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Overtaxed Working Memory Knocks the Brain Out of Sync: Study
- mromanuk 8y ago> In 1956, the renowned cognitive psychologist George Miller published one of the field’s most widely cited papers, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” In it, he argued that although the brain can store a whole lifetime of knowledge in its trillions of connections, the number of items that humans can actively hold in their conscious awareness at once is limited, on average, to seven. So, your mind can hold 4-5, not 7 things at the same time or it goes "out of sync" edit: added quote.
- bovermyer 8y agoThis seems to agree with my own experiences. I've never been able to hold seven things in my head at once, it's definitely closer to the four number.
- DiffEq 8y ago...and you may not be able to do a handstand. But if you learn the technique you can easily within a few weeks or less. Memory is no different. Learn the techniques recall and you will be able to remember more.
- graeme 8y agoDo you have any evidences that this applies to short term working memory? That's what the article is about. The limit seems to be 3-7, and it's not clear that's malleable.
- lhuser123 8y agoYeah. The number 7 has always seems to me like an oversimplification. Applicable to specific cases.
- perfmode 8y agohow does one begin to even delineate a “thing”?
- azhenley 8y agoA great place to start reading about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
- pmalynin 8y agoOh man. You should read Heidegger's The Thing. [0] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/nmwg/the.thing-heidegger.pdf http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/nmwg/the.thing-...
- dredmorbius 8y agoThanks, iteeresting, in a thingness sort of a way. Found the scan annoying, transcribed to pandoc Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/3HYkwASH https://pastebin.com/raw/3HYkwASH
- wm_throwaway 8y agoWelsh.
- yosito 8y agoThe trend of turning untested hypotheses into clickbait headlines is getting really bad. There is little evidence so far that the headline is true, it's just one hypothesis.
- havemylife 8y agoNot nearly as bad as taking one experiment and extrapolating as conclusive. To clearify, there isn't enough retesting of experiments to make good science from. Or when an experiment's results have been challenged or disregarded yet people continue to recall the first experiment's results. For example, the Stanford prison psychology study. However, yes, poorly constructed headlines meant to attract a click rather than true information is still bad. Though that might be a fault of the collective being more interested in snipping headlines without reading the articles behind it.
- dang 8y agoOk, we've added the qualifier ": Study" to the title above. But I don't think this complaint is so fair. As far as clickbait goes this title is tame.
- yosito 8y agoThe qualifier should be ": Hypothesis", there is no study that points to this conclusion.
- CodeCube 8y agoI'm curious how this might apply to your average tech worker/programmer type person ... Are there common missteps that we do which overtaxes working memory, and how can we adjust our working rituals to mitigate?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoOpen plan offices are one such misstep. We could adjust our working habits to be more privacy focused, preferring to err on the side of assuming that most hours of the day need to be quiet, private hours in a private setting spent on contemplative work, especially for collaborative work. It should be seen as rare and exceptional to need hours spent in meetings or group settings where dynamic real-time audio is required. That is a form of collaboration needed much less frequently than asynchronous collaboration built out of individuals taking a more contemplative and personally customizable, adjustable approach to organizing thoughtful work habits that don't disrupt others. (Note: I'm not saying I support this particular study on working memory, just that open plan offices are a problem in this area of productivity, whether or not this particular study turned out to be mostly click bait or not.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rashkov 8y agoIn my opinion unnecessary abstractions -- especially splitting code up into different files -- is a tax on working memory and leads to difficulty achieving flow state. Every layer of indirection takes up residence in working memory and so it had better be necessary, else it should be omitted even at the cost of some code duplication
- clarry 8y ago> In my opinion unnecessary abstractions -- especially splitting code up into different files It gets especially bad when someone else wrote that code and you're just getting into it. Layers upon layers of abstractions scattered across classes, functions, files. Each add very little on their own, but you kinda have to keep it all in your head (or write it down as I do) if you're planning to grok it and fix that bug. It's kinda like reading some piece of code not in its final form, but as a pile of diffs are applied to it. Fun. :-) I find older style procedural code with longer functions generally much easier to get into than any OOP.
- azhenley 8y agoI just wrote up a human memory section in my dissertation a few days ago. There seem to be two more widely accepted limits to working memory than George Miller's 1950s limit: (A) 3-5 chunks [1] or (B) it depends greatly on the context and type of chunk (e.g., visuospatial) . [1] N. Cowan. Metatheory of storage capacity limits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1):154176, 2001.
