Everyone knows A LOT. Do we understand the process that the brain goes through to determine that it doesn’t know something?
For instance, if someone asked me what the capital of Uzbekistan was, I would immediately know that I don’t know. If there’s a search going on, it’s seemingly instantaneous. Do we know what’s really happening?
I assumed most people could have memories that take time to locate. Don’t you have any memories that you can’t recall right away? How about your grade school teacher’s names, if you couldn’t recall one instantly don’t you think you might remember after some time?
The less than useful answer is that we have no clue.
Memory is very poorly understood at best.
Even the differences between:
are pretty hard to nail down. Yet clearly different and suggestive.
We know about different parts of the brain processing memory in different ways. Left fore-brain does syntactic processing pulling things together to build more complex structures. But the mechanisms that feed it are hard to nail down. Information from brain injury allows gross maps of function to be built, but the how is a very different question. Even an injured brain can repurpose, within limits, to address some injuries.
Other than that there are competing models for even the highest level ideas of how memory operates. So much so that even understanding what memory is remains little more than hand waving.
Here is an interesting article which both explores memory and how the science is changing:
Scientists have long known that recording a memory requires adjusting the connections between neurons. Each memory tweaks some tiny subset of the neurons in the brain (the human brain has 100 billion neurons in all), changing the way they communicate. Neurons send messages to one another across narrow gaps called synapses. A synapse is like a bustling port, complete with machinery for sending and receiving cargo—neurotransmitters, specialized chemicals that convey signals between neurons. All of the shipping machinery is built from proteins, the basic building blocks of cells.
And of course the bizarreness when your friend asks a question and you know the answer and just can’t think of it. Then a few hours later or the next day you shout out “Jeanne Tripplehorn!”
And for some bizarre reason, without hesitation, my brain just signaled Waterworld.
I also assume that everyone has memories like that as well. And the older I get, the more of them I seem to have. But that actually makes sense to me. I can understand how it can take a long time to find something.
An analogy I would draw is comparing the brain to a book. For those long buried memories, you might have to read the whole book to find it. Or maybe, your brain can piece enough information together that you only have to read a chapter. But somehow, the brain seems to have the ability to look in the index and determine “Nope. It’s not in this book.” That’s what fascinates me.
Which of course just gets worse as you age. I used to watch Jeopardy and when I knew the answer, which was a lot of the time, I could say it before the contestant answered. Now, whenever I watch it, I often know I know the answer but it won’t come to me in time to ‘beat the buzzer’.
It is interesting, but IMHO just exemplifies the naivete of current knowledge. There are some experiments that may or may not support what is hardly even a hypothesis, but more of a hunch. I could come up with at least two fundamentally different ideas of memory processing that would fit the data.
One really hard problem is that experimenting with rats avoiding unpleasant stimuli is a long way away from someone remembering their first teacher’s name or the street their grandmother lived on. One is a learned behaviour that is clearly subject to modification with further trials. A memory is not the same as a behaviour. Same with PTSD. The idea that the therapy is modifying the memory as opposed to creating and modifying coping behaviours is not really supported.
We are still groping about in the dark when it comes to any sort of understanding.
Doesn’t seem bizarre to me. She looked very fine in that movie.
It is generally accepted that long-term and short-term memories are somehow different. As an old man, I can recall things that happened over 60 years ago pretty well, but I forget my granddaughter’s names.
The problem with those long-term memories is that they are not accurate and some of them may be wildly inaccurate. For example, there are things I thought I remembered but later decided that I was repeating things that my mother had described.
This. All the rubbish on the 'net about how we’re poised to download one’s memories and personalities into machines and that we’re on the verge of creating true AI that works like a brain makes me laugh. We still don’t really understand how a jellyfish’s neural network works.
I tend to believe the hypothesis that the human brain is inherently unable to comprehend itself.
It is still a mystery to me. When I saw above the question of the capital of Uzbekistan I decided there was no way I had ever known that. But when I googled it just now and saw the answer, Tashkent, I instantly realized that a prime minister of India had died there. Obviously, I once knew it. But damned if I can recall the name of that prime minister.
Another point raised above were the names of my elementary school teachers. I recall the name of my second grade teacher only because it is unusual (Miss Mismer) but also because my mother mentioned her a few as a teacher I loved. I recall what my mother said, but I have no memory of loving her. I do remember the names of the teachers in 5th through 8th grades and some, but not all, of my HS and university teachers.
But it is a real mystery to me how arrangements of neurons can code things like Tashkent <—> prime minister of India died there.
I read a thing about memory, but for the life of me I can’t remember where*, so this is just spitballing.
Supposedly, we don’t form memories to remind us about the past, but to inform us on what to do in the future.
*No meta intention.
There is good experimental evidence that we form better memories when there is context and connection. Bare rote learnt facts don’t take as well. This quickly starts to beget various theories of functional models of memory. But the idea that the memory may degrade over time leaving a random subset of connections isn’t too unreasonable.
In computers we use associative memory for some tasks. Memory that is addressed not by location but by content. It is tempting to suggest similar functionality for some aspects of human memory. With zero physiological evidence however.
Mapping from computer operations to models of mind is a common habit. But it more underlines the lack of models than anything profound.
[Moderating]
We don’t need this sort of commentary in GQ.
I question the OP’s premise. There have been plenty of times when I’ve said “there’s no way I could possibly know that”, but then, after thinking about it for a while, realized that I did know.
Of course it is. But we haven’t been limited to just using a human brain to think for hundreds of thousands of years. A collection of many human brains just might be capable of comprehending a single brain (while, of course, also being incapable of fully comprehending a similarly-sized collection of brains). Likewise for brains plus written materials, or brains, written materials, and computers, or whatever.
My hunch is that the organization looks less like a digital computer and more like students doing card tricks in a stadium. When an image is projected on the crowd, each student (neuron) responds with the closest match it has on file. Resulting in some electrochemical waveform. A weak response indicates no information.
That certainly happens but the question then becomes “Why did i immediately believe that the specific knowledge wasn’t in there somewhere?”
I had a disconcerting memory event once. After retiring I was catching up on some episodic television and was watching three episodes a day of the Sopranos. I saw an actor I recognized as Max Casella, the actor who had played a character named Vinnie Delpino on Doogie Howser, M.D. some twenty-five years earlier. I recognized him, knew his name, and the character he played on Doogie although to the best of my recollection hadn’t seen him since Doogie.
The next day; streaming the next episode, again with the same actor. His name was gone. I remembered his name for twenty-five years and then completely forgot it in 24 hours. I had to look it up on the IMDB.
I’ve had similar experiences with trying to place other actors. I’ll see an actor, and I’ll be like, “Hey, I know him!” but I have to sort it out from a list of roles. It’ll be like, he was Magneto, and that doesn’t work, and he was Gandalf, and that doesn’t work, and then it’s he was James Whale in that Gods and Monsters biopic with Brendan Fraser and I’m “Oh yeah, Ian McKellen, I knew I recognized him.” I have no idea way I remember his name from that movie but not the others.