Scientists Unveil How Our Memories Are Stored: The Format of Working Memory:
A team of scientists has discovered how working memory is "formatted"—a finding that enhances our understanding of how visual memories are stored.
[...] It's been known for decades that we re-code visual information about letters and numbers into phonological or sound-based codes used for verbal working memory. For instance, when you see a string of digits of a phone number, you don't store that visual information until you finish dialing the number. Rather you store the sounds of the numbers (e.g., what the phone number "867-5309" sounds like as you say it in your head). However, this only indicates that we do re-code—it doesn't address how the brain formats working memory representations, which was the focus of the new Neuron study.
To explore this, the experimenters measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants performed visual working memory tasks. On each trial, the participants had to remember, for a few seconds, a briefly presented visual stimulus and then make a memory-based judgment. In some trials, the visual stimulus was a tilted grating and on others it was a cloud of moving dots. After the memory delay, participants had to precisely indicate the exact angle of the grating's tilt or the exact angle of the dot cloud's motion.
Despite the different types of visual stimulation (grating vs. dot motion), they found that the patterns of neural activity in visual cortex and parietal cortex—a part of the brain used in memory processing and storage—were interchangeable during memory. In other words, the pattern trained to predict motion direction could also predict grating orientation—and vice versa.
This finding prompted the question—why were those memory representations interchangeable?
Journal Reference:
Yuna Kwak, Clayton E. Curtis, Unveiling the abstract format of mnemonic representations, Neuron, April 07, 2022 (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.03.016)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @08:25AM (6 children)
Not everyone thinks or memorizes the way you do. I'm pretty sure some people wouldn't be storing the sounds. For instance, maybe go ask a congenitally deaf person whether they store the sounds of the numbers? ;)
FWIW I'm not deaf but when I see those OTP/2-factor numbers, since they're kind of short and small I also store the visual representation temporarily - e.g. I keep "seeing" the numbers in my mind till I enter them in the form. So I won't be surprised if some non-deaf people are visually seeing the phone numbers, or even storing the actual "mathematical sense" of the number e.g. instead of chunking 867-5309 into separate decimal digits or groups of digits they recognize it as a single numerical value 8675309 and they might even be able to tell you about the other mathematical characteristics of that number.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @08:27AM
A phone phreaker might store the DTMF tones of the phone number. ;)
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday April 11 2022, @09:15AM
I don't know about storage, but some people do see numbers as colors or shapes [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by liar on Monday April 11 2022, @03:51PM (2 children)
Jenny?
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(Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Tuesday April 12 2022, @02:30AM (1 child)
Yeah, she's now divorced with three kids.
(Score: 2, Funny) by liar on Tuesday April 12 2022, @02:47PM
So, she saw through that malpracticing psychologist, good for her! Hope he's been arrested!
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday April 11 2022, @08:16PM
Yes, and its fairly obvious, and has also been studied.
But the vast majority of people do it the way they explained, and the formatting of that is what they are actively studying. So why would they dive into a tangent about people who are deaf or who have synesthesia or any number of other exceptional cases that aren't being studied?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Monday April 11 2022, @09:36AM (5 children)
Great. So when can we expect the chemical defrag tools? Or will this just be used to implement false memories? So are all memory problems in that regard corruption of the re-code or compression routines in the brain? Is the directory filled with crap entries? Sometimes one, or I, really wish there was some way of resorting things. Push some things that you for unexplained reasons keep remembering to the back and unused parts while bringing more important things to the front and here and now.
Question as noted by others remains how universal this really is. Are everyone equal in that regard? Storing the sounds of numbers? Sure I always store numbers like some old-time-dial-tone-modem ... here let me recite Pi for you ....
But it is an interesting question of sorts, I recall it being talked about during university in various higher maths classes. How people stored, worked, solved and interpreted problem. Did they just see the numbers? A lot of people saw various curves or colors or figures and not just rows of numbers and equations like it was some kind of gigantic excel-sheet but had some inner representation of what it looked like.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 11 2022, @12:24PM (4 children)
fMRI also stands for fuzzy magic reading image. An inference of brain activity based on regional blood flow differences measured in response to stimuli in an already alien and very noisy environment at low-ish resolution.
fMRI "studies" regularly push the frontiers of statistical significance from small sample sizes because "magnet time is so expensive."
Saying that an fMRI study has determined anything is like archaeologists saying they have discovered and described a new culture based on some pottery fragments. Interesting? Yes. Actionable basis for engineering of brain manipulation devices? Yeah, like the discovery that flint makes sparks is the basis for a laser engraving plotter.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday April 11 2022, @01:56PM
I think, though, that it's fair to say they have shown that, in at least some people, this kind of summarizing happens. That it's the only thing happening would require a lot more and different evidence.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @03:35PM (1 child)
Add in the grandiose title and we have distilled modern research in a single article. Vacuous self-regarding puffery that will gain somebody a prestigious lecture at an equally vacuous publicity-driven conference, then destroy a few grad student's mental health who are tasked with "running with" the Great Man's idea, which nobody will dare call out as bullshit. Perfection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 11 2022, @09:31PM
As a language teacher, I welcome such studies. For so many decades I have had to put up with "learning types" ( ie. we are all special little snowflakes and we all learn differently), which I decided was complete BS after my first decade of observation - I found my experiences at odds with the current literature on the subject of androgogy, and felt uneasy when training other teachers.
See, if you write something up, people will dutifully copy it down, claiming that's how they learn best. However I noticed that the students then began to rote memorise via silent repetition. They would look, and either close their eyes or turn them upward where there is nothing to see, and begin the ritual.
The Vedic and Australian Aboriginal peoples' traditions of memorising stories via oral transfer are fantastic examples of this; note that their stories go back way longer than European etchings, paintings...even the oldest carvings did not enable such long term data storage.
So, this gives yet another push in that direction. Hopefully one day all of this "grandiose" posturing will provide a way towards a science of pedagogy/androgogy, and we will all be better off for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12 2022, @03:13AM
Also add that some years ago there was a study which indicated most brain scan studies weren't reproducible. Run the same brain scans of the same or different people doing the original task and the results shows up differently each time. So take any fMRI study with a grain of salt.
Any idea if that reproducibility has improved or not?