Originally a comment on Creating false memories.
There is growing evidence that memories are actually stored in the brain in a very fragmented fashion, with individual fragments held in the place where the data point was processed. That is to say, your memory about driving to work this morning might consist of the sound of traffic and horns stored in the sound processing part of the brain, the route is stored in the part of the brain that processes spacial relationships, individuals signs stored in the parts that deal with vision, color, shape and contextual meaning, etc. These fragments are stored as archetypes: you do not have hundreds of memories about how bacon tastes, for example, you have only one or two that get used over and over again.
In the cerebellum, there is a kind of daemon that assembles these fragments into a cogent whole. This daemon is basically an idiot savant, capable of amazing feats but about as bright as a puppy. Like a puppy, it is very eager to please: if you ask for a memory that it does not know, it will assemble one for you out of the stored memory archetypes. There are independent checks, such as the part of the brain that gives rise to the “I’ve seen/heard/been here before” feeling, but ultimately the memory daemon is the final arbiter of what we remember.
If the daemon can be convinced that a memory exists, it will exist. Maybe it is an actual event — a birthday party or observation of a crime — with some facts remembered and other filled in to justify opinions or cover gaps. Maybe it never existed and was created from scratch, like a Ferris wheel made out of Tinker Toys. Once it has been sufficiently reinforced, it will be as real as any other memory.
Thanks! I guess I should go and find supporting references: most of this, I remember (insert eye-roll here) from sources I’ve read, mainly from Scientific American.
Some of the references probably mention Elizabeth Loftus, at least as regards the creation of false memories. Beyond that, I wouldn’t know.
Well references will be welcome but it’s permissible to write an informed essay without references.
The daemon idiot savant puppy is just great.
I also like the description of the “idiot savant puppy” – and I think it also touches on humans’ tendencies to jump to conclusions when encountering cognitive dissonance. There’s an engine up there that wants to please the part that is demanding satisfaction, so: bullshit! Problem solved!
Yes, memories can be fickle. Memories of Woody Allen’s films are changing as we speak. The feeling aspect comes first, content change will likely follow as time goes by. You can witness it happening in blog comments. People are motivated to express how they feel (or felt) about his films, saying things like, “well I never really did care for Annie Hall that much.. etc…etc. , None of the comments I have seen even hinted at an appreciation, suprise, suprise. Ad hominems is us.
There’s something very Humean about memories being formed from archetypes.
This is relevant:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Bartlett
The “War of the Ghosts” experiment from Remembering(1932) was Bartlett’s most famous study and demonstrated the constructive nature of memory. A memory is constructive when a person gives their opinion about what had happened in the memory, along with additional influences such as their experiences, knowledge, and expectations.
In the experiment, Bartlett assigned his Edwardian English participants to read the Canadian Indian Folklore titled “War of the Ghosts”. Participants were told to remember the story at extended intervals numerous times. Bartlett found that at longer intervals between reading the story and remembering it, participants were less accurate and forgot much of the information from the story. Most importantly, where the elements of the story failed to fit into the schemata of the listener, these elements were omitted from the recollection, or transformed into more familiar forms. Each participant’s report of the story mirrored his or her own culture, Edwardian English culture in this case. An example of this can be demonstrated by some of these participants remembering “canoes” from the story as “boats.”
Basically, people remember things that already fit their world view.
Worth remembering (sorry) Bartlett was writing when psychology was dominated by psychoanalysis and memories were thought of as being stored away but ‘repressed’ so his work should be considered as ground breaking as Copernicus proposing a heliocentric view of the solar system.
I should point out my own memory is pretty ideocentric: I can remember the licence plates of cops in 70s cop shows and all the probabilities quoted in The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy but have great difficulty remembering the names of work colleagues. This is almost certainly related to my Aspergers.
When your memory works differently than most other people’s you soon realise it’s not some archived recording people can tap into like downloading music from the Cloud.
I remember some stuff better than they do, they remember some stuff better than me.
I’ve been reading some stuff along the same lines and it has made me think of the creation of dreams. How the scenes are often cobbled together out of memories of places and events and infused with meaning. So you can get scenarios that have that same “I’ve seen/heard/been here before”, and even ‘know’ that a person is someone from real life but they don’t actually look like the person does, or the place isn’t really the place you know in real life.
Perhaps it is this same daemon unleashed, and it is unrestrained and can get really creative.
Then with all the observations that memory and imagination are connected and as people’s memories are affected by dementia, there is an accompanying loss in the ability to imagine. Perhaps I make these connections because I have dreams so vivid at times that dreams events can almost fool me into thinking they are memories.
I can relate to Shatterface about memory working differently. With me it particularly comes out in learning languages where I often ‘see’ the words from the different languages. There are a lot of my relatives with kids on the autism spectrum, including my brother whose son has been diagnosed with Asperger’s, and my family have watched him as he’s developing and keep have ‘aaah’ moments about me when I was his age.
