None of this is part of government, nor should be. Government should not enforce the MORALS or MEMES of a people, only insure that justice can be addressed. I don’t even think that government should protect people from each other, but only provide a way for victims to get some attention and even the score with those who attacked them. This has to be in a public forum, which is what I think government should be. A public forum where people can go and get attention about whatever is hurting them. Then, again in public, DISINTERESTED parties as well as interested parties should fight and argue in the open about the situation brought up by the victim(s) in order to publicly enforce some kind of cultural shunning on the perpetrators, whether it is a fine or some kind of moral/memetic shaming.

We get way, way too tied up in thinking that government is a greater family, to take care of the members of the clan. That is a job for a family, not a government. With the loss of family and clan, trying to invent an adoptive family and mix those responsibilities in with law and order gets really messy really fast. Moral rules such as who should marry are not a part of law and order, but a preference of a clan. My grandmother should be able to try to keep me from marrying someone, but not a band of strangers set up to address my need for justice should it arise.

Government fails when it’s expected to do things that it is not designed to do. Like using a bed as a table, sort of works, but ultimately has problems. Government and common law and group enforcement of justice are invaluable parts of a society. Let’s not force government to do the job of our mothers.

“When was the last time you did something for the first time?”

Uhhh…recently? I can’t remember what it was, though. It was this week. Or last. Anyway, not long ago.
More generally, I can remember that I have a bad episodic memory, but I don’t remember any specific episodes of failing to remember an episode.

Yes. I can’t think of any reason why it needs to be that way, but yes. I know this because I have a ridiculously good semantic memory, but almost no episodic memory. I almost never takes notes because I don’t need them. You’d think I’d be able to cast episodes as facts, but that only sort of works – I only remember caricatures of most events, and any non-unique event almost always gets rolled/compressed into the general fact that event X has occurred.

Here are a few thoughts (please keep in mind that I’m probably wrong):

Unitary Store theory is almost automatically false. The only way in which it can be true is through an uncharacteristically closed definition of “memory”. Speaking of which, I think it’s important to back up and define what we’re talking about. In the posts we’re focusing entirely on memories that accessible to attention (i.e. consciousness). These are the memories which we can actively “remember”. As I mentioned in my post, conscious systems in the mind are dwarfed by nonconscious systems, and these systems have their own memory bits (“muscle memory” and the memory of perception (face memory, etc) are two good examples).

If we restrict ourselves to consciousness-accessible memories, I think the Unitary theory seems less obviously false, though there’s still a major difference between short-term and long-term memory. A good falsification at this point would be pointing out that inhibitor enzymes can be used to knock out long-term memory in mice. Said mice retain their short-term memory in tests, thus indicating a qualitative difference.

But I don’t want to harp to heavily on Unitary memory, so I’ll move on.

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Model has some merit, I think, but I dislike the qualitative difference between modalities. As far as I can tell, the neocortex has proven to be incredibly general, and also probably the seat of consciousness (or more specifically, the concepts accessed by consciousness). What seems far more plausable to me is a general “spotlight” in place of the visuospacial sketchpad or whatnot, which is capable of addressing any concept matter in “upper consciousness”, and is not picky about modality. Examples: When imagining textures, is it visuospacial, phonological, or episodic? When doing math, do we always think in pictures, words, or memories, or perhaps sometimes just in concepts?

That’s a fairly nitpicky point, though. I have a great deal of respect for the general model of Executive -> Spotlight -> LTM “Digraph”, which I think is evident in my writing. In fact, I took a stab at defining the Executive mathematically here: http://raelifin.com/code/simple-rationality/

You mention practice as a component of memory, and I’d like to try and correct your emphasis on means rather than ends. Practice is the method through which we build some kind of structure (we might generally call it “experience”, but that’s too vague to be of any help). The question is what is the structure that practice builds. I haven’t posted much about control systems, but I seriously recommend you check out Behavior: The Control of Perception by Powers. To make a long story short, a musician can play a complex song without any conscious thought very similarly to how a computer can. The action is encoded in a “muscle memory” (which should equally be called ear-memory in this instance) which can be turned on with a simple choice. Let me know if you’d like me to illustrate how this can work, because the human behavior system *is* somewhat more complex than a computer’s set of speaker signals.

