Most useful thing I've ever learned about memory: every time you recall a memory, you change it. Memory is not a fixed or static 'historical record'; ultimately, it's unreliable.
Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
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Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#82this makes sense to me, the thrust of this paper.
Reminds me of another paper which has impacted me deeply:
https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
>claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later And, is she right or does she likes to be right?
My accusation is that the conversation memory works the same way as the BBQ party memory. You remember a skeleton. This subject was discussed, and things were said that gave me a feeling of ____. And a few more easily compressed details. The rest is interpolated. Imagine a language model the size of GPT-3 being trained on one particular person's manner of speaking and then given a one-paragraph summary of a conversat…
Not to forget, memories are not only unreliable per se, but also change with each act of their remembrance.
For example, by character peculiarities, new experiences, current circumstances, etc. Often they are made up on a whim, without the remembering person being aware of it.
So in a sense, memories have a past and a history.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#84Compression is very well captured by the neural networks already. Value of using those features(or knowledge as we say) outside the purview of training data(iid) is dismal. Symbolic AI may help ?
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#85Compression 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…
The human brain also forgets, something that may be a feature instead of a bug. Also, beyond compression––brains are simulation machines: imagining new scenarios. Curios to understand if ML provides anything analogous to simulation that isn't rote interpolation.
People with hyperthymesia don‘t forget and don‘t necessarily seem to have any other potentially disabling neuroatypicality like autism.
Having it is a premium feature.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#86> 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…
Right, it's quite obvious that the memory is not being stored bit-for-bit in exactly the same way because if you ask the person what they saw after the experiment, they will be able to recall the difference of "lines" or "dots".
But the paper is explicitly looking at the representation in working memory; so two obvious possibilities are, one that the "orientation" and "dotness vs. lineness" attributes are being decoupled and stored separately in working memory (different "registers" if you will). Or the "dotness / lineness" is getting stored somewhere else (not working memory, some other memory system) because it's not "behaviorally relevant" (i.e. relevant to the task that the participant is attending to while creating the working memory). I'd guess at the first because my impression was that essentially everything that makes it into episodic memory starts in working memory, but I'm not a neuroscientist.
I think the OP is getting way ahead of itself with "The findings suggest that participants weren’t actually remembering the grating or a complex cloud of moving dots at all.". The paper is making a much more modest claim that "direction" is recorded in the same underlying way, specifically during a task where you're being asked to recall direction. It's completely possible that this intermediate/common representation would not be generated if you're just looking at the pattern and not performing a task related to direction.
I couldn't find the full paper on SciHub, just the abstract linked in the OP: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/. I'd hope the full paper talks about all this in more detail.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Which is the greater danger: the fearless few or the fearful masses?
Who kills more, the ice-cold predator or the whipped-up herd of people?
Of course, for hell on earth, you need both.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#88It 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…
I mean loads of people have very precise and good memories. Photographic memory as a term exists for a reason
> loads of people have very precise and good memories.
Or at least they think they do.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#89> 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
Reading the paper's abstract, definitely just bad science reporting.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#90Compression 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…
I have always thought that the best measure of intelligence is compression of information. If you can create a smaller, abstract model that is still accurate despite a loss in details, then you are intelligent.
Interesting counterargument from AI researcher François Chollet (creator of Keras and one of the main contributors to TensorFlow): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V-vOXLyKGw