Cool exercise. I suspect the human “J-space” analogue is similarly noisy. When I tried the second exercise on myself, I couldn’t keep focus on lots of different types of creature—which is what Qwen is doing, and the prompt seems to imply it—while repeating the phrase aloud. But if I tried to narrow to a couple specific mental images (a manatee for the first half, then an elephant for the second), it was pretty easy to hold a seemingly-stable image and switch at the requested time. On the first exercise, I, like Qwen, had the image of a sea creature in my head several words before “wooden”, like my brain was trying to keep it in cache. Trying not to do this seems paradoxical in a similar vein as “don’t think about pink elephants”. I’m curious if others have the same reaction, and especially if anyone feels like they’re able to complete the first exercise without mental spillover.
I couldn’t keep focus on lots of different types of creature … while repeating the phrase aloud. But if I tried to narrow to a couple specific mental images … it was pretty easy to hold a seemingly-stable image and switch at the requested time. On the first exercise, I, like Qwen, had the image of a sea creature in my head several words before “wooden”...
Same experience here.
But when I fix the sea-creature in advance (e.g. an octopus), picture it while saying “She carefully placed the letter,” and then switch to a specific land animal (say a cheetah) for the rest of the sentence, I didn’t experience the ‘cache spillover’. Perhaps I’m subconsciously expecting ‘land animal’, or the ‘land animal’ signal isn’t high enough in magnitude for me to noticeably process it? (I am assuming that the signal detection theory is true.)
One complication is that we both seem to be using mental imagery, not an inner voice—this might make the (already strained) analogy of what we are doing here to LLMs even more tenuous. What happens if you repeat the exercise while internally saying the relevant word (e.g. “octopus” then “cheetah”) rather than picturing the animal? For me, I don’t think I can cleanly say the sentence aloud while also internally saying another word. It feels much more like a very short-horizon switching process than two stable streams running in parallel.
Some theorize that working memory is really an attention thing, in that it has to be actively reinforced with other noise or stuff suppressed in order to function.
This is where the whole “ADHD leads to lower working memory” seems to come from, even though usually when a layman says that they seem to not be thinking about, say, how many sequential digits I can keep in my head (which made me quite confused—they name-drop working memory but then talk about organization, sustaining focus, etc., never even mentioning how they are supposed to be related, and giving me confused looks when I ask!).
Cool exercise. I suspect the human “J-space” analogue is similarly noisy. When I tried the second exercise on myself, I couldn’t keep focus on lots of different types of creature—which is what Qwen is doing, and the prompt seems to imply it—while repeating the phrase aloud. But if I tried to narrow to a couple specific mental images (a manatee for the first half, then an elephant for the second), it was pretty easy to hold a seemingly-stable image and switch at the requested time. On the first exercise, I, like Qwen, had the image of a sea creature in my head several words before “wooden”, like my brain was trying to keep it in cache. Trying not to do this seems paradoxical in a similar vein as “don’t think about pink elephants”. I’m curious if others have the same reaction, and especially if anyone feels like they’re able to complete the first exercise without mental spillover.
Same experience here.
But when I fix the sea-creature in advance (e.g. an octopus), picture it while saying “She carefully placed the letter,” and then switch to a specific land animal (say a cheetah) for the rest of the sentence, I didn’t experience the ‘cache spillover’. Perhaps I’m subconsciously expecting ‘land animal’, or the ‘land animal’ signal isn’t high enough in magnitude for me to noticeably process it? (I am assuming that the signal detection theory is true.)
One complication is that we both seem to be using mental imagery, not an inner voice—this might make the (already strained) analogy of what we are doing here to LLMs even more tenuous. What happens if you repeat the exercise while internally saying the relevant word (e.g. “octopus” then “cheetah”) rather than picturing the animal? For me, I don’t think I can cleanly say the sentence aloud while also internally saying another word. It feels much more like a very short-horizon switching process than two stable streams running in parallel.
Some theorize that working memory is really an attention thing, in that it has to be actively reinforced with other noise or stuff suppressed in order to function.
This is where the whole “ADHD leads to lower working memory” seems to come from, even though usually when a layman says that they seem to not be thinking about, say, how many sequential digits I can keep in my head (which made me quite confused—they name-drop working memory but then talk about organization, sustaining focus, etc., never even mentioning how they are supposed to be related, and giving me confused looks when I ask!).