[HN Gopher] Human brain compresses working memories into low-res...
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Human brain compresses working memories into low-res 'summaries'
Author : nihkolberg
Score : 474 points
Date : 2022-04-12 13:11 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (directorsblog.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (directorsblog.nih.gov)
| yu-carm-kror wrote:
| I'll pay extra for lossless compression, which is some Black
| Mirror stuff.
| ulisesrmzroche wrote:
| Kinda like what happens when you bite into a Madeleine.
| dnate wrote:
| > To take a closer look, they used a sophisticated model that
| allowed them to project the three-dimensional patterns of brain
| activity into a more-informative, two-dimensional representation
| of visual space. And, indeed, their analysis of the data revealed
| a line-like pattern,...
|
| So are they reading their minds? Is that possible/ What does it
| look like?
| JackFr wrote:
| > It turned out that either visual stimulus--the grating or
| moving dots--resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in
| the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a
| part of the brain used in memory processing and storage.
|
| >These two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant
| information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract
| memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain activity trained
| to recall motion direction was indistinguishable from that
| trained to recall the grating orientation.
|
| >This result indicated that only the task-relevant features of
| the visual stimuli had been extracted and recoded into a shared
| memory format. But Curtis and Kwak wondered whether there might
| be more to this finding.
|
| ----
|
| That is outrageously bad logic and is basically assuming your
| conclusion. This is not good science.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| possible it's just bad science reporting
| theptip wrote:
| Reading the paper's abstract, definitely just bad science
| reporting.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/
| JackFr wrote:
| I don't know. I just don't see it.
|
| The subject is given two tasks requiring working memory.
| The researchers observe activity in the parietal and visual
| cortices via fMRI, and find the neural activity between the
| two tasks is indistinguishable. And conclude
|
| > ... distinct visual stimuli (oriented gratings and moving
| dots) are flexibly recoded into the same WM format in
| visual and parietal cortices when that representation is
| useful for memory-guided behavior.
|
| Seems a pretty big leap to me.
|
| I'm not a neuroscientist, and fMRI is amazing. But I think
| there's more handwaving about how 'thoughts' and 'memories'
| are 'encoded' as if the brain were a piece of electronics
| we fully understood.
|
| There's no magic -- everything we think has to happen at
| some physical level, but I think there is a generation of
| neuroscientists who are fooling themselves by projecting a
| reductionist mental(?!) model of how the brain works that
| is as yet unjustified, and interpreting all of their
| results in the light of that model.
| hartator wrote:
| Thanks for hijacking my scrolling. I really don't like having a
| consistent experience across pages.
| [deleted]
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Maybe this is why deja vu happens? You run the "compression" and
| produce a memory that's very similar to another memory?
|
| The brain is nothing like a computer, so the hash table analogy
| is almost certainly inaccurate, but it's a funny idea.
| ornornor wrote:
| I read somewhere that deja vu is when your two hemispheres get
| out of sync for a split moment and record the same input one
| after the other. But I don't know if that's true for sure. Or
| maybe they're just rearranging the matrix.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Another theory I read was that some signal from your
| hippocampus (memory storage) fires, so that the rest of your
| brain believes erroneously that the current sensory input is
| coming from memory.
| baja_blast wrote:
| I believe this is the case. I have heard the same thing and
| it matches my experience every time I get deja vu. I have
| this strong sense that what is happening has happened
| before, but I am unable to relate it to anything nor recall
| what should happen next.
| vmception wrote:
| At this point I would need the hash table analogy explicitly
| disproved because I see something more and more like the
| computers we develop
|
| Short term memory operates radically different than long term
| memory
|
| Co processors doing specialized processing, with a limited
| ability of other processors to do it
|
| Each having their own currently unknown instruction set
|
| Bus between the processor with varying bandwidth constraints
|
| Modules for processing certain kinds of input, maybe some
| completely vestigial after deprecation
| 01100011 wrote:
| In my experience this plays out on multiple timescales. When you
| get older you start to have entire decades of life boiled down to
| the factual knowledge you gained plus a handful of episodic
| memories.
|
| It's a good reminder to write shit down and take lots of mundane
| pictures. You don't realize until it's too late though.
| ajford wrote:
| A friend of mine from some time back chatted about this once.
| His take was that as you get older, your "mental models" grow
| and are able to cover larger parts of your day/week/month and
| your mind simply keeps the important parts but lets the rest
| fade.
|
| When you're younger, those models are less complete and larger
| parts of your waking moments are needed to build the
| foundations of these models, so you feel like time is slower
| since so much more of your time is kept "fresh".
|
| I'm probably butchering his take on it, but I blame my own
| mental models for compressing away the finer details!
| codethief wrote:
| > When you're younger, those models are less complete and
| larger parts of your waking moments are needed to build the
| foundations of these models, so you feel like time is slower
| since so much more of your time is kept "fresh".
|
| As a corollary, if you want to keep on feeling young and
| feeling time pass slowly, you need to keep on incorporating
| "new" experiences into your life that extend (or change) your
| mental models.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Good reminder to backup your smartphone photos so you don't
| lose them to a brickening or lockout.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Actually this generation will have a very different
| relationship with the past. Never before there was so many
| high resolution traces of your daily life.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Indeed. We take photos and videos for our son pretty much
| everyday. He would need a good chunk of his life to review
| all these if he wants when he grows up and moves to his own
| house.
| agumonkey wrote:
| > moves to his own house.
|
| i'm sorry we don't have the technology for that yet
| fudged71 wrote:
| There was a great article on this recently. The author made
| the point that if there was a day, week, or month where
| there were no backups or photos then you might put less
| value on that time of your life in retrospect. Conversely
| there might be a timespan where you took too many photos
| and might feel like there was more value to be had in that
| time.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Interesting. I forgot who said that in your best moments
| you don't have time for anything else. Indeed if you
| don't take pics it might just be because it was deeply
| interesting and not worth taking your smartphone out of
| your pocket.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| So, not PNG but JPEG
| adtac wrote:
| More like a .txt file + OpenAI to generate images on demand
| deltille wrote:
| What I'm getting from this is that there are tangible parallels
| between suggestive memory alteration and deep-frying a JPEG.
| shrimpx wrote:
| This seems analogous to the weights in a neural network. In
| training, essential information about the training set is stored
| in weights and the rest is discarded. You can't recover a
| training sample from a trained network.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I think this is why it's hard sometimes to argue in support of
| something you believe, even if you're right.
|
| At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were loaded
| into your working memory, and with that information you arrived
| at a conclusion. Your brain, however, no longer needs those facts
| and figures; you've gotten what you needed from them, and they
| can be kicked out of working memory. What you store there is the
| conclusion. If it comes up again, you've got your decision, but
| not all of the information about how you arrived there.
|
| So when your decision is challenged, you are not well equipped to
| defend it, because you no longer retain _why_ you arrived at that
| decision, just the conclusion itself.
|
| It's _immensely_ easier to trust that you arrived at the right
| conclusion and the person who is in disagreement is missing
| something, than it is to reload all of the facts and figures back
| into your brain and re-determine your conclusion all over again.
| Instead, you can dig in, and resort to shortcuts and logical
| tricks (that you can pull out without needing to study) to defend
| what you 've previously concluded (possibly correctly, but
| without the relevant information).
|
| If this finding ends up being generally an approximation of how
| our brains work, it could explain a lot about what's happening to
| global conversations, particularly around the Internet and on
| social media specifically. It also suggests a possible solution;
| make the data quickly available. Make it as seamless as possible
| to re-load those facts and figures into your working memory, and
| make it as unpleasant as possible to rely on shortcuts and
| logical tricks when arguing a point.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> It also suggests a possible solution_
|
| Is there a problem? The so-called global conversation concern
| seems to be simply that some people have differing feelings and
| their feelings push them to want others to share in the same
| feelings. To 'solve' for those feelings of some implies that
| their feelings are of greater importance than the feelings or
| others, but that seems pretty wishy-washy.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| This justifies all the hours I spend on HN. :)
| ajuc wrote:
| Here's article about this phenomenon:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2MD3NMLBPCqPfnfre/cached-tho...
| sva_ wrote:
| Interesting thought. Perhaps that is also why people sometimes
| have a hard time changing their mind when confronted with new
| information: a certain number of bits of information have led
| you to your belief, and even if some of those change or turn
| out to be false, you can't access those bits anymore
| individually, but only the resulting belief.
