Memory Science

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
1

Science claims ignorance in regards to sleep. Humans simply don’t know what sleep is for.

But I do. The primary function of sleep is cognitive in nature, specifically, regarding the function of memories and memory making. The human brain is finite. It only has a certain capacity to store memories, which can range in vivid, real like simulations, or dull, bland generalities without much reference to reality. Different people have different brains. And different brains have different memory functions. For example, some autistic brains are capable of remembering and recalling vast amounts of specific data. Some autists can remember numbers, and recite pi digits almost endlessly. Other artistic autists can see a building one time, and redraw the whole picture almost to every detail. One woman even demonstrates that she can remember almost every part of every day of her life. Her brain has a “super memory” if you will.

The brain can specialize in the focus of a memory, remembering extraordinary details. Or the brain can specialize in amount of memories, by recalling less specific details but more generalities. Therefore, different brains have different memory functions. This is demonstrated by a crowd of individuals who witness a spectacle, like a theatre play or a movie. Individuals relate with different characters more or less, and different events.

This represents cognitive bias.

However, there are general rules in regard to memory science. Different individuals react to stress differently. When presented with an emergency scenario, some people will run toward the danger (fight reflex), some people will freeze in place (playing dead reflex), and others will run away (flight reflex). This is all based on instinct. When a great calamity like war, terrorist attack, or natural disaster occurs, different people will react according to their genetic instincts. There is almost no cognitive bias in these instances.

And traumatic experiences are very stressful. This imposes a large “force of memorization”. In life and death situations, people tend to switch to survival, instinct mode, and can be traumatized from them. And the traumatization is the primary concern of “psychology”. Different life changing events occur to different people, producing different reactions, and most importantly, different memories.

This returns to sleep science in a specific, simple, common sense way. Sleep is the realm where daily life becomes “integrated” into the subconscious, or to the deeper level of the unconsciousness. This is how reflexes and instincts are comprehended, and possibly changed, over time and across generations. Sleep, stress, and memories are all related, and occur during the dream state. This dream state is one where your essence, your “soul”, integrates memories into the deepest level of your consciousness and your existence.

Memories are kept or forgotten, like a form of material wealth, according to how your genetic, reflexive, instinctive cognitive bias interpret reality. For example, one person feels stress, anxiety, immense and fear in a warzone. He cannot function. While another, experienced soldier feels relaxed, and even may enjoy the experience. This is because one soldier might be a “natural born” soldier, who shines on the battlefield, while the other soldier is a coward and an unfit soldier. Why is one individual better fit for war than another? It is probably genetic.

But it absolutely must represent the cognitive bias inherent with stress and memory making.

2

An Act of Discrimination

A person lives her daily life. Maybe she has set routine that never changes, or endlessly travels to new places and meets new people. Regardless, how does she form new memories? How does her brain cognitively “decide” to start recording an experience, instead of forgetting it? Can she consciously manipulate thought to memorize certain experiences and information? And what does this represent, when, a “force” is used to memorize something that may otherwise be memorized immediately and readily?

In other words, why do some experiences require a “strength” of memorization, while other experiences and information are memorized seemingly effortlessly?

You remember this one thing, but, forget this other thing. You remember a certain type of information, but forget others.

You remember one song, and the melody sticks in your head. But you forget another.

Understanding the “cognitive bias” of this memorization is the key to understanding human consciousness.

3

Collective Conscious, Immediate Memories

Never forget 911! Just as individuals have cognitive bias, so too do whole societies and cultures have cognitive biases. Events are politicized and popularized. What is important to one society, is unimportant to the next. And the process of memorization is much the same for society as the individual. Consider this, ten thousand people watch a football game. The crowd’s emotions rise and fall, rooting for their respective teams. Memories are formed according to the spectacle of the game. The event captures the interest of everyone, except a minority of bored attendees.

An amazing moment is remembered, usually something excellent. Spectacular is the spectacle. And this is the reason why people crave these events, entertainments, circuses. The crowd demands excellence of performance, unique displays, and memorable excitement. The food, the music, the loud noise, the roar of the crowd, the feats of strength and dexterity, endurance.

This is when memories are experienced and shared collectively. It is not merely one, or a few spectators who matter, but thousands, or millions, or billions. That is the allure of stardom, and of Hollywood, and of Americanist culture. It is the Lady Gaga, fame monster. It is the craven lust to be in the spotlight, and to be entranced by the star. The paradigm is between star and star gazer, famous and fan. The star is the producer of memories. The fan is the consumer of memories. This is how the entertainment “industry” is run, through mass media, marketing, and psychology tactics. Spectacles are “engineered” to be memorable, with flashing lights, sex sells beautiful bimbos, and the expectations of physical performance.

