aux input

Psychology Support for the Caching Theory

Thanks to Hillary (via Chuck) for sending on this article.

Kids Have Better Memories Than Parents

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Next time, maybe you'll believe your kid. Small children apparently have better memories than their parents, researchers reported on Thursday.

They found a 5-year-old could beat most adults on a recognition memory test, at least under specific conditions. And the reason is that adults know too much.

"It's one case where knowledge can actually decrease memory accuracy," said Vladimir Sloutsky, director of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, who led the study.

For their study, researchers showed 77 young children and 71 college students pictures of cats, bears and birds. The study was designed to make the volunteers look at the pictures but they did not know what was being tested.

Writing in the journal Psychological Science, the researchers said the children, with an average age of 5, were accurate 31 percent of the time in identifying pictures of animals they had seen earlier, while the adults were accurate only 7 percent of the time.

The reason, Sloutsky believes, is that children used a different form of reasoning called similarity-based induction when they analyzed the pictures. When shown subsequent pictures of animals they looked carefully to see if the animal looked similar to the original cat.

Adults, however, used category-based induction -- once they determined whether the animal pictured was a cat, they paid no more attention. So when they were tested later, the adults didn't recognize the pictures as well as the children.

"The adults didn't care about a specific cat-- all they wanted to know was whether the animal was a cat or not," Sloutsky said.

And when taught to use category-based induction like adults, the children's ability to remember dropped to the level of adults.

Courage, Courage, Courage

Six months since we've seen each other. Too long to not talk with a good friend.

We really began with a book entitled Little Children. He described it as about parents in their 30's and, yes, saddening.

"What kind of sadness? What was the lament?"

"Well, it's sort of like Chekhov, simply factual. That's the way it is."

"Chekhov is a wuss. Unrequited whatever. 'It' never happened. I never got what I wanted."

"As a generation, we are a pathetic group of cowards. We have gotten so many great things - education, sympathetic and caring parents, general peace. But we also got this horrible ambiguity, a lack of mooring posts, moral reference points. And so we are equipted, able, perceptive, and yet totally adrift when it comes to real courage. Maybe as a result we are profoundly unmotivated."

We talked about a story of a woman who discovered that there was a need to provide shoes to a group of impoverished children. She began soliciting people and then collecting them in her garage. The idea swelled and now she is looking for warehouse space to house the donations.

Both of us agreed there was something remarkable. Part of it was her automatic action. It wasn't a plan, it was more like a muscle. She had to do it, it was who she is. There is a purity in that and we have an admiration for be who do what they are, especially if it is generous.

That's the other part: in the service of others. The nobility of an act that is entirely for their benefit. As naturally selfish creatures, we have an fascination with people who natually tend towards generousity.

So what about us? We see a certain heroism and yet we want it to almost 'happen' to us. Don't you, God or imagination or courage, recognize the desire to do good? Why don't you pick me to emerge, tap my shoulder as a chosen one?

"I'm lazy. I know all this and yet I still do what I do."

Whatever you want to call it, the thing degrades into an unbearable irony. And that whacked tone is that of our generation. One of the impacts is that we have lost our teleological (toward some end) sense entirely -- unlike our recent ancestors who believed in progress, a destiny and human goal. We, in fact, very recently have lost complete faith in technology to not deliver more liability than the benefit or any other human design to accomplish anything over the longhaul. We're not intending (nor is anything else intending) towards anything. That is a phenominal shift.

Back to Chekhov, David was right. Here is a quote that sum it up brilliantly:

Chekhov belonged to the age which followed the heroic generation of Tolstoy and Dostoevski. At times his characters live, or think that they live, in the world of his predecessors. One is tempted to say that they all seem to have read Tolstoy and Dostoevski and are trying to be Tolstoy and Dostoevski characters. But Chekhov has lost the passion of his predessors because he has lost the faith which sustains it. He and often his characters are skeptics rather than believers. The soul searchings of his personages are not terrible but, frequently, ridiculous, and it is their futility rather than their tragedy which most impresses him. Whereas Tolstoy and Dostoevski were prophets, he is a critic and a satirist. They believed; he doubts. They saw tragedy; he sees, at most, pathos, usually tinged with absurdity.

So our lack of courage is what bothers me. We far more pathetic and need to inspire each other towards possibility. In the word of 1001 Arabia nights, the purpose of it all is to cultivate enthusiasm.

Travel and the Cache

One more piece on time. A reply to a comment on the original post:

The next piece of the puzzle (as the person alluded) is that it is possible to travel and, alas, never leave. There are certainly obvious ways to do this -- eat at McDonalds in Prague, stay at the Four Seasons in Bombay -- but there are less obvious mis-takes we all tend to make.

Even those of us that are lucky enough to adventure and go to new places will often fail to see things with innocence, instead dropping into an all too habitual mode of comparisons.

We have this bias towards seeing things as 'like' other things (as with the cache problems of false assumption). You look at an arch and it reminds you of one you saw in a book. You have this tea and it reminds you of an orange. Part of it is how we learn, part of it is overreaching on the part of our somewhat pathetic brains (out of fear, maybe just trying to keep rational balance).