|
| Perhaps, the more those beliefs are reinforced, the less likely
| you are to access it's constituents. Sounds a lot like
| inductive bias, but somehow different from ML.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > why people sometimes have a hard time changing their mind
| when confronted with new information
|
| Something else happens with me, it's like my brain says "this
| does not fit in with what I understand, discard it". At a
| conscious level I don't hear what I've just been told. I have
| to be told it again, and sometimes more than twice before it
| finally works its way in. It's a liability for me and a
| frustration for others and it's just plain peculiar.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| This is a very astute point. But I would also add that, IMO,
| you only ever even perceived reality as a compressed summary.
| mjevans wrote:
| It's extremely difficult to maintain a database of __all__ the
| citations for __anything__ you ever adjudicated (reached a
| decision).
|
| Making things more easily findable and a database of debunked
| lies might be better.
|
| Also great would be training (for anyone) on how to spot 'magic
| tricks' in debates / information presentation. E.G. how things
| might be cut down, remixed, or staged to create something that
| at a glance is convincing, but with closer examination could
| just be gaslighting.
| gregwebs wrote:
| The solution I use is to take notes.
|
| I don't think the conversation on the social media is based
| around data. Most data points that people have are inaccurate
| (if not false), taken out of context, or used with an incorrect
| mental model. Once someone states something on social media, it
| has usually been taken on a viewpoint: at that point data is
| generally viewed with a confirmation bias type approach.
|
| I am wondering if there is a way to teach everyone to separate
| facts from values. The facts are the most important part that
| should be maintained separately (you can do this with notes).
| Then we need to recognize that different individuals will apply
| different values and focus on transmitting facts in discussions
| and let everyone apply their own value system.
| bitcuration wrote:
| What you described is called scientific method.
|
| It'd need good STEM education in young age, not shy on math,
| or at the very least doing computer programming
| professionally at some points of life.
|
| Good luck finding those in the last couple generations in the
| West.
| lekevicius wrote:
| Favorited this comment for when my brain remembers "people
| argue online because of how our memory works", but not exactly
| how I arrived to that conclusion.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This is why verbal debates are bad.
| ryanong wrote:
| This also make sense how one can hijack someones brain into
| believing something even if they don't understand why it makes
| sense
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were
| loaded into your working memory, and with that information you
| arrived at a conclusion._
|
| I often say " _X was explained to me once and it sounded
| reasonable, but I don 't remember the details anymore._"
|
| Sometimes remembering the reasons _themselves_ for X off the
| top of your head may not be important, but knowing that _there
| are_ reasons (that you can look up) is.
|
| _What_ the answer is for something may not be as remember as
| remembering _that_ an answer exists.
| SinParadise wrote:
| Which is also why I think using facts to convince others is a
| Sisyphean endeavor. It is far more rational to learn rhetoric
| when you have to argue. Learn to wield fallacies like a weapon.
|
| Of course, this relates back to good-faith, bad-faith
| engagement. Wielding rhetoric like this constantly deters
| people from engaging in good-faith, so you also have to develop
| a heuristic to determine whether or not the individual
| challenging your assertions is worth engaging in good-faith in
| the first place.
| freedomben wrote:
| I've found that 100/100 people just get offended and/or
| pissed and retreat to their amygdala if you point out a
| fallacy in their logic. It certainly doesn't help that many
| people pointing out logical fallacies are in fact wrong (and
| fallacious) themselves (the "you're using a slippery slope
| fallacy" for example is fallaciously used all over the
| place).
|
| I'm becoming increasingly convinced that good faith
| engagement is essentially impossible. The only reason I
| engage at all anymore is for the third party that might be an
| honest seeker who may stumble upon the thread at some point
| in the future.
| SinParadise wrote:
| >I've found that 100/100 people just get offended and/or
| pissed and retreat to their amygdala if you point out a
| fallacy in their logic.
|
| And I am sure I've been guilty of this before, many many
| times. Being challenged is not a comfortable position to be
| in. I have since learned to weaken my position to give
| myself and others some leeway when one of us is wrong.
|
| >I'm becoming increasingly convinced that good faith
| engagement is essentially impossible.
|
| It is certainly getting more difficult. I think it is still
| useful to engage with individuals in your chosen social
| circle honestly and in good-faith, otherwise why are they
| in your circle in the first place?
| leobg wrote:
| "Would I not need to be a barrel of memory to also remember all
| my reasons? It is hard enough to remember just my opinions
| themselves!" -Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Another potential upside of a brain to computer interface
| (Neuralink), the ability to store every memory you have ever
| had (while the device was installed) in full resolution.
|
| Assuming of course you maintain a server rack at home with
| copious amounts of hard drives.
| sethrin wrote:
| > full resolution
|
| What, generally, do you think this might mean?
| bick_nyers wrote:
| The ability to experience a memory as precisely as you
| want, including the option of a full mental transplant,
| like loading a save file for a video game. See, hear,
| touch, smell, taste, and think the exact same thoughts as
| you did 15 years ago. The playback mechanisms will have
| some caveats, as it may not strictly be possible to
| playback perfectly, as you are a different person with a
| different brain and body than say 15 years ago. You could
| relive something in the first person perspective, or
| perhaps just observe yourself from a third person
| perspective.
|
| To a lesser degree, just being able to hear the dialogue in
| your brain at the time of a memory would be monumental.
| Then you can get into the business of using tools built
| around this, such as searching your memories, computing
| statistical analysis (maybe you can find out why you
| haven't been able to commit to an exercise habit for the
| past 5 years?), and so on.
| freedomben wrote:
| People will still argue that self-hosting is too hard so you
| might as well just accept that Evil Corp is gonna be the
| central store of all memories (with a great proprietary
| format!). Better not think of anything that violates the
| terms of service.
| mattkrause wrote:
| (...and we figure out how to that which is uhh...not close).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dudeman13 wrote:
| >At one point, all of the relevant facts and figures were
| loaded into your working memory, and with that information you
| arrived at a conclusion
|
| You are awfully optimistic about the rationality of humans,
| aren't you? :)
| pc86 wrote:
| I know this is a joke but it seems unnecessary. _Most people_
| actually do use evidence and logic to arrive at their
| opinions. The problem is some people are presented with
| incorrect or fabricated evidence. Some people draw incorrect
| conclusions, or maybe some of the evidence is above their
| head so they ignore that when it 's vital to proper
| understanding. Some people aren't particularly good at
| logical thinking, or never progressed past introductory
| levels.
|
| This is all why you can show identical evidence to a group of
| people and get multiple, sometimes very different, opinions.
| fleddr wrote:
| "Most people actually do use evidence and logic to arrive
| at their opinions."
|
| They do not. The brain is a machine of lies designed to
| keep you alive, rather than arrive at some pure truth. The
| vast majority of your brain power is subconscious. Your
| brain is extremely good at arriving what it needs to know,
| not at knowing or truthfulness in general.
|
| It takes an incredible effort in critical thinking (which
| does not come natural) to unravel the layers of
| misdirection and crap your brain has produced in order to
| come to a kind of objective truth. It's such a headache
| inducing process that few will undertake it. Even more so
| when the outcome of critical thinking is typically
| uncomfortable.
|
| Perhaps more unsettling is that even the very concept of
| you is a lie. Not your body, obviously. Your inner self,
| your identity if you will. You think you're some kind of
| well defined, consistent character. Carved in stone. One
| could perhaps summarize you in 10 bullet points and this
| idea of you is pretty stable over time. That's how you know
| it's you.
|
| In reality, the brain has established this concept of you
| because it's in your best interest. Every little piece of
| input, thought or memory that directly contradicts it
| (which is constantly) is carefully dismissed whilst the
| confirmation of the false belief is amplified. Not because
| it is correct, because it is preferential.
|
| I'm happy to leave you in this confused state on a random
| Tuesday. You can now think that this guy is full of shit,
| which proves my point of your brain filtering information
| that is not in your best interest. Or, you can agree. The
| outcome is the same. I'm right. Or, rather, my brain thinks
| it is. Which is what brains do. It's a defensive organ.
| leaflets2 wrote:
| > Most people actually do use evidence and logic
|
| That's not how humans function.
|
| They are social animals and copy the opinions and beliefs
| of those they want to be (stay) friends with.
|
| Being part of the group is what matters, evolutionary, not
| logics and being right.
|
| And to influence others, step 1 is to make them look at you
| as a friend. There's a book about that :-)
| addaon wrote:
| "Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing
| animal." -- Heinlein
| pontifier wrote:
| Sometimes I find that the solution to some questions is so
| complete that I don't even remember what my issue was
| originally.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I had that thought this morning, knowing I have to present at a
| design review today!
|
| I think the boring solution is to take written notes when
| making decisions. As an engineer, I find that architecture
| documents are very powerful and always worth while.
| qq66 wrote:
| One way to make this clear to yourself is to observe how much
| more difficult it is to "define bread" than it is to answer "is
| this bread?"
