Our memory shifts into high gear when we think about raising our children | Hacker News Reader

Our memory shifts into high gear when we think about raising our children

medicalxpress.com

41 pointsdnetesn14 comments

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This reminded me of this gem from the Simpsons:

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-it-for-her

When job gets boring or uninteresting I always remember that. For some reason it seems to help and it cheers me up.

That is such a sweet episode and always makes me tear up at the end.

My waifu knows i love her

Been working as a developer full time for the past 5 years with some 1 week vacations thrown in here and there (I can count them all on one hand).

I'm on week 4 of a 12 week loa for baby #3. I was totally focused on my career, side project(s), and keeping up w/ latest tech to stay relevant my memory felt foggy if you were to ask me household/family things that my awesome wife just took care of on the daily.

I've noticed a complete change in me remembering what my family has going on. Household stuff, etc. It's been great!

Isn't this just a case of you paying attention to the things you are focused on most during the day?

Ok, that was barely cohesive but oddly fitting the situation. :)

If you want to take that a step further leave your family for a year and come back. It wildly changes how all these things work in the mind.

Would you mind describing in more detail?

People tend to fall into routines when doing the same things day after day. The behaviors are predictable like training pets.

When you leave for a year all that predictability and programmed thinking goes away. It really alters how you perceive many parts of the world around you. I have done this three times when my part time second job magically becomes the full time primary job.

According to Miller, the failure of the mating scenario may reflect our prehistoric ancestors not realizing that mating could result in children because of the nine months between mating and birth.

This seems to imply that successful evolutionary neural behaviors are consciously learned, as opposed to being "learned" over generations due to natural selection [0], in a similar way to how a neural network is trained.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/50/10/883/234025 William G. Wright; Neuronal and Behavioral Plasticity in Evolution: Experiments in a Model Lineage: Evolutionary changes in sensory neurons correlate with changes in learning phenotypes, BioScience, Volume 50, Issue 10, 1 October 2000, Pages 883–894

Maybe a nit, but I'm sure at least the female of the species observed something within a few months, rather than 9. Sure birth by 9, but I'm sure they felt hormonal changes, physical changes etc which culminated with bearing... so not quite a 9 month gap.

yeah when I saw that quote the first thing I thought is that this is probably one of those non-replicable studies that was cherry picked out of a small sample size.

Makes sense- for a prehistoric adult, with very little cultural guidance to go on, to be able to empathize at all with a tiny version of him/her-self, it would probably be crucial to be able to remember a time when they themselves were that small. And when else would a hunter-gatherer be called upon to remember events more than a few years back?

Dealing with children could be the only evolutionary reason we have very-long term memories at all.

Long term memory is a key aspect of learning. We often consciously remember things that are similar to current experience. So being near baby triggers recall of memories of childhood.

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