I can relate to Shatterface about memory working differently. With me it particularly comes out in learning languages where I often ‘see’ the words from the different languages.
Synesthesia?
How can I tell,” said the man, “that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?
— Douglas Adams , The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
OK, but what is this telling us other than that people can be suggestible? (As if a bunch of atheists should need to be told that).
The flexibility, and unreliability, of our memories is intriguing but this might be more useful if it gave us some indication of the boundaries. For instance, can anyone be induced to recall any childhood trauma, or just some, and does it have to tie in with some less blindingly-obvious experience such as some more subtle abuse, are some more susceptible than others, … (Elizabeth F. Loftus’ site is quite informative about this. http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm_
But the problem I have with all of this is the focus on the extremes – was it a crime, how do we judge it, who is telling the truth. Like the processes of law – which miss the whole story and only cover the outcome. And like all things legal, the discussion is (sometimes deliberately) mired in doubt and obfuscation. The unreliability of memory feeds the argument, and always has.
This is why, to my mind, an independent account of Woody Allen getting into bed clothed only in underpants to hug adopted with Mia Farrow’s account of how Allen defended this, is more interesting. It paints an authentic picture of the bigger story, not just a culminating event – the iceberg, not just the tip. It’s not a criminal offence, so the information is less contentious, there is less obfuscation, and attempts to explain things away instead of outright denial.
No good if you want someone punished of course, but if you want to know the story, then this is the real McCoy.
For instance, can anyone be induced to recall any childhood trauma, or just some,and does it have to tie in with some less blindingly-obvious experience such as some more subtle abuse, are some more susceptible than others,
Pretty much any memory can be implanted, from simple childhood memories of meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (impossible due to copywrite issues) or balloon trips to memories of flying Satanists, pregnancies, cannibalism or having animal parts grafted to your body.
But the problem I have with all of this is the focus on the extremes – was it a crime, how do we judge it, who is telling the truth. Like the processes of law – which miss the whole story and only cover the outcome. And like all things legal, the discussion is (sometimes deliberately) mired in doubt and obfuscation. The unreliability of memory feeds the argument, and always has.
We focus on the extremes because they are demonstrably false. We usually have no way of checking if someone really remembers bike riding as a child or it’s something they remember from the Famous Five – and it doesn’t really matter. The difference between false memories (which we all have ) and False Memory Syndrome is the memories induced in the latter have devastating, life-changing effects.
And while false memories are a problem legally people don’t seem to have a problem questioning the memory of witnesses to any other crimes other than sex offences – because often that’s the only evidence there is.
@urmensch #10 – There is a growing consensus that dreams arise when the brain “recompiles,” integrating short-term memory into long-term memory.
As mentioned, memories appear to be stored as archetypal fragments in the sections of the brain that process that specific input. Short-term memory is treated somewhat differently, getting stored as a jumbled whole in a separate part of the brain. During REM sleep, the brain essentially shuffles through short term memory, picking novel experiences to move to long-term storage and resetting the short-term buffer to write-available (sorry for the computer terms.) Long-term storage is tidied up during the process; I’ve heard the process described as shuffling a deck of cards, then squaring the pack.
This involves activating large areas of the brain at once. So the consciousness — in essence, a daemon that observes sensory input and creates a meaningful narrative — is knocked out cold and the brain disconnects itself from everything except the autonomic processes like heart beat and breathing. These are not always perfect, though. Sleepwalking seems to occur when the brain does not disconnect fully from the body, meaning that memories of activities get translated into actual movements. If the consciousness daemon is still somewhat active, it will observe the white noise generated by the reorganization and do its job of applying a narrative. This is why random images of your great grandmother, dressed as a clown and moshing at a rave while lecturing about the fine points of Nietzsche makes absolutely perfect sense when you “experience” it. Dreams fade very quickly because they occur outside of normal sensory input, and so are not recorded as memory.
@Gregory in Seattle #15, let me see if I’m understanding you correctly. There’s a memory daemon, your ‘idiot savant’, and that wants to please you, with you here being the conscious self?
You then say in your comment: “So the consciousness — in essence, a daemon that observes sensory input and creates a meaningful narrative…” By this do you mean there are two or even more daemons?
The idiot savant daemon of memory strikes a chord, as I still remember well in primary school how teachers were impressed by my ability of recall and being quick to learn, and I often felt slightly guilty or a cheat, that I didn’t deserve that praise; as if it wasn’t really me, the conscious me, that was doing the work. There was I, that part of me sitting being aware of what was being said and asked of us, and then, somehow the answers would get served up whole to me. So I was always aware of the main work being done outside of conscious awareness, and ‘I’ took the credit for it.
My take on it was more that this same daemon, which retrieves and organises memories for the waking self, was the same that got down to integrating new memories and information, freed up from the need to be answering the call of the ego.
Perhaps you could explain if what you meant by say consciousness as a daemon that observes and narrates? Is it another daemon by your account?