| samatman wrote:
| This is more about the fact that we _recognize_ bread, and
| definition plays no role in the process of recognition. Even
| if we define what bread is, that won 't play a role in our
| recognition of anything other than maybe-this-is-bread-
| plus-I'm-being-asked-to-judge-if-it-is-or-not.
| alanh wrote:
| There can be surprising insights yielded from such an
| exercise. For example, if I think about what separates breads
| from cakes and muffins, I am forced to deal with the way that
| a typical "banana bread" (baked with lots of sugar and
| without yeast) is really a bread-shaped muffin more than a
| banana-flavored bread. This might seem overly semantic, but
| it does reflect differences in how it is baked and what it
| means nutritionally.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The examples that you're structuring your attempted
| definitions around (banana bread) come from your intuition.
| In the ultimate limit your definition would be a complete
| list of your intuitions.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Bread is defined as anything I think bread is, and the same
| goes for any other word. To hold another position would be in
| some way dishonest.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| This would make it impossible to share definitions (even
| when we both think all the same things are bread).
| whatshisface wrote:
| It _is_ impossible to share definitions of natural-
| language words, at least pending advanced brain scanning
| technology. That 's a limitation of physical reality, not
| a philosophical flaw.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Are you implying that definitions aren't real because
| they're not physical objects?
| whatshisface wrote:
| I'm implying that natural-language definitions _are_
| physical objects, in your brain, made up of brain stuff,
| and that you can 't write them down in ways that are much
| briefer than a full description of their physical
| manifestation, although you can roughly approximate them
| in something like a dictionary.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| Then why bother writing these sentences? I have no idea
| what you mean by them.
| alanh wrote:
| That's not a definition :) And, by the way, a definition is
| not defined as whatever one thinks a definition is.
| zephyrthenoble wrote:
| Maybe their definition of definition is your definition
| of bread?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Give us this day our daily definition
| alanh wrote:
| At risk of really devolving this thread, I'm pretty sure
| that bodybuilders generally agree that bread is counter-
| productive in the pursuit of definition :)
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| Great, now we gotta figure out what a "bodybuilder" is!
| pc86 wrote:
| One whose body is sufficiently defined.
| mkaic wrote:
| "Bread makes you _fat??_ "
|
| ~Scott Pilgrim
| whatshisface wrote:
| It offers a one-to-one correspondence between stimuli and
| classifications, what else could a definition be?
| taylorius wrote:
| Definitions ideally don't require an oracle.
| addaon wrote:
| How then do you define Pythia?
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| That's not how definitions work. I can't know what your
| brain thinks bread is. And if you die, I can never know.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Definitions do not have to be computable, even in
| principle. For example, "a Turing machine that halts" is
| well-defined although there is no algorithm for
| classifying things into that bin.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/
| uoaei wrote:
| It is literally a definition: it defines the boundary
| between what is and isn't bread.
|
| There is a lot of context that is needed to get to a
| positive _identification_ (maybe the word you meant) of
| bread, but that is true of many definitions present in
| dictionaries, etc. today.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| That makes you a bread-oracle O, but doesn't define bread.
|
| Since there are some inputs x where O(x0) = False, some
| where O(x1) = True, and the laws of physics are
| continuous(yes, even in quantum mechanics), Buridan's
| Principle implies that you are incapable of deciding the
| breadness of arbitrary input in bounded time.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I agree that I cannot decide the breadness of arbitrary
| inputs in bounded time, although I contend that does not
| stop me from claiming to have defined bread, on the
| grounds that the set of Turing machines that halt is
| well-defined but also has the same difficulty you're
| describing.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| A definition doesn't change: The prime numbers or Turing
| Machines are the same set regardless of who Putin invades
| next or what law Biden decides to veto.
|
| But the set of inputs that an oracle implicitly defines,
| could change if the oracle changes. And you could change
| your mind or die tomorrow.
|
| So you would need a very large number of definitions of
| bread, indexed by (time, person). Any one of them could
| be a valid definition - it's theoretically possible to
| make you look at 1000 pictures of bread so your brain is
| encouraged to make a bread-detector neuron, and then scan
| your brain and calculate its response on any input - but
| you don't know which one is correct to use for any
| purpose.
|
| i.e. If I want to start a bakery, should I use your
| current bread-oracle to define "marketable bread", your
| bread-oracle as of 5 years ago, should I take a
| statistical ensemble of brain scans from millions of
| people, or should I use my own?
|
| It seems like just having a function that returns true on
| some inputs and false on others doesn't tell you much,
| whereas traditional mathematical definitions have strict
| relations to other things.
| gryn wrote:
| > A definition doesn't change
|
| but they do, the definition of many words changed over
| time some to even start to mean the opposite of what they
| initially did.
| addaon wrote:
| I don't think this is true? Suppose I define "bread" as
| "that which has a net positive charge" [1]. Can I not put
| the bread candidate in an electric field in flat
| spacetime and measure (the direction of) its acceleration
| in a bounded time? I suppose I might be depending on its
| mass being finite, but the observable universe supports
| that assumption.
|
| [1] I don't think this is a very useful definition of
| bread.
| uoaei wrote:
| Remarkably, you are getting downvoted for stating exactly
| the conclusion of pretty much all philosophical discussion
| on the matter since the mid-20th century.
|
| Notably, the public reacted similarly then as HN does now,
| rejecting the notion that meaning is only constructed and,
| furthermore, hopelessly solipsistic.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This thought experiment ends with Diogenes running into the
| Academy and tossing a Guinness in my face. ;)
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| I have a hard time believing Diogenes would waste a good
| Guinness like that.
| Pr0ject217 wrote:
| Insightful. Thanks.
| robmccoll wrote:
| The weird (scary?) point will be when we figure out how to subtly
| present adversarial information to the brain that will be coded
| in a way that collides with some target information to induce
| false recognition/ memories.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think this is already possible.
|
| I have seen research where false memories were induced into
| people by photoshopping childhood images of those people into
| events that did not happen to them -- and worse, in 16% of
| cases just by _showing adverts_ of things that _could not_
| happen such as meeting Bugs Bunny at Disney World (wrong
| franchise): http://people.uncw.edu/tothj/PSY510/Loftus-
| Memory%20for%20Th...
| robmccoll wrote:
| Fascinating - thanks for the article. It's strange to think
| that however much we think that we're completely rational and
| can trust our own memories, we're more like malleable
| rationalizing machines.
| axg11 wrote:
| Read "The Mind is Flat" - your idea is a theme of the book.
|
| We already have a few examples of adversarial information for
| humans: optical illusions being the most widely discussed.
| robmccoll wrote:
| Wow - just watched a talk Nick Chater gave. Sounds like an
| interesting model for consciousness. I'll check it out.
| Thanks.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| So I remember reading somewhere, probably on HN, that we don't
| remember real facts but instead we remember our last call of a
| particular memory. I've hijacked some unpleasant memories that
| way. I'll add some colors, a round ball bouncing, all kind of
| stuff that'll alter the memory. It doesn't make it totally
| disappear but it kinda smoothen it.
| robmccoll wrote:
| Nice to know that there's an upside to this idea :-)
| swayvil wrote:
| One might call those summaries, _stories_.
|
| Which would make the consumption of stories easier than
| experience-then-convert-to-story.
|
| Which would explain their popularity.
| Tycho wrote:
| I definitely construct scenes from a few noted details plus
| general context. Like what colour is my neighbour's front door?
| Not sure, even though I pass it every day.
|
| However if I mentally retrace my steps within a short timespan,
| it seems that I recall details that I would generally not
| remember. For instance if I leave my house and think, "Did I
| brush my teeth?", I can usually confirm/disconfirm by picturing
| something very specific like where I placed the toothbrush
| afterwards.
| efortis wrote:
| Aristotle more or less explained this as:
|
| 1. you sense an experience,
|
| 2. retain it (percepts),
|
| 3. when repeated, you extract the common denominators to form a
| concept (something you can recall and communicate).
| adamnemecek wrote:
| This is not surprising.
| rackjack wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy-trace_theory
| dirtyid wrote:
| As someone who has problems remembering dates or names to events,
| I always assumed my brain had poor summary ability. Other aspects
| my mental compression likes to make fuzzy, clothes people are
| wearing, hair styles. But memory for locations, down to the room
| seems relatively loss less.
| yu-carm-kror wrote:
| <deduplicate>
| WalterBright wrote:
| My memory made a lot more sense to me when I learned it was a
| giant associative array, with multiple keys to look things up
| with. When I forget something I try various other "keys" to find
| it again, and that usually works.
|
| For example, if I forget someone's name, I'll try their last
| name, or their spouse's name, guessing names that sound like
| their name, trying common names, various syllables, other
| memories associated with them, etc.
|
| If I misplaced something, I'll try to reconstruct what I was
| doing the last time I remember having the item. When I find the
| item, that is the key that brings up the memory of putting it
| there.
|
| A consequence of this is my memories are not in chronological
| order (not at all like a movie). I can clearly remember events
| but have no information about what order they are in or when they
| happened, unless there is some anchor in the memory to tell me
| (like where I was living at the time).