- Nomentatus 8y agoOMG we still have mercury delay line memories as our "working memory", no wonder the world is a damn mess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory "Miller thinks the brain is juggling the items being held in working memory one at a time, in alternation. “That means all the information has to fit into one brain wave,” he said. “When you exceed the capacity of that one brain wave, you’ve reached the limit on working memory.” " File it under "path dependence," Pops. TIE (This is Evolution.) (a la "TIL")
- p1necone 8y agoIt's interesting - we have delay line memory effectively, but rather than bits the individual chunks we can carry are these big fuzzy nebulous concepts which possibly encode quite a lot of information in one chunk - albeit with many errors.
- namibj 8y agoConsider that there are ways to keep semi-coherent non-quantisizing thoughts. You can sythnesize such an abstract concept if you step through a list of 'named' concepts that are overlapping with it, to generate the combination of all the 'named' concepts. You can even associate one such abstract concept to another, like when you learn a single vocab, but the repetition you need to enable long-term memory has a strong impedance mismatch with the way you generated that abstract concept. Also, there are ways to form thought structures that you can't use a normal single-step debugger on, as the intermediate states have no useful interpretation. They are however much, much more capable, e.g. able to provide you with the ability to scan through isles at a large store, while walking reasonably fast through it, turning your head left and right. Your eyes scan rough at first, moving to get more detail for those areas in an isle that though process wants more detail on. Due to the inherent delay/reaction time, this needs an interleaving of about 3~6 steps delay between subsequent, sequential viewings of the same area, if all these viewings are decided with full knowledge of this area. The higher the interleaving, the higher the load on this working memory, but the less multi-viewings without intermediate deciding have to be done of the same area, as you can't handle more areas than this interleaving factor at the same time. A nice aspect of this fuzzy nature of associations is that you can directly combine fuzzy associations from two such abstract concepts you can synthesize. Don't refine those concepts too much though. Compare e.g. the visual impressions from one historic city center with those of another. Don't try to list each and compare them one-by-one, try to get a fuzzy state of non-individually-enumerated-at-any-point visual impressions from one city center, place it to the side (you can imagine it on a side in a virtual space with rough directions relative to your brain, but don't try to relate it to the physical world, or you snap out of the coherence and possibly loose part of the memories), and then gather the same for the other city center on the other side. Maybe switch between them a few times, like 2 or 3 times each, and then just dissolve the seperation, e.g., drop the association of which side the concept was on, and just all the other mental-space location information. Just consider it no longer important, don't think about it in the moment. Prepare how to drop one of like 4 or 6 or so low-complexity semi-abstract thoughts (there should not be a linguistic expression accurately describing it that is shorter than 7 syllables, this counts for each though separately), before you do the fusion. If you then run through the things you get if you brainstorm small linguistic expressions (like maximum 5 syllables, preferably fewer) or visual things (that are drawable to recognition in under 30 straight lines of finite length, to the visual recognition skill common in Pictionary), you get what both of these city centers have in common, with much of the sampling done on the combined probability distribution this essentially is. The reduction in noise/errors is related to what a quantum computer does, but the limits are sadly much lower. Be careful, you might like to use such to get rid of (some) emotions, and that can hit some feelings like hunger/thirst without trying to. It usually takes years to get a good handle on those after you loose them. Manipulation of these lower-level/monolithic though processes can be done by creating a self-feedback one that is trained to tell you as a one-dimensional, non-quantisized "feeling" (you probe it similar to how you consciously probe a specific bodily sensation, but by asking for an abstract concept (naming it creates too much overhead, as you don't need to directly refer to it from linguistic communication) instead of a region of your body. Like how you can feel how dry your eyes are if they are dry, with less quantisation than what you'd use if you try to put it in words, and with less fudging than if you try to put it in numbers (even it those have decimals).
- wm_throwaway 8y ago(Throwaway) I work in human memory neuroscience / linguistics. 1. The 7-plus-or-minus-two study is entirely bunk. Welsh words are longer and yield < 7. This WM capacity is about verbal rehearsal. 2. Here's background reading on the complexity and debates over oscillation functions: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20G.%20Rhythms%20of%20the%20brain.pdf https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
- wodenokoto 8y agoWhat is so controversial about this that you needed a throwaway?
- hyperpallium 8y agoIs there evidence of correlation between the size of working memory and brilliance/genius? Or is a universal human mind limit? Although, for any even moderately complex problem, abstractions or chunks of some kind are necessary, so proficiency in recognising, using and creating them is more important than holding one or two more, being able to hold more like help - especially in managing them. Perhaps help a lot, and the development of some abstractions may actually be impossible without greater working memory.