xeem

Everything you read, say, hear, seen.. is stored in your subconscious mind, since the day you were born. So that's why when you have a stimulus, you tend to remember your past, even if you have not thought about it for a long while. And when you ponder upon an examination question, you may come up with an answer because you are using what you have stored in your subconscious mind.

The sad thing is, no one knows how to fully ultilise it. If we did.. everyone would be geniuses.

Amazing?

p/s : read it in an English comprehension passage

CSflim

"Everything you read, say, hear, seen.. is stored in your subconscious mind, since the day you were born."

I'd like to see some hard evidence for this very strong statement.
Its seems very unlikely to me that a system such as the brain would have anywhere near the information capacity to store many many years of experiencing.

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Journeyman

Would everyone be genuises... or idiot savants? The thing about recalling everything is that you're forgetting nothing, and there's a WHOLE LOT of stuff that ought to be forgotten (did you wipe your ass 10 times or did you need 15 on June 19th, 1993?). To be able to recall specifics at will, or better yet, to encode specifics in a fashion where you could recall it at will, is the skill that would make... not so much geniuses, but more abled people (there's nothing in your memory recall abilities that directly leads (fosters, though) to creativity, spontanaeity, etc).

CS: The reason for believing that everything is stored comes from A) Some hypnosis case studies but mostly B) Early live brain studies, wherein a little wand with a small electric current was used to stimulate human gray matter. So they found out where the motor area was and what part controlled which body part, where the sensory area was and what part felt which body part. What they also discovered was that you could stimulate an area and the patient would recall an event in their life (nothing spectacular or traumatic, either) with such detail, that you could literally ask them minute details about, say, a newspaper that they were reading, and they could recite verbatim the whole article.

The *really* weird shit is, if you narrowed down which event they were in that they could recall *offhand*, and then legioned (effectively destroyed) the portion of the brain that was stimulated in open surgery, they could still recall offhand as much of the incident as they normally would. This lead to some speculation about the brain working somewhat akin to hologram structures: One bit encompasses the whole shebang.

Is anyone able to sound off sources on this? I only learned about it in Psych some 2 or 3 years ago, and have no idea where to point in terms of who wrote what.

orphen

yeah, i doubt everything is stored. if everything is, in what format? photo? words? i mean, you learn new languages and new building blocks. your memory can be redefined many times due to that. how can you have an obsolute memory then?

i believe there are too many problems with this hypothesis. plus, if you cannot retrieve the info, might as well not be there. in all pragmatic sense, a memory is as useful as you can recall it. a memory that cannot be recalled is like a lost file. you can count it gone.

You may argue, there probably may be ways to retrieve your lost memory. that would be very interesting but when do, once again, in what form will be the memory? does that fullfill the platonistic epistimology? or Lockian? or other? are you born with building blocks for learning or do you build them while you are young. so many questions that will answer.

xeem

exact phrase that I read.

Anyways, just sharing a bit. No strong proof Apologies

Thanks however, for making things clear, at least I know now that I shouldn't ponder that much over examination questions. Haha

MSD

Who the hell volunteered to have their brain lesioned for a study? People do some crazy stuff for research and in the name of science, but I don't think I'd let anyone kill brain cells. Still interesting, but I sure as hell wouldn't do it.

CSflim

I'm don't know about this particular case, but in the past, the cure for many brain related illnesses (e.g. epilepsy) was a brain lesion.
Often the doctors would ask the patients for their consent to do some experiments during the operation. (As the brain has no nerves that would case pain, the patient can be awake during the expirement and operation).

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whocarz

Man, fuck that. To get to your brain, they need to go through your skull, I bet that wouldn't feel good. And how exactly did they access the brain? Did they drill a hole or cut off the skull cap? Either way, I'd want to be heavily sedated.

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If there exists anything mightier than destiny, then it is the courage to face destiny unflinchingly. -Geibel

Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else. -Marcus Aurelius

Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever? -GySgt. Daniel J. "Dan" Daly

Journeyman

Well, anyone who's been to the dentist for both a filling and a wisdom tooth can tell you that there's local anasthetic, and then there's local anasthetic. The scalp gets local, and then the skull bone, pia mater/dura mater/arachnoid membrane, and any portion of the brain itself has no pain nerve endings. As best as I've seen, these sort of whole-brain studies end up with a single cut of the scalp, pulling it over like a flap, and then electric-buzz sawing around the skullcap for easy access to much of the cerebral cortex.