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > The new study, from Clayton Curtis and Yuna Kwak, New York
| University, New York, builds upon a known fundamental aspect of
| working memory. Many years ago, it was determined that the human
| brain tends to recode visual information. For instance, if passed
| a 10-digit phone number on a card, the visual information gets
| recoded and stored in the brain as the sounds of the numbers
| being read aloud.
|
| I'd be cautious over-generalizing that result, because I think
| it's also been found that different people do this in different
| ways, and it may be one of the things that distinguishes speed-
| readers from other readers.
|
| I know when I read text, my brain sounds it out. It's gotten very
| fast at it, so I can read pretty quickly, but that sounding-out
| engages auditory parts of my brain that make it hard to read and
| listen to someone at the same time. Other people I've met simply
| do not have that limitation, and their description of the qualia
| of how they read doesn't mention a sounding-out step at all.
| Fergusonb wrote:
| Anyone know a good compression algorithm? Mine seems to be
| incredibly lossy.
| throwawaygo wrote:
| Surprise!! The human brain compresses all experience into low-res
| summaries. Full res is not possible. :D
| axg11 wrote:
| Compression is a component of general intelligence. A few years
| ago I was very sceptical of machine learning ever leading to
| general intelligence. I've since changed my mind. There are a lot
| of parallels to this work and the concept of "embeddings" in
| machine learning.
|
| Intelligence requires the ability to generalize. A prerequisite
| for generalization is the ability to take something high-
| dimensional and reduce it to a lower-dimensional representation
| to allow comparison and grouping of concepts.
|
| We're doing this all the time. Take a pen for example: we're able
| to combine information from sight, touch, and sound. Through some
| mechanism, our brains reduce the multi-sensory information and
| create a consistent representation that is able to invoke past
| memories and knowledge about pens.
|
| Our brains encode the embeddings in a very different way to deep
| learning neural networks, but the commonality is that both are
| able to compress data into a _useful_ representation. Note that
| as a result of this, the quality of the compression is important.
| Some forms of compression might be very efficient but they also
| tangle concepts together, resulting in loss of composability. The
| ideal compression (from an intelligence point of view) is both
| information efficient and maximally composable.
| goaaron wrote:
| The human brain also forgets, something that may be a feature
| instead of a bug. Also, beyond compression--brains are
| simulation machines: imagining new scenarios. Curios to
| understand if ML provides anything analogous to simulation that
| isn't rote interpolation.
| uoaei wrote:
| Absolutely. Generative methods are all the rage now. Those
| methods work on learning information-rich representation
| spaces. You could argue it's still "interpolation" but
| instead of interpolating in data-space per se you are
| interpolating in representation-space.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| I think the simulation aspects of conscious and intelligence
| are fundamental. We don't simulate the world, we simulate
| what we might experience.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| People with hyperthymesia don't forget and don't necessarily
| seem to have any other potentially disabling neuroatypicality
| like autism.
|
| Having it is a premium feature.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
| kaba0 wrote:
| I am quite a novice in ML topics, but isn't this concept of
| simultaneously training a generator and validator sort of
| this?
|
| I don't know the exact term but I think of deep fake
| generators with an accompanying deep fake recognizer working
| in tandem bettering each other constantly?
| samstave wrote:
| > _able to compress data into a _useful_ representation. Note
| that as a result of this, the quality of the compression is
| important. Some forms of compression might be very efficient
| but they also tangle concepts together, resulting in loss of
| composability_
|
| ---
|
| I wonder if various factors inform how/what compression is used
| on a memory...
|
| For example, a memory of putting the object back where it
| belongs/got it from vs the memory of a violent attack is
| through the lens of emotional (trauma) and thus the memories
| will be stored differently.
|
| Its interesting in that I have been wanting to post an ASK HN
| on memory and dreams...
|
| Now with this post, and your comment, I will post that.
|
| ---
|
| The idea is that the surunding meta-information of a memory is
| important.
|
| Lenses of senses that colour a memory are many, and
| individualistic.
|
| i.e.
|
| A person who is a psychopath, has an emotional block on the
| lens that they would see their actions through (remorse, guilt,
| empathy, etc) - thus they may not recall or RE- _MIND_
| themselves of an action /situation.
|
| A memory that is laid with a sensuous experience, such as sex
| with someone you love/lust deeply may last a lifetime.
|
| Certain things that one does/says can also lead to a lifetime
| of regret ; a cringe-worthy action/comment from decades ago can
| still haunt your thoughts.
|
| ---
|
| I think the mystique btwn ML and biological memories is a
| really interesting space, as an ML|AI based system will never
| achieve the 100th monkey or DNA|biological transfer of
| information, but an approximation/facsimile based on
| evolved|updated libraries/files/code which are maintained
| exclusively by the AI entity will/does exist
| axg11 wrote:
| Speculating here: if the brain really uses embeddings similar
| (in concept) to neural network embeddings, the mechanism
| could explain a lot of the peculiarities of the brain.
| Embeddings are naturally entangled, so are memories. For
| example, a specific smell can evoke a previous memory.
| metamuas wrote:
| I have always thought that the best measure of intelligence is
| compression of information. If you can create a smaller,
| abstract model that is still accurate despite a loss in
| details, then you are intelligent.
| meowface wrote:
| Interesting counterargument from AI researcher Francois
| Chollet (creator of Keras and one of the main contributors to
| TensorFlow): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V-vOXLyKGw
| beaconstudios wrote:
| This also ties in to the cybernetic concept of the law of
| requisite variety, where adaptable entities need to be able to
| compress their sense-data about their environment into an
| internal model that corresponds in complexity to their need to
| act - this necessarily involves compression as the totality of
| reality is effectively infinite and can't fit between your
| ears.
|
| There's also the Hutter prize that ties data compression
| directly to intelligence through Kolmagorov complexity.
|
| Information and cybernetic theories cut pretty close to a
| general theory of intelligence in my opinion!
| mherrmann wrote:
| A nice definition of intelligence I've heard is exactly the
| ability to form models of the world with predictive power. And
| a model is essentially a compression of real-world data.
| Physical laws are a great example of this.
| bweitzman wrote:
| How do you tell if something you're trying to determine as
| intelligent or not has formed a model?
| uoaei wrote:
| If it efficiently ingests data with a non-trivial signal-
| to-noise ratio and returns actions/reactions that contain
| more signal and less noise.
| WithinReason wrote:
| You can't make accurate predictions without some kind of
| model
| alanh wrote:
| Well, one thing you can ask it to do is to make a
| prediction.
| copperx wrote:
| Creating models with predictive power is also a precise
| definition of science.
| pizza wrote:
| Slight tweak to this imo: models that can predict which new
| reframings/samples of current scientific-community-
| consensus SOTAs/benchmarks/datasets will disprove
| contemporary consensus is science :)
| ThouYS wrote:
| Not necessarily, since models that predict correctly can
| still be wrong. Science is figuring out the real mechanism
| lavishlatern wrote:
| I disagree with this definition. We have yet to produce a
| perfect model of the world (aka, a theory of everything).
| All models produced by "science" thus far are "wrong", at
| least on some level (ex. Newton's model doesn't cover
| relativity). I think "Creating models with predictive
| power is also a precise definition of science." is a fair
| description.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that a "theory of everything" is
| sort of the great work of any particular field of
| science. In practice that means refining models, but the
| model-building is ancillary to the truth-finding, not the
| other way around. Of course, if the truth wasn't
| predictive we're all just screwed, but that doesn't mean
| that whatever is predictive is necessarily the truth. It
| just means we might all be screwed.
| mehphp wrote:
| I think that most work in quantum physics negates that
| claim.
|
| While we are improving our predictive power, we're still
| baffled by the underlying nature of reality. We don't
| know the "mechanism" by which the quantum world works.
| rektide wrote:
| Instead of reasoned & formula based models, now we have
| purely empirical models. See Wolfram's New Kind Of Science.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Does ANKS engage with empirical models beyond what is
| necessary to hype up cellular automata?
| 8note wrote:
| Isn't wolfram's new kind of science purely rational? No
| observations of the universe needed
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The universe is required to run Mathematica.
