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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Our brains are crammed with a massive amount of memories that we have formed over a lifetime of experiences. These memories range from the profound (who am I and how did I get here?) to the most trivial (the license plate of the car at a stoplight). Furthermore, our memories also vary considerably in their precision. Parents, for instance, often know the perils of a fuzzy memory when shopping for a birthday gift for their child: remembering that their son wanted the G.I. Joe with Kung Fu Grip rather than the regular G.I. Joe could make an enormous difference in how well the gift is received. Thus, the “fuzziness” of our memory can often be just as important in our daily lives as being able to remember lots and lots of information in the first place.
Different Levels of Detail for Different Types of Memory?
In the past several decades, cognitive psychologists have determined that there are two primary memory systems in the human mind: a short-term, or “working,” memory that temporarily holds information about just a few things that we are currently thinking about; and a long-lasting memory that can hold massive amounts of information gained through a lifetime of thoughts and experiences. These two memory systems are also thought to differ in the level of detail they provide: working memory provides sharp detail about the few things we are presently thinking about, whereas long-term memory provides a much fuzzier picture about lots of different things we have seen or experienced. That is, although we can hold lots of things in long-term memory, the details of the memory aren’t always crystal-clear and are often limited to just the gist of what we saw or what happened.
A recently published study by Timothy F. Brady, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues suggests that these long-term memories may not be nearly as fuzzy as once thought, however. In their work, the researchers asked subjects to try to remember 3,000 pictures of common objects—including items such as backpacks, remote controls and toasters—that were presented one at a time for just a few seconds each. At the end of this viewing phase, the researchers tested subjects’ memory for each object by showing them two objects and asking which one they had seen before. Not surprisingly, subjects were exceptionally good (more than 90 percent correct) even though there were thousands of objects to remember. This high success rate attests to the massive storage ability of long-term memory. What was most surprising, however, was the amazing level of detail that the subjects had for all of these memories. The subjects were just as good at telling the difference between two pictures of the same object even when the objects differed in an extremely subtle manner, such as a pair of toasters with slightly different slices of bread.
If It’s Not Fuzzy, Why Do We Still Forget Things?
This new work provides compelling evidence that the enormous amount of information we hold in long-term memory is not so uncertain after all. It seems that we actually hold representations of things we’ve seen in a fairly detailed and precise form.
Of course, this finding raises the obvious question: if our memories aren’t all that fuzzy, then why do we often forget the details of things we want to remember? One explanation is that, although the brain contains detailed representations of lots of different events and objects, we can’t always find that information when we want it. As this study reveals, if we’re shown an object, we can often be very accurate and precise at being able to say whether we’ve seen it before. If we’re in a toy store and trying to remember what it was that our son wanted for his birthday, however, we need to be able to voluntarily search our memory for the right answer—without being prompted by a visual reminder. It seems that it is this voluntary searching mechanism that’s prone to interference and forgetfulness. At least that’s our story when we come home without the Kung Fu Grip G.I. Joe.
Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
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16 Comments
Add CommentDoesn't this sound like the search engine? The web pages are all there on the net but the search engine just cannot get the right one for you!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEveryone knows that recognition is better than recall. That's why kids perform better on multiple choice as opposed to written answer tests. Granted, this preference may be due to how we're tested in school and perhaps in the world. In general, our ability to recognize memorable objects is more useful than being able to consciously recall these same objects. If I see the eyes of a predator and I remember "hey those eyes belong to something that attacked me in the past" it is more useful than my thinking "now... what did the eyes of that predator look like?". The same goes for food. Why would I need to remember what an edible berry looked like if I where in the middle of a desert? Now, if present with two bushes one poison and one edible... and I recognized that the last time I ate the red berries I got sick... I might go for the blue berries.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismnemonic devices can help us remember more, but they're silly and cumbersome. It may simply be easier to practice recall on a regular basis... and while we're young in order to strengthen the neural pathways that deal with recall memory.
search engine
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis paper remind me of the search engine principle .The web pages store lots of information.The seach engine crawls web pages and indexes them.The search engine is requested with some key words, it just cannot get the right information for us.But I think the search engine can tell you whether these key words are requested by other people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI once took a "memory enhancement" class. They taught all sorts of tricks that would work for a while but began to lose affectiveness over time. What they all boiled down to was finding ways to trick yourself into paying attention. When a method was no longer new or unusual because you used it a lot it would be less affective. I discovered that simply paying attention worked far better than any tricks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately I also discovered that a major medical episode can sometimes destroy your memory recall ability almost completely and can take years to recover from. I'm still a bit forgetful but my memory is finally returning to normal after three years of recovery.
I would like to see a follow up study where they don't show the subjects pictures. This one seems to rely too much on visual recognition and differentiation, rather than direct memory recollection. Maybe if they showed subjects a number of pictures, then asked general and specific questions like, what color was the backpack or how many pencils were in the picture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy own ad hoc research shows that there may be a link between memory recall efficacy and the "learning" of the mind to discard useless stimuli. Similar to the contrary manner in which certain autism victims cannot shut out sensory stimuli, normal individuals develop the ability to sift sensory input to avoid being overwhelmed. Likewise the mind may actually develop methods to forget much of what is processed. The trick then becomes finding a synergistic way to work with this process (or processes) and "tag" certain memories have a higher probability of being important , now or later.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow I wish we could store our memories in separate "directories" - like
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Junk", "Important", "Useful" and so forth! I guess much of the problem with retrieval is because probably 90 percent of our memories is "Junk"
and to retrieve useful information from all that is not easy...I guess we have no control over what is being stored in our heads?
I'm trying to determine the dependent and Independent variables of this study, could anyone tell me if these are right?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDependent: # of pictures shown, # of seconds the picture is shown, types of pictures shown, # of pictures subjects are asked to compare an original picture to.
Independant: subjects memory?(I dont know if this is right)
I've always had a dire memory but that has only begun to hack me off as I become older, maybe because I'm aware that my overall cognitive functions are deteriorating more obviously.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat I have always found extraordinary is being able to instantly recognise a face, from say 40 years past, but for instance, cannot recall (now) the detail of what I might have just read.
Re 'bucketofsquid's' comments, couldn't agree more. In 2004 I had an op that meant my heart was kept 'alive' mechanically for around three hours. Maybe I'm wrong but I felt that my 'problems' began after that.
Has anyone experimented legal substances to enhance, restore or slow down declining cognitive function?
You can remember everything...back to the time of your birth.....every little thing if you try really hard.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's one thing I don't understand- the research regards the memory that the subjects were using as long-term, but actually they viewed all the pictures not too long before the test, and were viewing them with knowledge that they will soon need to use the information they are getting. Doesn't that mean that they were using their Short-Term memory?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnjoyed reading.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismore problems arise with dreamed memories and suggested same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisor even imagined.
in the very far past, such become more of an influence-
According to history, before writing spread widely in the population, people had prodigious memories. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had many thousands of verses and was passed by bards from generation to generation orally for several hundred years before being committed to writing. The same happened with the Bible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think we forget most of the time just because we aren't into the moment. Like trying to remember a phrase minutes later the thought escapes because you are heading to school, we forget in order to pay attention to what is happening in our surroundings.Most of the time we forget so we won't experience failures we have committed in the past so as a self defense we won't remember a situation to not repeat a past mistake.
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