10 ms·

To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

353 points by digital55 8y ago

sctb 8y ago
Related? https://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186 https://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computat....
sevagh 8y ago
The book Behave by Robert Sapolsky describes this topic (among others) nicely. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/9780143110910/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-ro...
- maneesh 8y ago
  This book was fantastic, and elegantly laid out in how it described behaviors that human beings take.
wahern 8y ago
For Robert Calin-Jageman, it’s exciting that forgetting seems to be a biological process like digestion or excretion because that means it can, at least in theory, be ramped up or down. Huh? Of course it's biological. Why would one believe otherwise unless they made naive deductions from the metaphors du jure--computers and neural networks. Perhaps the journalist is misinterpreting the researcher, and was, indeed, working backward from modern metaphors to conclude that it's somehow novel to think the mechanisms intrinsically corporeal.
- svachalek 8y ago
  I think the keyword here is "process" not "biological"; i.e. that it's an action taken rather than random decay.
misterprime 8y ago
Looks like Married With Children was on to something back in '94: "When the Bundy TV set blows its condenser, Al decides to try out for a place on a new sports trivia game show, hoping to win $10,000 for a new TV set as the first prize. But when he is denied because of his lack of personality, Al tries to transfer his knowledge of sports to Kelly to win the show for him. But for each fact that she takes in, another falls out." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_...
hanniabu 8y ago
Well I guess the saying "if you don't use it, you lose it" must be true
eruci 8y ago
Makes sense. It is best to forget useless things and fill the brain with useful ones. I was also going to say something else, but I forgot.
- ksec 8y ago
  Well, whether or not it is "useless" depends on the person. Most human have emotional attachment to memories. And hence those that are more emotional ( whether it is inside or outside ) tends to remember things better and in tiny details. And I actually doubt we "forget" about it. It is not like a computer sudden decide to do GC and you have more memory space. I think our brains tends to archive those "useless" things into somewhere deep, that takes lot of energy and take it back out. I don't believe information is lost in our brain, it is most encrypted, compressed ( lossy ) and stored differently.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Apparently each time a memory is accessed, it gets written down back again. Imperfectly.
Aardwolf 8y ago
> Eleven of those genes, they discovered, were still active on one side of the animals’ brains but not on the other, even after the animals had apparently forgotten about the shock. What exactly does active genes mean here and how can they do that in a living slug and be different on both sides? Afaik, genes are mostly constant throughout one individuals' lifetime, and usually the same in all cells With almost a GB of data in the DNA of a single cell and 100 billion human brain cells, the DNA sounds like a great storage medium for memories (725 exabytes)! But that's not how it works, right?
- daveguy 8y ago
  The entire genome in each cell contains all of the genes for every type of cell in your body. In different types of cells and in different states certain genes are upregulated and downregulated. Essentially the process for turning a specific gene into the protein it codes for can be turned on or off. That is what is meant by an active vs inactive gene. Note: the activity of a neuron and the activity of a specific gene (eg rac1) are two completely different kinds of activity. The first is electrochemical activity and the second is production activity. Where changes in production can change the physical number of receptors available for the electrochemcial process.
- bizkitgto 8y ago
  Use it, or lose it!
colemannugent 8y ago
Memory seems rather like a multi-tier cache hierarchy to me. You can only really keep something like seven objects in your mind at once, and everything else seems to be pushed to slower sections of your memory. Within this analogy cache eviction strategies start to have massive effects on our ability to process information.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  There's also the fundamental theory of this which ultimately rests on thermodynamics, e.g. [1] [2]. Basically, any finite organism only has a finite number of configurations available to it; but to 'remember' something is to a set up a long-term correlation between the past and the present, which uses up some of the 'available degrees of freedom' to e.g. respond to shorter-term changes in the environment. If you never forget anything, then eventually you 'run out of bits', whereas a system that allows some forgetting has greater flexibility in e.g. forgetting the distant past in order to remember to tie your shoes right now. There are some neuroscientists that are starting to bring thermodynamic views into looking at actual biological systems as well [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle [2] https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/49 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/49 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5108784/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5108784/
