Exactly. It’s only hell if it results in a bombardment outside the subject’s control, or rather, the user’s control, as our thinking on these matters evolves from that of congenital wetware to consumer grade neurotech.
Bring on the kinds of minds!
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Everything I’ve read about neuroscience regarding memory says the brain doesn’t work that way.
As I understand it, the current model is closer to what you described a few paras later. That memories are encoded along bundles of synapses, and remembering something isn’t “reading off the disk” so much as “re-experiencing what happened by looking at all the adjacent connections”. Essentially every time you remember something, it’s rebuilt from the general layout of your brain, and gets re-encoded.
That’s why memory distorts so badly, so quickly. When you remember something your current state of mind has major effects on how it gets re-encoded.
Like, imagine every time you wanted to look up a page in a book on your book shelf, you had to use every other book on the shelf to interpolate the text on the page you’re looking at. And also you have to take into account what you had for breakfast, and the fact that your second cousin called you ten minutes ago, and that your dog’s been hiding your brand new slippers. All that affects how you remember something, and will affect how, when and where the book you’re looking in goes when you put it back on the shelf.
Although my knowledge is most likely badly out of date now.
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What about the depiction of Sherlock Holmes and his mind palace on the BBC show? Aka the method of loci
I feel like there’s something to the holonomic theory of consciousness
My personal experience of recall is like finding key events, stronger, more easily recallable shards or fragments of memory and then the act of recalling them makes other memories that… surround that memory more easily recallable. And so on.
I think the associative property of memory and even synapse (firing pattern) entrainment could potentially fit into a holographic theory, where every part is in some way reflective of the whole. Potentially.
This really piques my interest:
Pribram suggests that there are two layers of cortical processing: a surface structure of separated and localized neural circuits and a deep structure of the dendritic arborization that binds the surface structure together. The deep structure contains distributed memory, while the surface structure acts as the retrieval mechanism. Binding occurs through the temporal synchronization of the oscillating polarizations in the synaptodendritic web. It had been thought that binding only occurred when there was no phase lead or lag present, but a study by Saul and Humphrey found that cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus do in fact produce these. Here phase lead and lag act to enhance sensory discrimination, acting as a frame to capture important features. These filters are also similar to the lenses necessary for holographic functioning.
Along with ideas like the composite, organisationally aggregative properties of strange-loops and such, explored in Hofstadter’s GEB, theories of mind which explore this realm really interest me.
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That’s some interesting reading. I’m going to have to do some research.
I tend to be very wary of physicists and people calling themselves physicists talking about cognition, consciousness and biology. They so often tumble into Chopra-territory and give away that they don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes time to probe their hypotheses and theories with experiment.
But there appears to at least be some supporting evidence for the plausibility for holographic use of certain anatomical structures in the brain. If not solid evidence that there’s actual use in that way.
I’ve got a lot of reading to do. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
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Borges got there first (or at least early) with a lot of sci-fi tropes: e.g. “The Garden of Forking Paths” (parallel timelines), “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (virtual worlds).
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There’s also what’s called “exceptional memory,” where people can remember huge swaths of their lives, but it only seems to be on a direct, personal level. They could tell you that March 31st of 1999 was a Friday and they spent it at the movies eating popcorn that had too much salt
How do we know that they’re actually remembering and not just confabulating? OK, the day of the week is subject to independent verification (and I bet there are people who can correctly tell you the weekday for any date in the Gregorian calendar without any claim to exceptional memory), but the rest?
The author’s claim that it’d be hell, rests on the assumption that upon familiar experience, people with perfect memory are swamped by waves of recollection, of the same type but on a larger scale.
This article is based on Sci-fi, not Psychology. (Sci-chology?).
The memories may function very differently from normal memory, in that there are no waves at all. Perfect memory may well be ‘scanned’ rather than swept along.
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Perfection does not exist is just your perception of reality 
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That just means you need a better indexing system, where you can add or remove “keywords” and get the relevant associations back, limited by the desired time.
With more storage we need also better indexing. Simple as this.
I like the parallel in the possibility that both the Universe and the mind operate holographically… reality has a strong tendency to be too clever by half, and that’d fit right in.
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Reality is pretty dumb, once we start looking and doing statistics. Of course it can mean that it is clever enough to know when we are looking…
Sherlock Holmes is fantasy, not science fiction. The abilities Sherlock claims are not abilities that are possible for humans to have. It’s unfortunate that people think that they are possible, because it allows frauds to claim Sherlock-like abilities and be treated as if their claims were plausible.
The memory palace is a real memorization technique, but there are limits to what you can remember using that technique, and you can’t have perfect recall of experiences using it.
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Of course, an imperfect memory can be horrifying as well:
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I feel like you missed the biggest problem with remembering everything. It’s not just that everything gets cluttered, but it’s impossible to learn anything.
Borges already pointed this out in Funes, as mentioned above. But I also studied this as part of my Cognitive Science degree.
The process of learning is the process of generalization and amalgamation. To learn what a “car” is is to learn that this thing and that thing, though they look different, are part of the same category. Our brains do this naturally by a process of “chunking,” which “saves space” (in a sense), but also allows us to immediately make generalizations. If someone tells me they have a new car, I can already assume it has four wheels. A machine that sees every car as a unique object doesn’t do that.
No where is this better seen than language: when infants are young, they can discriminate between every phoneme in human languages. At this stage, they haven’t assigned any meaning to sounds, so they are all completely unique. Around 6-10 months, however, we start to lose that ability, and that losing of the ability to discriminate between different sounds is a critical part of learning. For example, English babies will lose the ability to discriminate between the Japanese sounds “i” and “ii,” while Japanese babies will lose the ability to discriminate between the English sounds “la” and “ra.”
We lose this ability to discriminate between sounds outside our own language because it’s critical for us to merge together irrelevant differences and recognize that two words are the same, even when spoken slightly differently.
A perfect “photographic” memory would necessitate attending to these differences (because after all they do exist), which would make it impossible to learn.
Another small example from my thesis: the (fairly rare) cases of “idiot savants”, especially those who can draw almost perfectly. If you ask a typical 5-year-old to draw a horse, they’ll draw something like the image on the right. If you asked 5-year-old Nadia to draw a horse, she’d draw the two images on the left:
The images on the left are many, many times more beautiful, but the image on the right is actually representative of a typical high-functioning child, and it’s the high-functioning part that caused that kid to draw the “ugly” regular 5-year-old’s horse. Nadia’s IQ was about 60 and she never learned much language. She could reproduce drawings she had seen perfectly and beautifully, and the kid who drew the right image couldn’t. Why? Because his brain was forgetting and chunking and merging and forming the symbol of a horse, and what he drew was that symbolic representation. The kid on the right almost certainly had a better mental model of what a horse actually was, and could reason about horses.
That’s what you’d lose if you could have perfect memory: it’s not a question of “cluttering,” it’s a question of not being able to learn, or form models, or reason about the world.
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Radiolab has an episode about a guy who remembered everything:
He did not have a happy life.
So, maybe my extremely shitty memory is actually just a sacrifice my brain made for greater reasoning ability…?
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The whole article is about comparing fictional perfect memories to reality. Why be dismissive of Sherlock Holmes and not Batman (who was mentioned in the article’s first paragraph)?
Because nobody believes Batman is possible, but people do seem to believe that Sherlock Holmes is.
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