What is Digg?59 Comments
- comradeTJH, on 09/09/2008, -2/+21What was that article about again?
- AndrewMoyer, on 09/09/2008, -1/+20God knows I corrupted a few sectors back in college.
- weeFred, on 09/09/2008, -1/+19But you don't remember how to use the word right?
- TaintBrush, on 09/09/2008, -0/+14Mine stores porn in a hidden folder.
- jec68, on 09/09/2008, -2/+15That's nice about the brain having a better memory and all, but will it run Crysis?
- thegamingguy, on 09/08/2008, -2/+15I have always believed this. We have awesome hard drives already built in..
- Aroundtheworls, on 09/09/2008, -1/+13My brain makes clicking noises when accessing or writing data. Is that bad?
- upick, on 09/09/2008, -1/+11Aparatenly we have about 12TB of memory however I'm very sure I'm lacking a few TB's in my brain
- greatgatsbyII, on 09/09/2008, -0/+10That's not good news if you're trying to forget.
- bipolarruledout, on 09/09/2008, -0/+7I have heard this figure before and I don't know whats more laughable, only 12tb or the fact that they feel they can somehow estimate the digital data capacity of the brain. I have mentioned it before but I'm still waiting for them to construct a working model and until this can be done you can't possibly say that the brain is 12tb.
- VdgX, on 09/09/2008, -0/+6What? The human brain has more capabilities than an animal brain? I never would have guessed. Those birds always seemed pretty smart.
- tobyloc, on 09/09/2008, -0/+5I resent your sarcasm, being an albatross myself I feel society thoroughly demeans our intelligence and memory capacity. I remember exactly where I was when JFK was shot for instance, I had a great angle too, birds eye view in fact.
- xGeneric, on 09/09/2008, -0/+5Yeah we have way more than 12TB...
In my head, I have at least 1TB of Video Game codes, 2TB of worthless crap I've read on the internet(most of it coming from Digg), 0.5TB of Networking Info, 1TB dedicated to Windows. Hmmm, that's only 3.5TB. Oh wait! 20TB of Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, South Park, The Office, King of the Hill, LOST, and George Carlin routines stuck in my head.
WTB Defrag. - hoist0that0rag, on 09/09/2008, -0/+4you know, i've a little more...ahem...faith in the Digg population as i read this whole page of comments and came across zero ***** claims like "God is wonderful and has endowed you this wonderful grey matter to help you be all good and smart and stuff so be a gullible douchebag your whole life, chop off some peoples' heads and you'll get into Heaven."
- vicaya, on 09/09/2008, -0/+4Would you use a hard drive that takes 9000 seconds to store 3GB (assuming 1MB per picture, i.e 0.33MB/s transfer rate) and have an immediate recall rate of 90% (a lot worse if you wait a few days)? For comparison, you can buy a $100+ hard drive that has a transfer rate at about 80MB/s and stores 1TB (about 1000000 1MB pictures) and people will call bloody murder if it doesn't recall 100% of data you store in it for at least a couple years.
Human memory is amazing in its ability to extract and store high level summaries, which facilitates reasoning. Storing precise bits is not its strong suit. - Anonchrist, on 09/09/2008, -0/+3Could you have picked a more sourceless page. I had to scroll down to get past the content accuracy warnings.
- sadGuru, on 09/09/2008, -0/+3http://www.myspacedouchebags.com/
you are definitely one of these guys, who has somehow learned how to type. - mistertrogdor, on 09/09/2008, -0/+3It's either wiki or actually finding someone that claims they have visited the Akashic records themselves. Otherwise they seem like a myth, or some new age holistic medicine type of scam. Most of the other sites are telling you to buy this book or CD. This type of thing is beyond our current understanding of physics and cannot be tested or proven.
http://www.akashicdreams.com/akashic_whatare.html
We are all made from the exploded dust from all the same stars that forged the iron in your blood, which in theory means we are all connected on a quantum level. Everything came from one singularity.
Maybe we have just forgotten what we really are. - physco827, on 09/09/2008, -0/+2Ok so we have these astonishing memories, how do we make our current ones work better, if they are so good. I am being honest, i would like to know, the adderall can only help me so much.
- lolgasmic, on 09/09/2008, -1/+3can you remember what you ate last night, or do I need to tell you the story of the Hamburger and the Fries.
- tulpe, on 09/09/2008, -0/+2put it in the fridge overnight.. worked for some of my broken drives
- azbmr, on 09/09/2008, -0/+2Says who?
- bipolarruledout, on 09/09/2008, -0/+2While I'm sure that the brain operates very different from a computer it's simplistic to say that memories can't be both fixed and accurate. Humans have intelligence that computers might not see for decades if ever.
