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Well, it seems I can only go back to 1979 before I draw a blank. Must be those disco biscuits.

I do remember somewhere reading about Bill Gates predicting something like what you are talking about, MM, happening in the not too far off future.

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Note that there's a difference between discarded memories and repressed memories. You may have stored certain events in your memory, but can sometimes repress those memories, usually traumatic ones. It takes some work to reconnect and remember, but I don't think that implies that the human brain stores everything imagineable, it just means you wanted to forget, but the brain didn't.

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I recall learning a long time ago that we only use something like 10% of our brains. I've not googled that latelsy so perhaps that number has changed over time. I wonder if the remaining, let's say, 90% of our brain is unused (unlikely) or we just don't know what it's used for. I personally believe that the human brain is a very powerful "machine" and is capable of much, much more than we think and / or understand and / or imagine...but I don't know exactly what. It's funny to think how complex a thing the brain is and then look at some of the dumbasses out there who possess one.

Wouldn't it be weird to be able to retrieve all those "lost" memories like when you were very young, in the womb or just out of your tits on, hmmm, disco biscuits.

[ 12-02-2004: Message edited by: Mad Max ]

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Hello.

The eyes record the images but they are actually from only one perspective. Depending on if you are walking/running while recording the images they may be shaky much like a shaky cam image.

Say you were walking down a road.

The actual image your eyes recorded is shaky from your walking and limited by your vision, obstacles in the way, etc. Instantly your brain re-processes the information smoothing the image out and enhancing it.

The process continues when storing and accessing the memory and the brain continues to reprocess the images, making them more clear, removing obstacles, filling in missing parts, adding different angles, etc, and complies the memory so it is very clear and may even show different angles/perspectives much like a movie.

In a movie there are usually 3 or more angles that the cameras film and later the film is spliced to show the scene from several perspectives much like our brain does automatically.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jonathan Harris:
I remember everything.

Hello.

[ 12-02-2004: Message edited by: Jonathan Harris ]

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holy shit, a coherant post.

Cac ~ I've read some scary research on perception and memory storage. Experimental findings show us that the brain does on-the-fly editing and extrapolation of the input that comes in through our senses, and stores false memories or edited versions of what we see, hear, etc. So, regardless of what you may actually see, you will remember that you saw/heard/etc something different. There is an alternative theory that states that the brain actually edits the things your eyes/ears/etc pull in before we are conscious of them. So you actually see something that's not there. These lines of research have led into examining the way we perceive the passage of time as well because all this memory editing is going on live and takes some time while you perceive that what you see is instanteous. The resulting memories took time to be stored, and a split second later tell you that you were seeing something that you remember seeing, but you really didn't.

[ 12-02-2004: Message edited by: Wintermute ]

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so things that aren't worth remembering are discarded from the short-term and space in the long-term isn't wasted.

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The actual image your eyes recorded is shaky from your walking and limited by your vision, obstacles in the way, etc. Instantly your brain re-processes the information smoothing the image out and enhancing it.

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Again, this is something I learned a long time ago and may have been debunked since then.

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Originally posted by Mad Max:
"Someone" did a study and it turns out that your eyeballs are actually constantly shaking / vibrating. The way this was tested was to affix stalks to contact lenses with an image on the end. The image was far enough away to partially focus but only about an 1" or so as I recall. The guy wearing these modified contact lenses reported that the image was shaking.

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The shakiness you guys are referring to are sciatic movements of the eye ball. If the contact lense moved with the sciatic movements, the man would not have reported a shaky image, because the brain would have "smoothed" it out. On the contrary, studies have been done where subjects wear contact lenses with images on them, like a chicken, for example. After 30 seconds or so, people reported the head or feet beginning to disappear, and eventually the whole chicken was gone. Because the image was fixed to the sciatic movement of the eye, the same nerves in the retina were sending the same messages to the brain, and the brain discarded the redundant information and will try to "fill in" the gaps.

The eye constantly makes these movements so the brain isn't looking at the same static image all the time (assuming you're just staring straight at something). If it didn't, images would slowly blend and get all messed up. I think that's what happens when I watch TV and my gaze is fixed; a lot of funny things start happening to my peripheral vision.

Try this, its really cool. Look straight ahead at a blank wall or something and hold your left hand out about half-arm's length in front of your face. Point your index finger up and focus on the tip. Now with your right index finger pointed up, move it in slowly from your peripheral vision towards the center until you see the tip of the finger disappear. The tip disappears because the light is hitting the part of your retina that connects to your optic nerve, so there are no nerves there to receive the light. Your brain guesses at what is there by filling in the gap with the background surrounding the finger.

Other studies have been done where people wear special glasses that invert light, turning the images they see upside down. After a period of time (i don't know how long, a few days?), they were able to adapt to the new way of seeing things. What is fascinating is that when they took the glasses off, they got all messed up again. Their brains adapted to seeing things upside down, and when things got turned right-side up, their brains had to readapt.

Mute - I was part of a memory experiment. It was poorly-conducted, IMO, but the idea was that she tried to implant false memories by having us take the same questionnaire twice in a two-week time span. The first dealt with recalling certain childhood memories, and if a described event didn't happen to us, we were supposed to just pretend that it did and describe what we saw. The second test was a multiple-choice 50-question test that asked us "Did this happen in your childhood? Yes or no."

I thought it was interesting, but maybe could've been done better. I'm no psych student, but I had to participate for class credit. heh.

I also heard that someone found the part of the brain that fires when someone recalls a false memory, a part which is dormant otherwise. It would help to make better lie detectors.

