It all works this way (though a certain female family member would disagree, claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later).
But my memory works this way. A summary "party at so-and-so's house, weather was nice, overall vibe was ___". The rest is context. You know what the house/backyard is like, you know the general feel of that time of year, you know the crowd that usually comes, you can easily synthesize details like the smell of the BBQ and the taste of the food... build up a complete "memory" from stuff that could be summarized in a paragraph of text plus generic (not specific to one memory episode) context.
I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is it accurate? Who cares. As long as no detailed record exists to compare it to that would reveal the "lossy compression".
>I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is it accurate? Who cares.
Not only that, but by recalling and rebuilding memories, how gaps are filled in depends on your current mental state. For example, if I'm feeling depressed and brooding over past social interactions, I'll likely imagine people having meaner expressions or saying harsher things than they did. The big problem is that your memory of the event is "written over" based on the rebuilt memory. Again, only the seemingly important bits, but people are more likely to remember emotionally strong portions. Like those imagined harsh words.
I realized I was doing this when I thought a professor strongly disliked me, avoided his classes for a couple years, but then found him pleasant. My depression and social anxiety had warped my memories over the years. Being aware that this happens really helps. I trust negative parts of memories less, and I consciously stop myself when I start to brood (or at least, have fun with a puzzle while thinking back on things).
Just thought I’d share an example of how this memory issue manifests for me.
I listen to a lot of music and use it (like many) to index various stages of life - i even have playlists by year to help facilitate this.
The problem occurs when I listen back to music i was listening to in, say, 2008. All of a sudden, i’m transported back. But, each time i do this, the effect wears off a little, because their is some - let’s call it - “meta data” being written from the current moment in time im listening from which is adding new color to the initial index.
This effect has been studied and noted somewhere before, but i’ll have to dig up when i’m not on mobile.
Ditto on the "certain female family member who insists that she remembers things word-for-word". When she recounts her meeting with a friend it is needlessly tedious (I try to be a good listener of course). Complains that my recollections are too vague and she wants to know what really happened and is frustrated I won't give her details.
I think a large part of it is just that you store what is important to you. To me the day-to-day politeness is just filler. I don't care if they had black coffee or a latte. If someone was struggling with something and poured out their heart over multiple conversations, I'm going to remember what arguments and concerns they had and the mental model I built up around that situation. The filler is just unimportant and doesn't stick around.
My wife is the opposite. Signs of weakness are an embarrassment to be forgotten. She lives for the day-to-day.
The Myers-Briggs system distinguishes call these two perspectives "Sensing" (detail orientated) and "Intuition" (theory/model based) [not the best names]. And it posits that it's less a matter of importance people place on things and more that people literally notice different things and perceive the world differently (so it's not even just about remembering, it's about what you notice and how your mind represents the world in the first place).
Meyers-Briggs is a fundamentally non-empirical model. I wouldn't recommend it as the basis for any argument or position concerning real world phenomena.
I don't think Myers-briggs is fundamentally non-empirical. Empirical evidence is certainly lacking for it, but I think there's a good argument to be made that this is due to poor experimental design (for example applying the categorisations to persons rather than to mental processes) and a general difficulty in empirically measuring internal mental processes (it's notable that more mainstream competitors to the Myers-Briggs like the five-factor model don't even attempt this).
I would also point out that I was replying to a comment that was an empirical observation. My comment highlighted that their empirical observation corresponds to the pre-existing Myers-Briggs theory (which suggests that other people have previously had similar observations).
No, Meyers-Briggs is fundamentally non-empirical, it has no empirical validity, nor was it derived from any empirical process. If you have a personal faith in its validity then I'm sure I don't mean to disrespect that.
If you're talking about the testing instrument itself, then sure I don't think it's great. But if you're talking about the underlying theory (and that's much more interesting - when we discuss physics we talk about the theory of relativity not the tools we use to measure it) then I would like to point out that the theory (lets call it Jungian Type Theory - JTT) was derived from an empirical process. Specifically it was derived from Jung's observations as a clinician over several decades. That's not a controlled experiment, but it's certainly empirical.
