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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’

#61

Post by ben_w »

robmccoll wrote: post #21

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.

I think this is already possible.

I have seen research where false memories were induced into people by photoshopping childhood images of those people into events that did not happen to them — and worse, in 16% of cases just by showing adverts of things that could not happen such as meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney World (wrong franchise): http://people.uncw.edu/tothj/PSY510/Loftus-Memory%20for%20Th...

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

#62

Post by Symmetry »

That makes a lot of sense. One big result from a lot of the subliminal stimuli research scientists do is that nothing that doesn't enter your consciousness and get combined with your other sensory input streams get preserved by the brain for more than a second or so. As best we can tell conscious awareness has a far narrower bandwidth than your visual cortex so of course its dropping details.

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

#63

Post by ThalesX »

Borrible wrote: post #54
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 aphantast, but I do not suffer from it. When I am fully conscious, I have no inner vision, but I have vivd and colorfull dreams. If I remember them, outside that twilight zone shortly before full awakening. So I have an idea what it probably is like to have inner vision when fully awake. Allthough there are some disadvantages, of course. I admire people that are able to draw and paint based on their inner vision…

> Much more important for me was the realization that I can evoke images, scenes, etc. in other people that trigger feelings in them. Which in turn can trigger actions or omissions. Fear, joy, hate, love, disgust, lust. Which they can't do to me, at least not just by invoking visual images in my mind through words. Manipulative, but not manipulatable in this regard. With time, that came in handy.

I've also discovered this but I can only admit it to my closest friends else I'd be labeled a psychopath. There are things that trigger these kind of feelings in me, but it's more about situations than images and never in remembering something.

I do have a feeling that we might be more susceptible to do really nasty deeds if push comes to shove (Nazi Germany?) so I think it's something we need to be careful about as we can be manipulated into doing things that other people might find gut wrenching just thinking about.

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

#64

Post by Symmetry »

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…

This is more about how what you can remember about an event after five seconds differs from all that you experienced, as opposed to what you can remember a year later. I think most people can give a word for word summary of an utterance after a few seconds so this particular experiment doesn't really have any bearing on your relatives claims, which are more about recall from long term memory rather than working memory.

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

#65

Post by jotm »

The most impressive part here is the "decompression" imo. Computers are already being used to do stuff that's more or less similar (creating apps, 3D models, pictures, videos from code) but the speed at which a human brain does it is incredible.

It can be pretty inaccurate, though, adding extra objects/words/feelings/circumstances that literally were not there :D

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

#66

Post by copperx »

mherrmann wrote: post #44
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.

Creating models with predictive power is also a precise definition of science.

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

#67

Post by dqpb »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #42
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 definitio…

I’ve always thought of myself as being fairly good at visualization.

For example, I can imagine multiple 3D shapes at one time, rotate them, keep track of which direction a face is pointing on each one, etc.

However, I don’t really “see” any image. It’s more like a feeling of seeing it. Now I’m wondering to what extent other people actually see things they imagine…

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

#68

Post by JackFr »

> 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.

>This result indicated that only the task-relevant features of the visual stimuli had been extracted and recoded into a shared memory format. But Curtis and Kwak wondered whether there might be more to this finding.

——

That is outrageously bad logic and is basically assuming your conclusion. This is not good science.

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

#69

Post by Borrible »

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…

>claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later

And, is she right or does she likes to be right?

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

#70

Post by roflc0ptic »

JackFr wrote: post #68

> 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 a…

possible it's just bad science reporting
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