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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

I didn't read the article, but when I got kids I was surprised they can actually remember for a very long time. Both of my kids could at e.g. 3 remember things that happened a year earlier, which still surprised me with the younger one. There was however a point when the older one could no longer remember some things from the past, as if there was a cutoff line to a previous life and he had transitioned into a new phase of his life.

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I don't know what the state-of-the-art is, but there was some work done that suggested that memories are formed encoded in the language you know at the time of formation.

I dug up some of this a while back[1].

My dad, who taught our language to immigrants, mentioned that it was known in that field that immigrants who lost their native language would also lose a lot of the knowledge they had from their home country, like stuff taught at schools.

Thus the memories might be there, one just can't make sense of them anymore and so they become forgotten.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37204047

I'm currently finishing the related work of my PhD thesis which deals with memory, so I want to chime in to say that some studies [2] have tested this, i.e. that memory recall is tied to the linguistic environment in which the learning took place.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242

[1] https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361

[2] Nevertheless, I am usually dubious about multiple experiments confirming related things from the same author(s).

I think I read here on HN a theory that memories are like encoded and as we grow the encoding changes and we forget how to access certain memories, this was a theory of course. Probably explains people with Dementia (I think?) where they randomly remember something and a ton of joy rushes them, but they also get very confused as well, probably trying to decode memories but they cannot, they instead seem to ramble and get angry.

I dont remember the thread but the context I think was regarding reading memories digitally somehow.

I am slowly becoming convinced of this the more I hear about it. We encode and store memories, we decode them, but as we grow and adapt our thinking, we forget. I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?

> I dont remember the thread but the context I think was regarding reading memories digitally somehow.

Funnily enough, apparently the language in the different parts of memory process (i.e. encoding+storage+retrieval) stems exactly from "digital computer memory" :), psychologists in the 40s/50s looked at the development of computers and started making analogies with the brain.

> I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?

Well, you have Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve, which shows how (in this case, semantic) memory decays with time but, with rehearsal, the memory trace (i.e. the neural substrate) gets "stronger" ("neurons that wire together fire together") and lasts longer in memory.

There are multiple types of "forgetting" (Schacter's "The Seven Sins of Memory"), what we usually mean by it is the "transience sin", i.e. forgetting because of elapsed time. There are several views why it happens, mainly storage failure, i.e. that memory trace getting weaker, or retrieval failure, being unable to get the right "memory cue" to retrieve that memory.

So, probably, if you start associating one particular [0] cue with the memory, and training that over time, yes, it should be possible to not-lose the memory (I don't think it will help with Alzheimer's, though).

The funny thing is that every time you retrieve a memory from long-term storage, it gets re-encoded before it goes back to storage so, basically, every time you remember you are modifying the memory a bit with your current biases (another sin!), thus also forgetting :).

[0] And choosing the best cue is already a hard topic, as it should be different enough as to not trigger many different memories ("cue overload principle" from Surprenant and Neath's "principles of memory"), and the memory should be not so different enough that you may get the risk of other singular memories interfering with it.

> every time you retrieve a memory from long-term storage, it gets re-encoded before it goes back to storage

I don't know how literal you're being (e.g. read once, fully overwrite previous), but it's a good model for "reinterpreting past events, with a new perspective".

This may be a tool/strategy for therapists -- I've spent zero hours in clinical psychology classes.

But anecdotally, very few people are open to reflecting on past events with greater charity for the remembered villain of the story. :)

Well, another one of the "sins of memory" (categorised along the sins of comission, instead of omission) is bias, which means modifying the actual transpired event with our beliefs and previous knowledge, either at encoding or during retrieval.

So, if at retrieval time, your beliefs (e.g. now you support legalisation of marijuana) and knowledge are different than what they were during the memory encoding (e.g. you didn't support legalisation of marijuana), because you see yourself as "consistent" you may actually remember the memory tinted with your actual beliefs (e.g. you were a supporter all along).

Furthermore, as we lose the complete experience details from our episodic memories, we start filling the gaps with our current knowledge and beliefs, too, to achieve some consistency of the event...

Quite interesting, but obviously, lots of variables and different things come into play in this topic.

> I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?

There's work that suggests our memories are kinda like magnetic core memory[1] in that a read operation is destructive and requires a rewrite.

I heard about it in the context of phobia therapy, where participants would get some drug that for a short term prevented new memories from forming, and then exposing them to their phobia. That would trigger a recall but not the rewrite thanks to the drug, and after just a couple of such sessions their phobia would be gone as there was nothing to recall.

