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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
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 ...
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 ...
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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 ...
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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
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
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 ...
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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".
...
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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
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
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 ...
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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.
...
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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 ...
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It appears that they tested all of the participants (control & stress) at the same time:
Memory was assessed 24 h after learning. According to the model
by Joels and colleagues (2006), it can be predicted that learning under
stress enhances memory, in particular for stress context-related
information
Twenty-four hours after learning, ...
3
This is what I do to store something in the long term memory.
1) Place it in the short term memory (those methods depend on the material).
Use mnemonic memory techniques.
Repeat the facts in different order.
Relate the facts to something that you already know.
Organize the facts in a logical order (order improves memory).
Try to find semantic meaning the ...
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The brain structure for memory, association, learning and thinking works more like a network of weighted, linked nodes.
in machine learning and related fields, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are computational models inspired by an animal's central nervous systems (in particular the brain)
[...]
Artificial neural networks are generally presented as ...
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There is research showing that Black Cab taxi drivers while training with 'the knowledge' (2 months on a moped with an A-Z, learning every road/route in London) grew larger areas of brain grey matter concerned with memory. Therefore it cannot be fixed and fillable, neuroplasticity will grow more where required. Although this is not the reference I was ...
3
No, the distinction is real, not arbitrary. Implicit and explicit memory show different hallmark behavioral characteristics. A good overview of the difference between explicit and implicit memory is available in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. The wikipedia page on implicit memory also has some useful information.
Perhaps the most important ...
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No, it just makes the intervals suboptimal. Either bury the card if the opposite side came recently or change the card to the direction it will usually appear. (Sometimes it will be the description first.) The forgetting curve, memorizing right at the periphery, will still go back up:
There is also the study done by Glenberg Smith & Green about this...
...
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What you are describing may be the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon.
There are two major explanations for this: the direct-access view and the inferential view.
The direct-access view: the memory strength is just not strong enough to recall the item, but strong enough to trigger the recall
The inferential view:
It claims that TOTs aren't completely ...
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The answer is episodic. Episodic memory is responsible for storing information about events (or episodes) we have experienced; whereas semantic is for storing information about the world, such as the meaning of words.
While semantic memory would be required to understand and thus encode the words in the first place, remembering the list of words would ...
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The forgetting function
In this answer about the relationship between time and recall I discussed how research shows that the relationship is often characterised by a three parameter power or exponential function. The basic idea is that the recall is a monotonically decreasing and decelerating function of time since the event.
Forgetting as adaptive ...
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The search terms "gradual-interval recall" may give you another area to research. I found that in a blog posting about SRS
https://medium.com/p/5481606b087a
"In a paper on gradual-interval recall published by Paul Pimsleur in
1967, he hypothesizes the following intervals: 5 seconds, 25 seconds,
2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, ...
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the cognitive skills of a human population have a great variance. I am more like your friend, with episodic memory below average but semantic memory above average. You seem to have episodic memory above average (I envy you on that, because a large part of our feeling of self identity depends on episodic memory). There are extreme cases of people that ...
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