
The brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events - akbarnama
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39518580
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trishume
Hypothesis: Deja Vu happens when the long term memory isn't suppressed
properly during the first few days.

I often find when I experience Deja Vu I think I remember doing a thing I did
the day before a long time before that. It feels like I have two memories, one
of a recent event and one a vague recollection of something a long time ago.
This sounds like exactly what one would expect if two memories are recorded,
one suppressed for a few days and one forgotten in a few days, but the
suppression fails.

Does anyone else have Deja Vu like this?

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yathern
In my experience Deja Vu doesn't happen for something I remember doing
yesterday, but something I'm currently doing right now, or some combination of
events that just occurred. But either way, that's a good hypothesis.

~~~
jat850
This matches my experience. Deja vu is not something I remember from a past
event, but from something happening right at the moment. If I understand the
article correctly, and a candidate theory for deja vu encountered on
Wikipedia, this might make sense.

I think the theory is that occasionally there are slight issues with the
timing/synchronization of the memory being stored in certain parts of the
brain. Since the research shows that memories are written twice, if such a
desync occurred, maybe deja vu is some perception of disagreement between
short and long term memories?

For some reason, I find the experience of deja vu somehow quite ... pleasing.
I am not sure if this is true for everyone.

~~~
kylebenzle
As a kid I found deja vu pleasing as well and "practiced" it for a long time,
"giving myself" deja vu.

I would practice by doing the same thing I did the day before or a week
before, then try to focus on the feeling and enhance it as soon as it started
to show up, then kind of "let myself live in deja vu" for longer and longer
periods.

Now I can give myself that feeling anytime. I first relax and look around,
take in as much as I can. Then go back to doing something else, then relax
again and pretend I have already been where I am.

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shahbaby
Further supports the notion that understanding the neocortex is the key to
understanding intelligence.

"It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof
Tonegawa said.

What's going on during those first several days? It's probably re-arranging
it's model of the world to account for those new memories.

"The idea you need the cortex for memories I'm comfortable with, but the fact
it's so early is a surprise."

The neocortex is constantly making predictions about the future, so it makes
sense that it has some short term memory of its own to make those predictions
from.

~~~
devoply
Why do we need to understand intelligence, so we can make the intelligent
irrelevant. Sort of like how the evolution of the human brain made animals
irrelevant.

~~~
tankenmate
If every human on the planet died the planet would largely continue on, if
every insect died then the planet would go through a large catastrophic
change. "Animals" aren't irrelevant, and the human brain isn't everything.

~~~
yardie
I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here. Insects are a class of
which there are hundreds of thousands of species. Humans are a single species.
If insects the class died that would be catastrophic. If mammals the class
died that would be catastrophic as well.

~~~
true_religion
Hmmm, I'm not sure about that actually.

Insects and plants are closely tied together, with insects being essential for
the flowering of certain plants.

Are mammals so closely tied to any species outside of the class?

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
They absolutely are. For example:
[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150514-extraordinary-
pollin...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150514-extraordinary-pollinators)

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tannerc
We've known this for some time, but this is additional evidence to the notion
of our brain processing and prioritizing which information gets stored in
short-term vs. long term memory.

This also explains deja vu, but possibly not as many on this thread have tried
to explain.

I've written about this about two years ago, the leading theory of deja vu
being that your brain processes and stores an experience in the long term
memory before it's had a chance to properly store it in short term. By the
time the short term memory has caught-up, the event feels already lived,
because it's already been processed and stored in long term memory.

At least, that's one theory.

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willvarfar
> Researchers then used light beamed into the brain to control the activity of
> individual neurons - they could literally switch memories on or off.

So can this be extended to movie-plot-like memories be wiped, or false
memories implanted? How did they identify the memories to be targeted and
where they were stored?

There's lots of exciting work to reverse-engineer and extract rules from
software neural nets. Can the same be possible in hardware nets too, or will
attempting to measure it interfere and distort it?

~~~
glippiglop
A more practical use might be found in psychotherapy - recalling traumatic
memories to identify the relevant neurons and then switching them off. That
could be extremely useful for treating PTSD if it's feasible to do so.

~~~
cryptarch
"The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is [SPOILER ALERT] a movie about
erasing the memories of a past lover, a very similar idea.

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sjcsjc
Link to paper
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6333/73](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6333/73)

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amelius
Just hypothesizing but could it be that the brain is structured as two
adversarial networks, which train each other e.g. during sleep?

