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

directorsblog.nih.gov

101–110 of 349 posts

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> moves to his own house.

i'm sorry we don't have the technology for that yet

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

#102

I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you're right. At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory. What you store the…

One way to make this clear to yourself is to observe how much more difficult it is to "define bread" than it is to answer "is this bread?"

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

#103
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 am an atrocious artist who absolutely kicks ass at those mental object rotation tests. I can very easily manipulate objects in my head, but draw a picture? It's an ugly mess.

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

#104
post #73

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…

I mean loads of people have very precise and good memories. Photographic memory as a term exists for a reason

Photographic memory is not a real phenomenon though. But eidetic memory is real, some people can remember almost everything they read. But they don’t remember photographic images.

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

#105
post #102

I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of something you believe, even if you're right. At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded into your working memory, and with that information you arrived at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they can be kicked out of working memory. What you store the…

One way to make this clear to yourself is to observe how much more difficult it is to "define bread" than it is to answer "is this bread?"

Bread is defined as anything I think bread is, and the same goes for any other word. To hold another position would be in some way dishonest.

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

#106
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not necessarily, since models that predict correctly can still be wrong. Science is figuring out the real mechanism

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

#108
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

a good test would be:

Look at this thing, and describe what you see

Now, close your eyes and imagine another thing and describe it

comparison of imagery in reality and visualised. This presupposes people describe things visually even when directly seeing them, and not in other modes (texture, sound, smell , etc)

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

#109
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to make this clear to yourself is to observe how much more difficult it is to "define bread" than it is to answer "is this bread?"

Bread is defined as anything I think bread is, and the same goes for any other word. To hold another position would be in some way dishonest.

That’s not a definition :) And, by the way, a definition is not defined as whatever one thinks a definition is.

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

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you tell if something you're trying to determine as intelligent or not has formed a model?

Well, one thing you can ask it to do is to make a prediction.
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