- shylove, on 09/09/2008, -0/+2Yeah, right, look who's just discovered how much greater it is!! Do you really trust the brain to give you an unbiased assessment???
- Amadeus2490, on 09/09/2008, -0/+2Believe it or not, I actually have a few vivid memories since BEFORE I was a year old. I asked my mom about them (before she ever told me), and she was shocked, asking "How did you remember that?!" I figure that the memories would have to be real, since I can recall certain details that I couldn't have known otherwise. I just think it's weird that I have memories from this far back, when most people don't really start remembering things until they're about 3.
- stk198323, on 09/09/2008, -1/+3I don't want to insinuate anything but... usually people do remember thing's that happened before they were 3 years old, but thos thing's are ''overwritten'' with more important information. In your case it was not overwritten... Draw your own conclusion!
- fuckingstudent, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1hey, he might have 'aspellia' long with his great memory
- bipolarruledout, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1Why must people take pride in the fact that they are not computers? Can you not give yourself more credit? I'm sick of hearing how bad your memory is as if it's the only strength of human intelligence.
- Webnower, on 09/09/2008, -1/+2Then why the ***** can't I find my ***** keys?
- UpperUpsilon, on 09/09/2008, -2/+3But technically, you aren't remembering it at all. It's just paths between neurons. You can remember the Columbus landing if you really wanted to. You probably have memories of when you were a baby, not because you "remember" it, but because your parents told you stories enough times. Memory in the brain is just not set, like on a computer.
- roddack, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1Mine stores a ton of info and every time some jack ass tells me some useless information it overwrites someones phone number
- amagiri, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1At least it's not on fire.
- mistertrogdor, on 09/09/2008, -1/+2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records
That would mean time is merely an illusion, and that consciousness experiences itself subjectively through the eyes of every life form. - azbmr, on 09/09/2008, -1/+2What if the brain is only the front-end (the interface) and the back-end is actually "off-site" and possibly limitless?
- DiggCommando, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1I've always suspected that somewhere in our brain we store every single experience in our lives, mostly for the consumption of our subconscious. With the right trigger or mnemonic however we can "bring to our consciousness" almost any memory from this archive.
- senfo, on 09/11/2008, -0/+1I have a vivid memory of a day when I was young, riding on the back of a horse with my older sister. I can remember my mom standing there and telling my sister (who was behind me) to make sure that she held onto me tight so that I didn't fall off. My grandfather was also there, watching over us.
Some years after, I would think about that day from time to time --it was a good memory. I always figured I was about two or three years old until one day, I was going through an old picture album and found a picture of that day. I was surprised how small I was, so I took the picture out and looked at the back. According to the date on the back of the picture, I was only nine months old.
That is my first known memory. - QuimbyDogg, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1The test was not really done in the best way for a "true" memory measurement. It is testing retrieval queues more than memory itself. It is nothing new that retrieval queues help improve memory (showing pictures of similar objects or just showing an object itself and having a participant decide if they saw it or not). This is the reason why everyone loves multiple choice tests and not essays when they are in highschool (and the main reason why I never had to do much homework but still obtain decent grades). A more accurate study of memory would have been to have people list/draw what they saw without picking it out from a lineup. This would give a "true" memory measurement.
One of my undergrad majors was in psychology and I wrote an extensive research paper on memory and how faulty it is with humans. Most memory studies have found that memory (without retrieval queues) is incredibly inaccurate. There are countless studies on the subject and it is extremely important when looking at our judicial system and the strength we place on eyewitness testimony. There is some really interesting research out there.
As a general rule the brain likes to fill in its own gaps with information -- it doesn't like holes. A fun test to see the brain fill in random information (non memory related but still a similar idea) is to have someone hold a colored marker cap just in your peripheral vision. Your brain will determine a color for the marker cap but it will most likely be wrong if done correctly -- this is because people can not see color in peripheral vision. Rods are the receptors for peripheral vision and they do night vision but not color, cones do color but they are in the center of the retina. - drgruney, on 09/09/2008, -1/+2Says 2-XL
- QuimbyDogg, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1You ask some interesting questions, unfortunately I haven't really been following psychology or anything brain/memory related since I finished my undergrad. I generally wasn't too fascinated with cognitive psychology in general but I did really like studying memory. I moved on to get my masters following my other major (comp sci) so I may be a little out of the park now.
I am not sure if there are any real answers to your questions about why the gaps are filled in. I would guess that the gaps are needed to be filled because it makes the entire brain process easier in all functions. Memory management for example, would be much easier if data was continuous. This may be an evolutionary trait and possibly why we have a better overall thinking processes than other animals. Of course this is all just a theory.
