Memory, an experience
Many a times, it has been a personal experience that the events or the data registered in the mind does not immediately fade away. At certain times, we use to have fun games like recollecting the character names, places from the novel, or even the short stories read really long back. It would take a lot of time, hours or even days together to get back the names. Analyzing into how this mechanism works is again a sensational touch with nature.
A book-keeping dictionary
Is memory a book-keeping table? An association of object A is associated with object B by so and so means. No idea. Data organization as memory in humans is one of the complicated mechanism that is being under constant research. The storage mechanism is responsible for many activities, induces sensation, emotions, alertness etc. which might not be directly induced. Almost every other activity has got its path crossing the data warehouse. Of course, the things we can do is really limited if we do not have this storage.
Storage, an abstraction
The storage in humans could be highly abstracted. The moment we see an object, we recognize its type, characteristics, speculate its dynamic behavior and what not? If we see a polished surface, we feel it has got to be smooth. This is primarily because during our learning phase, probably we would've touched a polished surface that is smooth. Moreover, to _agree_ that the surface that is polished would be smooth, requires a higher statistical average so that the 'agreeing' part puts the data into bias.
Lumps and lumps
This gives a little insight into how memory could've been organized. In memory information is organized as 'lumps'. Each lump has a weak interaction with another lump. The strength of the interaction is increased once the event of association between two discrete elements from the lumps increases. For example, the sensory experience we learn from getting hurt by touching a hot plate makes us understand what 'hot' means. Moreover, seeing the steam coming out of boiling water and trying to get our hands really near to the steam would also have a burning effect. In another scenario, the plate is placed on top of a vessel with boiling water. The steam is ventilated through the opening in the top. By seeing this we immediately guess the plate would be hot. How does this happen? It is similar to a classify operation, A can be hot (plate), B can also be hot (steam). Now what happens after learning is that we abstract the sharp common property of the plate/steam out from the object itself. A and B are same in the sense of _hotness_. But the feel of the _hotness_ from A and B are different. One acts on the point or in a small area and the other has a 'spread' effect and affects a larger surface.
Thus by abstracting the 'sense' of 'hotness', the object A and B comes under this class. But behold, if there is just a plate lying on the table, we do not recognize it as hot right? Of course, the abstraction or classification is not sharp, in the sense, there are no strict boundaries. The levels of abstraction for the object that we learn include its:
- Surface characteristics
- Behavioral characteristics
- One's emotional orientation with the object
The behavioral characteristics include the dynamic characteristics of the object. For instance, we would observe the same object in different scenarios with different behaviors. The plate can also be hot, cold. The plate can be used as a placeholder for some things. And a lot more... So, all these characteristics have links to the abstract object that we perceive, that which is round, metallic, etc.
The emotional orientation with the object is what is really subjective and hard to simulate, or model or find. It depends on how an individual orient him/her self with the object. Being a dynamic object ourselves, we got to interact with the other static/dynamic objects. This makes us have a kind of sensation to different objects. Most often, the sensations are completely and sub-conscious and involuntary. Majority of people would have very blurry or no remembrance at all for the kind of sensation they have towards objects like plate, pen, paper, nail etc. Some would have a sharp remembrance of it because of the events that had happened would've got a sharp impression in their conscious region of memory. For instance, the nail has a kind of 'driving-away' effect in me when i view its sharp edge.
Memory at height of abstraction and Learning
The thing that we've guessed so far is just a small fraction on sub-conscious memory. What is the 'memory' that we say that we 'forget'? It is the information that we store on rather higher level of abstraction. Voluntarily pluggable information, also called as 'consciously memorized' information is subjected to loss and is characterized by weak links, for quicker cleanup. Imagine, a set of information that we learn, at certain time. For instance, certain paraphrases for exams. If we observe ourself into how we learn, it reflects the way the data would be stored. The learning for holding the information temporarily is different from the learning for having a lasting impression. One cannot speculate that the learning methodology that involves 'reading it aloud' is not effective than reading deeply. For instance, reading it aloud when done for considerably longer time, has a subconscious effect and gets registered in the subconscious memory. For instance, the learning that we do when we are really young is of this kind. Our parents teach certain things again and again and thus it gets to the sub-conscious memory. Looking at the ancient 'gurukula' type of educational system, they had this 'memorization' of vedas for young students. Once the sense of the information is 'understood', the 'memorization' is stopped. Many would be curious if they recollect that they would've learned by reading aloud for sometime and as they grew up, dislike that way of learning and would've done deep reading to remember things.
