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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’

#141

Post by copperx »

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…

Is it really unique? I can visualize a sphere, rotate it, rotate the "camera", see it in wireframe, apply any kind of texture, reflections, make it bounce, like working with CAD software. I can picture the image through a fishbowl lens, or through telephoto. However, I do not believe, for example, the reflections or the light sources to be realistic. I can "see" the effect of changing the lenses, but I don't think they correspond to reality. I think that's where people exaggerate. The dimensions, light sources and reflections are not based on reality.

I can picture anything that I want. Movie scenes with my friends faces in them. I always thought everybody could do this. If it's somewhat unique, can I use it for something?

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

#142

Post by taylorius »

whatshisface wrote: post #125
alanh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It offers a one-to-one correspondence between stimuli and classifications, what else could a definition be?

Definitions ideally don't require an oracle.

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

#143

Post by bufferoverflow »

whatshisface wrote: post #125
alanh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It offers a one-to-one correspondence between stimuli and classifications, what else could a definition be?

That's not how definitions work. I can't know what your brain thinks bread is. And if you die, I can never know.

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

#144

Post by pizza »

copperx wrote: post #66
mherrmann wrote: post #44

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.

Slight tweak to this imo: models that can predict which new reframings/samples of current scientific-community-consensus SOTAs/benchmarks/datasets will disprove contemporary consensus is science :)

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

#145

Post by agumonkey »

fudged71 wrote: post #139
agumonkey wrote: post #36

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.

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.

Interesting. I forgot who said that in your best moments you don't have time for anything else. Indeed if you don't take pics it might just be because it was deeply interesting and not worth taking your smartphone out of your pocket.

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

#146

Post by dirtyid »

As someone who has problems remembering dates or names to events, I always assumed my brain had poor summary ability. Other aspects my mental compression likes to make fuzzy, clothes people are wearing, hair styles. But memory for locations, down to the room seems relatively loss less.

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

#147

Post by codethief »

ajford wrote: post #52
01100011 wrote: post #19

In my experience this plays out on multiple timescales. When you get older you start to have entire decades of life boiled down to the factual knowledge you gained plus a handful of episodic memories. It's a good reminder to write shit down and take lots of mundane pictures. You don't realize until it's too late though.

A friend of mine from some time back chatted about this once. His take was that as you get older, your "mental models" grow and are able to cover larger parts of your day/week/month and your mind simply keeps the important parts but lets the rest fade. When you're younger, those models are less complete and larger parts of your waking moments are needed to build the foundations of these models, so you feel like time…

> When you're younger, those models are less complete and larger parts of your waking moments are needed to build the foundations of these models, so you feel like time is slower since so much more of your time is kept "fresh".

As a corollary, if you want to keep on feeling young and feeling time pass slowly, you need to keep on incorporating "new" experiences into your life that extend (or change) your mental models.

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

#148

Post by WalterBright »

My memory made a lot more sense to me when I learned it was a giant associative array, with multiple keys to look things up with. When I forget something I try various other "keys" to find it again, and that usually works.

For example, if I forget someone's name, I'll try their last name, or their spouse's name, guessing names that sound like their name, trying common names, various syllables, other memories associated with them, etc.

If I misplaced something, I'll try to reconstruct what I was doing the last time I remember having the item. When I find the item, that is the key that brings up the memory of putting it there.

A consequence of this is my memories are not in chronological order (not at all like a movie). I can clearly remember events but have no information about what order they are in or when they happened, unless there is some anchor in the memory to tell me (like where I was living at the time).

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

#149

Post by robmccoll »

ben_w wrote: post #61
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...

Fascinating - thanks for the article. It's strange to think that however much we think that we're completely rational and can trust our own memories, we're more like malleable rationalizing machines.

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

#150

Post by ryanong »

TameAntelope wrote: post #96

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…

This also make sense how one can hijack someones brain into believing something even if they don't understand why it makes sense
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