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Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

studyfinds.com

11–20 of 142 posts

Re: Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

#12

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me -- my mother was recently transferred into memory care, and the changes to her memories are definitely showing some interesting changes. The foremost was that her new "apartment" is shared with one other person, gives off a bit of a dorm room vibe. First day, she was talking about how excited she was to be going back to school and seeing her boyfriends again(?!). I said, "Oh…

I feel for you. Even though it's entertaining to read, that must be really hard to go through for you.

Re: Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

#13
The paper certainly has its limitations. Only 61 participants, with almost nobody between 30 and 50, so we shouldn’t read the age trend as a decline across lifespan. What’s more interesting than the title suggests (and I find the title forcing the conclusion a bit) is that the attention measures were not linked to age or the brain patterns at all.

Then again, i'm 45 and I've been losing my keys and my IDs since I was 20

Re: Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

#19

The paper certainly has its limitations. Only 61 participants, with almost nobody between 30 and 50, so we shouldn’t read the age trend as a decline across lifespan. What’s more interesting than the title suggests (and I find the title forcing the conclusion a bit) is that the attention measures were not linked to age or the brain patterns at all. Then again, i'm 45 and I've been losing my keys and my IDs since I was…

>I find the title forcing the conclusion a bit

The entire article is AI-generated.I wish such sources would include the prompting used as well as the model so a (human) reader can better evaluate the document.

Re: Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

#20
post #8

It's interesting to compare and contrast LLMs and biological brains. Both use a form of "compaction".

Compaction is not even an intrinsic function of an LLM, but of it's harness or whatever code is calling it. When an LLM compacts something it's just creating a summary of the previous conversation using the same mechanism that it uses to generate any other text. It doesn't "forget" the text from before the summary, it just no longer receives it when it is invoked.

In contrast, when we forget something we are not summarizing anything, we are just losing the ability to recall something. We might remember what we have forgotten later on, showing that it is still somewhere in the mind, and that the reason we have forgotten it is not necessarily because it has been discarded.

Even then, what this article is talking about is not even normal forgetting as a function of the brain. It's talking about a degenerative and dysfunctional form of memory loss where different memories are confused with each other.

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