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Bettawrekonize -> RE: Human Evolution? (5/17/2008 1:34:47 AM)
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I personally think that most people (the large majority), if they practiced (put the mental effort involved), if they took care of themselves (ate right, got enough sleep and exercise, stayed away from alcohol and drugs (besides drugs for legitimate medical reasons)), have amazing mental capabilities and could remember just about everything they read or came across (and do amazing mathematical calculations with their brains). Of course, such a thing requires huge amounts of mental energy and, for the most part, is inefficient, so I'm not going to waste my effort doing this and I think that most people won't either. I think that our brains are already capable of going far above and beyond what is necessary for our current survival (and have always been able to) but most of us either don't take care of themselves or they simply don't need to expend the necessary mental energy involved because it's inefficient. I mean, seriously, the brain is meant to be efficient. It's inefficient for us to remember everything we come across, we only need to remember that which is relevant. If someone told you a wrong phone number and then they corrected themselves, do you need to remember both the wrong number and the right one? A waste of mental energy and space, you only need to remember the correct one. It's too inefficient for us to remember every unnecessary detail we come across and the brain wasn't designed to be inefficient. We look for and remember that which is relevant, it's much more efficient than just arbitrarily remembering everything we encounter. To some degree, it makes sense that our memories fade with time because more recent information is usually more relevant. I still think we retain much of the older memories too, but it just takes us longer to reference because, since the most recent memory is usually more relevant, our recent memories would be stored in a place for faster seek time which pushes back the older memory to locations that would have a slower seek time. It's kinda like a trade - off so that much energy is not required to search your entire memory every time you need a piece of information (since necessary information is more likely to be recent, it can be searched first. Otherwise, you'll have to poll your entire knowledge base every time you want to remember an event that occurred yesterday and that's inefficient. It's like searching an entire hard drive every time you want to find a document. It's better to group information according to how likely you are to need it and then search the information that is more likely to contain what you need first and recent information is exactly what is more likely to contain what you need so it gets searched first. Think of your start menu and desktop. On your hard drive, we try to sort information roughly in some sort of nested hierarchy because that makes sense. On your desktop, you have shortcuts/references to information that you are most likely to use. On your start menu, you have shortcuts to information that you are likely to use, but not as likely as the information on your desktop. Your brain probably works in a similar manner. As the information becomes older, it is less likely to be used in the recent future so it gets moved from your desktop to your start menu in a sense. Then, it eventually gets taken off of your start menu because it's cluttering your start menu and other links become more useful for the near future since they become more recent. But you still keep the majority of the information on your hard drive somewhere, even if the references are not on your start menu or your desktop. Of course, this is oversimplified but you kinda get the point).
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