Ignoring useless information aids memory
Headline: Discovery disproves simple concept of memory as 'storage space'
As I read this news release, I realized that I could save storage space in my brain by ignoring useless information. So in this case, I have included long passages of what I consider useless information. I have put those passages in italics to make it easier for the reader to ignore the information and thus save memory.
(In other posts, I have simply cut out this information when excerpting a story. Of course, I didn’t know why I was doing that until I came upon this discovery. Now I realize that I was trying to help my readers save memory.)
From the story, useless information in italics: Even if you could get more RAM for your brain, the extra storage probably wouldn't make it easier for you to find where you left your car keys.
What may help, according to a discovery published Nov. 24 in the journal Nature, is a better bouncer – as in the type of bouncer who manages crowd control for nightclubs. The study by Edward Vogel, an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, is the first to demonstrate that awareness, or "visual working memory," depends on your ability to filter out irrelevant information.
"Until now, it's been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage but actually, it's about the bouncer – a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Vogel said.
The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person's memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia.
(It’s been assumed? By whom? This phrase is an example of what I call the passive evasive voice. It lets you make an assertion without taking responsibility for knowing the source. I doubt that any psychologists have ever made this assumption. To see what informed people really think about the relation between memory capacity and intelligence, read “Inside the mind of a Savant” in the December, 2005, issue of Scientific American.
(In any case, all this talk about a scientific discovery that overturns previously held beliefs is pure hype. And hype is useful to publicists. But not to readers.)
The study used a new technique for measuring brainwaves, developed by Vogel and previously reported in Nature (April 2004), which allows researchers to record the effects as objects pop into the minds of their subjects on a moment-by-moment basis.
(Sounds like mind-reading, does it?)
…Vogel recorded brain activity as people performed computer tasks asking them to remember arrays of colored squares or rectangles. In one experiment, researchers told subjects to hold in mind two red rectangles and ignore two blue ones. Without exception, high-capacity individuals excelled at dismissing blue, but low-capacity individuals held all of the rectangles in mind.
(The actual data gives reasonable support to the general conclusion. It is good research and did not need the hype. The real information is in the graphic results included in the reference below. To my disappointment, I did not find anything about objects popping into people’s minds.
(The conclusion about filtering out irrelevant information has been widely accepted since the early days of Gestalt psychology about 75 years ago. What Vogel has reported is a paradigm that shows the effects of filtering out irrelevant information on observable brain activity. That paradigm might be used, for example, to measure the effects of training on such filtering.)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uoo-dds111805.php
As I read this news release, I realized that I could save storage space in my brain by ignoring useless information. So in this case, I have included long passages of what I consider useless information. I have put those passages in italics to make it easier for the reader to ignore the information and thus save memory.
(In other posts, I have simply cut out this information when excerpting a story. Of course, I didn’t know why I was doing that until I came upon this discovery. Now I realize that I was trying to help my readers save memory.)
From the story, useless information in italics: Even if you could get more RAM for your brain, the extra storage probably wouldn't make it easier for you to find where you left your car keys.
What may help, according to a discovery published Nov. 24 in the journal Nature, is a better bouncer – as in the type of bouncer who manages crowd control for nightclubs. The study by Edward Vogel, an assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon, is the first to demonstrate that awareness, or "visual working memory," depends on your ability to filter out irrelevant information.
"Until now, it's been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage but actually, it's about the bouncer – a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Vogel said.
The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person's memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia.
(It’s been assumed? By whom? This phrase is an example of what I call the passive evasive voice. It lets you make an assertion without taking responsibility for knowing the source. I doubt that any psychologists have ever made this assumption. To see what informed people really think about the relation between memory capacity and intelligence, read “Inside the mind of a Savant” in the December, 2005, issue of Scientific American.
(In any case, all this talk about a scientific discovery that overturns previously held beliefs is pure hype. And hype is useful to publicists. But not to readers.)
The study used a new technique for measuring brainwaves, developed by Vogel and previously reported in Nature (April 2004), which allows researchers to record the effects as objects pop into the minds of their subjects on a moment-by-moment basis.
(Sounds like mind-reading, does it?)
…Vogel recorded brain activity as people performed computer tasks asking them to remember arrays of colored squares or rectangles. In one experiment, researchers told subjects to hold in mind two red rectangles and ignore two blue ones. Without exception, high-capacity individuals excelled at dismissing blue, but low-capacity individuals held all of the rectangles in mind.
(The actual data gives reasonable support to the general conclusion. It is good research and did not need the hype. The real information is in the graphic results included in the reference below. To my disappointment, I did not find anything about objects popping into people’s minds.
(The conclusion about filtering out irrelevant information has been widely accepted since the early days of Gestalt psychology about 75 years ago. What Vogel has reported is a paradigm that shows the effects of filtering out irrelevant information on observable brain activity. That paradigm might be used, for example, to measure the effects of training on such filtering.)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/uoo-dds111805.php
posted by Selby Evans at 10:20 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home