"...old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form."
Reminds me of this Married with Children episode I've seen ;) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/
Can your brain really be full?
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll concede that this might be true - but you most certainly can't validate it based on these descriptions. In fact, by definition, you are unable to forget "something" for every other "something" you learn. In fact - if you know you forgot something - is that not a new piece of information? Now that I'm writing it out I think it's definitely nonsense actually - sorry. As a parallel consider music (a "single" domain…
You can take a hash, delete the file, and record the deletion. You'll use less space, know something is missing, and even be able to identify the deleted file if you encounter it again.
Or maybe you can jam an SSD in your ear and use it as swap space?
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#33No more than a neural network can be full. To anybody who has worked with neural networks, the following comes as no surprise: old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form Weights in a NN like the brain would just gradually shift. Older, seldom-accessed information will slowly fade. That said, a NN can suffer from the trying-to-be-jack-of-all-trades, ending-up-an-idiot problem.
Another possibility is that two activation patterns are so similar that they interfere and thus they merge, one replaces the other or they both become useless noise. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting#Interference_theori...
this sounds like whats happening during an approach that is sometimes used in therapeutic settings: where a patient or client is induced into recalling a memory with negative emotional content, and then guided into transforming that memory by introducing competing neutral or if possible positive interpretations. for this purpose the result isnt useless noise, but instead its useful because the patient or client then experiences less negative pattern matching in daily life. at least thats the idea.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying it's a hard number and, one-for-one, if something new goes in, something old goes out?
Pretty much. Since around my late 20s everything new going in has been at the expense of something old. The only interesting thing is the loss is not a first in, first out system nor is it based on importance. I have retained pointless memories from the past and lost things that were quite important. All I can say is that my capacity is finite and I have reached the limit.
So then the brain must have some kind of weighting algorithm to decide what memory of equal value to jettison. Surely learning a few new URLs poses no risk to remembering which kind of car you drive?
And on the subject of memories, are all memories information? If you learn something new in mathematics, do you risk losing the memory of the cake at your fourth birthday party, or only something technical you learned about archery?
Also, if what you are saying is true, you are vulnerable to a DoS attack on your brain. I could flood you with new information right now and, if you read it, you might not remember your mother's name by the end of it.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The brain is constantly evicting, shifting, and changing memories as new stimuli come in and change the connectivity of our neurons. In that sense the brain, from inception, is full in the same sense that in an artificial neural network every neuron has a weight. The only thing that changes are the weights. (Note that I realize ANNs are a dramatically overly simplified representation of the brain, but the point remai…
The brain may also choose to re-encode a memory as part of a recognized pattern, in a sense, finding a way of compressing memories as recognizing them as part of a kind.
Lossy compression is still a loss of information.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. Since around my late 20s everything new going in has been at the expense of something old. The only interesting thing is the loss is not a first in, first out system nor is it based on importance. I have retained pointless memories from the past and lost things that were quite important. All I can say is that my capacity is finite and I have reached the limit.
So then the brain must have some kind of weighting algorithm to decide what memory of equal value to jettison. Surely learning a few new URLs poses no risk to remembering which kind of car you drive? And on the subject of memories, are all memories information? If you learn something new in mathematics, do you risk losing the memory of the cake at your fourth birthday party, or only something technical you learned ab…
Your mention of the idea of DoSing someone's brain reminds me of Ewen Cameron's experiments attempting to "depattern" people.
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation... )
Rather horrifying.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. Since around my late 20s everything new going in has been at the expense of something old. The only interesting thing is the loss is not a first in, first out system nor is it based on importance. I have retained pointless memories from the past and lost things that were quite important. All I can say is that my capacity is finite and I have reached the limit.
So then the brain must have some kind of weighting algorithm to decide what memory of equal value to jettison. Surely learning a few new URLs poses no risk to remembering which kind of car you drive? And on the subject of memories, are all memories information? If you learn something new in mathematics, do you risk losing the memory of the cake at your fourth birthday party, or only something technical you learned ab…
I've found that my weighting is a function of recall. The more often I recall a memory, the more likely I am to continue to remember it, conversely unrecalled memories tend to fade more and in a sense become compressed or move to cold storage which requires more concentration to recall.
I've always assumed this was an evolutionary result of weighting memories based on their usefulness, wherein the most useful memories are correlated with their recall frequency. I.e. they are the most useful for surviving my day to day life since I seem to need them a great number of times.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll concede that this might be true - but you most certainly can't validate it based on these descriptions. In fact, by definition, you are unable to forget "something" for every other "something" you learn. In fact - if you know you forgot something - is that not a new piece of information? Now that I'm writing it out I think it's definitely nonsense actually - sorry. As a parallel consider music (a "single" domain…
No I am not trolling. The reason I know (more precise I think I know) that every new piece of information I learn is at the expense of something old, is that the old is not always lost without the metadata about the old being retained. I am often left with the memory of having once known something, but now lacking the actual knowledge. To give you an example I often come across plant species where I know I once knew…
I experience a very similar thing. You aren't alone in being able to look at meta-states of your mind and realize it's different, or things are slipping.
For me, I noticed I no longer had instant recall of various remote control buttons. Was a small thing, but until that time, I stored maps of buttons and modes for everything. Now, I sometimes do, but I find I have the general rules, and need to parse devices and apply them now, not just thought as action as it was before.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#39My brain is definitely full. Every new thing I learn comes at the expense of something else I know (I guess this should be past tense). The funny thing is I still remember when my brain had spare capacity - I used to fill it with arbitrary facts like what page I was up to when I was reading dozens of books at once. When I was young I never read one book at a time or used bookmarks. I would just remember the page I wa…
What about your ability to understand and process new information?
I'm finding almost everything to be much easier to understand now, compared to how it was when I was younger. Back then, I could focus, read at much faster speeds and my memory seemed way better, if measured by the amount of information I could remember. Entire texts were memorized with one or two passes. But then I'd have to spend time figuring out what to do with the information.
Now, my feeling is that wherever data I absorb is slotted right next to familiar concepts, so even though I read slower, the amount of 'post-processing' is much reduced.
It feels like a compression algorithm. "This new concept is like A and B, except for X, and Y, which are similar to Z". Sometimes, I caught myself saying that aloud. I've had to develop coping mechanisms however, to avoid jumping to conclusions, as my brain loves to do.
Entirely unfamiliar concepts are now way harder. From foreign languages (with different roots) to... Haskell.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#40No more than a neural network can be full. To anybody who has worked with neural networks, the following comes as no surprise: old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form Weights in a NN like the brain would just gradually shift. Older, seldom-accessed information will slowly fade. That said, a NN can suffer from the trying-to-be-jack-of-all-trades, ending-up-an-idiot problem.
Another possibility is that two activation patterns are so similar that they interfere and thus they merge, one replaces the other or they both become useless noise. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting#Interference_theori...
I have that problem trying to recall some books that I've read. I used to read a lot, and so many of the books I read as a teen seem to have merged into bigger story threads.