ADDED: In the comments, Galvanized says:
How cool -- so the human brain defragments itself. Cognition is so interesting! I think that this is why a prof once told me that actually making lists and actually marking off obsolete items is important, as a visual boost to jog the brain to drop old items from memory. I believe that it works, too, since list-makers seem to be more together than the rest of us.
This reminds me of one of my favorite vids of animated poetry by poet Billy Collins:
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But is the opposite of "remember" to "dismember"?
It's nice to know that all those little neurons are so much more efficient at Spring cleaning than their resident host -- they're busy doing it all the time, without any prompting let alone spousal hectoring. Reading this article reminded me of Damasio's books about neuroanatomy and the mechanics of how the brian does what it does. They're quite interesting at the level of mechanics -- describing the brain activity that goes along with particular mental states or results. But they're less successful in getting the ghost out of the machine. The scientists' way of describing brain activity -- you can see it in this article -- is to imput intentionality into the otherwise mechanical process they describe. I've never been able to understand who or what the neuroscientists are claiming is doing the "intending" or "seeing" the images or forming/using/erasing the "dispositional representations" (Damasio's term) involved in memory. It seems that they've just shrunk the ghost to the size of a collection of neurons.
This post reminded me of a scene in "When Harry Met Sally." It is New Year's Eve and they're dancing to "Auld Lang Syne"
Harry: What does this song mean? For my whole life I don't know what this song means. I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot'. Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them!?
Sally: Well may be it just means that we should remember that we forgot them or something. Anyway it's about old friends.
How cool -- so the human brain defragments itself. Cognition is so interesting! I think that this is why a prof once told me that actually making lists and actually marking off obsolete items is important, as a visual boost to jog the brain to drop old items from memory. I believe that it works, too, since list-makers seem to be more together than the rest of us.
This reminds me of one of my favorite vids of animated poetry by poet Billy Collins -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEPJh14mcU
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