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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.'"
There's a word for people like you. I can't quite recall what it is at the moment, but I know there is a word for people like you.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
Don't worry, it will come to you tomorrow morning.
I've been known to blurt out answers to three day old questions, and have my geezer friends nod in agreement as if no time had passed.
Its hard to dig up a single nugget from under under that pile of tailings I've accumulated over the years.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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!
Its hard to dig up a single nugget from under under that pile of tailings I've accumulated over the years.
It's okay; you can blurt it out in three or so days when the article is re-posted.
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.
And that is what old age does. You forget what you've said, and you say it again. Longer search time requires one to maintain the goal of the search in mind, longer. This could potentially explain the wandering phenomenon in old age, where the mind wanders and doesnt' stay on task. The search requires more investment, more time, more concentration. Any Interruption to that search will require a different search to recover the goal/search you were originally maintaining. But this search for your old goal takes a while too and, oh a pretty flower.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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.
I also noticed that wandering about is (in my case) more of a character trait, than age related thing. I was mind wandering much more, when I was young. It took years till I learned, that I do and few more to learn how to control that. Learning that I do wander about was a tough part but few 'friends' were very helpful in teasing me into discussions because it amused them how I wander about connecting more and more of new aspects. They had golden moments of entertainment out of that which I noticed years later when I changed environment and they became less careful and more blunt. Come to think of it, this maybe the same process: my thinking was faster than the search process - I was just made that way. Reading Encyclopedia (does anybody here still knows what that is and how did it look like without looking in wikipedia or asking dr Google - young colleague of mine I interrogated on the subject yesterday, knew what that is but have never seen one) was one of the things that would help create effect by overloading brain with shit in relatively young age already. Which then leads me to the point where I think it is not really the amount of information but rather the spread of it - most people do not gather knowledge and brain is good in storing only some facets of events (sort of mp3 of nature), problems with search is much more visible when you have to search in this chain of memories and then the other etc.
interesting subject early in the morning. I suppose I spent early ours at work thinking about that and not about verifying why the system is f.ed up again and who did it.
Dual core ARM chips?
rewriting history since 2109
How I wish I had mod points today, although not sure if I'd mod it funny or insightful ;)
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.
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!
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
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 don't worship science as a religion. I reserve worship for God. I do look to science as the best method we've devised to obtain solid, useful explanations of observable phenomena. While we certainly did develop and use many technologies prior to discovering the scientific method of inquiry, contrast the effectiveness and pace of progress before and after the enlightenment to see that science makes our knowledge dramatically more effective and impactful.
As for using the whole of my brain, not just the "scientific" part, that statement doesn't even make any sense. The whole of my brain encompasses all sorts of functions, most of which contribute to scientific reasoning -- including, in particular, all of the so-called "creative" elements, since creativity is a core part of the scientific method; some of which have no relevance to or even detract from scientific reasoning but enrich personal experience; and some of which are purely involved with survival processes. It's impossible not to use one's whole brain.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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.
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