| hammock wrote:
| Testing models*
| freediver wrote:
| I co-authored a paper exploring this topic while I was still
| pretty hyped about the possiblity of using embeddings for
| generalization.
|
| "Towards conceptual generalization in the embedding space"
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01873
|
| I still think the approach outlined in the paper (using
| embeddings to map the physical world) is sound especially for
| the field of self-driving which is in dire need of
| generalization, but I've since changed my mind and currently do
| not believe we can achieve AGI (ever).
|
| While embeddings are a great tool for compressing information,
| they do not provide inherent mechanisms for manipulating the
| information stored in order to generalize and infer outcomes in
| new, unseen situations.
|
| And even if we would start producing embeddings in a way they
| have some basic understanding of the physical world, we could
| never achieve it to the level of detail necessary because
| physical world is not a discrete function. Otherwise we would
| be creating a perfect simulation (within a simulation?).
| ascar wrote:
| > I've since changed my mind and currently do not believe we
| can achieve AGI (ever).
|
| Considering we (as in humans) developed general intelligence,
| isn't that already in contradiction with your statement? If
| it happened for us and is "easily" replicated through our
| DNA, it certainly can be developed again in an artificial
| medium. But the solution might not have anything to do with
| what we call machine learning today and sure we might go
| extinct before (but I didn't have the feeling that's what you
| were implying).
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's semantics at this point but we did not create
| ourselves, it was a complex process that took billions of
| years to create each one of us. Something being conceivable
| isn't the same as it being practically possible. I can
| imagine what you propose, but the same goes for traveling
| to distant stars or a time machine for going to the future.
| All perfectly possible in theory.
| freediver wrote:
| It is not a contradiction as I meant in the context of us
| achieving it by creating it.
|
| The fact it happened to us is undeniable, but the how/why
| of it are still one of the biggest mysteries of the
| universe - one we likely will never solve.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > currently do not believe we can achieve AGI (ever).
|
| Do you mean with embeddings as the approach, or in general?
| bgroat wrote:
| In the incredible story "Funes the Memorious" the eponymous
| Funes has an absolutely perfect memory, but is functionally
| mentally handicapped.
|
| He can't even abstract to the existence of "trees" because he
| can recall and diff all of the details of every tree he's ever
| seen.
|
| He can't even identify that he's seen a particular tree before,
| because he can diff how different it looked in a particular
| configuration of leaves and shadows because of different wind
| and cloud cover
| tartakovsky wrote:
| Makes me think of ... Asperger's.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I would think it's being an megasavant, sort of like Kim
| Peek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
|
| Not capable of functioning independently or surviving for
| any long period unassisted but having a brain and cognition
| setup that allowed for amazing feats of mental wizardry. If
| you could have that ability and function normally in
| society you could do some astounding things.
| bgroat wrote:
| That's how I understood it.
|
| A great story about a mega-savant who _can_ function is
| "Understand" by Ted Chiang, if you're interested
| Lich wrote:
| I thought that the idea of Mentats (human computers from
| the Dune novel) were kind of ridiculous, but yeah, when
| you look at savants like Peek, makes you kind of wonder
| if such a thing would be possible.
| konschubert wrote:
| I find it funny how I can "see" a map of the world in front of
| me when I imagine it, but I totally cannot draw it.
|
| Clearly, much less information is stored than the whole
| image... yet my mind DALL-E style fills in the gaps and "sees"
| a map.
| amelius wrote:
| Keep drawing until what is on paper equals what is in your
| imagination. Seriously, try it.
| axg11 wrote:
| Already plugged this book elsewhere in the thread, you might
| be interested in "The Mind is Flat". One chapter of the book
| explores the concept you're describing. Our brain creates the
| illusion of a "full picture" when often our imagination and
| internal representation is quite sparse. I think that's one
| of the key impressive qualities of our brains and general
| intelligence. We only do the minimum necessary imagination
| and computation. As we explore a particular concept or scene,
| our brains augment the scene with more details. In other
| words, our mind is making it up as we go along.
| [deleted]
| samstave wrote:
| How do theories such as " _The 100th Monkey_ " as well as
| transferred information via DNA to offspring translate to ML|AI
| at all?
|
| For example, couldn't a sufficiently developed AI modify some
| code/libraries it utilizes/learns from/creates, to ensure any
| new spawns of said AI/ML/Bot has the learned previous
| behaviors?
|
| I doubt _100th Monkey_ will ever hit AI.
|
| So that's an interesting aspect to the limits to AI '
| _evolving_ '
| Joel1234 wrote:
| Que gracioso tio
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I saw a presentation once (It was not recorded, so I can't link
| it) that said the difference between real intelligence and
| artificial intelligence is the ability to quickly learn.
|
| As an example, he said imagine if he invented a word. Poditon.
| And he told us that a poditon is any object that can fit on a
| podium. Instantly, you know whether or not any object can be
| classified as a poditon. A laptop is a poditon, but a car is
| not.
|
| We are not at the stage where we can just tell a program "Any
| object that can fit on a podium is a poditon" and then ask "Is
| X a poditon?" and get a correct answer. And we probably won't
| be there for another couple decades.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| If you've seen examples of GPT3 you'd know this is already
| possible.
| gjm11 wrote:
| So, I tried this out with GPT-3 in the OpenAI Playground.
| (The model called text-davinci-002.) My prompt looked like
| this: Definition: A blorple is anything
| that is red and more or less round. Question: Is a
| tennis ball a blorple? Answer: No, because although
| tennis balls are round they aren't red. Question: Is
| a cherry a blorple? Answer: Yes, because cherries are
| red and approximately round. Definition: A
| poditon is anything that can fit on top of a podium.
| Question: Is a laptop computer a poditon? Answer:
|
| GPT-3 says: "Yes, because laptop computers are small enough
| to fit on top of a podium."
|
| Is a normal-sized automobile a poditon? "No, an automobile is
| too large to fit on top of a podium."
|
| Is the sun a poditon? "No, because the sun is too large to
| fit on top of a podium."
|
| Is a human being a poditon? "Yes, because human beings are
| small enough to fit on top of a podium."
|
| Is a house a poditon? "No, because a house is too large to
| fit on top of a podium."
|
| While generating those answers it also spontaneously answered
| the question for tennis balls (yes) and books (yes).
|
| Decades sure do go by quickly, these days.
| eruci wrote:
| That's why intuition and prejudices are such a time saver.
| karpierz wrote:
| > It turned out that either visual stimulus--the grating or
| moving dots--resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in
| the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a
| part of the brain used in memory processing and storage.
|
| > These two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant
| information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract
| memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain activity trained
| to recall motion direction was indistinguishable from that
| trained to recall the grating orientation.
|
| Isn't the alternative explanation that our tooling for inspecting
| the brain at work abstracts too much detail away for us to be
| able to tell the difference?
| theptip wrote:
| Right, it's quite obvious that the memory is not being stored
| bit-for-bit in exactly the same way because if you ask the
| person what they saw after the experiment, they will be able to
| recall the difference of "lines" or "dots".
|
| But the paper is explicitly looking at the representation in
| working memory; so two obvious possibilities are, one that the
| "orientation" and "dotness vs. lineness" attributes are being
| decoupled and stored separately in working memory (different
| "registers" if you will). Or the "dotness / lineness" is
| getting stored somewhere else (not working memory, some other
| memory system) because it's not "behaviorally relevant" (i.e.
| relevant to the task that the participant is attending to while
| creating the working memory). I'd guess at the first because my
| impression was that essentially everything that makes it into
| episodic memory starts in working memory, but I'm not a
| neuroscientist.
|
| I think the OP is getting way ahead of itself with "The
| findings suggest that participants weren't actually remembering
| the grating or a complex cloud of moving dots at all.". The
| paper is making a much more modest claim that "direction" is
| recorded in the same underlying way, specifically during a task
| where you're being asked to recall direction. It's completely
| possible that this intermediate/common representation would not
| be generated if you're just looking at the pattern and not
| performing a task related to direction.
|
| I couldn't find the full paper on SciHub, just the abstract
| linked in the OP: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/.
| I'd hope the full paper talks about all this in more detail.
| akyu wrote:
| That's possible. But I think the reason why this is interesting
| is because you are seeing the same kind of representation in
| the brain for two seemingly different phenomenon, motion and
| orientation. It's intuitive to see how you could represent
| motion by an orientation (we do this with vectors in math), but
| its interesting to actually see it happen.
| 323 wrote:
| Indeed, it's like saying "the CPU used 16 Wh of energy,
| executed 1 billion MOV instructions and 2 billion ADD
| instructions for both these two tasks, thus the algorithm it
| ran must be identical".
