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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’

#41

Post by nice2meetu »

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…

Ditto on the "certain female family member who insists that she remembers things word-for-word". When she recounts her meeting with a friend it is needlessly tedious (I try to be a good listener of course). Complains that my recollections are too vague and she wants to know what really happened and is frustrated I won't give her details.

I think a large part of it is just that you store what is important to you. To me the day-to-day politeness is just filler. I don't care if they had black coffee or a latte. If someone was struggling with something and poured out their heart over multiple conversations, I'm going to remember what arguments and concerns they had and the mental model I built up around that situation. The filler is just unimportant and doesn't stick around.

My wife is the opposite. Signs of weakness are an embarrassment to be forgotten. She lives for the day-to-day.

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

#42

Post by throw1234651234 »

ThalesX wrote: post #8

As 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 am very interested in the topic, and have been looking into it for ages. I think most people vastly exaggerate their ability to visualize anything. Most people can't really hold a square or a sphere in their mind, rotate it, or change colors. The only people who truly can are really good artists. My point - you may be mis-diagnosing yourself, especially since aphantasia doesn't seem to have clear tests or definitions. How could it, if a verifiable test would be to ask a person to draw what they see, and obviously that confuses the whole test with one's art skill.

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

#43

Post by beaconstudios »

axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression 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…

This also ties in to the cybernetic concept of the law of requisite variety, where adaptable entities need to be able to compress their sense-data about their environment into an internal model that corresponds in complexity to their need to act - this necessarily involves compression as the totality of reality is effectively infinite and can't fit between your ears.

There's also the Hutter prize that ties data compression directly to intelligence through Kolmagorov complexity.

Information and cybernetic theories cut pretty close to a general theory of intelligence in my opinion!

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

#44

Post by mherrmann »

axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression 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 nice definition of intelligence I've heard is exactly the ability to form models of the world with predictive power. And a model is essentially a compression of real-world data. Physical laws are a great example of this.

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

#45

Post by myfavoritedog »

nice2meetu wrote: post #41
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…

Ditto on the "certain female family member who insists that she remembers things word-for-word". When she recounts her meeting with a friend it is needlessly tedious (I try to be a good listener of course). Complains that my recollections are too vague and she wants to know what really happened and is frustrated I won't give her details. I think a large part of it is just that you store what is important to you. To m…

My wife remembers what clothes people wear and the colors of their cars, their houses, and even the shutters on their houses.

I remember what computers people own, what the bread-winners of the family do for a living, and an insane amount of TV and movie trivia.

It's all about what captures your interest.

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

#46

Post by bgroat »

axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression 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…

In the incredible story "Funes the Memorious" the eponymous Funes has an absolutely perfect memory, but is functionally mentally handicapped.

He can't even abstract to the existence of "trees" because he can recall and diff all of the details of every tree he's ever seen.

He can't even identify that he's seen a particular tree before, because he can diff how different it looked in a particular configuration of leaves and shadows because of different wind and cloud cover

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

#47

Post by karmakaze »

ansible wrote: post #37
toper-centage wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been wondering the same ever since I read that Nikola Tesla invented/designed the AC motor in his mind's eye.

Seems to be along the lines of lucid dreaming, with a vast difference in degree. Sometimes as I'm falling asleep I can see vivid scenes or objects that I can--to minor degrees--play with for a short time before I either fall asleep or wake up, then it's gone.

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

#48

Post by ummwhat »

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…

A while back I went on a google maps street view tour of a place I lived until I was 9 but hadn't been to in well over a decade. I wasn't sure what to attribute to the tenuous nature of my ancient memories versus what things had actually changed since I last looked. It was honestly a bit uncomfortable and disorienting having this gaping hole in my perception of reality. Was the swing set always blue in that park? I thought it was yellow. Maybe they repainted it? I will never know.

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

#49

Post by Joel1234 »

axg11 wrote: post #35

Compression 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…

Que gracioso tio

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

#50

Post by ummwhat »

dotnwat wrote: post #22
ThalesX wrote: post #8

As 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.

I'll take a stab at it.

Imagine you sit at your desk all day answering emails. Emails come in, responses go out. Except when you step back from the desk, it's just a black void. Information from your eyes? That's just an email saying what grandma looks like. Pain in the leg? Re: URGENT. Nothing exists beyond the emails. The emails are reality. The brains representation language is the same as it's actual language. Why have more than one language?

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