vonnik 8y ago
Tangential but interesting: There's a great Borges short story called Funes the Memorious, which imagines a man who could never forget anything. To remember the events of a day, he must spend an entire second day, going through it second by second. https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Funes-the-Memorious.pdf https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Funes-the-Mem...
jeffwass 8y ago
Relevant convo between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (My choice of Italics highlights). Below excerpt from A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887. —— My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.” “To forget it!” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” “But the Solar System!” I protested. “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
- misterprime 8y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I need to reconsider my podcast and reddit habits.
- vagab0nd 8y ago
  Came here to say this, which is the first thing I thought of after reading the title of this article. Incidentally, I first read the Chinese version of "A Study in Scarlet". And I remember vividly (because I read it many times) what Sherlock said was translated as "Even if I had known it I would have tried to forget it". It wasn't until I read your comment did I realize it's actually "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." Funny. EDIT: formatting
chrstphrhrt 8y ago
Is that why smoking weed makes things seem profound, from instantly forgetting the less salient stuff?
adriand 8y ago
I remember sitting at a bar in a distant city in some other country one night, and the person next to me, who I had just met that day, suggested that we do a shot together. Now these shots were big, and it had already been quite the night, and I remember thinking, "If I do this shot, it's probably the last thing I'll remember tonight." It was, but that's not the point of this anecdote. This experience gave me the idea for the premise of a sci-fi story: a drug which, once taken, has no affect on you whatsoever outside of one crucial impact, which is that whatever happens while you're on it, you won't remember once it wears off a few hours later. The scientific findings related in this article seem to indicate that developing such a drug would be possible. Would people take it? I suspect they would, although I also suspect that it would lead to regrettable behaviour. (That is probably, in fact, its chief advantage.) What about you - would you take it? Are experiences less meaningful if you don't remember them?
- zumu 8y ago
  This sounds pretty close to my experience with Xanax.
- stickydink 8y ago
  Passing time without any knowledge or memory is probably the main reason to be taking drugs in prison. Yours sounds like the perfect, side-effect free solution!
  - notheguyouthink 8y ago
    Interestingly, I wouldn't use it for that (if at all), because it doesn't actually pass the time at all. You still live the time, experiencing it in full. Ie, a boring day would still be a boring day. On the flip side, a drug that let you retroactively forget would be heavily used I bet. Traumatic experiences are often wished to be forgotten. Though, I wonder what a human would be like if they didn't have negative experiences. One who was able to remove a big portion of mind shaping experiences. Further yet, I wonder if your mind ever truly forgets. If a dog bites you as a kid, and then you take the forget pill, are you still afraid of dogs?
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I only skimmed the piece, but it doesn't look like it touched on the fact that the brain apparently "resets" during sleep (edit: specifically to foster new memories the next day, from what I gather). I have seen several articles in the last couple of years about the brain shrinking, etc, during sleep. A quick search pulled up, for example, this piece: https://www.newsweek.com/brain-synapses-shrink-during-sleep-making-way-new-information-551871 https://www.newsweek.com/brain-synapses-shrink-during-sleep-...
- whymauri 8y ago
  One of my favorite papers on the subject, from a colleague's lab: "Unstable neurons underlie a stable learned behavior" https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5859e85dd2b8571a0a859309/t/586c5066e58c624be9ff2165/1483493485348/nn.4405.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5859e85dd2b8571a0a859... >Motor skills can be maintained for decades, but the biological basis of this memory persistence remains largely unknown. The zebra finch, for example, sings a highly stereotyped song that is stable for years, but it is not known whether the precise neural patterns underlying song are stable or shift from day to day. Here we demonstrate that the population of projection neurons coding for song in the premotor nucleus, HVC, change from day to day. The most dramatic shifts occur over intervals of sleep. In contrast to the transient participation of excitatory neurons, ensemble measurements dominated by inhibition persist unchanged even after damage to downstream motor nerves. Brain circuitry truly is amazing. The connectome is vital to the function of the brain, and slight perturbations can severely damage that function; however, the connectome can change over night even in the context of precise motor skills. It's a sort of Catch-22.