Memory, on the surface is the web of associations held together by sensations. A lump of information could be untouched for years together. The lumps spread across in multiple layers of abstraction. The lumps are highly dynamic and rigid for transformations. Multiple lumps could merge into a single big lump and also subdivide into smaller lumps. Moreover, smaller the lumps, easier for the learning process to make associations and other memory processing. The lump break-down is done during the sleep or resting process sub-consciously. A transformation of memory can happen once we learn a new behavior of already learnt object. The observations constantly query from the lumps and the queried information is sent to the arbiter. The agreeing/disagreeing about a particular event is done by the arbiter. It is a kind of tug-of-war. Both the parts pushes and depending on where the rope is pushed into, the decisions flow.
Loss of Memory
Many a times, after the regret of having memory loss, i observed, the loss that we incur is just a superficial phenomena in most of the cases. The feedback because of a slow recall, sent as a wrong signal as 'forgotten' keeps the mind biased with the thought that the forgetfulness has come in place. Moreover, it is amazing how the 'forgetfulness' feedback has a 'down' effect whereas faster recall of information often misinterpreted as 'more memory, memory power' etc, gives an 'up' effect. Just looking into what 'Loss of memory' means and why is this done, gives an amazing picture into the 'cleaning' work of nature. Nature is 'clean' in the sense, in all her design, she has weaved the mechanism of self-initialization, self-sustenance and self-destruction. The self-destruction of information that we have got on surface is called the memory loss. Though this definition is no where near the fact, but could give a brief sketch. Think of the scenario where one suffers from 'no loss of memory'. The hurt from the hot plate, the scratch due to a fall some years back, yelling of neighbors, etc,etc,... oh my god, so many events that we encounter and if we do not forget, or at least loosen up the associations, it would really consume up all our cells for just book keeping and that would hinder other processes. We could never be efficient, because for every small event, there would be lot of matches in the data warehouse and we could constantly fighting back and forth with ourselves.
STML is just a subset of the general memory loss in terms of definition. As the name says, it is the loss of information from the 'short term memory' or the temporary space where the information which one wants to hold for 'time being' would reside. It would just not be enough to write about the unknown architecture of our memory in this single post!
Hanoi Experiment
I feel one another experiment for improving as well as testing the limits of your short term memory could be the hanoi experiment. Solve the 'Towers of Hanoi' problem in your mind screen. It also calls for testing your abstract visual ability. Standard experiments like remembering words ranging from all related to nothing related, exists to test and improve the short term memory and long term memory.
The hanoi experiment is of particular interest because of its abstract nature. It is easy to solve the problem with 5 plates. As the number of plates are increased, it is difficult for us to imagine _distinctively_ the plates. How do we _distinctively_ imagine 10 plates of different or more specifically increasing sizes? More appropriately, it takes a long time to render the ten plates on the mind screen with finer details. Most often, the plates are visualized only when we are about the pick them up and the process of pushing and popping of plates are done conceptually or abstractly. Observe keenly when you are solving for 5 plates. Stop in between, do some other work not related at all and come back after sometime and resume where you had left. How finer can you proceed? The problem being that the visual screen we have is highly precious in the sense that the objects drawn on it are not richer in details but rather in concepts. You cannot draw a beautiful jewel with lot of finer details, it would simply be herculean. But one could easily draw a set of geometrical structures and do some intersection with that and process that more conveniently.
The base of the experiment is to have fun and feel the joy of the mind screen, also to smile at the limitations of the abstract screen and the trick the abstract part does to solve the problem.
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