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Comment by hellameta | Hacker News Reader

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 for simplicity) - you are implying you can hear a new song and forget an old one, AND KNOW that you forgot an old one(?). You're trolling us for sure.

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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 the name (I can even often remember where I first learned its name), but I can now no longer tell you what it is. Basically I have memories of what my brain used to be like without it being like this anymore.

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.

So you forget things. Everyone does. Now demonstrate that forgetting is caused by learning. It seems you just assumed that part.

One way of demonstrating this is if the rate of forgetting old information increases when you are doing some intense learning (either studying in school, or taking additional vacations, etc).

Has that been your perception? How do you measure that?

This is definately hard to prove particular since we are talking about my own perception of my brain. Due to the nature of my career I have never had to stop learning new concepts and skill and the pace of this learning has been pretty constant over the last 25 years.

What I can say is that up until my late 20s this learning did not seem to come at the expense of past learning or memories. Since then I have noticed that while I can still learn new things at around the same pace as in the past, that new learning seems to kick out the old.

Since my ability to learn has not changed (I have had to do courses and other external tests that confirm this personal observation), then the most parsimonious explanation is that new learning is coming at the expense of old learning which is just another way of saying my brain is full :)

Of course it is possible that my memory storage capacity is just getting smaller with age, but if this was the case I would expect it to impact on my ability to learn new things now. My perception is my brain can hold around 30 years worth of learning and as you get old that capacity gets stretched to the point that gaps start to appear. While better than the alternative, getting old is not good :(

Kind of like how I can't remember a thing about a rafting trip I was supposedly on when I was 19, but I clearly remember running into someone I was on that trip with, and discussing/reminiscing about it, when I was 22. So at 22 I clearly had the memory (enough to talk in detail about it), and I now (more than 20 years later) have a recollection of that conversation, but other than that the memory of that trip at 19 is totally purged. (except some vague recollection about glowing moss in the woods).

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?

I thought this was why people carry around phones - why remember anything when you can just ask siri?

I think it's possible to know that you forgot something. You can remember the title of a song, but the lyrics/details are deleted and replaced with a much shorter "memory was deleted to free space" message :-)

This is true - the metadata about a memory and the actual memory are often stored seperately. In regard songs memory loss seems to occur with the song title before the cord progression is lost. This results in the classic old person lament that all new music sounds the same.

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