Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
131–140 of 349 posts
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes me think of … Asperger’s.
I would think it's being an megasavant, sort of like Kim Peek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek Not capable of functioning independently or surviving for any long period unassisted but having a brain and cognition setup that allowed for amazing feats of mental wizardry. If you could have that ability and function normally in society you could do some astounding things.
That's how I understood it.
A great story about a mega-savant who can function is "Understand" by Ted Chiang, if you're interested
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#133Earlier 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?
You can't make accurate predictions without some kind of model
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#134It's not an indiscriminate lossy compression though, it's a summary your brain finely tuned for a specific audience: yourself.
What's cool in this whole intelligence process is we get to refine the algorithm of what exactly it is we want to keep in the summary.
In "discarding features that aren't relevant" mentioned in the article, we subconsciously pick what is and what isn't relevant.
That's why I think we sometimes have such vivid memories of some childhood scenes: something new happened, our algorithm at that time didn't know what was "relevant", so out of safety it decides to store everything.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of reasoned & formula based models, now we have purely empirical models. See Wolfram's New Kind Of Science.
Isn't wolfram's new kind of science purely rational? No observations of the universe needed
The universe is required to run Mathematica.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I disagree with this definition. We have yet to produce a perfect model of the world (aka, a theory of everything). All models produced by "science" thus far are "wrong", at least on some level (ex. Newton's model doesn't cover relativity). I think "Creating models with predictive power is also a precise definition of science." is a fair description.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#137Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#138Compression 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…
> 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 --- I wonder if various factors inform how/what compression is used on a memory... For example, a memory of putting the object back where it belongs/got it from vs…
Speculating here: if the brain really uses embeddings similar (in concept) to neural network embeddings, the mechanism could explain a lot of the peculiarities of the brain. Embeddings are naturally entangled, so are memories. For example, a specific smell can evoke a previous memory.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#139Earlier 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.
There was a great article on this recently. The author made the point that if there was a day, week, or month where there were no backups or photos then you might put less value on that time of your life in retrospect. Conversely there might be a timespan where you took too many photos and might feel like there was more value to be had in that time.
Re: Human brain compresses working memories into low-res ‘summaries’
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should add that as a geek I ought to have a better ability to remember, say, computer code that I've written. But am I the only one who, going back to something I haven't touched for two years, has to re-learn my own code?
>But am I the only one who, going back to something I haven't touched for two years, has to re-learn my own code? No, that is perfectly normal, and it starts much earlier, weeks sometimes days after leaving the code. Depending on its complexity and level of its abstraction. You mentally build something highly abstract without much emotional or bodily bond. Your brain has not much incentive to rememeber it.
Adding to that, there's a lot of sampling bias as well. If a function fits my mental model of it, then I'm unlikely to revisit it. If a function doesn't fit my mental model, then it is very likely that I'll misuse it, increasing the likelihood of a bug, and increasing the likelihood that I re-read the code.