10
How do the brains of savants such as Orlando Serrell and Temple Grandin compare to a standard brain?
I believe the answer lies in minicolumnar morphology in the neocortex. It's been shown that the minicolumns of autsitics and gifted individuals have narrower minicolumns, with greater spacing between each minicolumn. It's speculated that this creates an increased ability to distinguish percepts. Here is a paper on the topic:
Casanova MF, Switala AE, Trippe ...
9
No. I don't think so. There are many arguments for why this is not the case.
A common understanding of human memory is that it is part of an information processing system: attention, sensation, perception, interpretation, memory consolidation, forgetting, and memory recall. In some sense all these represent possible points of failure. Thus, we can fail to ...
9
As Chuck pointed out in the comments, it's important not to take a metaphor too literally. Comparing our memory to a mailbox may have some validity, it is not true that our memory can "fill up"-- i.e., that we have a limited capacity for knowledge in general. No matter how old or how many facts you have learned, you will always be capable of learning new ...
8
It sounds like you are interested in the Spacing Effect.
A search on Google Scholar for "spacing effect" for articles published since the year 2000 yields over 2500 articles some of which might be worth pursuing.
Perhaps you might want to start by having a read through the meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Cepeda et al (2006). To quote the ...
8
Just to add to Jens answer, opinion is still divided regarding whether memory is subserved by distinct systems, or is a distributed, emergent property of perceptual, navigational and semantic systems. Whereas patient data has always strongly implicated distinct memory systems (e.g., declarative vs non-declarative), multivariate fMRI studies have provided ...
8
Although this is quite an old question, I thought I would add additional
information regarding this topic for consideration.
As already noted, the storage capacity of the human brain is certainly very impressive. However, there are also some interesting quirks to human memory worth noting.
does memorising a new thing increase the chance of losing ...
7
Suppose a person learns a subject in college and waits for 10 years before learning it again. An exam is given one week after the person relearns the subject. So in this case, the ISI (inter-study interval) is very long compared to the RI (retention interval). The person will definitely forget some of the material after the 10 years. So how long they would ...
7
It seems this "fact" is becoming more debatable. This article and this article might clear up some misconceptions and confusion about this issue.
It's incredibly difficult to say anything about memory that applies to all situations. Each person will remember different things for different lengths of time, but often it is not based on some aspect of ...
7
Memories are generally understood to be encoded within networks of neurons, and not within neurons themselves. New neurons are certainly useful, but they are not necessary to store new memories.
Indeed, the hippocampus is extremely plastic, meaning that the connection strength between different neurons can change rapidly, and sometimes, new connections are ...
7
If I understood correctly, you are talking about "false memories" in the context of the following definition in (Johnson, M. K., 2001)
"A false memory is a mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be
a veridical representation of an event from one's personal past.
Memories can be false in relatively minor ways (e.g., believing one
last saw the ...
6
As far as your first question is concerned:
It seems that you're interested in the distinction between declarative and nondeclarative forms of memory. These different forms of memory have also been termed knowing that and knowing how (Cohen & Squire, 1980)
Nondeclarative memory, according to Squire (2004), is an umbrella term refering to Procedural ...
6
First, whenever talking about memory, it helps to be specific. Memory is, somewhat controversially, categorized in a number of different ways.
I'll take the liberty of assuming that you are specifically referring to episodic memory. Given your examples, we might even call it autobiographical episodic memory.
Episodic memory is special in that it is a ...
6
What I do not quite understand is: What is (according to Syka) "useless information" and how should we "avoid" this kind of information?
Let me try and answer this as follows: During our lifetime, our brain undergoes "synaptic pruning", which lasts from childhood into puberty. Basically, the brain gets rid of "unused" synapses to make space for more ...
5
There are individuals who possess extraordinary memory ability, sometimes called eidetic memory. With specific reference to your question, a woman in Los Angeles has an extraordinary ability to recall autobiographical events from her past. You can read the Wired article of her story here.
At the scientists' behest, for example, she recalled—without ...
5
The literature generally provides strong support for the use of self-testing in cases like this, particularly via the use of flash cards (Karpicke and Roediger, 2008). The efficacy of self-testing for facilitating learning of arbitrary or complex sets of items has been suggested to be driven largely by the combination of two effects: the generation effect (...
answered Mar 31 '13 at 10:11
Christian Hummeluhr
6,6774 gold badges43 silver badges113 bronze badges
5
Short answer
Over-thinking
Background
Unconscious recall of information can be more effective than conscious recall of that same information. Disruption of the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (by TMS) improved image-recall in healthy subjects (source: UC Santa Barbara). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with executive functions ...
4
There is strong evidence that suggests there are changes in neural pathways, synapses, and even birth of new neurons due to changes in behavior, environment and neural processes. That is known as Neuroplasticity, which suggests that our brain's capacity can be "recycled" and even augmented in many cases.
If I had to choose a metaphor to make an analogy of ...
4
Depending on what you consider 'photographic memory', there is a documented psychological syndrome called 'hyperthymesia' or 'highly superior autobiographical memory'. People with this condition can recall mundane aspects of nearly every day of their lives, such as what shoes a stranger was wearing 20 years ago. It's not quite the same as what 'eidetic ...
4
Just a few words on mnemonics before answering your question. I have been practicing for two years. First because I was impressed how easy it was to remember items using these techniques. My personal best time for learning the order of 52 cards is 1min 40s, which is not really good compared to real competitors, but the point is that practicing 30min a day ...
4
Memory in the brain isn't super-well understood, so going to the level of "data-structures" isn't really possible with purely biological models. Not that a purely biolgocial description would be very useful anyways. When people ask how the brain works, they typically don't want to be told "molecule A interacts with molecule B, which triggers molecule C".
...
4
This is true if you do have a hard disk of 20GB, but the human memory is large enough.
You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive.
Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain's memory storage capacity to something closer ...
4
There could be several reasons, I'm sure. One particular explanation that sticks out to me is a concept called 'feature integration theory'. I mention this because the things you say you remember -- what the guy in a video looked like, a time when your spelling was auto-corrected, general mundane details or 'features' -- are in line with this theory. You ...
4
According to this article, yes it does have various symptoms including cognitive deficiencies that make us more prone to errors and less efficient :
Circadian rhythms biologically program us to stay awake during
daylight hours and sleep at night. Shift work goes directly against
what our bodies desire to do, and those that struggle with this may
...
4
Short answer
Dreams cannot predict the future.
Background
Likely you are referring to Deja reve ('already dreamed'), which has been hypothesized to be (Schredi et al., 2017):
...the distinct impression that the uncanny familiarity one is
sensing has come from a preceding dream, but one not usually
remembered until the experience is taking place.
...
4
I would say it depends on what your goals are and what parts of the grandmother cell "story" you want to highlight.
Sure, the output layer is grandmother-like because it can represent single concepts
If you are writing a classifier to identify objects, then in some ways, yes, the outputs of an ANN reflect "grandmother" cells in that they represent a single ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
