Aristotle more or less explained this as:
1. you sense an experience,
2. retain it (percepts),
3. when repeated, you extract the common denominators to form a concept (something you can recall and communicate).
Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
31–40 of 349 posts
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#32This is not surprising.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe this is the case. I have heard the same thing and it matches my experience every time I get déjà vu. I have this strong sense that what is happening has happened before, but I am unable to relate it to anything nor recall what should happen next.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#34Anyone know a good compression algorithm? Mine seems to be incredibly lossy.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#35Compression is a component of general intelligence. A few years ago I was very sceptical of machine learning ever leading to general intelligence. I've since changed my mind. There are a lot of parallels to this work and the concept of "embeddings" in machine learning.
Intelligence requires the ability to generalize. A prerequisite for generalization is the ability to take something high-dimensional and reduce it to a lower-dimensional representation to allow comparison and grouping of concepts.
We're doing this all the time. Take a pen for example: we're able to combine information from sight, touch, and sound. Through some mechanism, our brains reduce the multi-sensory information and create a consistent representation that is able to invoke past memories and knowledge about pens.
Our brains encode the embeddings in a very different way to deep learning neural networks, but the commonality is that both are able to compress data into a _useful_ representation. Note that as a result of this, the quality of the compression is important. Some forms of compression might be very efficient but they also tangle concepts together, resulting in loss of composability. The ideal compression (from an intelligence point of view) is both information efficient and maximally composable.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#36In 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.
Actually this generation will have a very different relationship with the past. Never before there was so many high resolution traces of your daily life.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#37As 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.
I wonder if that's something that can be practiced and improved upon.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#38How does photographic memory work, then, and does it interfere with brain function somewhere else?
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#39Announcements like this seems so out in front of what we actually understand. It's not like we can take someone's brain and read memories from it, right?
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good reminder to backup your smartphone photos so you don’t lose them to a brickening or lockout.
Actually this generation will have a very different relationship with the past. Never before there was so many high resolution traces of your daily life.
Indeed. We take photos and videos for our son pretty much everyday. He would need a good chunk of his life to review all these if he wants when he grows up and moves to his own house.