Yesterday, I spent some time with a couple of friends trying to find an answer to one of man’s oldest questions. “How do we think and remember?”

First off, let me say this. If you are looking for mysticism and godly type stuff, this is not the page to visit. Second, these thoughts are my speculations. I have no background in this stuff so if you, oh fine reader are an expert and know more than me, please do enlighten me. I cannot pretend an expertise I don’t have.

If any of you have queried computer databases, you have probably sat twiddling your thumbs while the database looks through every row and column of the entire data set trying to find the relationship that you are looking for.

But if you ask a person, “do you know that guy?”, the other guy would probably be really quick at figuring out if “that guy” was really known to him or not.

If you think about this, its amazing. Modern hard discs can parse through a few hundred Megabytes of data in a couple of seconds and can literally do trillions of operations every second. And here, a humble human being can parse through all the data points that make up his/her memory and remember a face or an incident.

I am not going to try to figure out the mechanics of how the brain gets to parse through its data banks. I am sure it has to do with synapses and neurons and proteins and stuff. But I am going to try to look at it as a data manipulation problem. Assuming the brain stores a 100 billion bits of information, and that it would take a finite amount of time to go through those 100 billion bits, you can sort of work out the time taken to recall a particular set of information.

The problem is that for the brain, its not exactly a linear search process. For example, we can remember the sequence of numbers from 1-10, but at the same time, have difficulty remembering certain words…(its at the tip of my tongue!). Essentially, the number of bits of information in a word and a sequence of numbers may be the same, but the way the human brain retrieves this information is different.

Of course, I am not the first to come up with this funda. People before me have come up with this “short term memory” and “long term memory”. They even make funky analogies of RAM and Hard Disk Drives to explain it.

But I think I have stumbled upon an idea. Its always puzzled me how human beings are so awesome at retrieving information compared to computers (which ought to be even more awesome, considering their perfect recall and blinding speeds of manipulating data.). Then I actually sat and thought about it. Does having more data and perfect recall actually make you better at retrieving information….or worse!

Let me illustrate this with a practical situation. A computer records a face perfectly. It stores Ms. N’s face as a 1920×1080 pixel image, with each of those pixels having several properties (colour, tone, brightness, etc). This essentially translates into a huge pile of data which can be up to 8Mb in size. In my head however, N’s face is not stored at all (she would be the first to agree). Instead the idea of N is stored. Its a bit hard to explain because everybody stores personal details differently in the privacy of their own mind. But the best I can come up with is that N’s face is buried into this really complex data warehouse, where the number of bytes that actually represents her face is a lot less than 8Mb….it might only be a few bytes of memory.

But the advantage it gives me is game changing. Firstly, as the data that is N’s face is actually stored as part of  a data query, and is a lot smaller in size, my comparatively slow speed of access is offset by a huge advantage in my software. My mental database is exceedingly efficient at parsing through massive data sets precisely because I don’t actually store all the data that a computer stores.

This of course leads me to a weakness. I cant exactly tell you how every pixel of N’s face looks. At best, I can recall maybe 10% (probably closer to 1%) of N’s facial features. My computer is probably way better than me at remembering those details. So if I want to figure out how N looks like, I don’t try to bring a picture of N in my minds eye. I just do not have the capabilities to do that good a job of it. Instead, I take a look at her photograph, which is way more detailed than I could ever be.

In my next post, I shall try to cover the other part of memory….which is rote memory. Its how I passed my commerce examination after all! Finally I hope to draw an analogy between these types of memory and data manipulation by computers.

So stay tuned. Till then ta ta!

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