
Ask HN: What do you think of the idea that human memory is bugged? - srikanthsrnvs
What if the fact that we cannot erase bad memories&#x2F;traumatic experiences is actually a bug in the optimization process of our own neural network, which decided to converge at a local minimum instead of the global minimum?<p>Obviously the prerequisite for this would be that backpropogation of error actually occurs in the brain, but what do you think?
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gregjor
A person barely gets away from a predator or survives a near-drowning. How
would erasing that traumatic event have an evolutionary advantage?

Your question uses the language of machine learning to speculate about human
memory. That seems pretty thin.

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srikanthsrnvs
Depends on the traumatic memory, hence the idea that we've probably optimized
for remembering everything rather than the events that have evolutionary
advantage.

I.e Why should I remember a bad ex girlfriend if there was nothing to learn
from it?

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jelliclesfarm
You remember the bad ex gf because you don’t want repeatability of the trauma.

Without retention of the memory of trauma, you won’t be forming new
experiences.

Amygdala creates emotional responses and utilizes long term memories.

We know from ape studies and amphibian studies that amygdala evolved
differently in humans than with other animals.

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srikanthsrnvs
That's interesting.. so you mean that human memory is not bugged and perfect
from an evolutionary perspective?

Isn't it also arguable that retention of trauma is inherently bad from an
evolutionary perspective? Let's say someone retains a traumatic event, gets
depressed, ends up committing suicide. In that case, if the brain optimized
for survival, it would be beneficial to erase the memory.

I'd argue that the probability of death occurring as a result of severe trauma
is greater than the probability of death occurring as a result of forgetting
an experience

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gregjor
Perhaps at this time in history, in some cultures. I doubt our hunter-gather
ancestors got depressed and killed themselves after surviving a trauma. I
don't think depression and PTSD and suicide happen at constant rates across
human cultures, and certainly not in apes or other mammals. You're confusing
social pressures and cultural effects with biological evolution.

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srikanthsrnvs
Perhaps not, but the part of our brain responsible for optimizing contentment
would ideally prefer deleting traumatic memories

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gregjor
I don't think any part of our brain is "responsible for optimizing
contentment" or "deleting traumatic memories."

In evolutionary terms, individual organisms are optimized for reproducing and
living long enough to give their offspring (more accurately, their genes) a
good shot at survival. Richard Dawkins explains that in _The Selfish Gene_ and
other books. "Contentment," a human social construct, and classifying a memory
as "traumatic" probably have little to do with what evolution has optimized us
(or any organism) for. If we reproduce and pass on our genes, then slowly die
a miserable and traumatic death, that makes no difference in terms of
evolution.