| srinivasbakki wrote:
| Compression is very well captured by the neural networks already.
| Value of using those features(or knowledge as we say) outside the
| purview of training data(iid) is dismal. Symbolic AI may help ?
| [deleted]
| darepublic wrote:
| This makes me think about people with photographic memory. This
| compression process might work differently for them
| imperio59 wrote:
| Except many people have eidetic recall and memories for their
| entire life so this doesn't hold water, yet another garbage study
| about the brain that ignores the edge cases.
| hintymad wrote:
| This reminds me of this recent book on high-dimensional analysis
| with low dimensional models: https://book-wright-ma.github.io/.
| It looks our brain is great at finding sparsity of information
| and compress it accordingly.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| Is this entirely true? I remember a lot of my work and stuff. If
| the work is a few months old it definitely is compressed but two
| weeks work is still fresh. I also remember every bit of my
| effort.
| alanh wrote:
| Parents report that student brains compress memories of the just-
| ended school day into "fine" or "nothing" depending on the
| specific interrogative used as a prompt.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| It all works this way (though a certain female family member
| would disagree, claiming to remember conversations word-for-word
| years later).
|
| But my memory works this way. A summary "party at so-and-so's
| house, weather was nice, overall vibe was ___". The rest is
| context. You know what the house/backyard is like, you know the
| general feel of that time of year, you know the crowd that
| usually comes, you can easily synthesize details like the smell
| of the BBQ and the taste of the food... build up a complete
| "memory" from stuff that could be summarized in a paragraph of
| text plus generic (not specific to one memory episode) context.
|
| I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking
| route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is it
| accurate? Who cares. As long as no detailed record exists to
| compare it to that would reveal the "lossy compression".
| __s wrote:
| Somewhat. But the compression can be unevenly distributed: a
| few key frames as single vivid images
| Borrible wrote:
| >claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later
|
| And, is she right or does she likes to be right?
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| My accusation is that the conversation memory works the same
| way as the BBQ party memory. You remember a skeleton. This
| subject was discussed, and things were said that gave me a
| feeling of ____. And a few more easily compressed details.
| The rest is interpolated. Imagine a language model the size
| of GPT-3 being trained on one particular person's manner of
| speaking and then given a one-paragraph summary of a
| conversation to get it started. Barring an audio recording or
| a transcript, who's to say that these weren't the words that
| were spoken?
|
| Of course the engineer is tempted to test this by secretly
| recording a conversation and trying to trip up the perfect
| rememberer, a year later. But the non-geek life experience
| accumulated says don't go there.
| Borrible wrote:
| Not to forget, memories are not only unreliable per se, but
| also change with each act of their remembrance.
|
| For example, by character peculiarities, new experiences,
| current circumstances, etc. Often they are made up on a
| whim, without the remembering person being aware of it.
|
| So in a sense, memories have a past and a history.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I should add that as a geek I ought to have a better
| ability to remember, say, computer code that I've written.
| But am I the only one who, going back to something I
| haven't touched for two years, has to re-learn my own code?
| Borrible wrote:
| >But am I the only one who, going back to something I
| haven't touched for two years, has to re-learn my own
| code?
|
| No, that is perfectly normal, and it starts much earlier,
| weeks sometimes days after leaving the code. Depending on
| its complexity and level of its abstraction.
|
| You mentally build something highly abstract without much
| emotional or bodily bond. Your brain has not much
| incentive to rememeber it.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Adding to that, there's a lot of sampling bias as well.
| If a function fits my mental model of it, then I'm
| unlikely to revisit it. If a function doesn't fit my
| mental model, then it is very likely that I'll misuse it,
| increasing the likelihood of a bug, and increasing the
| likelihood that I re-read the code.
| nice2meetu wrote:
| Ditto on the "certain female family member who insists that she
| remembers things word-for-word". When she recounts her meeting
| with a friend it is needlessly tedious (I try to be a good
| listener of course). Complains that my recollections are too
| vague and she wants to know what really happened and is
| frustrated I won't give her details.
|
| I think a large part of it is just that you store what is
| important to you. To me the day-to-day politeness is just
| filler. I don't care if they had black coffee or a latte. If
| someone was struggling with something and poured out their
| heart over multiple conversations, I'm going to remember what
| arguments and concerns they had and the mental model I built up
| around that situation. The filler is just unimportant and
| doesn't stick around.
|
| My wife is the opposite. Signs of weakness are an embarrassment
| to be forgotten. She lives for the day-to-day.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The Myers-Briggs system distinguishes call these two
| perspectives "Sensing" (detail orientated) and "Intuition"
| (theory/model based) [not the best names]. And it posits that
| it's less a matter of importance people place on things and
| more that people literally notice different things and
| perceive the world differently (so it's not even just about
| remembering, it's about what you notice and how your mind
| represents the world in the first place).
| sethrin wrote:
| Meyers-Briggs is a fundamentally non-empirical model. I
| wouldn't recommend it as the basis for any argument or
| position concerning real world phenomena.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| qiskit wrote:
| > I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking
| route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is
| it accurate? Who cares.
|
| It's not just decades old memories. Memory of recent events is
| likely to be suspect. Which is an issue for the legal system
| because it relies so heavily on eyewitness testimony.
|
| https://theconversation.com/new-research-reveals-how-little-...
|
| Not only is human memory unreliable, it is also malleable. And
| if we are just a collection of our memories, then who are we
| really?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| One of my oddest part of my dreams, is that they often tend to
| be places from my childhood or young adult life and that my
| brain seems to processing the 3D layout. Like I will walk
| specifically to school, remembering the route, or through my
| church and I had re-visited a giant thrift store from many
| moons ago and my feet just trod the path right where I knew I
| wanted to go. It's like watching my mind process these
| locations into mental maps in dreams. Kinda neat
| louthy wrote:
| Using routes is a key technique in memory techniques (an the
| so called 'memory palaces'), presumably because when we went
| hunting for food we needed to find our way home, so memories
| attached to routes are a lot stronger.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Interestingly I was able to retrace the walk two decades
| later (we had emigrated to another country in the meantime)
| and while the "vibe" matched, the details were quite
| different from what I thought I remembered (this is an old
| town in south Germany where things don't change that
| quickly so it wasn't redevelopment).
|
| But it was possible, with a bit of head scratching, to walk
| the route just from memory.
| [deleted]
| vharuck wrote:
| >I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking
| route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is
| it accurate? Who cares.
|
| Not only that, but by recalling and rebuilding memories, how
| gaps are filled in depends on your current mental state. For
| example, if I'm feeling depressed and brooding over past social
| interactions, I'll likely imagine people having meaner
| expressions or saying harsher things than they did. The big
| problem is that your memory of the event is "written over"
| based on the rebuilt memory. Again, only the seemingly
| important bits, but people are more likely to remember
| emotionally strong portions. Like those imagined harsh words.
|
| I realized I was doing this when I thought a professor strongly
| disliked me, avoided his classes for a couple years, but then
| found him pleasant. My depression and social anxiety had warped
| my memories over the years. Being aware that this happens
| really helps. I trust negative parts of memories less, and I
| consciously stop myself when I start to brood (or at least,
| have fun with a puzzle while thinking back on things).
| ladyattis wrote:
| I think some memories are closer to lossless compressions than
| lossy which I wonder if it's more of a scale where memories can
| slide between the two modes with varying degrees of fidelity.
| Like there are memories that I know I shouldn't remember from
| childhood that I can remember clearly and others I barely
| remember what year it happened. So I have to wonder if some of
| this seeming lossless-ness is more fractal-like in nature where
| one can just reconstruct from the base encoding and expand it
| outward to fill in sufficient detail to seem like it's
| perfectly captured when it's really just merely the
| reconstruction.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I vaguely remember reading something that traumatic or "very
| important" memories never go through the usual process of
| becoming memories. Instead, when you recall them, your brain
| physically "relives" it so it is never forgotten. Probably a
| evolutionary trait to make sure we learn as much as we can
| from the experience. This is also why you remember those
| "times you almost died" in slow motion. Your brain goes into
| a high resolution mode in those cases, which you remember as
| slow motion, like speeding up a camera and playing it back at
| normal speed.
|
| Sorry I don't have any sources, I'm just a casual reader in
| this space.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If you are taking a truncated SVD, the math says that it is
| the best representation of that data for a given truncation
| size, and will even give you a measure of how good that
| representation is. But picking how good you need often ends
| up being a kind of annoying and fuzzy heuristic thing. In
| addition, some data just gives you better singular values,
| and so fundamentally compresses better.