You mention how sorting cards requires decision making. I disagree with this. To me, when we first start sorting cards it requires active engagement of “the Executive” (i.e. conscious decision making; the part of our minds we attribute the personal pronoun to), but then with practice, this to is encoded in muscle memory (+ eye memory) and it becomes nonconscious in the same way playing a guitar is tricky until it’s automatic.

If it’s not already obvious, I think you’re looking at memory a bit backwards (at least in your comments towards the end), but I recognize that it may be me that is looking at it backwards, or there might not be any actual disagreement (just miss-communication), and I’m looking forward to resolving the perceived difference. If you’d like to talk about it more, let me know and I’ll work out a more formal alternative, rather than just criticism of other models.

Regardless, thanks for your input! ^_^
– Max

I’m a second year uni student studying science and psychology with a particular interest in Cognition and we have been spending a lot of time on both attention and memory recently.

Thus I’d thought I’d quickly do a blurt on what the dominant theories in the cognitive field say about some of the things you mention. I am just a humble beginner in the field and have my own thoughts on some of this, but certainly do not speak with any authority on the subject.

Attention and Memory seem to be very closely related. Most models of Memory incorporate attention as an important factor and vice versa.

Within Memory there are two major shools of thought, the more traditional approach (going back to 1890!!) is that of ‘Multi-store’ memory models. Ie: there are different bits of memory that do different things. Short term vs Long Term, Episodic vs Semantic, Implicit vs Explicit etc… The opposing and much more recent and therefore still formative theory is the ‘Unitary Store’ model which suggests that there is only one mechanism for storing data – but it manifests in different ways.

There are also a Zillion different theories of Attention. If your interested in these here might be a good place to start.

http://www.epistemics.co.uk/staff/nmilton/papers/attention.htm
The wikipedia page is not bad also.

One of the more established (and has solid evidence backing it up) thories of memory is Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Working Memory Model.

Here’s a little diagram of the basic concept:
http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v4/n10/images/nrn1201-f5.jpg

It states that there are a couple of different ‘modules’ that process different types of information eg: the visio-spatial scratchpad and the Phonological loop for pretty much anything that isn’t visual or spatial.

What’s interesting about attention in respect to these theories is that the degree to which a given action requires attention varies enormously accdording to a bunch of factors, the most important being practice. When we are learning an instrument we need to apply ALL of our conscious, attentional resources to fingering, tone, reading the music, remembering where we are, adjusting for mistakes etc… However a really accomplished musician can sit down and wander through a sonata while still thinking about last night at the pub. This is an INCREDIBLE human capacity and never ceases to blow me away!

Another major factor is decision making – this seems to often bring ‘multi-tasking’ to a grinding halt. But not always! Again practice helps – so if we are doing a task like sorting cards into two piles – red and black colours, even though this requires a decision for each card ‘what pile does this card go in?’ – eventually we can practice this to a point where we it takes up little of our attentional resources.

The unitary store model of memory is fascinating since it suggests that attention is simply a temporary activation of memory! In that: when we observe something – it is immediately encoded and that particular part of the brain that represents that memory (network, neural node, memory trace, representation – whatever you want to call it) is made active. Thus attention is really just what memory we currently have active – or (and this is where it gets interesting) the MOST active! When our mind wanders back to our first kiss – that particular network has it’s activation level raised.

This implies that we can have background processes going on etc… which clearly we ARE capable of (writing this I’m still kind of half waiting for my flatmate to come home etc… but have bought that feeling to a higher state of activation while writing this…).

Anyway,

Enjoying this conversation!

Regards,

Dan.