Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id AAA01433 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 11 Mar 2002 00:38:27 GMT Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 00:32:59 +0000 (GMT) From: Simos Kitiris <sk288@hermes.cam.ac.uk> X-X-Sender: <sk288@green.csi.cam.ac.uk> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: Re: is forgetting adaptive? Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.33.0203102305250.27418-100000@green.csi.cam.ac.uk> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>In the short-term it might be good for me to recall that I have some
frozen
>dinners in my freezer so that later I can cook a meal. The ability to
>maintain this short-term information may have long-term survival
advantages
>harkening back to ancestors that needed to recall momentary sources of
food
>or caches on the savannah. OTOH, would it do me any good to remember that
I
>had a particular brand of frozen microwavable dinner in my freezer back
say
>10 years ago? Would it do me any good to painstakingly recall every
package
>of microwavable dinner I had ever retrieved from my refrigerator? Maybe
the
>basic ideas that I can buy these dinners at various local supermarkets
and
>that I have recently stored them in the freezer would suffice. In the
>ancestral environment, likewise, it may have been advantageous to
remember
>that certain areas were where food had often been stored in the past, but
>not the explicit details of every cache. Would it do the savannah dweller
>any good to remember that particular cache from 10 years ago when there
are
>more recent caches to recall?
>
>If something is no longer current or pressing, why remember it? Wouldn't
it
>be better for this memory (or at least its particulars) to recede,
allowing
>space for newer, more pertinent, information?
>
Just as an aside... I think that there must be an even more high-level
initial screaning to the information that actually reaches your memory;
if you think about it the examples that you give seem like pre-processed
information. By that I mean
that our brain classifies some relatively important information as
'events', 'locations' etc. Remembering for example every microwavable meal
that we've eaten, is actually not a lot of information if you consider
other sources of information inflow; our eyes alone, give a data rate of
about 3 Gbytes/s!
Our memory can't possibly cope with that kind of information inflow; most
of this information is just simply discarded (well, perhaps not discarded
but just has a very very short 'expiry time-stamp' if that helps in
relating this to what Daniel Schacter says) on the spot and there is an
obvious evolutionary advantage to anyone that can perform this initial
screaning effectively and keep only information that will be of use later
on - extending this I would say that the same applies to the reduction of
memory as function of time. As Grant pointed
out 'There has to be a way for a finite brain to deal with infinite
amounts of information about the world we live in.' - to that i'd like to
add that it's not only a matter of capacity; the brain also seems to have
a constraint regarding the rate at which new information is stored (this
probably has to do with biological processes but i have no clue about
those). Memorising 10 new phone numbers in one minute seems like an
really hard task, whereas the brain obviously has the capacity of
remembering them... I wonder if forgetting specific things with time helps
to improve this maximum rate, apart from the actual capacity. (ie does
having less stored information in your brain increase the maximum rate of
storing new information?)
What i also find interesting is the way events (and generally information)
is time stamped; why is it that after a period of time, although the
information is still somewhere in our memory, we might need much longer to recall it?
That might shed some more light into this but I guess
that is another story...
Simos
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Mar 11 2002 - 00:48:50 GMT