People don’t really forget. They fail to remember. Most of the information is accessible via hypnosis.
Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does “most” of the information mean? I know the “consensus” gets casually mentioned in the lectures, but I don’t think it’s strong. How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity? Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?
(I think wedrifid’s “physics says otherwise” makes this discussion rather pointless.)
A second languages give you an additional four years before getting alzheimers.
From the link you provided: “The physical effects of the disease in the brain were found to be more advanced in the bilinguals’ brains, even though their mental ability was roughly the same.”
I think this also means that their tests for mental ability just failed to capture what they were losing with that brain matter.
Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does “most” of the information mean? How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity?
One of the classic ways to demonstrate that a lot of knowledge can be retrieved is to retrieve from a person the number of steps in the stairway of the house in which he lived as a child.
I personally have IRC and ICQ and MSN messanger transcripts that go a long time back with contents that you could potentially retrieve.
The fact that you get in some savants total memory recall of some particular type after damaging their brain is also good evidence.
(I think wedrifid’s “physics says otherwise” makes this discussion rather pointless.)
As far as physics is concered maybe a human being that’s 1,000,000 years old runs into problems with storing his memories. That doesn’t mean that an issue for human operating in todays world.
Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?
Because the main evolutionary reason that we store information in our brain isn’t to recall memories. It’s to pattern match what we experience into categories and make decisions based on those categories. For pattern matching it’s useful to keep storing all information but unnecessary to retrieve individual instances of memories.
Do you think that this is strong evidence? What does “most” of the information mean? I know the “consensus” gets casually mentioned in the lectures, but I don’t think it’s strong. How would you design an experiment to test infinite memory capacity? Keeping memories stored requires energy, how does it make evolutionary sense to store memories you never recall?
(I think wedrifid’s “physics says otherwise” makes this discussion rather pointless.)
From the link you provided: “The physical effects of the disease in the brain were found to be more advanced in the bilinguals’ brains, even though their mental ability was roughly the same.”
I think this also means that their tests for mental ability just failed to capture what they were losing with that brain matter.
One of the classic ways to demonstrate that a lot of knowledge can be retrieved is to retrieve from a person the number of steps in the stairway of the house in which he lived as a child.
I personally have IRC and ICQ and MSN messanger transcripts that go a long time back with contents that you could potentially retrieve.
The fact that you get in some savants total memory recall of some particular type after damaging their brain is also good evidence.
As far as physics is concered maybe a human being that’s 1,000,000 years old runs into problems with storing his memories. That doesn’t mean that an issue for human operating in todays world.
Because the main evolutionary reason that we store information in our brain isn’t to recall memories. It’s to pattern match what we experience into categories and make decisions based on those categories. For pattern matching it’s useful to keep storing all information but unnecessary to retrieve individual instances of memories.