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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- We're accustomed to using technology to remember things on our behalf...but are we losing something important in the process?
Links for the Curious -
The Extended Mind (Clark & Chalmers, 1998) - web-archive.so...
The lost arts of memory (Boorstin, D. J., 1984)
Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic (Carr, N., 2012) - web.archive.or...
Americans are following the news less closely than they used to (Forman-Katz, N., 2023) - www.pewresearc...
Outsourcing Memory to External Tools: A Review of ‘Intention Offloading’ (Gilbert, S. J., Boldt, A., Sachdeva, C., Scarampi, C. & Tsai, P.-C., 2023) - link.springer....
Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance but diminishing memory (Grinschgl, S., Papenmeier, F. & Meyerhoff, H. S., 2021) -
Offloading memory: Serial position effects (Kelly, M. O. & Risko, E. F., 2019) - doi.org/10.375...
Offloading information to an external store increases false recall (Lu, X., Kelly, M. O. & Risko, E. F., 2020) - linkinghub.els...
The Extended Mind (Menary, R., 2012) - mitpress.mit.e...
Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic - Allison Parrish | Open Transcripts (Parish, A., 2016) - opentranscripts...
Offloading memory leaves us vulnerable to memory manipulation (Risko, E. F., Kelly, M. O., Patel, P. & Gaspar, C., 2019) - linkinghub.els...
Cognitive Offloading (Risko, E. F. & Gilbert, S. J., 2016) - linkinghub.els...
Specifying the mechanisms behind benefits of saving-enhanced memory (Runge, Y., Frings, C. & Tempel, T., 2021) - doi.org/10.100...
The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers (Schacter, D. L., 2001) -
Feats of memory anyone can do | Joshua Foer , 2012) - • Feats of memory anyone...
Extended mind thesis (Wikipedia, 2024) - en.wikipedia.o...
Your Outboard Brain Knows All (Wired & Thompson, C., 2007) - web.archive.or...
I feel almost constantly frustrated in any conversation about American politics about the fact that overwhelmingly people don't remember things that happened in their lifetime (let alone histories they may or may not have been taught). They sometimes comment on events that I observed them live through and respond to with views in the present that contradict not only their previous views but contradict the historical context or factual details of the past event. I think you make a terrific point about how memory is critical for creating a persistent context for our lives, both as individuals with a sense of coherent identity, but also as social agents who are robust against psychological attack or swindling.
Memory, like all cognitive tools, needs to be exercised! Def agree that the more you can remember, the better you'll be you
Hopefully I can flex those old muscles, if I put my mind to it. :)
One thing I discovered when I was in school was that if I needed to memorize something, I would retain the memory longer and more accurately if I wrote it out several times. To me, it seems like I store the memory in more than one part of the brain (as sound, as a visual list, as the muscle memory of writing the list) and that makes it easier to retrieve the memory.
Totally - writing things repeatedly is a time-honored mnemonic technique, as Bart Simpson is all too aware. XD
I will watch "thunk"
I will watch "thunk"
I will watch "thunk"
I will watch "thunk"
You've pretty much hit on why proponents of the extended mind thesis will pretty much always bring along the idea of embodied cognition with it. I can't recall ever hearing a theorist propose the former without the latter.
Anyway, I would contend that forgetting is also an active process, one which consolidates our ability to access parts of the world we actually care about, and which comes to define our daily activities. Forgetting is as much constitutive of ourselves as remembering.
If we are the sum total of what we remember, then we absolutely should "forget" that we need to get snow tires tomorrow, knowing that it's on a list, so that it frees up our memory for more important things.
There is no known upper bound to what one could theoretically memorize, if they are efficient about it and endlessly focused. But no one is that radical with the exploration-exploitation trade-off, and also our brains tend to get increasingly bored if there is not at least a bit of reward, and also most people need to have a job on order to not die.
So you are extremely unlikely to be the first human to discover the limit to human memory capacity. What is limited is our attention, and it's not the same thing.
(And also memories have an expiration date and don't last forever but that is still not the same thing as a lack of space)
tk;dr: you can remember the snow tires, because you will never lack room for new memories.
It's true that performance on certain cognitive tasks improves while we're not actively remembering, but the mind is not an attic - the more one practices remembering, the more one will remember. Snow tires will not dislodge your piano lessons! :P
Off-site memory storage has been a fact of human existence since the first alphabets. However, no amount of information can replace the actual experience, which is knowledge.
I'm working on a thing about text & its origins RN - for all the mysticism around Names and magic writing and whatnot, it's pretty inauspicious for the written word to have started as an accounting tool.
COW. COW. COW.
Truly magical. 😆
@@THUNKShow, you have no idea how magical it would seem for the big man to ask how many cattle he had and have his herdsman look at a piece of clay and answer: "3 bulls, 6 cows, and 2 calves."
@@LeeCarlsonwitchcraft! Sorcery! Heresy!
Isn't there a difference between semantic memory and Recognition memory? Intuitively it's far easier to remember something and draw connection with things when receiving a relevant sensory input, than simply writing down memorized facts.
