Post No.: 0916
Furrywisepuppy says:
‘Post-traumatic amnesia’ occurs immediately after a traumatic blow to the head. This type of amnesia, where one is left disorientated, is usually temporary but can indicate a concussion.
‘Retrograde amnesia’ is hardly as common as fictional dramas suggest, where a brain injury leads to forgetting the past couple of decades wholesale. This is because individual memories are distributed throughout the brain, thus if you lose that much of your brain, you’d have far more pressing problems! In reality, retrograde amnesia is more transient and the memories will usually eventually return.
‘Anterograde amnesia’ is far more frequent than the above. This is the inability to form new memories following a trauma, like in the movie Memento.
‘Transient global amnesia’ is incredibly rare. Here, one experiences a temporary loss of all memory, including forming new memories.
‘Dissociative amnesia’ involves forgetting one’s identity or personal information. It’s like waking up suddenly not having a sense of who one is. Those who experience dissociative fugue may also suddenly find themselves somewhere with no recollection of how they got there.
There are also other forms of amnesia like ‘alcohol-induced amnesia’, where memory gaps can result from a bout of heavy drinking; and ‘posthypnotic amnesia’, where one is unable to recall events that happened whilst under hypnosis.
…In general, we’ll remember all that we feel we need to and little more, unless we specifically want to memorise something e.g. we’ll remember the sizes and weights of different coins because that’s all we’ll need to know to differentiate between them. We won’t so easily remember which way the head is facing or what the furry tail design is because this information is less vital to know. Descriptions need only discriminate amongst the choices in front of us. But this may fail if, say, a new, similar-sized coin to an existing one is introduced.
Also, if the information we need is always presented in our environment then we won’t need to commit that information to memory e.g. we don’t need to remember inside our heads which buttons do what on a remote control because they’re always labelled on the object if we need to look.
All memories of something you commonly experience, like taking showers, get smushed into one; except for any unusual or salient times – like when some psycho entered with a knife perhaps!
The way ‘time flies when we’re having fun’ can make it appear like we’ve forgotten much of what happened during that period. One explanation is that so much is usually happening when we’re having fun that we cannot possibly focus on and fully absorb everything that’s happening in the first place. So we might be focusing on the stage effects and props, etc. that we forget the set list during a concert.
Our memories aren’t linear like a video recording but are effectively grouped by associations – events that are perceptually linked will be encoded together in long-term memory. And after the resolution of an event, the walking through a doorway, or anything that suggests the end of the preceding experience, the encoding for that preceding experience as a group can end. The ‘boundary effect’ or ‘doorway effect’ can mean that we immediately forget what we went into another room for!
Therefore in adverts, the product needs to be included within the advert’s story before closure, not just tagged on with an image at the end separately; otherwise the encoding into long-term memory of the product and story together may not form. (A fancy advertisement will also have failed if it grabs too much attention away from the product itself!)
Context acts as a trigger e.g. if you learn a list of words underwater then get tested on that list whilst underwater, you’ll be able to retrieve more words than if you were to get tested on that list in another context, like on a plane. So a tip is to learn as close to under the conditions that you’ll be tested in, or if you wish to remember something then go back to the place it happened. You’ve probably felt that feeling of memories flooding back when you returned to a place you hadn’t been to in a while. Also, if we were in high spirits when something happened, it’ll be easier to recall that event if we’re presently in high spirits too. Similarly, when in a bad mood, all sorts of bad memories will come to mind more easily – thus after a string of rejections or acts of discrimination against you, you can end up focusing on all the memories of terrible interactions you’ve ever had with anyone. Depression then becomes a vicious downward spiral. Faith in humanity and trust in others decreases. That’s all you can think of, even though there have been many more pleasant interactions with people in your life so far.
For most of us most of the time, our memories are biased by ego to twist and reconstruct events to paint ourselves in the best light possible and make ourselves look and feel better about ourselves – so we’ll tend to forget it when someone else suggests a brilliant idea but we’ll remember it if we were the one to come up with it! We’re even more ready to criticise our far past decisions than our recent ones because our past self is less ‘us’ than we are today. This is the ‘egocentric bias’. In group decisions, we’ll remember being more influential to the final decision than we really were. These aren’t always conscious deceptions or exaggerations – we really believe our own versions of events. Our own memories are framed from a personal, subjective viewpoint hence we’ll logically remember what we said more than what others said.
