Memory

The other day I heard something from one of my favorite philosophers, a gentleman named Albert Einstein. He may have done some work in other fields too, but that’s for another day. I liked it and it goes like this:

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned in school."

Don’t run away yet, I’m not going to write about education. Instead this got me to thinking about how you learn and remember things, and in the wonderful and weird way that a mind can wander, it lead me to the slight similarities, and huge differences, in the way computers “remember” things and the way we people remember things.

I think almost the only similarity is that they are both called memory. From there the two systems seem so different that it is amazing we think they have anything in common. Computers need only be told something once, then they remember it until told to forget it. But they are so different they can’t really “forget” as we think of it. They erase or delete, and even then it’s still “there” until some newer bit of info is written over top of it.

People remember things depending on, well....,everything. How many times they hear it, whether or not it’s interesting, how it was presented to them, the list is long. Once remembered, they may remember it long after they wish they had never learned it (I wish I could forget the theme song from Gilligan’s Island) or forget it altogether, or even not know they remember it until the memory is called up by some unexpected retrieval cue. Can you imagine a computer saying “that smell brings back memories of...”, or maybe “that song takes me back”? Well no, that’s not the way machines work. They file things away in whatever order they are told, at least sort of, and then retrieve that thing when needed or ask for. The machine knows right where that information is because it will always be there. People on the other hand work so very differently. Do we even have a retrieval system? Think of all the odd ways we work to remember things, mnemonics, association, and other little tricks are exclusive to us because our brains are such complicated organic devices. We think about things, look for patterns, and try to figure things out. We learn, while computers remember. I guess it’s no wonder that it takes a decade or two to have our operating systems installed, if that quickly.

I was going to say something else but I forgot what it was!

Have a nice weekend everybody, Randy