So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
replies(5):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy (see research section)
One remembered memories of a WWII pilot named James Huston Jr. and the other a deceased Hollywood agent named Marty Martyn.
Putting aside the reincarnation hypothesis for the moment, do you think the kids invented the details and coincidentally happened to match to a real person or were they fully coached? Maybe they didn’t get enough sleep or got too much sleep?
Every memory your brain has ever produced is still there, even if most are beyond conscious access. Memories quite literally become a permanent part of you.
A lot of people mistakenly think of human memory as a sort of hard drive with limited capacity, with files being deleted to make room for new ones. It's very much not like that.
If you just mean that human memory has a finite capacity that's much larger than anyone has come close to reaching by storing the memories of a normal human lifetime, that might make sense.
Do you have any references for your statements about memory? I'm not familiar with whatever science there is in this area.
On the other hand, I do have some Gandalf "I have no memory of this place" moments for other things.
You're saying that those memories are exactly the same as all the other memories.
Every time you "recall" something, you are not pulling up some file that is always the same. You are actively recreating the memory.
There's nothing "fun" or insightful about this, this mechanism has been known for a long time.
Obviously it's not unique to psychotherapy.
> may have been created
Most things that "may" have happened do not warrant absolute statements such as "that's not a thing" (which, incidentally, is a particularly empty statement in any context, since every thing is a thing)
Memories seem to be constructed by a group of neurons together, and it seems clear that neurodegeneration is a thing, whether by trauma or due to aging. When pathways degenerate, maybe you have a partial memory that you brain can help fill the gaps with(and often incorrectly), but that does not make it the original memory.
I'm reminded of the story of dragon sightings in Great Britain: after the printing press and newspapers and newspaper reporters chasing stories emerged, as news distribution out from city centers into rural areas increased, it seems dragons picked up and moved farther away, only being spotted in the hinterlands without news.
You apparently would keep your mind open to the idea that dragons don't like the smell of newsprint as no other conclusion could be more plausible sheerly on the basis of logic?
If you have questions about my comment, I'm happy to try to explain myself better
"I didn't understand you at all, so you must have meant either A or B" is not the way to reach an understanding
The idea of "repressed memories" was that people had hidden memories that they couldn't access, even if they tried. According to the theory, even if someone brought up the past event and tried to remind the person about it, they would be unable to recall it happening because their brain had blocked it out.
The idea was that only intervention by a therapist or some other special event could help the person "unlock" the repressed memories, making them available for remembering again.
What was really happening was that some therapists were leading people into "remembering" things that didn't happen through aggressive prompting and pushing, much like what happens when an aggressive investigator convinces a vulnerable person to falsely confess to something they didn't do.
The way I understand it, it's just that, unlike on disk, the deletion process is not binary. Weak connections that are not revisited regularly gradually become weaker, until they're undistinguishable from noise (false memories).
I don't know where I got this trick. Likely some survival show or some novel. But I don't have any background in survival, otherwise, I would have brought a lot more water.
So my brain knew there was a memory that could help and made up a dream about it is my theory.
Some of the techniques used in the therapy include giving patients sedative-hypnotic drugs to put the patient in a waking dream-like state while the therapist asks leading questions to get them to "remember" an event. The same drugs they used are known to be associated with false memories, like when someone falsely recalls something from a vivid dream as having actually happened.
Some of the techniques included hypnosis or even giving the patients (including children) sedative-hypnotic drugs before pressuring them with the leading questions.
If they could eventually get the person or child to claim to have some memory of the event (after asking a lot of leading questions and maybe even drugging them) they considered it to be a recovery of the memory.
It is specifically about trauma, and generally you don't forget traumatic events and that's often a big part of the problem. We are not talking about trivial things like the name of your maths teacher in high school, which have a tendency to come and go.
It is also specifically about therapy, that is an environment where you are actively encouraged to recall memories. We know how easy it is to make up memories, especially with the help of a third party (here, the therapist).
Combine the two: memories that are hard to forget and an environment conductive to making false memories and it becomes very likely that the "lost" memories are completely made up.
True, but it doesn't really detract from his statement because do we really know what that upper bound even is? I don't think we come close to the theoretical storage limit... So saying "every memory you have is permanently stored" is effectively true, at least true enough for a thought experiment like this. Perhaps when people live to be 200 years old and we know more about the brain we can test this, though.
I used to be weary of learning new, complex things, thinking I'd "lose" old knowledge XD
On top of that, I have legitimate memories that were not traumatic, but still related to the same traumas because said person attempted to encourage these activities throughout my young life on rare occasions. I didn't remember what happened as a kid, but I knew something wasn't right and I wasn't comfortable. It wasn't until I was almost 30 that I had my first "flashback" which was a fractured memory, I still remember it looked like a faded photograph in my mind, and it was accompanied by an extremely uncomfortable feeling.