If I recall correctly it's the technique behind a lot of mnemonics, keying concepts to highly memorable self-stimulation leveraging our ability to associate arbitrary things as a way to index and internal database. That however has the opposite problem, the information stored in the memory palace is just there and it's not "useful" becasue it's not inegrated with what you *do* frequently.
There must be a third level between semantic and recognition memory, what's actually *part of you*, closer to muscle memory than either of those two.
I really like the point about 'cementing' at the end, I believe there's also a component of "conceptual digestion".
How often are we allowed to sit with our thoughts in this time period? We are constantly overstimulated, we need an act of willpower to deprive ourselves of stimuli.
For a long time that wasn't the case, the amounts of downtime available to our brain was far bigger than it is now, I do believe that it does play a role in the decreased cohesiveness of our memories.
These are fully my musings, becasuse I do think about my mind a lot.
I wonder how much of my "poor memory" is due to ADHD and how much is actually just me not practicing it, because it takes effort and avoiding effort when possible is just what we are inclined to do as biological systems.
Yes! Technically "recognition memory" describes a process, while "semantic memory" describes a category of things remembered. The whole mish-mash of discrete processes that can all be damaged/arrested/etc. while preserving the function of the others is really quite a lot to remember.
People who routinely use memory palaces show neural activation in parts of their brains normally mapped to spatial faculties, even when they're not using those methods consciously. This is not slam-dunk evidence that practicing mnemonic techniques can make them an extension of your normal cognitive processes, but it is at least suggestive! A little practice couldn't hurt! ;)
I always believed that more/better tools only make us better even (and especially!) in their absence.
This video convinced me I was wrong.
😅You should see how good I am at hand-sawing in a straight line, after owning a circular saw for 15 years.
I dont speak english.
I mean you are better at straight saw cuts than me despite you only ever using automatic saw while I never use any saw.
You are better at using alien saw of magic origin compared to me who has never used a saw.
WE are being controlled.
Remembering is a radical act!
Taken to its logical extreme, the notion that external storage methods can be considered equivalent to internal conscious memory would see no meaningful difference between an immense written list of all memories in a person's mind . . . and the memory apparatus, in its entirety, of a person's actual mind.
In other words, an automated husk with no internal conscious memory whatsoever, but with access to that list, would qualify as a fully functioning human on that paradigm. Like you, for a variety of reasons, I don't buy it.
Does the author of The Extended Mind give a definition of mind?
OMG NEWTON IS CUTEE
The authors of the essay in question (Andy Clark and David Chalmers) are more focused on redefining "thinking" or "cognition" than specifically "mind." It's a very accessible essay, if you're interested! web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/320/1/extended.html
We're in a funny crossroads, where we exists as life forms in a world that made life forms that extend their cognition around themselves using objects and other life forms (spiders and spider webs being the classic example) but also we live in a society(tm) that has decided that too many tools of cognitive extension are gonna somehow compromise the strength or purity of uh, the essence of being smart/human/capable. I hear it all the time "if we allow kids to use wheeled backpacks instead of carrying their books, their backs are going to be so weak" and "if you allow a bra to carry your breasts, your back is going to be so weak". Imagine this line of thought applied to say, building materials. "If we stop tearing up logs with our hands or a simple ax, we're gonna end up with weak lumberjacks!", yes, maybe? unless they go to the gym, and also modern logging companies could not sustain the needs of the world with honest work and one ax per man instead of so many machines that the same amount of lumberjacks can operate regardless of how much lumber they can split per minute with an ax the good ol' fashioned way. We can understand that kind of advantage to extended tool operations for industrial needs but we tend to shy away from doing the same about cognition.
I think "unless they go to the gym" is the crux of it - technology allows greater capability than our frail meat bodies could ever manage, but someone who refuses to "go to the gym" because forklifts exist is missing something!
@@THUNKShow Yeah, we can deconstruct all our needs and satisfy them in a big array of modular ways if we accept we can deconstruct first.
Hey have you seen the vid of a rat's brain as it decides which direction to turn in a maze? It shows how the brain triggers ideas to navigate space. The clip is just part of a larger lecture (which is really cool and goes into several other ideas), but it sums up the idea pretty quick. th-cam.com/video/DFkr30QdHtg/w-d-xo.html
Oh coooooool...
Always excited by new stuff!
i think that people are incorrect to imagine your memory as something inherent to your very being.
you live in a world where you have not been trained to use raw memory.
if we had been raised with different technology, we would have very different skills.
also, all those intellectuals that you mentioned had to memorize far far less information than we have to know just to be a normal citizen.
none of those guys could do any form of household chore for them selves, none of them could cook, and most of them had social skills that would be considered a dsm-axis 2 disorder now adays.
like literally... ever person you mentioned had a bunch of slaves and subservient slave wives that did everything for them. and most of them had the equivalent of an 8th grade education.
they where basically just babies.
Well! 2025! (soon) It has a bad association already! Maybe we can change that? The "Project" is the worst of the worst! But there is push-back! Very small majorities! Unhappy gop? Let's hope!
our brains generate the precise frequencies to access memories which are stored in a higher dimensional timeless place. I agree, quite valuable to train the recall abilities, get good enough at accessing the right frequencies and the mind can access more information than just its own memory...