I have a couple of distinct but mundane memories from early childhood, when I was 1-2 years old. I'm nearing my 50s and they're not nearly as vivid now as when I was a teenager say, but I've long suspected that the reason I can still relive them is because I kept recalling those moments.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory

I've heard of beta blockers, specifically propranolol, being used in this way in an experimental PTSD therapy protocol, I think back in the 80s or 90s. It didn't seem to go anywhere, or at least I stopped hearing about it.

This 2016 metareview suggests the reason is insufficient evidence of efficacy, for that and a couple of other anxiety indications: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724794/

The explanation can't be that neat. You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories. Maybe there's a subtle effect but that's very different.

> The explanation can't be that neat.

It's not an absolute, I was telling OP that, in fact, there was some research on what he mentioned. Basically, that memory is linguistic-context dependent, but as a subset of cognitive-context dependent (as well as physiological-, affective-, and several types of context). This doesn't mean that memories are ONLY linked to language, they have lots of different associations, things that work as a cue of the memory, this (language) is only one of them.

> You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories.

What does it mean to "lose language"? Are you unable to speak, to express yourself, to comprehend others, all together? What memories do you retain and form? Are you talking about semantic memories, or episodic memories? How do you measure that those memories are retained and formed, if you cannot test the subject due to the impossibility of communication?

It's a lot more difficult than absolutist statements.

Edit: typo (thinks->things)

I suspect it goes deeper than language even. We have associative memories, right? Given our learning, modelling, pigeonholing of the world along with our changing bodies, our older selves are unlikely to experience anything close enough to what our younger selves experienced to trigger that association and recall the memory.

I'm approaching 70, and my mental model is that the graph is getting so big that it's getting harder to navigate through it to the memories I'm looking for.

Interesting. I wonder how this relates with my anecdotal observation that my aging immigrant parents and their similarly aged friends increasingly rely and use the language of their youth found in the home vs what they learned in school and used in their adopted country and while raising us. Are old encodings being rediscovered and decoded? Or is there a degradation in the power of their decoder and so it is slowly going back to a foundational level? Fascinating stuff.

Huh. I know very little on this topic, and am pattern-matching that to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

That’s been my observation too. My completely amateur theory is that a young child’s perception of the world - their ability to contextualise what they’re looking at - changes so much that even if those old memories are still hanging around, they don’t really make sense any more. It’s more like a sliding window than a hard cutoff.

I read a similar discussion here on HN before and the explanation that its how our brain decodes memories shifting over time really hit me. I have a theory that if that in fact is the case, then things like journaling would help to retain memories in a superior way, since we can review such things as our encoding changes and retain it while we can still decode. Even if we dont remember it as richly though we will still be able to go back to a journal to remember something at a bare minimum.

I experienced this with my older child. Ever since he could begin to talk he seemed to have exceptional memory, seemingly recalling things from even before he had words to describe them. But somewhere between 3 and 4 it's like there's been some culling of memories where a lot of things he would have known if you asked him on this third birthday he's seemingly forgotten by his 4th.

Not enough to be concerned of any cognitive things, and he still otherwise seems to have an excellent memory.

My child, at 8 or 9, remembered a game I used to play that scared her when she was 2 or 3. At 10 she could no longer remember the game.

I might be misremembering, but talking with a friend years ago he was talking about a "New Scientist" article that described how the brain is flushed/cleaned of most memories at age 4 and again at age 7. Or something like that.

I was also surprised with my kids at 4-5 remembering when they were 3 or so, but now those memories seem to be completely, or near completely gone (at age 10). Perhaps they are just remembering the remembrance.

It's like there's a window where early memories seem pretty solid, and then suddenly parts of that window just vanish

I'd go so far as to liken it to a series of memory wipes between age 3 to 4. Memory otherwise appears to function quite fine, from day to day and year to year, but then large blocks all vanish in rapid succession.

Also interesting, as the article alludes to, is that infantile amnesia seems specifically related to episodic memory. Motor skills, language, and other learning obviously survives.

Makes me wonder what the actual mechanism is behind deciding what sticks and what gets wiped

yeah i think enough rewiring and adaptation happens in the brain that the older memories are still around but are no longer stored in the way the brain needs them to be stored in to be accessible at an older age, or something like that. they become inaccessible as the brain matures its ability to remember effectively.

anyone with kids knows that children remember all kinds of things, very, very early. habits, games, routines, schedules, things like that. these things are almost never able to be recalled later in life but they become part of your psyche somehow. for example you will often feel comforted when they are repeated later and you feel a bit "off" when they are done differently, even as an adult. I think a lot of parenting instinct is actually rooted in this kind of memory. The inclination to raise your children as you yourself were raised.

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