Category: Psychology

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Wired an interesting article on a guy who, after a detailed study of how human memory works, has developed SuperMemo, a software program that will allow you to remember many more things than you currently can:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

While initially I found myself tempted by the idea of trying this software, or at least the techniques used in it, I soon decided that in my current situation in life, I don’t really want to memorize anything so desperately. More generally, if I read something, and then I forget it later because I did not encounter it again in my readings soon enough, I believe that it was not important enough to remember in the first place. I only want to memorize the things that keep showing up in my readings.

Your mileage may vary. And even if it doesn’t, you should still read the full article. It’s rather long, but parts of it are quite interesting.

Catch-22 in real life

The book Philosophical Psychopathology reports on the case of a man who got into a real-life Catch-22 situation. He was brought to psychiatrists because he was suffering from mental delusions. He was afraid that he was going to be “locked up”. And the psychiatrists said that this was a delusion without any basis in reality. In fact, his delusion was so strong, that to avoid being locked up, he tried to kill himself. Based on this, the psychiatrists decided that he should be …… you guessed it …… locked up.

If they lock him up, then his belief was true, and he wasn’t really deluded, was he? So they shouldn’t be able to lock up him. But then his belief would turn out to be false. And they can lock him up after all. Somewhere, Alfred Tarski is getting uncomfortable in his grave.

See full article (via boingboing.

Why I cannot resist surfing the web

Apparently, scientists are doing research into why I spend so much time surfing the web (and indeed why you are reading this). New information, or information that needs to be analyzed gives us a high. Wall Street Journal has an article about this research:

Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).

The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.

When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don’t yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.

It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ”

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

Apparently, this is hardwired into our brain due to evolutionary forces. Just like cats and laser pointers:

Many cat owners know that the lasers are the easiest way to keep the pet amused. The cats will ceaselessly, maniacally chase it as it’s beamed about the room, literally climbing the walls to capture what they surely regard as some form of ultimate prey.

Obviously, cats are hard-wired to hunt down small, bright objects, like birds. But since nothing in nature is as bright as a laser, they are powerless to resist its charms.

[…]

Watching a cat play with a laser, you realize the cat never learns there is no real “prey” there. You can show the cat the pointer, clicking it off and on, and it will remain transfixed.

But we can hope that:

People presumably are smarter than cats, and as we become more familiar with the Web and its torrent of information, maybe we’ll do a better job learning what is useful and what isn’t.

Then again, maybe not.

See full article.