The weird (scary?) point will be when we figure out how to subtly present adversarial information to the brain that will be coded in a way that collides with some target information to induce false recognition/ memories.
Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
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Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#22As someone suffering from Aphantasia [0] (I don't have mental imagery at all) and I've been telling people for the longest time that this is how I relate to the world. I summarize things. Even my mother's face. A post by a Facebook engineer [1] felt like a good way to understand it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia [1] https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/medic...
Same here. Recently tried to explain this to someone who has vivid imagery, but it was challenging. It seems we do have a wildly different experience of life in this aspect.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#23Maybe 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.
Another theory I read was that some signal from your hippocampus (memory storage) fires, so that the rest of your brain believes erroneously that the current sensory input is coming from memory.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#24Maybe 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.
At this point I would need the hash table analogy explicitly disproved because I see something more and more like the computers we develop
Short term memory operates radically different than long term memory
Co processors doing specialized processing, with a limited ability of other processors to do it
Each having their own currently unknown instruction set
Bus between the processor with varying bandwidth constraints
Modules for processing certain kinds of input, maybe some completely vestigial after deprecation
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#25The weird (scary?) point will be when we figure out how to subtly present adversarial information to the brain that will be coded in a way that collides with some target information to induce false recognition/ memories.
Read "The Mind is Flat" - your idea is a theme of the book.
We already have a few examples of adversarial information for humans: optical illusions being the most widely discussed.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#26In 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.
Good reminder to backup your smartphone photos so you don’t lose them to a brickening or lockout.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#27The weird (scary?) point will be when we figure out how to subtly present adversarial information to the brain that will be coded in a way that collides with some target information to induce false recognition/ memories.
So I remember reading somewhere, probably on HN, that we don't remember real facts but instead we remember our last call of a particular memory. I've hijacked some unpleasant memories that way. I'll add some colors, a round ball bouncing, all kind of stuff that'll alter the memory. It doesn't make it totally disappear but it kinda smoothen it.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#29As someone suffering from Aphantasia [0] (I don't have mental imagery at all) and I've been telling people for the longest time that this is how I relate to the world. I summarize things. Even my mother's face. A post by a Facebook engineer [1] felt like a good way to understand it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia [1] https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/medic...
I realized some time ago when I learned of Aphantasia that it is a spectrum. From 0 to 10, 10 being perfect photographic memory and zero being total Aphantasia, I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle. I can recall images, sounds, memes, faces, but in terrible quality, with very little color or focus, more similar to fast paced dreams than photographs.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#30Thanks for hijacking my scrolling. I really don't like having a consistent experience across pages.