The re-surfacing memories aren't real in a sense, but in my case they aren't entirely fake either.
I wonder if it's possible that things can be completely imagined with absolutely no basis what-so-ever in certain circumstances, and I also wonder how difficult it is to discern that. It seems to be a difficult concept to manage.
I didn't ask for that. I asked if you have references for what you said. Even if I misunderstood you, that shouldn't be a reason for you not to give references for your statements, if you have them.
If you don't have any references to back up your statements, then I'm not sure what you're basing them on.
It is almost certainly false, but it doesn't require infinite storage to be true.
If it happens in therapy, that doesn't mean the memories are "implanted". And not all memories lack the ability to validate them... for example, if you've forgotten someone's name, then remember it later, you can call out to them by their name to confirm that you've correctly remembered it.
Memories tumble around in the brain all the time, not all memories are easy to access, but that doesn't mean they're inaccessible.
The point that memories can also be implanted or fabricated during therapy is absolutely an important one, but dismissing the possibility for memories to resurface (and conflating any situation where this might happen with a specific type of discredited therapy) is needlessly reductive.
Yes, witness testimony is always potentially flawed.
But knowing "some repressed memory recovery is false" does not justify saying that repressed memories are not a real thing. Repressed memories do happen. They do come back sometimes. When they do, they are just as valid as any normal memory that a person thinks they always had.
I know because I had them myself. Mine were of trauma in the age range from 5-9. I had a high "ACE score" when I eventually looked into this. I did not have any therapy session prompting the recall, I just remembered them spontaneously around age 15 when I was empathizing with a schoolmate who told me about domestic violence. It was a sickening feeling to have this whole phase of my past come unlocked.
Amazingly, it submerged into repression again. I next remembered it at about age 20. In between, I had years of basically not remembering/knowing that I had any of this trauma or that I had experience the earlier recall. They all came back together, again triggered by an empathetic moment in college. Again it was disorienting to have this whole aspect of my past reopen.
At that later point, I confronted people who were around my childhood and got enough of a painful discussion, confession, and apology to know that these memories were not invented.
I had other forms of childhood trauma that never submerged. I don't know why this one section did.
I find it very offensive for someone to make broad statements that these phenomena do not exist.
Other things about that day were surfaced. How my braces felt and the fear I felt about forgetting a textbook.
All real, but unsurfaced until then.
Consider an exponentially weighted moving average - you can just keep putting more data in forever and the memory requirement is constant.
The brain stores information as a weighted graph which basically acts as lossy compression. When you gain more information, graph weights are updated, essentially compressing what was already in there further. Eventually you get to a point where what you can recall is useless, which is what we would consider forgotten, and eventually the contribution of a single datapoint becomes insignificant, but it never reaches zero.
It might be something that one might not understand if he/she doesn't live through it I guess
Compare, from https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/anthropology-... :
> at the first news of English ships in the area, Buckley rushed to the spot. He attempted to make contact, but couldn’t swim out to the ship and couldn’t convince the ship to send a boat to him (Buckley had, at this point, forgotten how to speak English.) Buckley was again heartbroken until another ship showed up, and he found the English colonists and tried to approach them:
> “Presently some of the natives saw me, and turning round, pointed me out to one of the white people; and seeing they had done so, I walked away from the well, up to their place, and seated myself there, having my spears and other war and hunting implements between my legs. The white men could not make me out–my half-cast colour, and extraordinary height and figure [Buckley was around 6’5” or taller,]–dressed, or rather undressed, as I was–completely confounding them as to my real character. At length one of them came up and asked me some questions, which I could not understand; but when he offered me bread–calling it by its name–a cloud appeared to pass from over my brain, and I soon repeated that, and other English words after him. …
> “Word by word I began to comprehend what they said, and soon understood, as if by instinct, that they intended to remain in the country; that they had seen several of the native chiefs, with whom–as they said–they had exchanged all sorts of things for land; but that I knew could not have been
I submit that it takes more than a day to learn English if you don't already know it.
Once I was in a Toys-R-Us and noticed a cover image among the bottom-of-the-barrel DVD display which caused me to put what I was doing on hold for several minutes while I stared at the DVD. I bought it, and it turned out to be a movie I had watched many times when I was very young, but that information hadn't been accessible to me.
Which would put it into the category of the second part of my comment--which the person I was responding to said was not relevant to what they meant.
It implies enough capacity to store everything. But what you describe is not storing everything.
> lossy compression
Which means you're not storing all the information. You're not storing everything.
> When you gain more information, graph weights are updated, essentially compressing what was already in there further.
In other words, each time you store a new memory, you throw some old information away.
