I suspected you would say so, as this is thought to be common knowledge. I’d like to see what this kind of research would even look like.
It the academic consensus as far as I know, and I visited neuroscience university lectures. I’m not particularly big on the detail but the gist is that there’s no sign of brainspace limitation found anywhere.
If brainspace isn’t limited, then why do people forget things? Does it make evolutionary sense?
People don’t really forget. They fail to remember. Most of the information is accessible via hypnosis.
Our brain is not optimized for retrieving long term information from our memory. A hunter gatherer doesn’t need to remember that much.
He needs to remember the location on which a certain tree that procudes good nuts grows. That why the loci method is a easy way to store information in your brain in a way that makes the information easy to remember.
There also the issue of pattern matching. Say I give you 4 apples. You don’t need to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4.
The hunter gather does much better if his brain merges those 4 distinct objects into one category called apple_n. In practice that means that whenever the brain get queried how apple_1 looks like the brain return apple_n. You might say that this means that the hunter gatherer has forgotten how apple_1 looks like but’s not a fair representation of what the brain does.
Some of the people who have no problem remembering everything fail to generalise from apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 into apple_n. Being able to remember every single apple that you encounter on it’s own is not worth not having a generalised apple concept. Being able to generalise is valuable in the evolutionary sense.
When using Anki, trying to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 is not what we are going for.
We might learn a concept of green apples and one of red apples. A hunter gather is also likely to learn different concepts and be able to distinguish different kinds of apples but he will never need to recall every single apple he has seen in his life.
To be able to learn a concept of green apples versus red apples, we need to learn to distinguish red from green beforehand and we need to learn to distinguish apples from other fruits.
Having a lot of concepts makes it easier to learn advanced concepts such as green apples and red apples.
If you for example learn biochemistry one of the most important concepts is to be able to distinguish:
lipids/carbohydrates/peptides/nucleic acids.
Once you learned that part you can learn to distinguish different lipids but if you don’t have those basics distinctions you will suffer trying to learn biochemistry. That’s the secret of learning for you ;).
Also memory interference could become a problem with huge Anki decks.
It a design problem. I don’t think a huge issue with any of the card I listed. They are all well designed to escape interference. Should interference become still an issue, you solve it by adding additional cards.
Let’s say I’m learning German, French and English and there a possible interference between the French chat[Katze] and the English chat[Gespräch]. In French chat can also mean the same as in English.
I will add a card like: [en->de]?(cat/chat)? means Gespräch
I will also add a card: [fr/en]chat means cat in ?(French/English)?
I might add a bunch of cards to cover the interference.
This might be true. I’ve also learned it’s possible that education doesn’t prevent the degenerative process, but helps you cope with it longer.
A second languages give you an additional four years before getting alzheimers.
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.
It the academic consensus as far as I know, and I visited neuroscience university lectures. I’m not particularly big on the detail but the gist is that there’s no sign of brainspace limitation found anywhere.
People don’t really forget. They fail to remember. Most of the information is accessible via hypnosis.
Our brain is not optimized for retrieving long term information from our memory. A hunter gatherer doesn’t need to remember that much.
He needs to remember the location on which a certain tree that procudes good nuts grows. That why the loci method is a easy way to store information in your brain in a way that makes the information easy to remember.
There also the issue of pattern matching. Say I give you 4 apples. You don’t need to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4. The hunter gather does much better if his brain merges those 4 distinct objects into one category called apple_n. In practice that means that whenever the brain get queried how apple_1 looks like the brain return apple_n. You might say that this means that the hunter gatherer has forgotten how apple_1 looks like but’s not a fair representation of what the brain does.
Some of the people who have no problem remembering everything fail to generalise from apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 into apple_n. Being able to remember every single apple that you encounter on it’s own is not worth not having a generalised apple concept. Being able to generalise is valuable in the evolutionary sense.
When using Anki, trying to remember apple_1, apple_2, apple_3 and apple_4 is not what we are going for. We might learn a concept of green apples and one of red apples. A hunter gather is also likely to learn different concepts and be able to distinguish different kinds of apples but he will never need to recall every single apple he has seen in his life.
To be able to learn a concept of green apples versus red apples, we need to learn to distinguish red from green beforehand and we need to learn to distinguish apples from other fruits. Having a lot of concepts makes it easier to learn advanced concepts such as green apples and red apples.
If you for example learn biochemistry one of the most important concepts is to be able to distinguish: lipids/carbohydrates/peptides/nucleic acids.
Once you learned that part you can learn to distinguish different lipids but if you don’t have those basics distinctions you will suffer trying to learn biochemistry. That’s the secret of learning for you ;).
It a design problem. I don’t think a huge issue with any of the card I listed. They are all well designed to escape interference. Should interference become still an issue, you solve it by adding additional cards.
Let’s say I’m learning German, French and English and there a possible interference between the French chat[Katze] and the English chat[Gespräch]. In French chat can also mean the same as in English.
I will add a card like:
[en->de]?(cat/chat)? means Gespräch
I will also add a card:
[fr/en]chat means cat in ?(French/English)?
I might add a bunch of cards to cover the interference.
A second languages give you an additional four years before getting alzheimers.
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.