Regarding my personal experience with it: I have personally found it highly useful as a predictive model of behaviour. It's the only thing I've found that allows me to explain the aspects of people's personalities that aren't easily explained by their environment or life experiences. And by combining with JTT with an understanding of someone's life experience and environment I've found that I can pretty much always find a satisfying explanation for someone's behaviour in a way that I am not able to do with either one individually.
Regarding its validity:
- Firstly, there's no need to tiptoe around the subject if you think it's bullshit. I won't be offended, and I can totally understand why might be skeptical given the experimental evidence that exists so far.
- Having said that, I would like to challenge to idea that we ought to expect JTT to be experimentally validated given how limited our current ability to inspect the brain is. Specifically (and unlike other models of personality) the theory's primary claims are that there are certain internal thinking processes, which of course we currently have no way of observing directly, and which will not necessarily correspond straightforwardly or 1:1 with observable behaviours (environmental and life experience factors being huge confounders).
- Given this I find it entirely unsurprising that experimental designs which rely on numerical scorings of observed behaviours fail to find an effect
- I think it no coincidence that this theory came out of clinical psychology, because you need to be able to control for the environmental and life-experience factors in order to be able to see the other pattern that is (well ok, might be) sitting there beneath them. And therapeutic relationships which continue over a number of years are one of the only scenarios where that context is available outside of close personal relationships.
> I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is it accurate? Who cares.
It's not just decades old memories. Memory of recent events is likely to be suspect. Which is an issue for the legal system because it relies so heavily on eyewitness testimony.
A while back I went on a google maps street view tour of a place I lived until I was 9 but hadn't been to in well over a decade. I wasn't sure what to attribute to the tenuous nature of my ancient memories versus what things had actually changed since I last looked. It was honestly a bit uncomfortable and disorienting having this gaping hole in my perception of reality. Was the swing set always blue in that park? I thought it was yellow. Maybe they repainted it? I will never know.
I think some memories are closer to lossless compressions than lossy which I wonder if it's more of a scale where memories can slide between the two modes with varying degrees of fidelity. Like there are memories that I know I shouldn't remember from childhood that I can remember clearly and others I barely remember what year it happened. So I have to wonder if some of this seeming lossless-ness is more fractal-like in nature where one can just reconstruct from the base encoding and expand it outward to fill in sufficient detail to seem like it's perfectly captured when it's really just merely the reconstruction.
I vaguely remember reading something that traumatic or “very important” memories never go through the usual process of becoming memories. Instead, when you recall them, your brain physically “relives” it so it is never forgotten. Probably a evolutionary trait to make sure we learn as much as we can from the experience. This is also why you remember those “times you almost died” in slow motion. Your brain goes into a high resolution mode in those cases, which you remember as slow motion, like speeding up a camera and playing it back at normal speed.
Sorry I don’t have any sources, I’m just a casual reader in this space.
If you are taking a truncated SVD, the math says that it is the best representation of that data for a given truncation size, and will even give you a measure of how good that representation is. But picking how good you need often ends up being a kind of annoying and fuzzy heuristic thing. In addition, some data just gives you better singular values, and so fundamentally compresses better.
I guess the brain probably is dealing (in a hugely non-mathematical way -- it is just an analogy!) with a similar sort of thing. Somehow we pick some memories to keep in great detail -- either because they seem to be very valuable, or because they just seem to compress nicely.
It is a bit funny that one name for this sort of thing is a "singular experience."
though a certain female family member would disagree, claiming to remember conversations word-for-word years later
Surely many people do. Otherwise you wouldn't have all these biographies and non-fiction books packed with conversations people have managed to recall in a level of detail enough to not get sued. I can barely remember a line of conversation from this week, let alone important ones from years ago, so I always assumed most/many people can remember conversations to some reasonable level in a way that I cannot.
I suspect many (most?) conversations in biographies and non-fiction books are not necessarily quoted verbatim. In most cases, the author may at best have had access to diaries or other notes from the time that recorded a summary of what was said, or they may have interviewed people who, years later, summarised what they recall -- more or less accurately -- being discussed.