If you are interested in the idea of false memories two key concepts to look up are the DRM paradigm (inducing false memories with a list of words similar to an unmentioned target word) and crashing memory paradigm (people report seeing footage of major publicity events that does not actually exist -- so it would have been impossible for them to see it).
A few things I just pulled out of an old research paper that may be interesting--all of these facts based on established studies:
-Children will falsely recall less words out of a long list than adults (chances of a false memories increase with age-sorry don't have numbers off hand) However, if a short list is used the false recall rates are essentially equal in the two age groups.
-In regards to the crashing memory paradigm with a suggestive question 66% of participants in a study reported that they had witness something that they had really not seen. (scary especially in regards to eyewitness testimony in court where everything is suggestive questioning)
-In regards to crashing memory without a suggestive question (free recall essentially) 17% of people falsely remembered seeing an event on their own. (thats almost 1/5 - I consider this extremely high as well)
I apologize for not having exact numbers for everything but generally in psychology studies the important part is if there is a significant statistically difference (difference that can not be associated to chance) between the two groups tested and not necessarily what the percentages from each group are.
The numbers that I did find when I did this research a few years ago seems staggering high to me however, since then I have placed less and less value on memory heh. If almost 20% of people will randomly recall seeing something they never saw, almost 70% of people can be lead to believe something they saw without ever seeing it just because of how they were asked.... Just can't place too much emphasis in your memory if you ask me :P
Something else I found in a few different studies that was interesting was that if a person rated how certain they were that a memory was accurate there was 0 correlation with how they rated it and if it really was accurate or not. Meaning that there is no way to tell really if you remember something correctly at all or not. You could be 100% sure of something that never happened. - PeeEqualsNP, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1You make a very interesting point. You might be able to answer the following questions or at least know where to go to find possible answers. How does our brain recognize a gap even exists? Why would our brain "feel" the need to fill in those gaps? What was the evolutionary benefit of this ability? How come the "on the tip of the tongue" problem doesn't happen all the time and correct recollection isn't the rarity? (You stated "Most memory studies have found that memory (without retrieval queues) is incredibly inaccurate", but this is relative. If 20% is considered "incredibly inaccurate", that still means correct recollection happens most of the time. So some numbers would help :) )
The remarkable thing about the brain, and especially memory, is that scientists can tell you where you're different types of memories are stored in the brain. They can diagnose problems that occur with memory that show themselves with recognizable symptoms, like amnesia and Alzheimer's, but, as far as I have read, they cannot really describe the process of memory recollection on the same level. They know it has something to do with neurons and electrical signals throughout the brain, but it is not completely understood how the brain "remembers". Oh they can describe the process, such as the different types of recall. But if you were asked what your name is, they can't describe down to the electrical signals how your brain knows to go to the correct part of itself, retrieve the needed "memory" and then send it off. As far as I have read, it is still not understood whether this memory is a stored electrical signal or some form of "metadata". This would be the difference between your brain finding the correct memory signal and just sending it off, and the brain somewhat or fully reconstructing the original signal and then sending it off.
Again, its been awhile since I read up on brain activity so if I've mistated, please correct me. - QuimbyDogg, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1Just wanted to point out that it is retrieval cues not queues. I wrote this early this morning and now it is really bothering me.
- apendrapew, on 09/09/2008, -0/+1We have good memory in relation to what?
- beaunewcomb, on 09/09/2008, -2/+2Just last night I got like 3 girls numbers... and now today I can't remember their names... Why?? Why? Because the brain isn't some big truck you can just dump all your stuff on to.. it's a series of TUBES. and if you don't know enough about those tubes, those tubes get CLOGGED.
- diqq, on 09/09/2008, -1/+1I think what people really want to know is how to strongly want something , without the promise of money. Drink beer? Smoke weed?
- ramiknet, on 09/09/2008, -0/+0I guess that i am one of those who have a very good memory, i can remember many things that people around me who lived the same experiences seems to have forgotten, nice article :D
- Princeamor, on 09/09/2008, -1/+1I hate thit type of useless yet obvious news!!!
- tobyloc, on 09/09/2008, -1/+1Your back-end may be limitless but not mine thank you very much, I exercise daily and follow a nutritionally balanced diet.
- jabelar, on 09/09/2008, -0/+0It makes sense if you think about it. Think of all the "video" memories we have, and all the cross-references and tags we can recall. You can remember kids you went to school with, what they looked like, what their parents looked like, where they lived, what their house looked like, what it smelled like, what you did together, etc. Despite all the memories we can't recall or only partially recall, what we still can recall is still a huge amount.
- JDizzle614, on 09/09/2008, -1/+198% of my memory is devoted to my "spank bank."
-
Show 51 - 60 of 60 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is