euske 8y ago
So, simply put... - short term memory: transaction journal - long term memory: persistent table - sleep: commit and garbage collection As I often said, Computer Science can explain everything.
- ralusek 8y ago
  I should hope that it can at least explain your brain, which is a computer.
  - lamoutasallite 8y ago
    This is a huge misconception.
linkmotif 8y ago
Micheal Pollan in Botany of Desire has a lot of good stuff about the importance of forgetting: https://books.google.com/books?id=Woywyw8LlcgC&pg=PA162&lpg=PA162&dq=botany+of+desire+%27For+it+is+only+by+forgetting+that+we+ever+really&source=bl&ots=EMnV0eX6e_&sig=ax7kyOVMzSIAG373IYGxAhYZyC4&hl=ru&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjnuKbB-LjcAhVBdt8KHTiIB7cQ6AEwAnoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=botany%20of%20desire%20'For%20it%20is%20only%20by%20forgetting%20that%20we%20ever%20really&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Woywyw8LlcgC&pg=PA162&lpg=... > For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment.
PascLeRasc 8y ago
I recently started taking noopept for memory health and I'm getting a side effect when I feel like I'm a college freshman again and don't know much about whatever I'm doing. It's helpful because I try new things that I wouldn't usually. I've learned a lot about bash and vim in the past two weeks as a result and I've tried new playing styles on guitar, while in the past I'd just play tabs from bands I like. I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn quickly and break through mental blocks.
digi_owl 8y ago
Over the years i have come to think that the brain can be better likened to a de-duplicating storage system, but with some nasty flaws that all too often result in mixed data on reading. Meaning that experiences that are similar enough gets overlaid each other, resulting in time flying past as we get older and to the same stuff day after day. This because we seem to experience time retroactively.
amthewiz 8y ago
Current neuroscience suggests that brain operates in broadly two regimes - learning during wakefulness and model selection during sleep. Both these activities require "forgetting" of specific kinds. Specifically model selection involves trimming synapses. The goal is to learn a model of the world at the right level of detail, what AI folks call avoiding over fitting.
8bitsrule 8y ago
If we remembered everything, he said, we would be completely inefficient because our brains would always be swamped with superfluous memories. Yet there are a few people who, it has elsewhere been claimed, can remember details from every day of their life, on demand. What's 'superfluous' to one of us may be essential to others... a strictly subjective judgement. Some of us are specialists, others generalists. The trouble with such reporting is that there's little science involved, and a whole lot of anecdotal reportage. Of course, our brains are enormously complex, having to operate in a wide diversity of human and chemical environments. Given the number of variables, solid memory science has yet to emerge ... in articles like this one, at least.
- heed 8y ago
  I've heard of these people, but if I remember correctly they were of the type to obessesively recall the events/details of their day - like a form of OCD.
  - demircancelebi 8y ago
    For the curious one, I think this is called Hyperthymesia.
- palad1n 8y ago
  https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/actress-marilu-henners-rare-super-memory-recalls-every-day-of-her-life/blogEntry?id=16199074 https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/actress-marilu-henners-...
IloveHN84 8y ago
I have probably reach the top of my Remembering capabilities. Often I feel actively the urge to make free space in my mind to store new information. Technology helps me keeping offloading useless/unimportant facts and store them somewhere else, but the overload of information is being an issue
ehnto 8y ago
Minor and probably not that interesting anecdote: I always struggled to remember sequences of numbers. Even if I had looked at the number just a fraction of a moment ago, they were gone. I would have to do things like repeat them over and over or remember two numbers at a time. I was always buzzing in my head anout remembering the numbers and that produced a noise that I think made me forget. Then I started cleaning up my attention span a bit, less social media, less mindless scrolling, more thoughtful long term tasks and planning. It helped a lot, but it wasn't perfect still. Then one day I tried reading a number sequence once, not making a single noise in my brain, and I jotted it down again with ease. It seemed the secret for me was to trust my memory had the number in working memory somewhere, rather than trying to persist it my concious stream of thought which inevitably garbled it. The brain is weird.
- la_oveja 8y ago
