Human memory

You can really only remember 5-7 things at a time with short-term memory.

People would make little marks in wood or tie knots in a rope to help “store” numbers so they could keep track of things. These rows of beads on an Abacus let you store numbers so that you don’t have to keep them in your short-term memory. You can add 20 numbers together by just using a little of your short-term memory at a time.

You can take a number (271 apples) and while it’s in working memory turn your body and note 271 to the abacus. Now you can forget that number entirely because it is recorded already on the machine. Then, you can turn back around and get the next number (139 apples) and add that number to the abacus.

Now you don’t need to remember either of those numbers because you’ve already added them to an external memory system. You just have to read the total. There should be 4 hundreds, 1 ten, and 0 ones. So, who cares what those numbers were? We know that we have 410 apples. (Although, if you had to go back and check, that wouldn’t be very easy – so you might write it down as you go?)

You have all of these things that you can remember. But every time you remember something, you are rebuilding it. It’s pretty weird… and a lot of people don’t like to believe that.

The way you recall them is by using signifiers and landmarks. I can remember many little bits that allow me to map out enough landmarks to build out a story I can tell myself.

Here are some good Radiolab episodes about memory:

• This one is just a clip that’s only 3 minutes long. So at least listen to this one: https://soundcloud.com/matt-glenn-sound-design/what-is-a-memory
• The full episode: https://soundcloud.com/radiolab/memory-and-forgetting

Humans have a mysterious and wonderful way of cobbling things back together. Computers don’t do that. Computers have explicit (fully developed or formulated) sets of data that can be recalled exactly every time. This is really really good for arbitrary things like numbers, or really large sets of information that humans wouldn’t want to remember.

While the computer can remember vastly more things than we can there is a limit. There are a few different types of memory involved with a computer – but we can talk about that later.

Some people say they can remember being a baby. They get really mad when I suggest that they actually can’t. I’ll probably talk about that later… but it’s unlikely that you can remember anything before you knew a language because we seem to store our memories in our native tongue. Does your internal voice speak to you? Mine definitely speaks English. Scientists believe our memories start around 3 because that’s when we learn to speak. We have to connect the ‘things’ to other ‘things’, and if we don’t know how to refer to anything… then it would make sense… but the jury is still out. What do you think?

The computer doesn’t know anything until we describe enough things to create a shared language.

My Mind Palace is pretty abstract so far. I’ll show it a little more in the video, but the basics are that I have some imagined physical space. Currently, I’m spending most of my time in the greenhouse. I haven’t organized the plants very much. The house is still a blur. I’m spending most of my time relaxing on a leather day bed in the central area of the greenhouse. Off to the side is a little kitchen. It’s more like an artist type kitchen with a sink for dirt and paint. There’s a refrigerator in there where I have Ivy’s phone number in those brightly colored plastic magnets.

Some people suggest that you use a real place. They used to teach this technique in schools across the world as a normal way to remember large amounts of information. It just kinda faded out for some reason (which I am sure I’ll research further).

I needed to remember an author’s name because I wanted to walk over to the book store and buy the book. The author is Randall Munroe.

I didn’t walk over to my ‘mind palace library’ and write down his name… and store it in my library as it might seem like it was implied in that Temple of Time figure.

Instead, you use the things in the imaginary place as a way to forcefully connect dots to something that you wouldn’t normally have reason to. My first thought was that Randall and Munroe have strange spellings. So, Randall felt kinda random. Because I haven’t really organized my plants yet I thought of the word “random.”

Then I thought Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t have anything to tie to that yet. So, figuring that I might need to anchor to that time period later… I placed a painting of Marilyn on the wall near the door to the greenhouse kitchen. I can always move it later. So, instead of trying to figure out the author name I think:

“It was a weird one… plants… on yeah… they are random… and the painting… – and the words were spelled funny… Randall Munroe.

Weird, right! But spending that time to connect the names was enough to lock it in memory. Instead of remembering 2 words with no context… I remember the whole act of setting up a way to remember it. It’s wild. You do NOT have to do this type of thing, but I’m just using it as an example. The more connection points (smell being a big one) the easier it is to get it into long term memory and more importantly – to recall (remember) it.

Your brain is taking bits of experience and bouncing around to retrieve a final concept or collection of things.

It’s ok if that all sounds crazy. It’s just for fun. What I’m getting to next is much more simple. Computers are simple compared to humans.

This stuff all sounds like a mess! Can’t we just write it down? Well, we did. People compiled huge lists of all of the mathematical outcomes for everything they could think of.

The word “computer” is traced back to the early 1600s.

“A person performing mathematical calculations.”

But, the idea goes back much further. We used books like this to figure out what would happen to crops and more recently how to bomb people with missiles and how to steer fleets of ships and all sorts of complex decisions.

The problem is that the books they used to make the calculations were made by humans. Sometimes they made mistakes when they wrote them. Sometimes they make mistakes when interpreting them. Sometimes the fleet of ships crashed into a reef or a miscalculation destroyed the crops that year.

If you’re like me, you look at a table of math like this and things just go blurry. That’s ok! We aren’t going to use anything like that. I promise!

Try and relate to the Multiplication Tables you used in elementary school. These tables are less complex but conceptually they are the same. They are just a bunch of pre-worked out “math stuff”.

These were the “Computers” of the 1950s.

Using some sort of Calculation machine we were able to off-load the job of our short term memory and skip much of the books of math tables. This allowed us to focus on bigger issues and to avoid some of the mistakes. Keep in mind that these machines aren’t perfect, and they are built by the humans, so – there is always a chance for something to go wrong)

Before cell-phones, I had to remember all of my friend’s phone numbers. Now I can only remember 2. I’m not sure if offloading our human memories is always the best thing…

There’s a 20-minute episode of The Mind, Explained – on Netflix or YouTube. Watch it after this lesson.

What are your thoughts on the video “pacing?” How does it make you feel?