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Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

directorsblog.nih.gov

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Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#11

Post by calvinmorrison »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #4

It all works this way (though a certain female family member would disagree, claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later). But my memory works this way. A summary "party at so-and-so's house, weather was nice, overall vibe was ___". The rest is context. You know what the house/backyard is like, you know the general feel of that time of year, you know the crowd that usually comes, you can easily synth…

One of my oddest part of my dreams, is that they often tend to be places from my childhood or young adult life and that my brain seems to processing the 3D layout. Like I will walk specifically to school, remembering the route, or through my church and I had re-visited a giant thrift store from many moons ago and my feet just trod the path right where I knew I wanted to go. It's like watching my mind process these locations into mental maps in dreams. Kinda neat

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#12

Post by ornornor »

ivraatiems wrote: post #9

Maybe this is why deja vu happens? You run the "compression" and produce a memory that's very similar to another memory? The brain is nothing like a computer, so the hash table analogy is almost certainly inaccurate, but it's a funny idea.

I read somewhere that déjà vu is when your two hemispheres get out of sync for a split moment and record the same input one after the other. But I don’t know if that’s true for sure. Or maybe they’re just rearranging the matrix.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#13

Post by akyu »

karpierz wrote: post #2

> It turned out that either visual stimulus—the grating or moving dots—resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a part of the brain used in memory processing and storage. > These two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain…

That's possible. But I think the reason why this is interesting is because you are seeing the same kind of representation in the brain for two seemingly different phenomenon, motion and orientation. It's intuitive to see how you could represent motion by an orientation (we do this with vectors in math), but its interesting to actually see it happen.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#14

Post by louthy »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #11
MarkusWandel wrote: post #4

It all works this way (though a certain female family member would disagree, claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later). But my memory works this way. A summary "party at so-and-so's house, weather was nice, overall vibe was ___". The rest is context. You know what the house/backyard is like, you know the general feel of that time of year, you know the crowd that usually comes, you can easily synth…

One of my oddest part of my dreams, is that they often tend to be places from my childhood or young adult life and that my brain seems to processing the 3D layout. Like I will walk specifically to school, remembering the route, or through my church and I had re-visited a giant thrift store from many moons ago and my feet just trod the path right where I knew I wanted to go. It's like watching my mind process these lo…

Using routes is a key technique in memory techniques (an the so called 'memory palaces'), presumably because when we went hunting for food we needed to find our way home, so memories attached to routes are a lot stronger.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#15

Post by photochemsyn »

The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging technique to get their data:

> "It turned out that either visual stimulus—the grating or moving dots—resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a part of the brain used in memory processing and storage. These two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain activity trained to recall motion direction was indistinguishable from that trained to recall the grating orientation."

Alternative hypothesis: the technique used wasn't sensitive enough to distinguish between how the brain handled the different information types.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#16

Post by MarkusWandel »

louthy wrote: post #14
calvinmorrison wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my oddest part of my dreams, is that they often tend to be places from my childhood or young adult life and that my brain seems to processing the 3D layout. Like I will walk specifically to school, remembering the route, or through my church and I had re-visited a giant thrift store from many moons ago and my feet just trod the path right where I knew I wanted to go. It's like watching my mind process these lo…

Using routes is a key technique in memory techniques (an the so called 'memory palaces'), presumably because when we went hunting for food we needed to find our way home, so memories attached to routes are a lot stronger.

Interestingly I was able to retrace the walk two decades later (we had emigrated to another country in the meantime) and while the "vibe" matched, the details were quite different from what I thought I remembered (this is an old town in south Germany where things don't change that quickly so it wasn't redevelopment).

But it was possible, with a bit of head scratching, to walk the route just from memory.

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#17

Post by __s »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #4

It all works this way (though a certain female family member would disagree, claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later). But my memory works this way. A summary "party at so-and-so's house, weather was nice, overall vibe was ___". The rest is context. You know what the house/backyard is like, you know the general feel of that time of year, you know the crowd that usually comes, you can easily synth…

Somewhat. But the compression can be unevenly distributed: a few key frames as single vivid images

Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’

#19

Post by 01100011 »

In my experience this plays out on multiple timescales. When you get older you start to have entire decades of life boiled down to the factual knowledge you gained plus a handful of episodic memories.

It's a good reminder to write shit down and take lots of mundane pictures. You don't realize until it's too late though.

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