But consumers can get greedy. The demand for more and more powerful memories becomes pressing. Eventually, over time, the old games get too boring, too redundant. A new stimulus is needed, to evoke the emotions of the newly dulled sensitivities. The populace demands more violence, more blood, more gore, more sex. Because the spectacle losses its luster over time. It becomes easier and easier to forget. The past memories, already formed, already shared, already experienced, become more powerful as a reminiscent story, than as a oft repeated rerun.

We’ve…seen this before, too many times, change the channel. We demand something new. And with the repetition of old spectacles, a demand for newer, more powerful memories arises, new experiences.

4

Forward or Backward Memory

I will present a new theory to this Memory Science. I am its creator. Let’s say you “experience” something, an event. How do you know whether this event is in the past, in the present, or in the future? You were raised to believe as children that you live in the present, right now. But do you? How do you know which time you’re living in? You don’t. You believe that you’re living experiences right now, but, you have no way of confirming this. Science cannot confirm it. Because there is no true objective measure of time. This is apparent through the Theory of Relativity. Time is a function of motion and mass. If motion accelerates, then time accelerates. This is the reason why the faster you move and accelerate, the more “impact” or force you have on “objective” time.

This is called “real time”. But it is not objective.

How long is the present? Is it a day? Is it an hour? A minute? A second? A nano second? We can actually measure nano seconds. It turns out, proved through neuro science, that the human brain is not experiencing any set length of time. One brain may be “slower” or “faster” than another. Some brains are superior at processing information. Some brains are superior at memorizing data and facts. Some brains are better at recalling memories. Different brains specialize in different cognitive functions. But generally, brains have an approximate length of time that they experience “right now”. This can range from nano seconds, with quicker reflexes, or minutes or hours. What people define as “right now” varies. One person defines “right now” as a minute, another as a few seconds, and another as a few hours.

How you define “right now” is a reflection of how you experience subjective interpretations of time. There is no set “right now”.

Given that there is no objective duration of time that everybody experiences together, how are you aware that your experience, your consciousness, “right now”, is in fact right now? How long has it taken you to read this far? How long has it taken you to process this information? One reader is quicker, another is slower. So again, even the process of reading or writing, will change a subject’s perception of time. And that is the underlying fact. Time is perceived. Time is a perception. And time is perceived from a perspective. And this perspective interprets events according to its cognitive abilities, as well as its superior or inferior abilities.

Now let’s take this post to its conclusion. You experience an event. But are you remembering the past? Are you dreaming? Or are you daydreaming, fantasizing about tomorrow? Where are your thoughts? No no, when are your thoughts? Are they “right now”? Often this is not the case. A person is remembering something, and therefore thinking in the past. A person is dreaming, and has no “objective” perception of time. Or a person is daydreaming, fantasizing, and thinking of the future.

But how these experiences are cogitated, demonstrates the reality of time. Your cognition and consciousness are not necessarily “right now” as you can think outside of right now. Thoughts transcend the present. You remember the past. You fantasize about the future.

The theory is this. No matter where your thoughts, past, present, or future, all of these thoughts and experiences are merely memories. They are all memories, all memes. And there is no objective means to configure them into “past, present, future”. You merely believe, as an article of blind faith, as a religious and spiritual convention, that you are living “right now”. And in an hour from now, past or future, you will have no means to differentiate when your “right now” truly was. Because you have no means of directing yourself toward “the past” or toward “the future”.

Because, what’s the real difference between past and future? And what is really right now?

You don’t know.

5

The future is a memory that you faithfully believe you can change.

The past is a memory that you faithfully believe you cannot change.

The past and future are both believed in, through faith. You believe that they exist. But you have no objective standard to measure past and future. And if you go far enough with philosophy, then you can even doubt the present and disbelieve “right now”. But this is a more profound level of doubt. How can you doubt “right now”? Imagine believing that “right now” is actually the future, or the past. You are living in the past “right now”. You are living in the future “right now”. All of this is faith. You believe something.

Almost everybody believes that you are living “right now”. But when is right now?

6

Powerful Memorization is not Powerful Cognization

Some humans have brains specifically evolved to memorize experiences. I believe that females have evolved to do this, whereas males are less capable with general memorization. Women have a powerful ability to memorize general life experience, filtered through an emotional lens. Women remember strong emotions, of themselves, of others, and of the general emotional mood of an entire society. Women are “tuned in” to social consensus this way. People often falsely compare female brain cognition with spirituality and mysticism. It’s “weird” or “spooky” when women intuit that a loved one has died, far away, as a premonition, before the actual death. But this has a reasonable and rational explanation. If females are more attuned to emotion, and have a powerful form of memorization compared to men, then it makes sense to further deduce that women can “feel” certain things happen before they do. Because emotions have momentum. And emotions dictate the direction a whole society can shift toward.

