As added support for this view, I can contrast with the relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical location at the time. When I return to that location, the experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one without the other.
But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like this. In the author's example, I can separately remember the philosophical musings that were in my head on a drive, and the feeling of the steering wheel (which normally would be too mundane to remember, but on a hot day the cover will get sticky and I'll be very aware of that). There might be a weak association from one to the other, but usually not much at all.
As a tangent, I wonder if LLM attention heads are doing something analogous. Each is associated with a strand, sometimes combined with the others and usually not? (I don't know enough to say whether this matches at all.)
I think it was the ancient Greeks(?) that walked while learning the epic poems in order to recite them by recalling their journey, using the associations made on the path they took. I think the method of loci[0] is similar except using purely imagined locations/details ("memory palace").
In India, there is an ancient art called 'avadhAnam'[1][2], where questioners pose various questions to the performer. This performer has to answer questions partially in a verse form, and this can go on for days, if 1000 people are involved. These people have to recite these 1000 verses after everything is over. Performer should not use pen, paper or any recording. These guys memorize many Indian texts that contain verses.
>As added support for this view, I can contrast with the relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical location at the time. When I return to that location, the experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one without the other.
I've noticed something similar with podcasts. It's usually when I first listen to it while driving. When I listen to that segment again I have this intrusive, prolonged, real-time replay of what was going on at the time I first heard it.
It doesn't feel like memory because while I'm watching this replay I can remember portions of it with typical poor fidelity from the usual memory of my brain. It's very odd, and as someone with a generally terrible memory it's something I wish I could figure out how to channel. It clearly is what people talk about when they describe photographic memory, it's incredibly detailed.
The tying together of physical locations and audio book contents, or philosophical musings on a drive, are examples of those higher-order representations [0] the author references.
There is a sibling thread further down regarding the Buddhist take on phenomenology as a linear stream of discrete events. With sufficient practice it becomes possible to observe an individual sense datum - an instant of time in which I am hearing a bird chirp, followed by an instant of time in which I feel an itch on my head, followed by an instant of time in which I experience the thought of "what's for dinner," and so on. This is stepping down a "layer of abstraction," beneath higher-order representations of unity, to observe the lower-level discrete phenomena as they exist prior to the "post-processing" applied by our minds. After this post-processing step, the individual discrete points of "hearing," "itching," "thinking" are melded into the (ultimately illusory) unified experience of, for example, "sitting down for meditation next to an open window." This latter, post-processed view is ultimately an oversimplification, and investigation into the nature of such higher-order representations reveals their constituent parts.
It's this act of reflection and retrospection that unifies this stream of discrete sensory events into a cohesive whole and weaves the illusion of continuity out of a series of discrete points. Our phenomenological experience is like a pointillist painting viewed from afar; the astute observer with sufficient concentration to examine the painting more closely however can see that it is in fact a constellation of dots which our minds smear together into the higher-order (and illusory) representation of a continuous whole.
I recommend Daniel Ingram's "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" for a western, secularized take on this aspect of (Vipassana) Buddhism.
I too am terrible at names and faces which is unfortunate for my job.
The only thing that works for me is using the name an absurd amount of times early on. Then telling myself a silly story about that person in my head afterwards again using the name and location an absurd amount of times.
This works about 90% of the time for me.
‘So I met Dave Jenkins the other day at the park and Dave Jenkins was wearing a coat bought for Dave Jenkins by Dave Jenkins because Dave Jenkins liked the coat when Dave Jenkins saw it on sale’
I’m glad I saw your comment!! I’ve experienced this exact phenomenon when playing Minecraft while listening to an audiobook or podcast. Returning to that area will immediately remind me of the topic or narrative that I heard. Presumably it’s related to the “memory palace” technique, but otherwise, I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s immediate, as if the location is a hash key mapping to the information. Or as if they’re stored in literally the same place, and fetching one implies fetching the other.
Similarly to you and the article’s author, this doesn’t happen with whatever thoughts I may think while at a location. But in that situation the brain is engaged in generating those thoughts, and not with the task of learning new information. So I don’t find it surprising that it works differently.
I haven’t thought about it in relation to “consciousness” yet. Will have to chew on this article a bit.
> But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like this.
It might be wise to reconsider if this “unusual.” The brain structure hippocampus is thought to bring working memory into longer term memory and has a large role in spatial memory. This neuro-activity association is also supported by the memorization technique known as a “memory palace.” [0]
As a child on road trips I would stare out the window while my mind wandered. I got carsick from reading and other activities so it’s all I could really do.
On the return trip a week or so later, everything I thought about would come back to me as we passed everything again, but in reverse order. Sort of like unwinding my train of thought back to the very first thought that started it as we left the garage when we finally got back home.
There’s this part in Prousts In search of a lost time where he recounts eating a certain sweets that kinda teleports him back to a moment in his childhood. I too experienced a similar thing once while visiting someone who just wiped their floors with a certain cleaner that my mom used that I haven’t smelled in ages. The smell took me back to a place and time I’ve long forgotten, and it was sudden and vivid and intense
As an experiment on readers' childhood memories, I would like to inject: "Those semi-solid candies Grandma had that were in red wrappers with white polka dots and a green fringe."
I don’t think it’s that unusual, I have 3 that immediately spring to mind. Whenever I hear Slipknot’s Iowa album I think of a MUD called Wolfenburg that I played a ton of at the time. NIN’s The Fragile triggers memories of reading the Diceman and smelling L’eau D’Issey reminds me of Berlin.
In highschool I read the Eragon book series while listening pretty much only to Jump Around from House of Pain, on repeat, for a couple of weeks. Whenever I hear that song again I get those dragon and fantasy vibes again
But this is unusual. Most things are not tied together like this. In the author's example, I can separately remember the philosophical musings that were in my head on a drive, and the feeling of the steering wheel (which normally would be too mundane to remember, but on a hot day the cover will get sticky and I'll be very aware of that). There might be a weak association from one to the other, but usually not much at all.
As a tangent, I wonder if LLM attention heads are doing something analogous. Each is associated with a strand, sometimes combined with the others and usually not? (I don't know enough to say whether this matches at all.)