10 ms·
The brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events
- bertlequant 10y ago2nd copy is in tape though
- tmsldd 10y agoBackup..
- lsh 10y ago"The experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to human brains too." I look forward to human trials.
- logfromblammo 10y agoUh oh. Looks like there was a bit of an overrun there. But you can clearly see that this is your signature on the release form, right? We advise you to avoid calendars for a few weeks, until you adjust.
- loader 10y agoMaybe in the future they'll simply erase the memory you had of being part of the trial.
- lutusp 10y agoThis is another welcome step on our journey between psychology and neuroscience.
- smitherfield 10y agoNot much real-world import, but this fixes a few aspects of the movie "Memento" I had considered plot holes. :) (How does he remember what "remember Sammy Jankis" means? How does he remember he has short-term memory loss?)
- johnfn 10y agoSammy Jenkins had short term memory loss. When he's confused about where he is or what he's doing, he sees the message on his hand, and remembers Sammys condition and understands he has the same condition. Yeah, it's a slight mental leap, but "remember you have Sammy Jenkins' medical condition" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. :)
- shahbaby 10y agoFurther supports the notion that understanding the neocortex is the key to understanding intelligence. "It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof Tonegawa said. What's going on during those first several days? It's probably re-arranging it's model of the world to account for those new memories. "The idea you need the cortex for memories I'm comfortable with, but the fact it's so early is a surprise." The neocortex is constantly making predictions about the future, so it makes sense that it has some short term memory of its own to make those predictions from.
- devoply 10y agoWhy do we need to understand intelligence, so we can make the intelligent irrelevant. Sort of like how the evolution of the human brain made animals irrelevant.
- tmsldd 10y agoWe need to understand intelligence because that is the only way it can be relevant..
- tankenmate 10y agoIf every human on the planet died the planet would largely continue on, if every insect died then the planet would go through a large catastrophic change. "Animals" aren't irrelevant, and the human brain isn't everything.
- reddytowns 10y agoIn both cases, the planet would carry on. It depends on your perspective as to which matters more, human intelligence and knowledge, or nature. I personally believe the former is more important than the latter, although that doesn't mean I don't value the latter as well.
- ominous 10y agoEvolution does not select for (y)our ideas of "importance".
- willvarfar 10y ago> Researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of individual neurons - they could literally switch memories on or off. So can this be extended to movie-plot-like memories be wiped, or false memories implanted? How did they identify the memories to be targeted and where they were stored? There's lots of exciting work to reverse-engineer and extract rules from software neural nets. Can the same be possible in hardware nets too, or will attempting to measure it interfere and distort it?
- stevenwoo 10y agoIn the article I thought it said they monitored the brain for any activity in response to the shock and the neurons that activated were assumed to be the associated in response to the memory. This is a far cry from being able to look at a neuron in situ and saying what memory or memories are associated with that neuron. This is an old article and may be superceded by more recent research but false memories may not have to be implanted, in some sense we do it ourselves every time we recall a memory http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-our-brains-make-memories-14466850/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-our-brains-...
- glippiglop 10y agoA more practical use might be found in psychotherapy - recalling traumatic memories to identify the relevant neurons and then switching them off. That could be extremely useful for treating PTSD if it's feasible to do so.
- cryptarch 10y ago"The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is [SPOILER ALERT] a movie about erasing the memories of a past lover, a very similar idea.
- uighjughhh 10y agoWhich was a total let down as a movie
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- GeeJay 10y agoHelpful for 'Memento', obsoletes 'Inside Out'.
- scribu 10y agoFortunately for 'Inside Out', the concept of memory is not the central component of the movie. Rather, it's the idea that we each have multiple competing subpersonalities inside our heads, which remains a useful model.
- sjcsjc 10y agoLink to paper http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6333/73 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6333/73
- Dowwie 10y agois there a package I can install to upgrade mine because this one seems to take high availability over consistency
- swombat 10y agoJust type "aptitude increase" in your brain-keyboard. You may have to read a number of books and live a number of years before the keyboard shows up though.
- chatmasta 10y agoWith the right medication, you might be able to accelerate the appearance of that keyboard, at least for a few hours. :)
- dmitripopov 10y agoTons of "Improve your memory" books are irrelevant from this moment. No suprise that none of them actually worked for anyone except placebo effect.
- mettamage 10y agoAny clue as to what would work?
