4 ms·

I don't know what the state-of-the-art is, but there was some work done that suggested that memories are formed encoded in the language you know at the time of

I don't know what the state-of-the-art is, but there was some work done that suggested that memories are formed encoded in the language you know at the time of formation. I dug up some of this a while back[1]. My dad, who taught our language to immigrants, mentioned that it was known in that field that immigrants who lost their native language would also lose a lot of the knowledge they had from their home country, like stuff taught at schools. Thus the memories might be there, one just can't make sense of them anymore and so they become forgotten. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37204047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37204047

sideshowb 2y ago
I suspect it goes deeper than language even. We have associative memories, right? Given our learning, modelling, pigeonholing of the world along with our changing bodies, our older selves are unlikely to experience anything close enough to what our younger selves experienced to trigger that association and recall the memory.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  I'm approaching 70, and my mental model is that the graph is getting so big that it's getting harder to navigate through it to the memories I'm looking for.
petemir 2y ago
I'm currently finishing the related work of my PhD thesis which deals with memory, so I want to chime in to say that some studies [2] have tested this, i.e. that memory recall is tied to the linguistic environment in which the learning took place. [0] https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242 https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242 [1] https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361 https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361 [2] Nevertheless, I am usually dubious about multiple experiments confirming related things from the same author(s).
- light_hue_1 2y ago
  The explanation can't be that neat. You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories. Maybe there's a subtle effect but that's very different.
  - petemir 2y ago
    > The explanation can't be that neat. It's not an absolute, I was telling OP that, in fact, there was some research on what he mentioned. Basically, that memory is linguistic-context dependent, but as a subset of cognitive-context dependent (as well as physiological-, affective-, and several types of context). This doesn't mean that memories are ONLY linked to language, they have lots of different associations, things that work as a cue of the memory, this (language) is only one of them. > You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories. What does it mean to "lose language"? Are you unable to speak, to express yourself, to comprehend others, all together? What memories do you retain and form? Are you talking about semantic memories, or episodic memories? How do you measure that those memories are retained and formed, if you cannot test the subject due to the impossibility of communication? It's a lot more difficult than absolutist statements. Edit: typo (thinks->things)
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  I think I read here on HN a theory that memories are like encoded and as we grow the encoding changes and we forget how to access certain memories, this was a theory of course. Probably explains people with Dementia (I think?) where they randomly remember something and a ton of joy rushes them, but they also get very confused as well, probably trying to decode memories but they cannot, they instead seem to ramble and get angry. I dont remember the thread but the context I think was regarding reading memories digitally somehow. I am slowly becoming convinced of this the more I hear about it. We encode and store memories, we decode them, but as we grow and adapt our thinking, we forget. I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
ben_w 2y ago
Huh. I know very little on this topic, and am pattern-matching that to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
boilerupnc 2y ago
Interesting. I wonder how this relates with my anecdotal observation that my aging immigrant parents and their similarly aged friends increasingly rely and use the language of their youth found in the home vs what they learned in school and used in their adopted country and while raising us. Are old encodings being rediscovered and decoded? Or is there a degradation in the power of their decoder and so it is slowly going back to a foundational level? Fascinating stuff.

sideshowb 2y ago

I suspect it goes deeper than language even. We have associative memories, right? Given our learning, modelling, pigeonholing of the world along with our changing bodies, our older selves are unlikely to experience anything close enough to what our younger selves experienced to trigger that association and recall the memory.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
I'm approaching 70, and my mental model is that the graph is getting so big that it's getting harder to navigate through it to the memories I'm looking for.

petemir 2y ago

I'm currently finishing the related work of my PhD thesis which deals with memory, so I want to chime in to say that some studies [2] have tested this, i.e. that memory recall is tied to the linguistic environment in which the learning took place. [0] https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242 https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1242 [1] https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361 https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.129.3.361 [2] Nevertheless, I am usually dubious about multiple experiments confirming related things from the same author(s).

light_hue_1 2y ago
The explanation can't be that neat. You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories. Maybe there's a subtle effect but that's very different.
- petemir 2y ago
  > The explanation can't be that neat. It's not an absolute, I was telling OP that, in fact, there was some research on what he mentioned. Basically, that memory is linguistic-context dependent, but as a subset of cognitive-context dependent (as well as physiological-, affective-, and several types of context). This doesn't mean that memories are ONLY linked to language, they have lots of different associations, things that work as a cue of the memory, this (language) is only one of them. > You can have a stroke and lose language and still retain and form memories. What does it mean to "lose language"? Are you unable to speak, to express yourself, to comprehend others, all together? What memories do you retain and form? Are you talking about semantic memories, or episodic memories? How do you measure that those memories are retained and formed, if you cannot test the subject due to the impossibility of communication? It's a lot more difficult than absolutist statements. Edit: typo (thinks->things)
giancarlostoro 2y ago
I think I read here on HN a theory that memories are like encoded and as we grow the encoding changes and we forget how to access certain memories, this was a theory of course. Probably explains people with Dementia (I think?) where they randomly remember something and a ton of joy rushes them, but they also get very confused as well, probably trying to decode memories but they cannot, they instead seem to ramble and get angry. I dont remember the thread but the context I think was regarding reading memories digitally somehow. I am slowly becoming convinced of this the more I hear about it. We encode and store memories, we decode them, but as we grow and adapt our thinking, we forget. I wonder if revisiting memories often enough will reencode them before they are lost?
- magicalhippo 2y ago

ben_w 2y ago

Huh. I know very little on this topic, and am pattern-matching that to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

boilerupnc 2y ago

Interesting. I wonder how this relates with my anecdotal observation that my aging immigrant parents and their similarly aged friends increasingly rely and use the language of their youth found in the home vs what they learned in school and used in their adopted country and while raising us. Are old encodings being rediscovered and decoded? Or is there a degradation in the power of their decoder and so it is slowly going back to a foundational level? Fascinating stuff.