  > It seemed the secret for me was to trust my memory had the number in working memory somewhere, rather than trying to persist it my concious stream of thought which inevitably garbled it. That happens to me too! PIN keys, or bank passwords I know I know, if I try to think to remember them, I'm unable to remember them correctly. Instead, just seeing the input interface, blank my brain and I start pressing keys... And I write them down perfectly! Indeed, the brain is very weird.
  - mateuszf 8y ago
    Now that's a good way to remember my btc private keys ;)
- 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
  Have you tried remembering the number as a picture rather than a list of digits? Works for me.
  - mattmanser 8y ago
    I'm not the grandparent, but after doing "Learning How To Learn" course on coursera[1] (very good), I finally realised I suffer from Aphantasia, where I don't see images in my imagination. Even though I'd tried loads of memory techniques over the years as I have a very poor memory, I'd never really understood people actually see images. I thought they meant that they were, like me, simply listing the properties the image would have in your head. So all these techniques like "remembering the number as a picture" never worked well from me, and finally explained why all the common techniques people recommend are pretty useless. It turns out people have a huge variation on how good they are at visualising things in their minds eye, and I'm right near the bottom in terms of skill. On the plus side it turns out that I can make images appear, having done some exercises to help it, although I didn't keep at it and it still doesn't come naturally. Most people can improve and there are very few cases of people not actually being able to do it. I also read of one man who'd had a stroke and lost his ability to picture things in his brain. Oddly, I am very quick at generally orienteering myself in new places and picking up map layouts in games, even though I don't visualize anything in my head. [1]https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
bojo 8y ago
As someone who has moved to Japan for the last ~12 years and speaks the language daily, I struggle to remember terms I am absolutely postive I know but can't recall while in the middle of conversations with my English speaking employees. Or even worse, deep in personal thought I have to start googling around to recall a term I know I know. There are linguistic studies which show that this is the norm (i.e. as a second language learner using said language daily, you begin to forget your mother tongue), but I have to admit it is quite disconcerting when I have to take a multi-second break to recall an uncommon word before I can carry the conversation further. I guess the moral of the story is that, yeah, you forget things you don't actively use.
generallyfalse 8y ago
Don't forget that you are not a fruit fly.
flabbergast 8y ago
>> Hardt said. “It filters out the stuff that the brain deems unimportant.” Most of the things I learned at school I forgot; all the math and so that I never need in my life. More than half of the curriculum is just rubbish for our brains IMAO. Maybe this helps to start making compulsive education more pragmatic. At this moment I see kids coming from school knowing how to do advance math they'll never ever need. But basic knowledge about what is healthy food or not, or knowing how the industry is poisoning almost anything you can buy in the supermarket, they have no clue.. And I believe knowing those things do matter for our brain, we would not easily forget.
- tjoff 8y ago
  Just because you wouldn't remember how to tackle an advanced math problem doesn't mean it has been wasted. You've gained experience and you can identify what you don't remember. Even if you can't remember it it is no longer magic, which is invaluable by itself. Also the process of learning these abstract concepts is arguably the most important skill you learn in higher education. You might recognize what is required and you do know how to pick it up when you are faced with it - or know when you need external help.
- kaybe 8y ago
  After I ran my head against math for some time and actually noticed changes to my mind structure, I am sceptical. Studying math is not (just) about the knowledge you gain, it is about the reasoning structure behind it, like a workout for the brain. Learning things is not (just) about the facts you know afterwards. I read so many books I forgot at least half of what was written there, but my worldview and thinking was altered from that. Not that the other stuff isn't very important too of course..
darkerside 8y ago
This article seems to operate under the premise that photographic memory is not a thing. Is it considered an urban myth now?
dpweb 8y ago
I know nothing of the neuroscience but I have a theory we look at memory wrong. We see it like storage. You take a cup, put it in a cabinet, and bring it out later. But what about memories as your brain, not pulling it from storage, but entirely regenerating the experience. So its remaking the cup every time, not pulling it from the cabinet. False/faulty memory is common. We’re regenerating the experience inaccurately. Like if you drew a picture then had to draw it again. It would look the same but slightly different. The cup after all if stored would always be retrieved exactly as it was.
JohnClark1337 8y ago
Waiting for someone to design a hardware interface and a data translation protocol so computer hackers can start tinkering.