[ 12-02-2004: Message edited by: Flux ]

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As far as lie-detecting, I've read that since lies are calculated, there is an increased flow of blood through parts of the brain when the lying takes place. This can be picked up on MRI. Also, using EEG they can now pick up on the part of the brain that recognizes images. So if you were to display a crime scene to an alleged thief or murderer, they wouldn't be able to prevent that part of their brain from reacting thereby proving their guilt. I suppose it would helpful to know whether or not the false memory portion of the brain was being activated as well so as to make sure an innocent person wasn't being set up to take the fall for the crime.

Of course there's also voice stress analysis and infrared face scanning, but that's more physiological than cognitive/neuronal.

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As far as the brain and the 10% theory, I heard a guy on a talk show awhile back say that was hogwash. 90% of your brain didn't just sit around idle all day. You supposedly use 100% of your brain all the time. (At least when awake).
Like I said though, this is just something I heard a guy on the radio say and I don't remember his name. Who knows if we'll ever know the real answer.

Interesting thread though. gg

[ 12-02-2004: Message edited by: dAm ]

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HOW was your childhood? Did you like school? Was your little brother your mother’s favourite? Were your parents too strict? Did you prefer books to sports? Here's a surprise. No matter what you think you remember feeling as a child, there is a good chance that you are wrong. In fact, a stranger taking a wild guess would be just as likely to be right.

Such is the finding of Daniel Offer, a psychiatry professor at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. Dr Offer tracked down 67 men he had interviewed in 1962, when they were all 14-year-old boys, as part of a study of "typical" American teens. Thirty-four years later he asked the study subjects, now 48 years old, to think back to their teen years and answer the same questions. So many had changed their answers that, statistically, anybody taking a guess in the survey would have scored just as well. Dr Offer concludes that, as people get older, their view of the past changes. His findings are published this month in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

He does not mean to suggest, however, that people who remember growing up in middle-class comfort in St Louis, say, are likely to turn out to be the children of pig farmers in Manitoba or millionaires in Miami. Barring some serious psychiatric problem, the factual outlines of a person's life are probably as they remember them. It is how people feel about childhood events that the study calls into doubt —even about emotionally resonant memories, such as those relating to family relationships and home life.

For instance, as teenagers, only 14% of the boys said they were their mother’s favourite. As men looking back, a full 30% remembered being the favourite. Asked what the worst thing about their home life was, 40% said that home was physically uncomfortable, but only 11% thought it was emotionally uncomfortable. Looking back as adults, though, only 15% remembered feeling physical discomfort with the home, but 50% complained that it had been emotionally uncomfortable.

Even a question as seemingly objective as whether physical punishment was used elicited conflicting answers. As boys, 82% said they received physical punishment as a discipline. As men, only 33% remembered it that way. A fair fraction of the men even misremembered themselves as bookish: 23% of the men said they enjoyed "mental activity" the most. Back when they were 14, only 5% did.

The findings fit well with how scientists understand memory to work. Research shows that remembering is actually an active process, in which the memory is mentally constructed. Beliefs, prejudice and subsequent experience can all affect what is remembered. Many mental-health professionals are rightly suspicious of "recovered" memory, in which people supposedly unearth memories of sexual and physical abuse, or even abduction by aliens. The new study is remarkable because it was conducted with perfectly normal subjects. Although some of the men have subsequently had psychological difficulties, statistically those did not score better or worse than the others.

In the light of these findings, doctors and therapists (not to mention biographers) will have to be more careful. Dr Offer recommends that they treat all recollections as "existential reconstructions", and take anything a subject says with "a small rock of salt".

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I've been told that my perceptual memories of events is fairly accurate, in so far as I remember things that happen, and my memories more or less coincide with other peoples who were present at the time.

Freud posited that memory and behavior are filtered according to our own psychological make up. In other words that who we are, and more importantly, how passionate (emotional) we are, dictates the slant our behavior and memory takes. Evidence is beginning to show that he was right.

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“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

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I'll probably have a psychotic episode before I turn 40

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Originally posted by Flux:
He said 40, not 45.

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Yesterday I was watching a movie with someone, and they seemed to me to react slightly before there was anything to react to in the movie. They had never seen it before, and tehre was nothing in the movie to let them know anything was going to happen. It bothered me for some reason, and I paused the movie, and asked them if they had said "Oh" or whatever before or after the certain scene, and they said they definitely said it after. I know I heard it before the scene, but now I'm wondering if my brain edited it wrnog before I was conscious of the memory or experience. I have had many of these types of experiences too.

Several months ago I was trying to remember something I had heard a year earlier, and as I was thinking my mind retreived a memory of something I had only read about a few minutes early. I had the eureka feeling you get when you remember or find something. Part of me knew that it wasn't the right memory or answer I was looking for, but there was a small part of my mind behaving or making me feel like I had just sucessfully remembered soemthing when I most definitely didn't remember the right thing. That had never happened before. I wonder if other people have that happen.

I've also had very bizarre dejavu before. I'm convinced that the mind is taking something you're doing and echoing pulsing the memory or something so you keep feeling like you've experienced it before. Anyone know anything more about it?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Reality:
Part of me knew that it wasn't the right memory or answer I was looking for, but there was a small part of my mind behaving or making me feel like I had just sucessfully remembered soemthing when I most definitely didn't remember the right thing.

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Yeah, that's happened to me.

"What did I forget? Toothbrush! Wait... no... yeah, I forgot my toothbrush. That's not right..."

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Ho Ho Ho!

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Ozzy.

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“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

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