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To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

quantamagazine.org

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Re: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#121

Post by taurath »

skate22 wrote: post #91
sirclueless wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a related corollary to this question though, which is whether systems that require less human memory enable you to remember other things better. For example, your phone can dial dozens or hundreds of your friend's phones without you remembering their numbers. This means you never need to use their phone numbers and hence don't remember them. A reasonable question you might ask is whether you are now free to s…

I felt this way for a long time about geospatial directions, but when your phone / gps dies and you have no map, it's kind of a terrifying feeling of helplessness

I skirt around this by instead of depending on turn by turn I study the main route and then only go to turn by turn at the endpoint. That way I gain the knowledge of the macro-infrastructure and main roads - I tend to give directions to out of towners even in cities I’ve been in for a week.

Re: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#122

Post by mattmanser »

ehnto wrote: post #111
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never heard of Aphantasia before. Funnily enough it never occurred to me to think of things as pictures for my whole childhood. Even though I am almost a completely visual thinker. It’s worth thinking about how you think. Eg if I imagine time passing as images of numbers, I can keep track of time and talk at the same time. If I count them out in my head, I always loose track within seconds.

Oh wow, I just tried counting to ten with pictures while thinking a conversation. Neat trick! I do something similar for separating my hands on the piano, the left hand becomes a pattern rather than literal chords and I can picture the hand placement and still think of the melody. Forever a work in progress that is though.

I wonder if that would work with the drums, I can never keep the foot pedal independent of the hi-hat/ride.

Re: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#123

Post by vanderZwan »

ZeikJT wrote: post #120
vanderZwan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC there is recent research confirming it is at least partially stored in the same are responsible for muscle memory, which supposedly explains quite a few things.

If that is true, the obvious question is why is it stored there?

Well, there are strong ties to movement in music. There is a reason that you don't dance to paintings, literature or poetry.

So one option could be that music arises partly from our motor functions to begin with.

Re: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#124

Post by vanderZwan »

Retra wrote: post #113
vanderZwan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flaw in the attitude of Sherlock Holmes is that he does not consider the, for the lack of a better term, "compressibility" of knowledge. Then again, Shannon wouldn't do his thing for another half century, so it would not be fair towards Sir Doyle to expect him to have taken this into consideration. The brain actually does a lot of lossy compression tricks to remember things together, plus I doubt that knowledge a…

I think there's a related problem that would have been understandable at the time: if you don't understand how the world works, you are potentially missing out on patterned information which allows one to form more accurate models of the world across domains. The assumption that's made seems to be that different problem domains are all independent, but that's not completely true. That's probably the main reason that…

> The assumption that's made seems to be that different problem domains are all independent, but that's not completely true. That's probably the main reason that mathematics and language are so useful.

To be fair, the effectiveness of multi-disciplinary research seems to only have been acknowledged in recent decades, even though by and large the biggest breakthroughs have almost always been thanks to people looking outside of the silos of their field. The sciences are really "tribal", and it used to be much worse.

For example, when I started studying in the early 2000s I remember the ML bachelor (then: AI) having recently split off from CompSci and being super-territorial.

I also heard stories of CompSci having split off from mathematics a few decades before that, and during my Interaction Design (IxD) master I learned that it separated from HCI in the nineties (short version: HCI was idolising the methods of the quantitative sciences too much for its own design-oriented good, IxD decided to bring in methods and insights from the qualitative fields).

I wonder if this was better or worse in Doyle's time.

Re: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#125

Post by vram22 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #123
ZeikJT wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is true, the obvious question is why is it stored there?

Well, there are strong ties to movement in music. There is a reason that you don't dance to paintings, literature or poetry. So one option could be that music arises partly from our motor functions to begin with.

>There is a reason that you don't dance to paintings, literature or poetry.

Ha ha, well put. Although poetry is sort of like music, a bit, at least rhyming poems are. Just looked it up, this article is interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme

Re: To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#126

Post by [deleted] »

jeffwass wrote: post #15

Relevant convo between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (My choice of Italics highlights). Below excerpt from A Study in Scarlet , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887. —— My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled…

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