|
| I guess the brain probably is dealing (in a hugely non-
| mathematical way -- it is just an analogy!) with a similar
| sort of thing. Somehow we pick some memories to keep in great
| detail -- either because they seem to be very valuable, or
| because they just seem to compress nicely.
|
| It is a bit funny that one name for this sort of thing is a
| "singular experience."
| rtpg wrote:
| I mean loads of people have very precise and good memories.
| Photographic memory as a term exists for a reason
| Tycho wrote:
| Photographic memory is not a real phenomenon though. But
| eidetic memory is real, some people can remember almost
| everything they read. But they don't remember photographic
| images.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think you've been downvoted because "photographic" is
| just a figure of speech to mean eidetic. If you look up
| "eidetic" it's essentially a synonym.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > loads of people have very precise and good memories.
|
| Or at least they think they do.
| petercooper wrote:
| _though a certain female family member would disagree, claiming
| to remember conversations word-for-word years later_
|
| Surely many people do. Otherwise you wouldn't have all these
| biographies and non-fiction books packed with conversations
| people have managed to recall in a level of detail enough to
| not get sued. I can barely remember a line of conversation from
| this week, let alone important ones from years ago, so I always
| assumed most/many people can remember conversations to some
| reasonable level in a way that I cannot.
| jfk13 wrote:
| I suspect many (most?) conversations in biographies and non-
| fiction books are not necessarily quoted verbatim. In most
| cases, the author may at best have had access to diaries or
| other notes from the time that recorded a summary of what was
| said, or they may have interviewed people who, years later,
| summarised what they recall -- more or less accurately --
| being discussed.
|
| The author may then present this in the form of quoted speech
| in order to make it more vivid and compelling for today's
| reader, but it rarely corresponds to a precise transcript of
| the original conversation.
| jjeaff wrote:
| I think most people remember the basic concepts and then they
| fill in the details using what they know about the situation
| and participants. I have remembered events a certain way that
| in my mind was very clear. But upon reviewing said events in
| old video, it turns out I got quite a few details wrong.
| Sometimes two people will recall the same event very
| differently. Which is why I think our justice system relies
| far too heavily on witness testimony.
| ummwhat wrote:
| A while back I went on a google maps street view tour of a
| place I lived until I was 9 but hadn't been to in well over a
| decade. I wasn't sure what to attribute to the tenuous nature
| of my ancient memories versus what things had actually changed
| since I last looked. It was honestly a bit uncomfortable and
| disorienting having this gaping hole in my perception of
| reality. Was the swing set always blue in that park? I thought
| it was yellow. Maybe they repainted it? I will never know.
| Symmetry wrote:
| This is more about how what you can remember about an event
| after five seconds differs from all that you experienced, as
| opposed to what you can remember a year later. I think most
| people can give a word for word summary of an utterance after a
| few seconds so this particular experiment doesn't really have
| any bearing on your relatives claims, which are more about
| recall from long term memory rather than working memory.
| Symmetry wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense. One big result from a lot of the
| subliminal stimuli research scientists do is that nothing that
| doesn't enter your consciousness and get combined with your other
| sensory input streams get preserved by the brain for more than a
| second or so. As best we can tell conscious awareness has a far
| narrower bandwidth than your visual cortex so of course its
| dropping details.
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| It's not an indiscriminate lossy compression though, it's a
| summary your brain finely tuned for a specific audience:
| yourself.
|
| What's cool in this whole intelligence process is we get to
| refine the algorithm of what exactly it is we want to keep in the
| summary.
|
| In "discarding features that aren't relevant" mentioned in the
| article, we subconsciously pick what is and what isn't relevant.
|
| That's why I think we sometimes have such vivid memories of some
| childhood scenes: something new happened, our algorithm at that
| time didn't know what was "relevant", so out of safety it decides
| to store everything.
| dschuetz wrote:
| This is nothing new; I have read several books and works on
| neurology, and this is best described a "a simplified
| representation of the environment". Thanks to signal noise and
| neuroplasticity over time the weakest connection points between
| "remembered" stimuli deteriorate and all what is left is even
| more simplified version of a "memory". I am surprised that they
| did not heard of it yet.
| rybosworld wrote:
| That doesn't sound like quite the same thing. This finding
| seems to suggest that the memories are compressed from the get-
| go. Where you are describing why memories get more compressed
| over time, I think.
| dschuetz wrote:
| The compression already begins with the receptors, maybe I
| should have started there. Each stimuli/pattern gets more
| simplified with each neuron layer, e.g. if a region of
| receptors fire a the same time, fire that one neuron, if not
| at the same time, inhibit that neuron, if nothing happens, do
| nothing. It's impossible to "capture" stimuli without
| compression with neurons in the first place. Information is
| being "reduced" or encoded if you will along the signal path
| into the brain, and then over time when recalling this
| information.
| bsedlm wrote:
| IMO this compresion is equivalent to sophisticated scientific
| (mathe-physical) understanding and theories (which really are
| stories)
|
| but I have no backing to this claim
| regpertom wrote:
| "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
| of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a
| placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of
| infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
|
| This is somewhat like an inference from best estimate used to
| develop a plan and then disregard that and implement the plan.
| Why the design of your plan is important to get right, because
| it's about to be thrown away. There is even a certain trauma or
| frustration with having to go backwards, unless you're prepared
| for it. Have you pulled your hair out on being questioned all the
| time by passer bys: why are you doing that? Why don't you do it
| this way? (Usually best translated as why aren't you/why don't
| you do it my way) By someone who has no conception of the system
| that produced the implementation plan? Because I am! Grrr! Or you
| core dump everything on them and you get: sorry I even asked. Or
| you go along with it only to find later there was a good reason
| you were doing it the original way and now there's a lock on the
| crit path.
|
| This is disregarding the times you're the one who is wrong.
|
| Which also hints at why logos is hard. Same with debugging. The
| sanctity of the system that produces the outcomes. Constantly
| having to remember details. What is happening? Why is it
| happening? How do you know? How can it be otherwise? Non
| technical people seem to be able to get away with the first idea
| that comes to mind, unexamined.
|
| Frameworks, shortcuts, assumptions are developed only at some
| point to fail you and shoot you right back to first principles.
| Or you never leave them and the unconcerned dance circles around
| you. I heard you've been having trouble with your tps reports?
|
| Lua indexes from 1 not 0! Are you kidding me!!!? ;_; I went
| through 5 Adams before I figured that out.
|
| "Professor Henry Jones : Oh, yes. But I found the clues that will
| safely take us through them in the Chronicles of St. Anselm.
| Indiana Jones : [pleased] Well, what are they? [short pause as
| Henry tries to recall] Indiana Jones : Can't you remember?
| Professor Henry Jones : I wrote them down in my diary so that I
| wouldn't _have_ to remember. Indiana Jones : [angry] Half the
| German Army 's on our tail and you want me to go to Berlin? Into
| the lion's den?"
|
| To extend further, is that why don't touch my stapler? Get out of
| my chair?
| jotm wrote:
| The most impressive part here is the "decompression" imo.
| Computers are already being used to do stuff that's more or less
| similar (creating apps, 3D models, pictures, videos from code)
| but the speed at which a human brain does it is incredible.
|
| It can be pretty inaccurate, though, adding extra
| objects/words/feelings/circumstances that literally were not
| there :D
| dayvid wrote:
| How does photographic memory work, then, and does it interfere
| with brain function somewhere else?
| bell-cot wrote:
| This sounds much like the old "chess positions" memory test
| studies - in which chess masters were found to be vastly better
| than novices at remembering chess positions taken from actual
| chess games. But just as bad as the novices at remembering random
| (non-game-like) arrangements of the playing pieces on a chess
| board.
|
| Plausibly, their years of experience had given the chess masters
| a far better compression dictionary - for situations within the
| scope of that experience.
| [deleted]
| pontifier wrote:
| It's long been my hypothesis that the so-called "Mandela effect"
| is an effect of memory compression.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Every now and then I become aware that things were not as I
| seemed to remember them. There's definitely some lossy
| compression going on up there!
| slibhb wrote:
| Announcements like this seems so out in front of what we actually
| understand. It's not like we can take someone's brain and read
| memories from it, right?
