2008-02-12

Next week you will be making an intelligence test. Study the merits of the genius of Wild E. Coyote. What is intelligence? Intelligence is based on the tests. Otherwise don't call it "intelligence." * Encoding ** Ques ** Encoding in certain formats and different representations * Decoding * Repression * Recognition * Recall * Association ** Validity of repression? ** Ability to create fake memories * Sourcing errors ** Reality sourcing errors ** Memory sourcing errors * Interference of memories ** Generalization (remembering that two things are the same when they are not) ** Discrimination (remembering that two things are different when they are not) ** Pre-knowledge interferring with the learning of new material ** Newly learned knowledge interferring with previously learned material * Long term memory * Memory conslidation * Short term memory ** 7 plus or minus 2 items * Hippocampus (encoding of long-term memories) ** See the artificial hippocampus project. * Amgydala encoding of emotional memories * Long-term potentiation (see Gary at UC Irvine) * Cytoskeletal basis of memory * Memory degradation problems ** Alzheimer's -- the buildup of plaque on neurons that is produced by the lack of lysosomes in advanced age. This prohibits the synapses from allowing neurotransmitters to travel from one neuron to the next. * Semantic meaning and memory * Mnemonic methods ** Peg method ** Walking in a 3D world with different things on walls and objects ** Linking -- generating weird connections between items on a list * SuperMemo - the importance of forgetting * Repetition schedules (such as in the SuperMemo software package) * Rehearsel What did I do to remember these things? I remembered all of my projects in memory, the different ways that I have been planning on interfacing with memory, recalling all of the discussions that I have had with other individuals on memory as well as the notes that I have taken from science journals, books, textbooks, etc. etc. I was also linking concepts together to try to remember my understanding of memory. * Decay * Retrieval * Attention * Awareness * Selective attention, filtering * Ieditic memory - photographic memory - these are just exceptional memories. You recall all things encoded. * Forgetting curves * LTM consolidation -- NMDA receptors on the neurons in the pathway to that location. * 7 plus or minus 2 --> chunking, 20 seconds, ... How does information get into memory? How is this information maintained? And how do you get this information back? Dakota mentions somebody who was able to write an entire textbook from memory after reading it -- however, how is this information encoded? This is autism at its best -- being able to filter out everything 'irrelevant' but how do you then figure out what is irrelevant? Filter - see Minsky's "Society of Mind". Those who are more intelligent are those who are able to control their filters. Craik and Lockhart (1972) - levels of processing and attention. The more attention you pay, the better you encode information. Shallow, intermediate and deep. The structuralist level - the shallow level - shapes, not any meaning at all. Intermediate is phonemic. Semantic is deep. You only want to read the chapter once, and only once, and never read it again - pay attention and apply the full faculties of your brain to each moment that you are reading the textbook. Your entire faculty of knowledge and intelligence -- that means doing as much as you possibly can: going to dictionaries, starting conversations, writing down notes, generating new ideas and solving problems, the whole thing. Elaboration is an extropic process. Self-referrent encoding. Atkinson / Schiffrin - model of memory storage in terms of information processing. George Sperling (1960) - sensory memory is (1/4) second long Baddeley (1986) - 3 components of working memory -- phonological rehearsal loop -- visuospatial sketchpad -- executive control system Flash bulb memories - photographic event, very vivid - usually an emotional response or intense event So what would it mean? What would it mean to apply your entire intelligence and memory to a certain situation? It would mean being able to filter out all other signals except the light of the signal that you want to study, it means narrowing focus even if you are studying new information -- how is it possible to have such a narrow focus over such broad topics? How is it possible to use these techniques to be able to memorize entire books at the same time?