353 points by digital55 8y ago

sctb 8y ago

Related? https://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186 https://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computat....

sevagh 8y ago

The book Behave by Robert Sapolsky describes this topic (among others) nicely. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-robert-m-sapolsky/9780143110910/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311787/behave-by-ro...

maneesh 8y ago
This book was fantastic, and elegantly laid out in how it described behaviors that human beings take.

wahern 8y ago

For Robert Calin-Jageman, it’s exciting that forgetting seems to be a biological process like digestion or excretion because that means it can, at least in theory, be ramped up or down. Huh? Of course it's biological. Why would one believe otherwise unless they made naive deductions from the metaphors du jure--computers and neural networks. Perhaps the journalist is misinterpreting the researcher, and was, indeed, working backward from modern metaphors to conclude that it's somehow novel to think the mechanisms intrinsically corporeal.

svachalek 8y ago
I think the keyword here is "process" not "biological"; i.e. that it's an action taken rather than random decay.

misterprime 8y ago

Looks like Married With Children was on to something back in '94: "When the Bundy TV set blows its condenser, Al decides to try out for a place on a new sports trivia game show, hoping to win $10,000 for a new TV set as the first prize. But when he is denied because of his lack of personality, Al tries to transfer his knowledge of sports to Kelly to win the show for him. But for each fact that she takes in, another falls out." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_...

hanniabu 8y ago

Well I guess the saying "if you don't use it, you lose it" must be true

eruci 8y ago

Makes sense. It is best to forget useless things and fill the brain with useful ones. I was also going to say something else, but I forgot.

ksec 8y ago
Well, whether or not it is "useless" depends on the person. Most human have emotional attachment to memories. And hence those that are more emotional ( whether it is inside or outside ) tends to remember things better and in tiny details. And I actually doubt we "forget" about it. It is not like a computer sudden decide to do GC and you have more memory space. I think our brains tends to archive those "useless" things into somewhere deep, that takes lot of energy and take it back out. I don't believe information is lost in our brain, it is most encrypted, compressed ( lossy ) and stored differently.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Apparently each time a memory is accessed, it gets written down back again. Imperfectly.

Aardwolf 8y ago

> Eleven of those genes, they discovered, were still active on one side of the animals’ brains but not on the other, even after the animals had apparently forgotten about the shock. What exactly does active genes mean here and how can they do that in a living slug and be different on both sides? Afaik, genes are mostly constant throughout one individuals' lifetime, and usually the same in all cells With almost a GB of data in the DNA of a single cell and 100 billion human brain cells, the DNA sounds like a great storage medium for memories (725 exabytes)! But that's not how it works, right?

daveguy 8y ago
The entire genome in each cell contains all of the genes for every type of cell in your body. In different types of cells and in different states certain genes are upregulated and downregulated. Essentially the process for turning a specific gene into the protein it codes for can be turned on or off. That is what is meant by an active vs inactive gene. Note: the activity of a neuron and the activity of a specific gene (eg rac1) are two completely different kinds of activity. The first is electrochemical activity and the second is production activity. Where changes in production can change the physical number of receptors available for the electrochemcial process.
bizkitgto 8y ago
Use it, or lose it!

colemannugent 8y ago

Memory seems rather like a multi-tier cache hierarchy to me. You can only really keep something like seven objects in your mind at once, and everything else seems to be pushed to slower sections of your memory. Within this analogy cache eviction strategies start to have massive effects on our ability to process information.

smallnamespace 8y ago
There's also the fundamental theory of this which ultimately rests on thermodynamics, e.g. [1] [2]. Basically, any finite organism only has a finite number of configurations available to it; but to 'remember' something is to a set up a long-term correlation between the past and the present, which uses up some of the 'available degrees of freedom' to e.g. respond to shorter-term changes in the environment. If you never forget anything, then eventually you 'run out of bits', whereas a system that allows some forgetting has greater flexibility in e.g. forgetting the distant past in order to remember to tie your shoes right now. There are some neuroscientists that are starting to bring thermodynamic views into looking at actual biological systems as well [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle [2] https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/49 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/49 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5108784/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5108784/

vonnik 8y ago

Tangential but interesting: There's a great Borges short story called Funes the Memorious, which imagines a man who could never forget anything. To remember the events of a day, he must spend an entire second day, going through it second by second. https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Funes-the-Memorious.pdf https://marom.net.technion.ac.il/files/2016/07/Funes-the-Mem...