Which the person I was responding to said does not happen.
I am not advocating for it, just stating the near total lack of substantive scientific evidence presented either in support or opposed.
That depends on how many you endured really. Only so much room in the old noggin with everything else important going on.
The thing that changed though is since the 2010s everyone has a high definition camera in their pocket. Everything you do is recorded online. Kids that grew up in the last few years will have their entire childhood recorded in some way or another. Every movement tracked by GPS. Therefore, while I don't agree completely, I wouldn't be surprised if some assumptions about psychology are upended and a great deal of so called repressed memories turn out to be bogus when we can easily disprove them.
When such memories come back, it can be like a mini identity crisis. You suddenly know things that are counter to your self-identity from the moment before. Once I was able to absorb the whole picture and not recoil back into repression, it became a permanent and unpleasant part of my self. .
There can be flashbacks of related events, some of which I also might feel are remembered for the first time in a long time. Those little flashbacks might be like remembering your specific uncomfortable cafe. The overall memory recovery is like suddenly realizing I spent years in a theater of war, that happened to have such cafes in it.
If you hear the first tones or words of a song you're much more likely to be able to tell the lyrics that follow compared to being asked to say those lyrics based on the title.
Yes, real life is messy and ideals like justice are quite difficult or impossible to achieve.
Don't assume you can cleverly deduce a nice, absolute and comfortable answer. That's just another coping mechanism called rationalization.
Essentially these guys try to stay up for the first few days and then sleep less than 8 hours after that. Way less. Many of them end up hallucinating by the end, and only their extreme fitness levels probably save them from just dying from lack of sleep.
The trick is that waking up to daylight makes you feel more rested. So the teams would have their riders sleep 2-3 hours from just before dawn until dawn so they would wake up to sunlight. Physiologically the difference is small, but psychologically it’s much bigger.
Some of the effect of power napping is likely the same sort of trickery, just as caffeine is partly trickery and partly adrenal.
The comments in this thread are indeed disturbing. Clearly many on this forum have led blessed lives and can’t imagine people having it differently,
This whole thread is gross. I’d say you should be ashamed of yourself but you likely lack the prerequisite self inspection.
Like, if kissing is derived from impulses relating to breastfeeding (which is a hypothesis that, AIUI, is in good standing, though not the only one in good standing nor necessarily more favored than a couple others), I wouldn’t think that therefore someone who was only ever bottle-fed as a baby would therefore not get anything out of kissing. The appeal of “my lips on another person” should be there regardless, just as it was for the first time a baby is breastfed (though, of course, it is also a cultural thing: not all cultures have had kissing as a standardized way of expressing affection, so whether one grows up in a context where kissing plays a role, that probably also plays a part in whether one finds it appealing to have one’s lips on another person).
the craziest one I had, my reaction wasn’t “oh my god i never knew i had this memory” it was “wow, i cant believe i havent thought about that in 25 years.” I knew and had known it was there all along, I just literally never thought of it to the point my other thoughts just didnt collide with it, ever. It’s almost like your brain just puts it in storage in a dark corner of your garage.
I understand it isn’t the same for everyone, but that was how it felt for me.
TLDR for me it was dissociation, and the only treatment that ever worked was scraping the corners of my mind for stuff like this and it got so much better the issues basically went away. I used a great deal of meditation, particularly tibetan buddhism.
demanding citations is the favorite trick of people who want to waste your time precisely because they disagree with you and no matter what you come up with, they'll never give in. therefore, one should never give in to it.
rather, doing your own research and contributing it to the discussion is the lifeblood of online communities.
Is that actually a thing, rather than just hearsay?
The only marathon I ever did was cram for a couple finals and playing computer games between them and after. I was working on 72 hours when the blue on my monitor started to ripple and decided it was time to go to bed… almost an hour after it started.
And in particular if you abuse epinephrine enough. Caffeine blocks the sensation of fatigue, epinephrine does it even moreso, and up until I was in college, when my roommate told me about it, could be purchased from truck stops as an “allergy medication” but truckers use it to pull double shifts. If you keep taking it you will feel fine right up until you keel over.
South Korea has places you can rent a computer. Some are 24 hour. There was a case a while back where a middle aged man stayed awake for around 50 hours and died at his computer. Officially he died from lack of sleep.
If it takes long, intense therapy to "bring back", it's almost cerainly untrue or falsified. There was a case of accused childhood abuse among close relatives of me, by someone who found out about this in therapy. It tore apart the family. I cannot take any sides because I was not there and cannot know the truth, but it checks all the boxes of falsified memories. It has destroyed multiple lifes. That's how I even learned about that stuff, and why I care.
Btw, better source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory (I originally mostly read stuff in my native language, so I didn't what to look for initially)