Also, keep in mind prehistoric/third world trepanations, ie having a hole sawn into your skull by a witch doctor, done in what amounts to a dirt floor village with the sun for lighting and remarkably little for anasthetics.

ARTelevision

If there's a reason I appear "smart" it's because I have a real bad memory... heh

I think our ability to forget things and start fresh is exactly how our intelligence operates best. Nearly everything I've done in the past is eminently forgettable. I'm pleased with how little of it I can recall.

In brief, I'd dispute the premise of the thread starter. Our capacity for genius is based upon our ability to let go of old, outmoded, and irrelevant experiences and concepts from the past and not any ability or capacity to recall them.

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QuasiMojo

Hmmm. I think I may be a fan of yours ART....
I predict that this thread will naturally evolve into a
HUMAN BRAIN=COMPUTER HARD DRIVE Discussion

....BUT!!! does the info actually ever disappear??
maybe...with the help of a little brainwash.......
maybe...with the help of a "shrink"........

does Scientology jumpstart the process?

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AzAbOv ZoBeLoE

ARTelevision

There is a tale by Jorge Luis Borges that brings these kinds of issues into the forefront of our imagination. I've long been a Borges reader and I stumbled upon the entire text of this enchanting, and terrifying, short story:

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Funes, the Memorious

By Jorge Luis Borges

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make maté tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental; I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887. . . .

That all those who knew him should write something about him seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb - an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.

Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, "an untamed and vernacular Zarathustra"; I do not doubt it, but one must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.

My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.

I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other's three-sided reply.

He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of Maria Clementina Funes, an ironing woman in the town, and that his father, some people said, was an "Englishman" named O'Connor, a doctor in the salting fields, though some said the father was a horse-breaker, or scout, from the province of El Salto. Ireneo lived with his mother, at the edge of the country house of the Laurels.

In the years '85 and '86 we spent the summer in the city of Montevideo. We returned to Fray Bentos in '87. As was natural, I inquired after all my acquaintances, and finally, about "the chronometer Funes." I was told that he had been thrown by a wild horse at the San Francisco ranch, and that he had been hopelessly crippled. I remember the impression of uneasy magic which the news provoked in me: the only time I had seen him we were on horseback, coming from San Francisco, and he was in a high place; from the lips of my cousin Bernardo the affair sounded like a dream elaborated with elements out of the past. They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but remained with his eyes fixed on the backyard fig tree, or on a cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the blow which had befallen him was a good thing. . . . Twice I saw him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also, another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling sprig of lavender cotton.

At the time I had begun, not without some ostentation, the methodical study of Latin. My valise contained the De viris illustribus of Lhomond, the Thesaurus of Quicherat, Caesar's Commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest talents as a Latinist. Everything is noised around in a small town; Ireneo, at his small farm on the outskirts, was not long in learning of the arrival of these anomalous books. He sent me a flowery, ceremonious letter, in which he recalled our encounter, unfortunately brief, "on the seventh day of February of the year '84," and alluded to the glorious services which Don Gregorio Haedo, my uncle, dead the same year, "had rendered to the Two Fatherlands in the glorious campaign of Ituzaingó," and he solicited the loan of any one of the volumes, to be accompanied by a dictionary "for the better intelligence of the original text, for I do not know Latin as yet." He promised to return them in good condition, almost immediately. The letter was perfect, very nicely constructed; the orthography was of the type sponsored by Andrés Bello: i for y, j for g. At first I naturally suspected a jest. My cousins assured me it was not so, that these were the ways of Ireneo. I did not know whether to attribute to impudence, ignorance, or stupidity the idea that the difficult Latin required no other instrument than a dictionary; in order fully to undeceive him I sent the Gradus ad Parnassum of Quicherat, and the Pliny.