jeffwass 8y ago

Relevant convo between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (My choice of Italics highlights). Below excerpt from A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887. —— My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.” “To forget it!” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” “But the Solar System!” I protested. “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

misterprime 8y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I need to reconsider my podcast and reddit habits.
vagab0nd 8y ago
Came here to say this, which is the first thing I thought of after reading the title of this article. Incidentally, I first read the Chinese version of "A Study in Scarlet". And I remember vividly (because I read it many times) what Sherlock said was translated as "Even if I had known it I would have tried to forget it". It wasn't until I read your comment did I realize it's actually "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." Funny. EDIT: formatting

chrstphrhrt 8y ago

Is that why smoking weed makes things seem profound, from instantly forgetting the less salient stuff?

adriand 8y ago

I remember sitting at a bar in a distant city in some other country one night, and the person next to me, who I had just met that day, suggested that we do a shot together. Now these shots were big, and it had already been quite the night, and I remember thinking, "If I do this shot, it's probably the last thing I'll remember tonight." It was, but that's not the point of this anecdote. This experience gave me the idea for the premise of a sci-fi story: a drug which, once taken, has no affect on you whatsoever outside of one crucial impact, which is that whatever happens while you're on it, you won't remember once it wears off a few hours later. The scientific findings related in this article seem to indicate that developing such a drug would be possible. Would people take it? I suspect they would, although I also suspect that it would lead to regrettable behaviour. (That is probably, in fact, its chief advantage.) What about you - would you take it? Are experiences less meaningful if you don't remember them?

zumu 8y ago
This sounds pretty close to my experience with Xanax.
stickydink 8y ago
Passing time without any knowledge or memory is probably the main reason to be taking drugs in prison. Yours sounds like the perfect, side-effect free solution!
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  Interestingly, I wouldn't use it for that (if at all), because it doesn't actually pass the time at all. You still live the time, experiencing it in full. Ie, a boring day would still be a boring day. On the flip side, a drug that let you retroactively forget would be heavily used I bet. Traumatic experiences are often wished to be forgotten. Though, I wonder what a human would be like if they didn't have negative experiences. One who was able to remove a big portion of mind shaping experiences. Further yet, I wonder if your mind ever truly forgets. If a dog bites you as a kid, and then you take the forget pill, are you still afraid of dogs?

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I only skimmed the piece, but it doesn't look like it touched on the fact that the brain apparently "resets" during sleep (edit: specifically to foster new memories the next day, from what I gather). I have seen several articles in the last couple of years about the brain shrinking, etc, during sleep. A quick search pulled up, for example, this piece: https://www.newsweek.com/brain-synapses-shrink-during-sleep-making-way-new-information-551871 https://www.newsweek.com/brain-synapses-shrink-during-sleep-...

whymauri 8y ago
One of my favorite papers on the subject, from a colleague's lab: "Unstable neurons underlie a stable learned behavior" https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5859e85dd2b8571a0a859309/t/586c5066e58c624be9ff2165/1483493485348/nn.4405.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5859e85dd2b8571a0a859... >Motor skills can be maintained for decades, but the biological basis of this memory persistence remains largely unknown. The zebra finch, for example, sings a highly stereotyped song that is stable for years, but it is not known whether the precise neural patterns underlying song are stable or shift from day to day. Here we demonstrate that the population of projection neurons coding for song in the premotor nucleus, HVC, change from day to day. The most dramatic shifts occur over intervals of sleep. In contrast to the transient participation of excitatory neurons, ensemble measurements dominated by inhibition persist unchanged even after damage to downstream motor nerves. Brain circuitry truly is amazing. The connectome is vital to the function of the brain, and slight perturbations can severely damage that function; however, the connectome can change over night even in the context of precise motor skills. It's a sort of Catch-22.