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
It's always tempting to think about the body in terms of the technological
concepts of the age. It's not automatically wrong, but there's nothing special
about this particular era of computing that would mean we're working with the
same methods as the human brain. Not even the fact that we call our systems
"neural networks".

~~~
Senderman
They're called neural networks because their design mirrors observations from
neurons in the brain.

There's truth to your sentiment, that the current level of knowledge is always
somewhat arbitrary, but to say there's "nothing" that suggests a connection
between the two is far too dismissive of an interesting question posed by the
original comment.

~~~
bluetwo
Yet in so many ways they don't act like neurons in the brain.

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GeeJay
Helpful for 'Memento', obsoletes 'Inside Out'.

~~~
scribu
Fortunately for 'Inside Out', the concept of memory is not the central
component of the movie. Rather, it's the idea that we each have multiple
competing subpersonalities inside our heads, which remains a useful model.

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lsh
"The experiments had to be performed on mice, but are thought to apply to
human brains too."

I look forward to human trials.

~~~
logfromblammo
Uh oh. Looks like there was a bit of an overrun there. But you can clearly see
that this is your signature on the release form, right?

We advise you to avoid calendars for a few weeks, until you adjust.

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smitherfield
Not much real-world import, but this fixes a few aspects of the movie
"Memento" I had considered plot holes. :)

(How does he remember what "remember Sammy Jankis" means? How does he remember
he has short-term memory loss?)

~~~
johnfn
Sammy Jenkins had short term memory loss. When he's confused about where he is
or what he's doing, he sees the message on his hand, and remembers Sammys
condition and understands he has the same condition.

Yeah, it's a slight mental leap, but "remember you have Sammy Jenkins' medical
condition" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. :)

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Jonathanks
> ""It is immature or silent for the first several days after formation," Prof
> Tonegawa said. 'Strong case' The researchers also showed the long- term
> memory never matured if the connection between the hippocampus and the
> cortex was blocked. So there is still a link between the two parts of the
> brain, with the balance of power shifting from the hippocampus to the cortex
> over time."

I have no good knowledge of neuroscience, so I'll be happy to read other
thoughts on this. Personally, it seems to me that this is an evolved technique
to direct us to:

act on impulses at the moment of an event, instead of contemplating rational
choices that may take too much time to arrive at (thus limiting our chances of
survival);

pursue rational choices in calmer times, trusting us to draw on stored
memories of similar events to help make better decisions (the purpose of Deja
Vu?)

For the link between the hippocampus and the cortex being required to retrieve
memories; maybe those memories are useless without the emotional context, and
the hippocampus is needed to relive those emotions to have a more accurate
recollection of the memories.

It might not make sense (I know almost nothing about neuroscience), but it's a
thought.

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Dowwie
is there a package I can install to upgrade mine because this one seems to
take high availability over consistency

~~~
swombat
Just type "aptitude increase" in your brain-keyboard. You may have to read a
number of books and live a number of years before the keyboard shows up
though.

~~~
chatmasta
With the right medication, you might be able to accelerate the appearance of
that keyboard, at least for a few hours. :)

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lutusp
This is another welcome step on our journey between psychology and
neuroscience.

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dmitripopov
Tons of "Improve your memory" books are irrelevant from this moment. No
suprise that none of them actually worked for anyone except placebo effect.

~~~
mettamage
Any clue as to what would work?

~~~
rimliu
Check out books of the memory champions (Tony Buzan, Domnic O'Brian, Joshua
Foer). The idea is not to improve your memory, just to use it efficiently. The
core is very simple: our brains have a hard time memorising abstract things.
Solution—convert them to highly vivid imagery/stories. Visualisation being
step one, step two is somehow to link the resulting images. Here you have a
choice of link system, peg system, memory palace/method of loci. That's
basically it. You will probably learn some system for converting numbers to
images (Major system, o Dominic system), but that's just a tool for the first
step. Also, get enough sleep.

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heisenbit
This should have a major impact on learning strategies for long term
retention. Short term retention may not be any indicator for long term
retention as different mechanisms are at work there. But short term memory at
least initially will hide any long term memory so how can we measure and
optimize what we remember in the long run?

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bertlequant
2nd copy is in tape though

~~~
tmsldd
Backup..

------
psyc
RAID1

~~~
shrimp_emoji
More like RAM and secondary storage.