The male version of this principle would be a priest “being in communion with God”. This is the male version of intuition. Whereas women are “in touch with nature”, as an evolved pathology, men are “in touch with God”. This is merely a different interpretation for the same pathological principle. Because male human brains have evolved with inferior or superior memories, and concerning different life experiences or generalities.

For example, a male autist has been recorded to memorize extreme visual images, briefly in a moment, and then can paint, draw, or depict the visual image at a later time, to almost exact, perfect detail. Has a female autist ever done the same? If not, then this proves something immediately about gender, pathology, and cognition. It firstly and roundly proves that brains are different by gender, and therefore gives credence to my theory here, that brains evolve to fulfill specific functions within society, as a race or specie. Different brains exist for different reasons.

And different brains excel at different functions.

One of these functions is outright memorization of life experiences. However, this doesn’t have to correlate with gender. Some people are merely better than others at memorization, alone. One person has a “powerful memorization”, while others do not. However, this leads to the question of “what is being memorized”? Which memories are important, to which people, why, and how is memorization achieved? Do different brains memorize different events, differently? And if they do, then what is the science of this memorization?

I will assert briefly that cognization is not memorization. Cognization is the process of rendering phemenona into noumena. IT is the mental action of observing and perceiving lights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, and immediately recognize them all, to produce an “experience”. Memorization then, is the recording of experience. And this is a separate process than the rendering of phenomena into sensibility.

A most powerful cognition and cognization is what most people refer to as “sensitivity”. If a brain is highly intelligent, then it is said to be both hyper sensitive and a powerful cognition. However, the point is, this can have nothing to do with memorization. Because cognition explicitly refers to what is “present” or even omnipresent. It is a state of mind having tuned into “right now” in “real time”.

This provides the possibility for an objective, not relative, experience of time and space.

7

Past, Present, or Future?

Given that memorization is possible, and the human brain has evolved to memorize events in different ways, then when are these memories located? When do they exist in time? Is your memory of the past, of the present, or of the future? Do you remember right now? Do you remember tomorrow? If space and time is an objective existence, and it is, then there is no true means of locating a memory in time. A memory can represent the past, the present, and the future. A memory is merely the perspective of an individual, and all the content, information, and bias that come with this perspective. Perspectives are unique. They cannot be replicated. Therefore, memories are unique, and can never be shared completely. There is always a residual loss of memory, for every repetition.

Because remembering experiences costs energy. Cognition also costs energy. The human brain uses blood-sugar to cognize and memorize data. The brain is an organic sponge to the blood system, soaked with nutrient rich and oxygen rich blood.

Memories are based on faith. You faithfully believe that a memory is “in the past”. This is directly caused by a logical premise. Memories cannot change, and the past cannot change. If the past could change, objectively, then memories could not exist. The past does not change. Instead it is only the subjective interpretations of humans that change the past, through memories. “Hindsight is 20/20”. Looking at the past, one is tempted to reinterpret it, away from “reality” and toward a more preferred state.

This creates the possibility of truth and lies. If a person presents her memories as the truth, and not a subjective interpretation, then the memory represents the specific function of recollection. Details, data, and sensual information are recalled, and presented as if the memory were present.

This is the nature of “Representation”. A memory is the literal, actual representation of the present state, an alternate reality to “right now”. Because even though people think of the past, and recall the past, does the human brain ever leave the “right now” present state? No, an act of thought, and an act of recollection, is not an act of separating cognition from the present state. Instead the real change is a change of focus. The brain shifts its faith and belief, in the present state, in the “right now”, to a past or future recollection.

A brain cognizes that it is yesterday or tomorrow, sometime other than “right now”, while simultaneous existing right now.

This creates the possibility for psychic projection. A human person believes that she is reliving some past event “deja vu”, or is dreaming about the future. To recall the past, or the future, are both acts of pathology. This is called “thinking”. This is thought. The brain expands the distance of “right now” to include the past and future. Because the past and future are both displacements of time. And time is measured by representation.

If the human brain cannot “save” or “store” an experience, then time cannot exist, as a subjective phenomena.

Cognization and recognition are the primary brain functions of every organism alive. This is a universal law. Recognition is the cognitive function that allows and expands awareness of time. This is achieved through pattern recognition, the ability to repeat physical behaviors.

8

Gossip

A group of women meet for lunch and talk. And talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. Scientists have measured the amount of words women use verbally, compared to men, on average, daily and yearly. Women talk a lot. Why is this? My hypothesis, after you apply memory science, then this social phenomenon makes immediate sense.