euske 8y ago

So, simply put... - short term memory: transaction journal - long term memory: persistent table - sleep: commit and garbage collection As I often said, Computer Science can explain everything.

ralusek 8y ago
I should hope that it can at least explain your brain, which is a computer.
- lamoutasallite 8y ago
  This is a huge misconception.

linkmotif 8y ago

Micheal Pollan in Botany of Desire has a lot of good stuff about the importance of forgetting: https://books.google.com/books?id=Woywyw8LlcgC&pg=PA162&lpg=PA162&dq=botany+of+desire+%27For+it+is+only+by+forgetting+that+we+ever+really&source=bl&ots=EMnV0eX6e_&sig=ax7kyOVMzSIAG373IYGxAhYZyC4&hl=ru&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjnuKbB-LjcAhVBdt8KHTiIB7cQ6AEwAnoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=botany%20of%20desire%20'For%20it%20is%20only%20by%20forgetting%20that%20we%20ever%20really&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=Woywyw8LlcgC&pg=PA162&lpg=... > For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment.

PascLeRasc 8y ago

I recently started taking noopept for memory health and I'm getting a side effect when I feel like I'm a college freshman again and don't know much about whatever I'm doing. It's helpful because I try new things that I wouldn't usually. I've learned a lot about bash and vim in the past two weeks as a result and I've tried new playing styles on guitar, while in the past I'd just play tabs from bands I like. I'd highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn quickly and break through mental blocks.

digi_owl 8y ago

Over the years i have come to think that the brain can be better likened to a de-duplicating storage system, but with some nasty flaws that all too often result in mixed data on reading. Meaning that experiences that are similar enough gets overlaid each other, resulting in time flying past as we get older and to the same stuff day after day. This because we seem to experience time retroactively.

amthewiz 8y ago

Current neuroscience suggests that brain operates in broadly two regimes - learning during wakefulness and model selection during sleep. Both these activities require "forgetting" of specific kinds. Specifically model selection involves trimming synapses. The goal is to learn a model of the world at the right level of detail, what AI folks call avoiding over fitting.

8bitsrule 8y ago

If we remembered everything, he said, we would be completely inefficient because our brains would always be swamped with superfluous memories. Yet there are a few people who, it has elsewhere been claimed, can remember details from every day of their life, on demand. What's 'superfluous' to one of us may be essential to others... a strictly subjective judgement. Some of us are specialists, others generalists. The trouble with such reporting is that there's little science involved, and a whole lot of anecdotal reportage. Of course, our brains are enormously complex, having to operate in a wide diversity of human and chemical environments. Given the number of variables, solid memory science has yet to emerge ... in articles like this one, at least.

heed 8y ago
I've heard of these people, but if I remember correctly they were of the type to obessesively recall the events/details of their day - like a form of OCD.
- demircancelebi 8y ago
  For the curious one, I think this is called Hyperthymesia.
palad1n 8y ago
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/actress-marilu-henners-rare-super-memory-recalls-every-day-of-her-life/blogEntry?id=16199074 https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/actress-marilu-henners-...

IloveHN84 8y ago

I have probably reach the top of my Remembering capabilities. Often I feel actively the urge to make free space in my mind to store new information. Technology helps me keeping offloading useless/unimportant facts and store them somewhere else, but the overload of information is being an issue

ehnto 8y ago

Minor and probably not that interesting anecdote: I always struggled to remember sequences of numbers. Even if I had looked at the number just a fraction of a moment ago, they were gone. I would have to do things like repeat them over and over or remember two numbers at a time. I was always buzzing in my head anout remembering the numbers and that produced a noise that I think made me forget. Then I started cleaning up my attention span a bit, less social media, less mindless scrolling, more thoughtful long term tasks and planning. It helped a lot, but it wasn't perfect still. Then one day I tried reading a number sequence once, not making a single noise in my brain, and I jotted it down again with ease. It seemed the secret for me was to trust my memory had the number in working memory somewhere, rather than trying to persist it my concious stream of thought which inevitably garbled it. The brain is weird.

