New brain theory of memory

[studiot]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39518580

 

 

 

The US and Japanese team found that the brain "doubles up" by simultaneously making two memories of events.

One is for the here-and-now and the other for a lifetime, they found.

It had been thought that all memories start as a short-term memory and are then slowly converted into a long-term one.

 

 

This seems to be a highly significant breakthrough, if verified.

 

Further references welcome.

Edited April 7, 2017 by studiot

[DrmDoc]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39518580

 

 

 

 

This seems to be a highly significant breakthrough, if verified.

 

Further references welcome.

 

Here's a link to the original article in Science. A fascinating read with compelling insights.

 

NOTE: Apologies, just notice that access to the full Science article requires membership. Still, the original BBC article is very informative.

Edited April 7, 2017 by DrmDoc

[TakenItSeriously]

Memory being stored as a parallel process as opposed to a serial process is completely consistant with my own experiences with my learning disability that involved poor short term/working memory with connected reading and auditory comprehension issues effecting my ability to learn from either text book or lecture, though learning through other methods worked much better.

 

What I discovered in my case was that if any single piece of information is missing for some reason in the learning process, then I could understand nothing after that piece at least for the rest of the chapter.

 

This implied that the long term and short term process must both be working in parallel, and here's why:

 

Consider the following:

Lets assume that a chapter in a math or science textbook is 10 paragraphs long and the following is true

Understanding paragraph 2 requires remembering/understanding paragraph 1.

Understanding paragraph 3 requires remembering/understanding at least paragraph 2.

Understanding Paragraph 4 requires remembering/understanding at least paragraph 3.

... and so on.

 

Therefore, we can assume that understanding paragraph 10 requires remembering and understanding all 9 paragraphs that came before, which I would presume exceeds short term memory.

 

To see that this is true, consider what happens if you remove any single paragraph from your memory, then there is a chain that is broken and none of the rest could be understood, which was exactly what happened in my case every time.

 

So esentially, if I had a question at the beginnig of a lechture it had to wait till the end of the lecture, so I never understood anything after the question.

 

I could also verify this hypothesis (to myself which was all I needed) through alternate learning experiences which was most dramiticly demonstrated by one on one learning with one example occurring after my standard education and one before.

 

My education was beset with other problems that I don't discuss here, but the troubles I discussed above were definitely real, for any advanced course material.

 

When working as a PCB designer I wanted to learn electrical engineering, though Id never taken a singe EE class before.

 

I was given the opportunity when I designed a PCB for a Stanford EE professor who liked to monitor the design process which wasn't a problem for me because it gave me the opportunity to pepper him with questions.

 

After the first few questions, he got the drift and just started teaching me from the beginning going through his lechtures while I designed his board which didnt require any focus on my part as design had long since become an automatic process for me.

 

He was a very good teacher at the end of his career and about to retire as I later found out.

 

Since I could asked questions as we went, I could easily grasp everything. The desiign took about 16 hours over two days, but half way through the second day he stopped. When I asked why, he said that was all there was and he'd covered all three semesters of material that he taught, and he said I had a better grasp of the material than any of his graduate students.

 

While I wouldnt have been able to recall much of that information due to a serious overload of information at the time and my problems with short term memory, I'm pretty sure it was still all captured by long my term memory which seems to have a different recall mechanism based on working on problems that required the information which I just seemed to know later on and must have mostly come from that session.

 

Another example occurred at the beginning of my education. I learned QM, SR, GR, and Astronomy sans the math at the age 7-8 because of my own intense interest and two older brothers who both majored in the sciences and were willing to teach me taking less than a year. I came away from that experience with a very strong understanding of those subjects, though odds and ends were missing, such as Quantum spin, intrinsic magnetic moments, or the Lorentz transform which I learned later in school but the vast majority of it was just review, and several times my grasp of the subject matter was better than the teachers.

 

Learning through the internet also got me around those hurdles by having access to multiple resources but also comes with it's own disadvantages such as learning out of order (massive headache), missing subject matter that you might not know exists, inconsistancy of sourcees, etc.

Edited April 30, 2017 by TakenItSeriously