Communication is a form of memory sharing. And women share more memories than men. Memories which may seem innocuous, unimportant, and invisible, are the focal point of women’s cognition. This is also the reason why men are bored by female conversation, topics, interests, and subjects. As well as women are bored by male conversation, topics, interests, and subjects. This is the reason why a clear, dominant majority of male autists can repeat pi digit numerals nearly endlessly, while females generally lag behind in mathematics in general.

Because the human genders have specialized in different memory formation. It doesn’t even matter whether you claim this is a matter of nature, or nurture, because the origin of these memories refutes either single origin. It is not such a matter of genes or memes. It is a matter of relevant, immediate information. And how could a language, such as math, or computer programming, be relevant to women in general? It’s not. And it is arguably irrelevant to the daily life of billions of people.

Relevancy is the point of memories. And all people across the world can relate to commonly shared memories, the memories of daily lives. Babies are born, old people die, adults get married or divorced, fall in and out of love. Friends go out and party, some become depressed, others travel and meet new people. What did you have for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, did you like it? How are you today? How are you tonight? What is your mood? What is your emotion? How did you feel when Tim said this and Sally said that?

Gossip is a vicarious form of experience. Because memories are saturated in experience. A simple, unrealistic fantasy is not enough. It is not enough to lie, or act, or pretend, about daily life. Often times, or almost always, the immediacy of daily life is needed, and demanded from memories. And that is the point of gossip, as a fact checking routine of the specie. As a crucial maintenance to specific groups of people, especially families.

This maintenance is accomplished through memory transfer. That is language and communication. Women gossip and convey the intricacies of daily life, which escape most men. Because men are focused on different memories, and memorize what is in their specialty to know, about the world and about life.

9

Actually there’s a fairly simple explanation for sleep, in terms of evolution it is simply not necessary or efficient to remain conscious every day all day. This may be because you cannot see in the dark, you are slugish at night because it’s colder, all sorts of things but generally animals tend to sleep as much as is most likely to be efficient behaviourally and ultimately energy wise. Cats can sleep up to 20 hours a day because once they have fed and are well satiated, it becomes unnecessary to stay active and thus waste energy. Humans sleep 8 hours of the day at night when it is most dark because they would not benefit from remaining awake all the time in an environment which would not only be more dangerous in terms of natural predators, but would lead to far less calorie intake to calorie output, I am sure you can think of many other reasons why any animal would be more likely to survive with sleep.

Basically you can make all sorts of things up about why we sleep, but it seems the amount we do is intrinsically linked to the most efficient way of surviving, it’s just plain blind evolution favouring those most adaptable to circumstances again. :slight_smile:

I agree the need for sleep is cognitive and physical, the body and mind probably repair and maintain function better when either is on its down time. But if you are going to sleep because it’s efficient it’s best you make use of the time to help your natural bodily function, I would suspect that the adaptation that lead to brain and physical benefits went hand in hand with the most likely way a species would survive in its environmental conditions, we sleep simply because at some time our ancestors were better able to stay alive if we did. You can be sure of course if we could remain awake all day and gain energy overall from doing so and hence aid survival we would. The brain and body would no doubt evolve a way of maintaining itself in consciousness with the extra energy that the body would gain.

10

These are great points. But you miss why sleep is necessary to begin with. I mean, why sleep at all? Why close your eyes rather than keep them open? Imagine that animals didn’t need sleep, they could still adapt to all the conditions you mentioned. If it’s cold at night, humans can find shelter and stay warm. But that doesn’t mean they need to go to sleep. Hunting cats may not want to waste energy, but that doesn’t mean they need to sleep. They could just stay in one spot and not move.

It’s the shutdown of your cognition that’s important. That leaves animals completely defenseless to predators.

11

Being active when you are cold blooded at night when it is better to shut down, of course the animals that evolved into mammals were originally cold blooded. Being active when you have already exploited the optimum times of day to feed and get energy. When animals sleep they do so in safe environments generally, wolves sleep in packs, cows sleep on their feet so they can move quickly away at short notice. Some fish only sleep on one side of their brain so that they can keep moving and respire. It’s a balancing act evolution, of course when asleep you may well be subject to predators, but the fact is the advantage sleeping gives mitigates the disadvantages. There is no reason to remain awake as an animal at all times unless it is more energy efficient and more conducive to survival to do so. It’s not so much the brain that determines the length of sleep, after all many animals with smaller brains sleep far longer than us with our so called superior intellect, it all boils down to what is most efficient, to humans remaining awake at the darkest hours of night is not selectively beneficial, what came first though was what was beneficial over time to our ancestors and that will always reduce to energy concerns given time over a day.Cognition is important but I think what correlates with consciousness and it’s length most is efficiency of energy use over the day.

I’m not saying your ideas are bogus just that we can clearly see that sleep plays a far more important role in survival than placing it down to cognition alone, it is fundamental to how any animal best exploits its environment.