(I think there was a New Yorker cartoon or a David Byrne lyric where the person is looking out at a great mountain vista and turns to his companion to say, "gosh, it's so beautiful. It almost reminds me of this postcard I saw.)

This is NOT an easy thing to solve. Even being very conscious of this problem, you'll find that many of your conversations with locals will involve descriptions based on what things are like in America or more often
your conversations with traveling companions are about things familiar.

There is this Concept that the poet Keats came up with - a bit heady but worth a remark - Negative Capability. It is a state in which a person "is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason". I like that "irritable reaching after the fact" part the best. It's could be looked at as similar to the tendency to reach into the cache.

I found an academic interpretation of Negative Capability that is better than anything I could hack together. It described quiet perfectly what 'seeing the world' can be, especially in travel. So here it is:

"It implies the capacity to engage in a non-defensive way with change, without being overwhelmed by the ever-present pressure merely to react. It also indicates empathy and even a certain flexibility of character, the ability 'to tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment' (Hutter, 1982: 305)."

Phew. It's a lot, but it's so right on. To really experience those new places without any processing. Just to take them in, not think as much. It really is telling the commentary of the mind to chill out and take a
breather.

There is no doubt in my mind (ha) that this is our problem back home but I'm not sure in our modern existence we can do much more than treat it like an unruly kid. Keep it on a balanced diet (not too much sugar) and give it a timeout when appropriate.

I don't know how much this does change as one gets older than I am. I do have a sense the some folks do arrive at a greater peace. Some anxieties die down and with it some of the commentary. There may be an opportunity to re-open one's eyes, see things anew, but it's probably very individual. Maybe you can talk about having come to some resolution about 'you' if that's opened more space to see more other things (people more clearly, the world more clearly). Essentially, can one more easily take oneself out of the picture?

Theories of Time's Passing: Clearing the Cache

This letter was in response to a posting on TimeGoesBy.net - a phenomenal blog on growing older. Here's the editor's original post.

For the sake of intellectual efficiency, our minds cache vast amounts of information for quick, later reference. Just as Web browsers store images of frequently and recently visited sites, the human brain stores parts of the world that we interact with everyday such as the shape of an eggplant, the golden retriever that belongs to our neighbor, our neighbors themselves.

As a result, much of what we think of as experience is actually the act of accessing the cached data rather than processing the real-life visual or auditory or other experience.

As there are fewer experiences, over time, involving new data and an increased number using cached data, the world seems to move faster because we are processing old data for the second, fiftieth, hundredth time (so it really is faster). And because there is a fundamentally different experience in seeing something for the first time and seeing it again, in one sense, we do not experience cached data, we merely process it.

To explain it another way, think of the computer again. If we access an image locally (the cache in our minds), it is pretty much guaranteed to be exactly what we saw before (yawn). If we have to go out to the network (ah, the world) to get the information, there is the chance the world may surprise us with something different.

Metal and silicon computers use the cached data only when it is exactly the same as the current reference. Humans, however, are much less strict. We are willing to replace even modestly similar experiences with a cached reference. This is a separate abstracting function in our mind: this golden retriever is close enough to the last one I saw that I don’t have to “see” it again. It could be a very different animal – a temperamental golden lab, for instance - but a person still sees that other referenced benevolent dog.

(A digression: as my nine-month-old son is learning what a book is, he uses what seems to be a parallel process in learning the abstraction that his Very Hungry Caterpillar and my Incomplete Education are both books.)

To summarize: time seems to accelerate as we get older because:

We tend to increasing refer to cached data because that cache seems increasing to encompasses our experience.

We tend to access cached data in cases where it is not an exact match with current experience (a false assumption).

The process snowballs as we gain a sort of self-righteous confidence that the world is what it is (the grumpy old man problem), and our ennui makes us lazy. Our mind-set biases us towards dipping into the cache versus dipping into the world.

If you accept this theory, the answer to slowing down time would seem to be to find creative ways to “clear the cache.” My modest experience has been that travel can do this. That is, if you go to a very different place and experience it as it is, then you can return to the your world and experience things fresh again. (A month in rural India or Morocco or, for most of us, The Bronx should do the trick.)

If travel is not available, there are more commonplace rituals we can use to clear our personal caches. Meditation and other methods of mindfulness may be a route.

It could be that one of our worst difficulties occurs interacting with other people. It probably accelerates the caching (Point 1); increases the false assumption rate (Point 2); and definitely exacerbates our belief in grandiose assumptions that we know what all people are like (Point 3). I haven’t really thought too much about this last part, but I have a gut sense this is true.

Lastly, I keep thinking of this Thomas Hardy quote from Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

“Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration.”
I think that’s really the crux. Experience (in time) is not really related to time (per se) but to intensity of the experience. And the level of intensity depends on how intimately or powerfully or emotionally we are interacting with the world versus our cache.