On 14 February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires telling me to return immediately, for my father was "in no way well." God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to point out to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the positive adverb, the temptation to dramatize my sorrow as I feigned a virile stoicism, all no doubt distracted me from the possibility of anguish. As I packed my valise, I noticed that I was missing the Gradus and the volume of the Historia Naturalis. The "Saturn" was to weigh anchor on the morning of the next day; that night, after supper, I made my way to the house of Funes. Outside, I was surprised to find the night no less oppressive than the day.

Ireneo's mother received me at the modest ranch.

She told me that Ireneo was in the back room and that I should not be disturbed to find him in the dark, for he knew how to pass the dead hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the cobblestone patio, the small corridor; I came to the second patio. A great vine covered everything, so that the darkness seemed complete. Of a sudden I heard the high-pitched, mocking voice of Ireneo. The voice spoke in Latin; the voice (which came out of the obscurity) was reading, with obvious delight, a treatise or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio; my suspicion made them seem undecipherable, interminable; afterwards, in the enormous dialogue of that night, I learned that they made up the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis. The subject of this chapter is memory; the last words are ujt nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.

Without the least change in his voice, Ireneo bade me come in. He was lying on the cot, smoking. It seems to me that I did not see his face until dawn; I seem to recall the momentary glow of the cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down, and repeated the story of the telegram and my father's illness.

I come now to the most difficult point in my narrative. For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which coulded that night.

Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.

These things he told me; neither then nor at any time later did they seem doubtful. In those days neither the cinema nor the phonograph yet existed; nevertheless, it seems strange, almost incredible, that no one should have experimented on Funes. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. Swift writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact. Babylon, London, and New York have overawed the imagination of men with their ferocious splendour; no one, in those populous towers or upon those surging avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the unfortunate Ireneo in his humble South American farmhouse. It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, being rocked and annihilated by the current.

Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the earthen patio.

Then it was that I saw the face of the voice which had spoken all through the night. Ireneo was nineteen years old; he had been born in 1868; he seemed as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids. It occurred to me that each one of my words (each one of my gestures) would live on in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures.

Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of a pulmonary congestion.

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roachboy

i would echo art's initial post (and applaud the second as a borges fan)--your ability to limit information is as or more important than your capacity to take it in. one of the defining features of psychosis is an inability to limit information in a way that enables an individual to write him or herself into a field of data as a causal center. say a visual field--if you walk through a space of any visual complexity, you do not and cannot take it all in consciously--you organize elements of that field, depending upon where you direct your attention, and knit yourself into is as the focal point--how you move, what you look at, etc.... you do it all the time, if you are functional. if you cannot do it, your relation to the world collapses and your sense of yourself as a unified subject does along with it.

this is not to say that everything does not register at some level--there is a psychoanalytic description of this kind of process developed around the treatment of psychotics, actually--piera aulagnier did it--i dont think much of her stuff is in english other than her major book, "the violence of interpretation"--which is fascinating and gives an overview of what i am talking about here--she argues that repression accounts for the ability to limit information (repression is a metphor more than anything else) and that the material excluded turns up as dream material. which would explain why it is not something immediately available to memory. it is interesting to think about.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

This is one of the fundamental reasons I advocate repression as the basis of human sanity and civilized life. Repression gets a bad rap, of course, because it is problematic for those who champion limitless "free expression" without acknowledgement of its absolutely necessary limitations - necessary for human sanity and civilized life, that is.

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roachboy

did you switch the meanign of repression in the last post, art? just checking...

as for limits, yes--but the key is in your relation to them, in why you adopt them, in their not being imposed from the outside...your sense of what limits to use for yourself is a function of your relation to the history and nature of the medium you work in--nothing absolute about them...

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

yes, roachboy. you know I did.
it was a convenient conflation - and one that works well for me and my particular agenda.

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AxelF

An off topic, scary, comment on open brain surgery. I saw on TV that some surgeries are done with the patient awake. When they removed a tumor on this guy he had to tell the team if something they did affected his sight or hearing or feeling. So he could not be at sleep. Imagine that, awake while they poke around in your brain. He was really nervous about that part before the operation.

The brain is a mystery to me. So robust yet fragile at the same time. Enormous capacity, yet I keep forgetting peoples names and where I put my lighter.

I am a successful consultant and yet I can be so stupid at times. I enjoy fine arts and litterature and yet I can laugh at fart jokes.

What is up with our brains?

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Coffee