5 ms·

> Mercifully, you don't really start forming strong memories until you're about 3-4 You do. It is just childhood amnesia kicks in at some point, and you lose a

by ordu 3y ago

> Mercifully, you don't really start forming strong memories until you're about 3-4 You do. It is just childhood amnesia kicks in at some point, and you lose an access to those memories. There is no accepted explanation what happens, I personally prefer the idea, that your memory qualitatively changes in spite of language acquisition, you get another (upgraded) way to access your memory, and then you forget the old (legacy) way. I like this explanation because my own memories from the time I was ~3 yo are strange (conditionally on I could reproduce them well and not to invent things), they are almost eidetic. But it doesn't matter to be frank, because your memories were active and accessible at some period of your life and they influenced your development already, maybe changing the development track completely. Father throwing his kind into a pool? Kid was terrified? It is a very emotional experience which is a betrayal of kid's trust, which probably will never be without limits again. It may destroy any trust to other humans as well. Though it may pass without any long term consequences also. People are unpredictable in this regard. But you'd better avoid such experiments with your kid. > your brain is gloriously plastic until around 23, so, to say 'that's the kind of trauma that stays with someone for their whole life' isn't really the case. Some things a sticky. If they are strong enough to change behavior at once, if the changed behavior becomes a habit, then habit will enable trauma to resist any brain's plasticity and ability to heal. And you know, it may be a very rational thing for a kid to stop trusting his father if the father can throw the kid into water just so without any thought of how kid will feel. Probably the kid should be wary around his father.

The_Colonel 3y ago
> I personally prefer the idea, that your memory qualitatively changes in spite of language acquisition, you get another (upgraded) way to access your memory, and then you forget the old (legacy) way. I like this explanation because my own memories from the time I was ~3 yo are strange (conditionally on I could reproduce them well and not to invent things), they are almost eidetic. I think people stick too much to the idea that human memory is kinda like computer memory. "Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went. Reminds me of a video of WW1 shell shocked soldiers I saw recently. It's not the exact memory record of the events which broke those men. Something more profound changed in their brain.
- ordu 3y ago
  I do not suppose that human memory is like a computer. Thinking of how it works, I believe it works a bit like LLM, you formulate a prompt and get memories. It is an automatic process an you do not see the details, like what the prompt was used. And suppose if at some point you've learned how to a) store memory in a categorized form; b) use prompts formulated in a language (or at least in categories of language), then you can "forget" the old way of prompt generating. > "Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went. This is too vague to my taste. Isn't any memory a brain's structure change?
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    > Thinking of how it works, I believe it works a bit like LLM, you formulate a prompt and get memories. It is an automatic process an you do not see the details, like what the prompt was used. In some ways, LLM seem to work kinda like brain. It doesn't remember the exact details, more like patterns, from which it then attempts to reconstruct the memory. > Isn't any memory a brain's structure change? Well, yes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that such events produce much larger changes in the brain in comparison to non-traumatic events. In the sense that the child's behavior changes as a result. For example, the child can gain a new phobia which can persevere much longer than the memory of the actual event. My overall point is that even if you forget the actual events, you will carry the consequences of such trauma anyway.

by ordu 3y ago

The_Colonel 3y ago

> I personally prefer the idea, that your memory qualitatively changes in spite of language acquisition, you get another (upgraded) way to access your memory, and then you forget the old (legacy) way. I like this explanation because my own memories from the time I was ~3 yo are strange (conditionally on I could reproduce them well and not to invent things), they are almost eidetic. I think people stick too much to the idea that human memory is kinda like computer memory. "Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went. Reminds me of a video of WW1 shell shocked soldiers I saw recently. It's not the exact memory record of the events which broke those men. Something more profound changed in their brain.

ordu 3y ago
I do not suppose that human memory is like a computer. Thinking of how it works, I believe it works a bit like LLM, you formulate a prompt and get memories. It is an automatic process an you do not see the details, like what the prompt was used. And suppose if at some point you've learned how to a) store memory in a categorized form; b) use prompts formulated in a language (or at least in categories of language), then you can "forget" the old way of prompt generating. > "Remembering" trauma could also mean that the brain's structure changes in some way as a result of trauma without necessarily recording how the event exactly went. This is too vague to my taste. Isn't any memory a brain's structure change?
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  > Thinking of how it works, I believe it works a bit like LLM, you formulate a prompt and get memories. It is an automatic process an you do not see the details, like what the prompt was used. In some ways, LLM seem to work kinda like brain. It doesn't remember the exact details, more like patterns, from which it then attempts to reconstruct the memory. > Isn't any memory a brain's structure change? Well, yes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that such events produce much larger changes in the brain in comparison to non-traumatic events. In the sense that the child's behavior changes as a result. For example, the child can gain a new phobia which can persevere much longer than the memory of the actual event. My overall point is that even if you forget the actual events, you will carry the consequences of such trauma anyway.