la_oveja 8y ago
> It seemed the secret for me was to trust my memory had the number in working memory somewhere, rather than trying to persist it my concious stream of thought which inevitably garbled it. That happens to me too! PIN keys, or bank passwords I know I know, if I try to think to remember them, I'm unable to remember them correctly. Instead, just seeing the input interface, blank my brain and I start pressing keys... And I write them down perfectly! Indeed, the brain is very weird.
- mateuszf 8y ago
  Now that's a good way to remember my btc private keys ;)
2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
Have you tried remembering the number as a picture rather than a list of digits? Works for me.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  I'm not the grandparent, but after doing "Learning How To Learn" course on coursera[1] (very good), I finally realised I suffer from Aphantasia, where I don't see images in my imagination. Even though I'd tried loads of memory techniques over the years as I have a very poor memory, I'd never really understood people actually see images. I thought they meant that they were, like me, simply listing the properties the image would have in your head. So all these techniques like "remembering the number as a picture" never worked well from me, and finally explained why all the common techniques people recommend are pretty useless. It turns out people have a huge variation on how good they are at visualising things in their minds eye, and I'm right near the bottom in terms of skill. On the plus side it turns out that I can make images appear, having done some exercises to help it, although I didn't keep at it and it still doesn't come naturally. Most people can improve and there are very few cases of people not actually being able to do it. I also read of one man who'd had a stroke and lost his ability to picture things in his brain. Oddly, I am very quick at generally orienteering myself in new places and picking up map layouts in games, even though I don't visualize anything in my head. [1]https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

bojo 8y ago

As someone who has moved to Japan for the last ~12 years and speaks the language daily, I struggle to remember terms I am absolutely postive I know but can't recall while in the middle of conversations with my English speaking employees. Or even worse, deep in personal thought I have to start googling around to recall a term I know I know. There are linguistic studies which show that this is the norm (i.e. as a second language learner using said language daily, you begin to forget your mother tongue), but I have to admit it is quite disconcerting when I have to take a multi-second break to recall an uncommon word before I can carry the conversation further. I guess the moral of the story is that, yeah, you forget things you don't actively use.

generallyfalse 8y ago

Don't forget that you are not a fruit fly.

flabbergast 8y ago

>> Hardt said. “It filters out the stuff that the brain deems unimportant.” Most of the things I learned at school I forgot; all the math and so that I never need in my life. More than half of the curriculum is just rubbish for our brains IMAO. Maybe this helps to start making compulsive education more pragmatic. At this moment I see kids coming from school knowing how to do advance math they'll never ever need. But basic knowledge about what is healthy food or not, or knowing how the industry is poisoning almost anything you can buy in the supermarket, they have no clue.. And I believe knowing those things do matter for our brain, we would not easily forget.

tjoff 8y ago
Just because you wouldn't remember how to tackle an advanced math problem doesn't mean it has been wasted. You've gained experience and you can identify what you don't remember. Even if you can't remember it it is no longer magic, which is invaluable by itself. Also the process of learning these abstract concepts is arguably the most important skill you learn in higher education. You might recognize what is required and you do know how to pick it up when you are faced with it - or know when you need external help.
kaybe 8y ago
After I ran my head against math for some time and actually noticed changes to my mind structure, I am sceptical. Studying math is not (just) about the knowledge you gain, it is about the reasoning structure behind it, like a workout for the brain. Learning things is not (just) about the facts you know afterwards. I read so many books I forgot at least half of what was written there, but my worldview and thinking was altered from that. Not that the other stuff isn't very important too of course..

darkerside 8y ago

This article seems to operate under the premise that photographic memory is not a thing. Is it considered an urban myth now?

dpweb 8y ago

I know nothing of the neuroscience but I have a theory we look at memory wrong. We see it like storage. You take a cup, put it in a cabinet, and bring it out later. But what about memories as your brain, not pulling it from storage, but entirely regenerating the experience. So its remaking the cup every time, not pulling it from the cabinet. False/faulty memory is common. We’re regenerating the experience inaccurately. Like if you drew a picture then had to draw it again. It would look the same but slightly different. The cup after all if stored would always be retrieved exactly as it was.

JohnClark1337 8y ago

Waiting for someone to design a hardware interface and a data translation protocol so computer hackers can start tinkering.