand things without needing 172 separate double blind peer reviewed studies to confirm it first.
Garbage in, garbage out. You should try to make sure your facts are facts before relying on them.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").