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| Isn't this easy to visualize? Think of driving down the highway.
| There'll be certain features that you remember in more detail
| than others. Trees, for example, will generally just be trees
| with the exception of a few "interesting" ones.
| ThalesX wrote:
| As someone suffering from Aphantasia [0] (I don't have mental
| imagery at all) and I've been telling people for the longest time
| that this is how I relate to the world. I summarize things. Even
| my mother's face. A post by a Facebook engineer [1] felt like a
| good way to understand it.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
|
| [1]
| https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/medic...
| toper-centage wrote:
| I realized some time ago when I learned of Aphantasia that it
| is a spectrum. From 0 to 10, 10 being perfect photographic
| memory and zero being total Aphantasia, I feel like I'm
| somewhere in the middle. I can recall images, sounds, memes,
| faces, but in terrible quality, with very little color or
| focus, more similar to fast paced dreams than photographs.
| ansible wrote:
| I wonder if that's something that can be practiced and
| improved upon.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I've been trying for years to visualize. My SO is an artist
| and my mother a psychologist, so I've been trying to gets
| tips and tricks from them. I never managed to even get a
| hint of color.
| gehwartzen wrote:
| You sound similar to me, girlfriend is an artist with an
| incredible visual imagination, mother is a therapist, and
| I was at a 0 on the scale before I met her. My gf and I
| have had some deep conversations, sometimes assisted by
| MDMA, and at times to the point of crying in front of her
| in a state of completely trusting her which uncovered
| some past trauma, social fears, and other discomforts I
| needed to work through. Anyway after each of these times
| it would get a little easier to visualize; simple colors
| at first, then colorful shapes, now small snippets of
| images that come in and out. Maybe a 2-3 on the scale.
| Also my memory has improved, not so much for technical
| stuff, but just remembering the details of my life which
| before had huge spans (in years) that I mostly didn't
| remember.
|
| Anyway this might just be specific to me but something to
| think about.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I've been wondering the same ever since I read that Nikola
| Tesla invented/designed the AC motor in his mind's eye.
|
| Seems to be along the lines of lucid dreaming, with a vast
| difference in degree. Sometimes as I'm falling asleep I can
| see vivid scenes or objects that I can--to minor degrees--
| play with for a short time before I either fall asleep or
| wake up, then it's gone.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| also, consider somebody who is an expert already in the
| problem domain.
|
| most of us here are programmers and do this on a daily
| basis. somebody describes "A GraphQL API driven by a
| clojure back end connected to a postgres database" and to
| a layperson that looks like either a bunch of nonsense
| words or maybe a few boxes, clouds, and arrows. but to
| you and me we can visualize the individual lines of code,
| configurations, functions, and infrastructural
| requirements behind that simple sentence.
|
| same with an electrical engineer/inventor in their
| domain.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I would take something written about Tesla on such an
| intimate level with a grain of salt though. He is very
| very hyped and often elevated to a God-like level.
| Borrible wrote:
| I am aphantast, but I do not suffer from it. When I am fully
| conscious, I have no inner vision, but I have vivd and
| colorfull dreams. If I remember them, outside that twilight
| zone shortly before full awakening. So I have an idea what it
| probably is like to have inner vision when fully awake.
|
| Allthough there are some disadvantages, of course. I admire
| people that are able to draw and paint based on their inner
| vision.
|
| Much more important for me was the realization that I can evoke
| images, scenes, etc. in other people that trigger feelings in
| them. Which in turn can trigger actions or omissions. Fear,
| joy, hate, love, disgust, lust. Which they can't do to me, at
| least not just by invoking visual images in my mind through
| words. Manipulative, but not manipulatable in this regard. With
| time, that came in handy.
|
| By the way, I am friends with a handful of people who suffer
| from schizophrenia. They say they envy me a little because in
| their worst phases they wished they didn't have this movie in
| their head. It repeats itself, over and over again.
|
| And aphantasia is a spectrum, I have known people who describe
| rather dull, colorless inner visions and others who can sustain
| them only for short periods of time. On the other hand, I met
| an artist who seemed to live in his own private vibrating Van
| Gogh painting. Judging by his descriptions. And of course,
| without DMT.
| ThalesX wrote:
| > Much more important for me was the realization that I can
| evoke images, scenes, etc. in other people that trigger
| feelings in them. Which in turn can trigger actions or
| omissions. Fear, joy, hate, love, disgust, lust. Which they
| can't do to me, at least not just by invoking visual images
| in my mind through words. Manipulative, but not manipulatable
| in this regard. With time, that came in handy.
|
| I've also discovered this but I can only admit it to my
| closest friends else I'd be labeled a psychopath. There are
| things that trigger these kind of feelings in me, but it's
| more about situations than images and never in remembering
| something.
|
| I do have a feeling that we might be more susceptible to do
| really nasty deeds if push comes to shove (Nazi Germany?) so
| I think it's something we need to be careful about as we can
| be manipulated into doing things that other people might find
| gut wrenching just thinking about.
| Borrible wrote:
| Which is the greater danger: the fearless few or the
| fearful masses? Who kills more, the ice-cold predator or
| the whipped-up herd of people?
|
| Of course, for hell on earth, you need both.
| kaba0 wrote:
| You can also reverse it and perhaps claim that doctors can
| benefit from less visceral reaction to seeing
| blood/internals. Though of course it is a learned behavior
| anyone can get better at.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I am very interested in the topic, and have been looking into
| it for ages. I think most people vastly exaggerate their
| ability to visualize anything. Most people can't really hold a
| square or a sphere in their mind, rotate it, or change colors.
| The only people who truly can are really good artists. My point
| - you may be mis-diagnosing yourself, especially since
| aphantasia doesn't seem to have clear tests or definitions. How
| could it, if a verifiable test would be to ask a person to draw
| what they see, and obviously that confuses the whole test with
| one's art skill.
| copperx wrote:
| Is it really unique? I can visualize a sphere, rotate it,
| rotate the "camera", see it in wireframe, apply any kind of
| texture, reflections, make it bounce, like working with CAD
| software. I can picture the image through a fishbowl lens, or
| through telephoto. However, I do not believe, for example,
| the reflections or the light sources to be realistic. I can
| "see" the effect of changing the lenses, but I don't think
| they correspond to reality. I think that's where people
| exaggerate. The dimensions, light sources and reflections are
| not based on reality.
|
| I can picture anything that I want. Movie scenes with my
| friends faces in them. I always thought everybody could do
| this. If it's somewhat unique, can I use it for something?
| ThalesX wrote:
| Could be that I am mis-diagnosing myself. I've never seen a
| mental image in my mind. I've never been able to conjure one
| and I've been trying for years before falling asleep to
| conjure even a sense of color. Nothing. Black.
|
| To be honest, it doesn't feel like such a handicap to my life
| that I would start submitting myself to clinical trials. If
| the worst to come out of my mis-diagnosis is this post, I can
| live with it.
| dqpb wrote:
| I've always thought of myself as being fairly good at
| visualization.
|
| For example, I can imagine multiple 3D shapes at one time,
| rotate them, keep track of which direction a face is pointing
| on each one, etc.
|
| However, I don't really "see" any image. It's more like a
| feeling of seeing it. Now I'm wondering to what extent other
| people actually see things they imagine...
| thinkingemote wrote:
| a good test would be:
|
| Look at this thing, and describe what you see
|
| Now, close your eyes and imagine another thing and describe
| it
|
| comparison of imagery in reality and visualised. This
| presupposes people describe things visually even when
| directly seeing them, and not in other modes (texture,
| sound, smell , etc)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I am an atrocious artist who absolutely kicks ass at those
| mental object rotation tests. I can very easily manipulate
| objects in my head, but draw a picture? It's an ugly mess.
| dotnwat wrote:
| Same here. Recently tried to explain this to someone who has
| vivid imagery, but it was challenging. It seems we do have a
| wildly different experience of life in this aspect.
| ummwhat wrote:
| I'll take a stab at it.
|
| Imagine you sit at your desk all day answering emails. Emails
| come in, responses go out. Except when you step back from the
| desk, it's just a black void. Information from your eyes?
| That's just an email saying what grandma looks like. Pain in
| the leg? Re: URGENT. Nothing exists beyond the emails. The
| emails are reality. The brains representation language is the
| same as it's actual language. Why have more than one
| language?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging technique to
| get their data:
|
| > "It turned out that either visual stimulus--the grating or
| moving dots--resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in
| the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a
| part of the brain used in memory processing and storage. These
| two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant
| information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract
| memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain activity trained
| to recall motion direction was indistinguishable from that
| trained to recall the grating orientation."
|
| Alternative hypothesis: the technique used wasn't sensitive
| enough to distinguish between how the brain handled the different
| information types.
| stakkur wrote:
| Most useful thing I've ever learned about memory: every time you
| recall a memory, you change it. Memory is not a fixed or static
| 'historical record'; ultimately, it's unreliable.
| blt wrote:
| Just like magnetic core memory!
| wonder_er wrote:
| this makes sense to me, the thrust of this paper.
|
| Reminds me of another paper which has impacted me deeply:
|
| https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...
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