- rimliu 10y agoCheck out books of the memory champions (Tony Buzan, Domnic O'Brian, Joshua Foer). The idea is not to improve your memory, just to use it efficiently. The core is very simple: our brains have a hard time memorising abstract things. Solution—convert them to highly vivid imagery/stories. Visualisation being step one, step two is somehow to link the resulting images. Here you have a choice of link system, peg system, memory palace/method of loci. That's basically it. You will probably learn some system for converting numbers to images (Major system, o Dominic system), but that's just a tool for the first step. Also, get enough sleep.
- stinos 10y agoHow did you come to this conclusion? IIRC the research is about finding out how memories are stored. Not about how to recall them. Or to make sure they are formed in the first place.
- psyc 10y agoRAID1
- shrimp_emoji 10y agoMore like RAM and secondary storage.
- amelius 10y agoJust hypothesizing but could it be that the brain is structured as two adversarial networks, which train each other e.g. during sleep?
- SpeakMouthWords 10y agoIt's always tempting to think about the body in terms of the technological concepts of the age. It's not automatically wrong, but there's nothing special about this particular era of computing that would mean we're working with the same methods as the human brain. Not even the fact that we call our systems "neural networks".
- Senderman 10y agoThey're called neural networks because their design mirrors observations from neurons in the brain. There's truth to your sentiment, that the current level of knowledge is always somewhat arbitrary, but to say there's "nothing" that suggests a connection between the two is far too dismissive of an interesting question posed by the original comment.
- ajuc 10y agoIf there's optimal way to solve the problems brain (and AI) are good at - then as times passes probability both we and nature use these methods increase. So we're indeed special in that we had more time than people before.
- trishume 10y agoHypothesis: Deja Vu happens when the long term memory isn't suppressed properly during the first few days. I often find when I experience Deja Vu I think I remember doing a thing I did the day before a long time before that. It feels like I have two memories, one of a recent event and one a vague recollection of something a long time ago. This sounds like exactly what one would expect if two memories are recorded, one suppressed for a few days and one forgotten in a few days, but the suppression fails. Does anyone else have Deja Vu like this?
- chrisco255 10y agoDeja Vu happens when they change something in the Matrix.
- saurabh 10y agoThis is the correct explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KmNZNT5xw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KmNZNT5xw
- yathern 10y agoIn my experience Deja Vu doesn't happen for something I remember doing yesterday, but something I'm currently doing right now, or some combination of events that just occurred. But either way, that's a good hypothesis.
- jat850 10y agoThis matches my experience. Deja vu is not something I remember from a past event, but from something happening right at the moment. If I understand the article correctly, and a candidate theory for deja vu encountered on Wikipedia, this might make sense. I think the theory is that occasionally there are slight issues with the timing/synchronization of the memory being stored in certain parts of the brain. Since the research shows that memories are written twice, if such a desync occurred, maybe deja vu is some perception of disagreement between short and long term memories? For some reason, I find the experience of deja vu somehow quite ... pleasing. I am not sure if this is true for everyone.
- tannerc 10y agoWe've known this for some time, but this is additional evidence to the notion of our brain processing and prioritizing which information gets stored in short-term vs. long term memory. This also explains deja vu, but possibly not as many on this thread have tried to explain. I've written about this about two years ago, the leading theory of deja vu being that your brain processes and stores an experience in the long term memory before it's had a chance to properly store it in short term. By the time the short term memory has caught-up, the event feels already lived, because it's already been processed and stored in long term memory. At least, that's one theory.
- heisenbit 10y agoThis should have a major impact on learning strategies for long term retention. Short term retention may not be any indicator for long term retention as different mechanisms are at work there. But short term memory at least initially will hide any long term memory so how can we measure and optimize what we remember in the long run?
- Jonathanks 10y ago> ""It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof Tonegawa said. 'Strong case' The researchers also showed the long- term memory never matured if the connection between the hippocampus and the cortex was blocked. So there is still a link between the two parts of the brain, with the balance of power shifting from the hippocampus to the cortex over time." I have no good knowledge of neuroscience, so I'll be happy to read other thoughts on this. Personally, it seems to me that this is an evolved technique to direct us to: act on impulses at the moment of an event, instead of contemplating rational choices that may take too much time to arrive at (thus limiting our chances of survival); pursue rational choices in calmer times, trusting us to draw on stored memories of similar events to help make better decisions (the purpose of Deja Vu?) For the link between the hippocampus and the cortex being required to retrieve memories; maybe those memories are useless without the emotional context, and the hippocampus is needed to relive those emotions to have a more accurate recollection of the memories. It might not make sense (I know almost nothing about neuroscience), but it's a thought.