The author may then present this in the form of quoted speech in order to make it more vivid and compelling for today's reader, but it rarely corresponds to a precise transcript of the original conversation.
I think most people remember the basic concepts and then they fill in the details using what they know about the situation and participants. I have remembered events a certain way that in my mind was very clear. But upon reviewing said events in old video, it turns out I got quite a few details wrong. Sometimes two people will recall the same event very differently. Which is why I think our justice system relies far too heavily on witness testimony.
One of my oddest part of my dreams, is that they often tend to be places from my childhood or young adult life and that my brain seems to processing the 3D layout. Like I will walk specifically to school, remembering the route, or through my church and I had re-visited a giant thrift store from many moons ago and my feet just trod the path right where I knew I wanted to go. It's like watching my mind process these locations into mental maps in dreams. Kinda neat
Using routes is a key technique in memory techniques (an the so called 'memory palaces'), presumably because when we went hunting for food we needed to find our way home, so memories attached to routes are a lot stronger.
Interestingly I was able to retrace the walk two decades later (we had emigrated to another country in the meantime) and while the "vibe" matched, the details were quite different from what I thought I remembered (this is an old town in south Germany where things don't change that quickly so it wasn't redevelopment).
But it was possible, with a bit of head scratching, to walk the route just from memory.
This is more about how what you can remember about an event after five seconds differs from all that you experienced, as opposed to what you can remember a year later. I think most people can give a word for word summary of an utterance after a few seconds so this particular experiment doesn't really have any bearing on your relatives claims, which are more about recall from long term memory rather than working memory.
Photographic memory is not a real phenomenon though. But eidetic memory is real, some people can remember almost everything they read. But they don’t remember photographic images.
My perception is that I've only collected "raw" materials, left unprocessed. Not sure if it's compressed and lossy or lossless. There's a quote that say like "if you can't explain, you don't really understand", I really hate this quote because I don't have to explain! Those necessary memory will come up, load into my processing unit and execute it.
My accusation is that the conversation memory works the same way as the BBQ party memory. You remember a skeleton. This subject was discussed, and things were said that gave me a feeling of ____. And a few more easily compressed details. The rest is interpolated. Imagine a language model the size of GPT-3 being trained on one particular person's manner of speaking and then given a one-paragraph summary of a conversation to get it started. Barring an audio recording or a transcript, who's to say that these weren't the words that were spoken?
Of course the engineer is tempted to test this by secretly recording a conversation and trying to trip up the perfect rememberer, a year later. But the non-geek life experience accumulated says don't go there.
I should add that as a geek I ought to have a better ability to remember, say, computer code that I've written. But am I the only one who, going back to something I haven't touched for two years, has to re-learn my own code?
>But am I the only one who, going back to something I haven't touched for two years, has to re-learn my own code?
No, that is perfectly normal, and it starts much earlier, weeks sometimes days after leaving the code.
Depending on its complexity and level of its abstraction.
You mentally build something highly abstract without much emotional or bodily bond.
Your brain has not much incentive to rememeber it.
Adding to that, there's a lot of sampling bias as well. If a function fits my mental model of it, then I'm unlikely to revisit it. If a function doesn't fit my mental model, then it is very likely that I'll misuse it, increasing the likelihood of a bug, and increasing the likelihood that I re-read the code.
Not to forget, memories are not only unreliable per se, but also change with each act of their remembrance.
For example, by character peculiarities, new experiences, current circumstances, etc.
Often they are made up on a whim, without the remembering person being aware of it.
So in a sense, memories have a past and a history.
But my memory works this way. A summary "party at so-and-so's house, weather was nice, overall vibe was ___". The rest is context. You know what the house/backyard is like, you know the general feel of that time of year, you know the crowd that usually comes, you can easily synthesize details like the smell of the BBQ and the taste of the food... build up a complete "memory" from stuff that could be summarized in a paragraph of text plus generic (not specific to one memory episode) context.
I can build up a relatively vivid mental image of my walking route to school (from the bus terminal) over 40 years ago. Is it accurate? Who cares. As long as no detailed record exists to compare it to that would reveal the "lossy compression".