Our memory is better than experts thought
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
> The psychologist read passages of Greek to his son from the age of fifteen months to three years. He later tested the boy for retention at ages eight, fourteen, and eighteen by having him memorize the original passages and some comparable new passages. At age eight it took the boy 27 percent fewer trials to memorize the original passages than the new passages, suggesting a considerable savings in relearning effort as a result of retention of the earlier learning. The methods of recall and recognition would likely have shown no evidence of remembering. The savings decreased from 27 percent at age eight, to 8 percent at age fourteen, and to only 1 percent at age eighteen.
Higbee, Kenneth L. Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It (p. 28). Da Capo Press. Kindle Edition. (citing 21 H. E. Burtt, "An Experimental Study of Early Childhood Memory: Final Report", Journal of Genetic Psychology 58 (1941): 435-39.)
As an example, I can only recall my own phone number if I try to type it on a keypad, either a real phone or mentally visualizing me hitting the digits. I only have this for a few phone numbers though, and not other numbers in general.
I also have some childhood memories that on the one hand seem vivid when I recall them, yet I struggle to describe when I want to tell others about them. Then the memory suddenly feels elusive, like a dream. Yet when I think about them, it's like I'm there in the moment... Other childhood memories are crystal clear and I can tell you all about them in great detail.
I also have a sequencing error, I'll fairly consistently swap the last two digits of a sequence when recalling. This was especially annoying when I worked at a grocery store, and would tell the customer the total was 371 say rather than 317 as the register showed. Yet I've never noticed any other sequencing issues, and being a programmer there's plenty of opportunity for noticing.
If you take away the hippocampus (if I'm not mistaken), you can still form procedural memories but not episodic memories. There was a relatively famous case of that happening.
> The cerebellum makes up just 10% of the total volume of the brain, yet it contains an estimated 50% to 80% of the brain's neurons.
I wonder if "muscle memories" are just a side-phenomenon of involving more neurons in this densely populated area of the brain.
Watched a video of a Japanese researcher showing a video picture of symbols to a chimp which then faded away within a few seconds.
I then got a food treat if it could recall the pattern on the touch screen - on the more difficult levels it had to also remember the sequence of the patterns as well.
Chimps always won against a human.
If you think about it, there's nothing especially mysterious about good memory per se if we view it as something like writing things down or a recording. You have to put effort into destroying the memory. Degradation is comparatively slow. So to judge how good (or conversely, bad) memory is, you have to determine what the goal is and the "architecture" implementing it. Recalling recent images that are destroyed shortly after being recorded vs. a mind map of conceptual relations, for example.
We are more on collaborating and thus evolved language.
Take chess grandmasters, for a counterexample. Their memory of chess positions and speed of processing them is incredible. Here's an example of puzzle rush, where the puzzles get progressively harder: https://youtu.be/B2ywPhNygM8?t=370
Someone wanna slap that game together and share the link? It would be fun to self test what the chimp was doing. Still though, really amazing to see how similar we are to them.
In medium mode, the numbers are hidden only after you click on 1. In hard mode, the numbers are flashed for 210ms. I couldn't succeed with that one, not even close.
The game is very rough and not mobile-friendly though, sorry. I know nothing about front-end development and my interest quickly waned.
.. but jokes aside. Science, understandably, seems to have a component view of humans. We have memory, strength, consumption of calories etc etc. We have all these mechanisms and we can quantify a lot of it. But as far as mental capability goes, to me it seems.. unlimited? Well, we will die one day, the body will stop working, that's a limit. But assuming we are healthy... I mean it just seems to me that we are nowhere near finding out the limits of thought.
Why did something click and suddenly we're smart enough to build rockets, fly to other planets, split the atom, and reason about the very nature of reality?
And a tickler for thought: Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zbqLuTgTCu365MNu9/your-dog-i...
I mean, you can teach animals words, but you can't teach them how to structure thoughts to create meaningful longer conversations.
I love this kind of hubris. People thought that there is no use for the appendix either.
Can you please quote sources that prove what you just said?
There were, other hominids. We exterminated them/added their diversity to our own. Tibetans have adaptations to high altitude that pre-date the emergence of Homo Sapiens because a small part of their ancestry is Denisovan.
> Why did something click and suddenly we're smart enough to build rockets, fly to other planets, split the atom, and reason about the very nature of reality?
There was no click. There was nothing terribly sudden about it on any human timescale. 200,000 years ago we were anatomically modern. There were almost certainly some individuals then who could be acculturated to now, if transport was possible. It took over 150,000 years to develop settled agriculture. All that time those people were smart enough to reason. What eventually happened was cultural accumulation more than any genetic change. We are the dumbest possible species that is capable of what we do. Otherwise we’d have done it earlier.
Whenever I get annoyed with "how stupid people are", I try to remember this (the irony that I am of average intelligence is not lost on me). It gives our species a lot of slack. If we had to be more intelligent to achieve our current society, it would be more fragile.
It allows discoveries and thoughts to be spread to others. This leads to progress, rather than a reset for each generation. Figuring out how to communicate through writings takes this to yet another level.
Not my field though so might be way off.
Those have come in the past 100-ish years despite the species not getting appreciably smarter in that small span of time. That is strong evidence that these leaps are due to process and culture, not just intelligence.
That said, there should be room for an intelligent species in the ocean, too.
She showed how false memories can be implanted and that our memories work differently from folk psychology (how people generally think the mind works). Her work was and is important with respect to court cases (eyewitness accounts, etc).