Due to ‘choice-supportive bias’, we’ll rationalise, with hindsight, that we had made better choices than we did at the time we made them. These biases could protect us from depression, even if they are an artificial boost to one’s self-esteem. And they can improve the confidence in our decisions instead of vacillating regarding the hundreds of decisions we must make each day. This self-enhancement or self-flattery does self-reinforce though – we’ll believe ‘I’m smart so of course I did a smart thing again’, which could lead to arrogance or complacency. This form of ‘hindsight bias’ isn’t always about ego or lying to deliberately make oneself look better but about how our memories rewrite themselves as they go along. Our memories are present reconstructions of past events. They usually won’t be major tweaks but believable ones. False memories (the topic of Post No.: 0803) can happen to anyone – not just those with brain damage like dementia or from a severe stroke that affects the hippocampi. That’s why self-reported anecdotes aren’t the most reliable evidence.
Attentions are limited and memories are fallible – combined, we miss and fur-get so much in our daily lives unless it was salient or we believed it was important enough to try to remember. We forget so many details that we’ve literally just been told. We won’t realise this unless quizzed simply because we’ve not noticed what we’ve failed to notice and we logically cannot remember what we’ve forgotten. How will we know how much we’ve forgotten if we’ve forgotten all the things we’ve forgotten?!
‘What you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI) too hence if you cannot retrieve a memory at the time you needed it, it’s virtually as good as you never knowing it at all. Saying later, “I knew it!” is too late.
We’re all born uneducated, and won’t become more educated just by virtue of growing older/time passing. This means that some people never learn some things within their lifetimes, like learning from history. Such lessons aren’t passed on genetically – we must get taught and personally learn them, otherwise we’ll e.g. risk repeating wars and over-exuberant avarice that lead to economic booms and busts. Each new generation of people start ‘blank-ish’ and must seemingly make the same mistakes as previous generations before they’ll learn for themselves. One generation has more-or-less the same genetics as the previous generation and so, given similar environmental factors, history will likely continue to repeat itself unless people learn from history.
Each human can only last for up to ~120 years currently, with brains that are limited by the size of human craniums, along with the reducing neuroplasticity to learn and inherent deterioration of memories with age – hence purely natural, organic beings are limited in their capacity to learn and remember things. Teaching each other skills and knowledge takes lots of time. Some lessons might need to be dumbed-down in order to teach the masses too. These are some reasons why AIs have the potential to easily surpass human intelligence.
You might assume that some people are just innately better at remembering things than you? There might be some inherent differences but the biggest thing that those with good memories do is they keep repeating what they’re trying to remember in their heads until it sticks – and anyone can put in that effort. We’ll better remember the things we have an interest in and really care to remember – so care to remember things and this’ll express in your efforts to constantly revise them.
SONAR stands for involving more of your senses, organising material more logically, narrating your experience as you go along, associating things with existing memories, and revising.
Ensure you’re alert and attentive before trying to memorise anything, which includes being well-rested and hydrated. Understand the material instead of merely memorising it. Look for larger patterns or ideas, and organise pieces of information into meaningful groups. Link new bits of knowledge into context with what you already know – seeking relationships between ideas. Engage your visual, auditory and other senses by using images, diagrams or melodies. Use mnemonics like acronyms, formulae, rhymes or jokes. Try to apply the information in your daily life e.g. by trying to teach someone else the material or just reciting it aloud to yourself. And revise the material as often as you can.
Strings of numbers could be broken down into an absurd (and thus sticks in your mind) story. So 63011832 could be broken down into 6:30, which is the time you get up. Then in the bathroom mirror you notice your two comically elongated arms, or 1 and 1. Down in the kitchen you fry a couple of eggs, which look like an 8 in the pan, and have a cup of tea, which rhymes with 3. You then finish by taking a number 2!
Condensing and organising a whole semester’s notes onto as few sheets of paper as possible can aid your revision. At a glance, a lot of information will be visible and the relationships between different pieces will be clearer. The action of handwriting these bullet points, lists, charts, numbers, etc. will help each key point sink in better too.
To help remember people’s names, repeat them when you first hear them. (“Nice to meet you Señor Chuff.”) Use their name as often as possible without overdoing it. If it’s uncommon, ask how it’s spelled or where it comes from? If they have an unusual facial feature, try to create an association between that and their name in your mind. Do they have the same name as someone else you know? After leaving their company, review their name several times in your head and maybe write down notes if you’re keen.
Woof! Having a strong memory is advantageous. It’s imperative for one’s intelligence. However, some people with weak memories can be really happy-go-lucky because their minds are less encumbered by constant revisions – or ruminations – of troubling past events that can lead to depression. Sometimes you want certain memories erased like in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then again, forgetful people become exasperating to others because they’ll claim that something didn’t happen when it did or they weren’t told something when they were!
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