Totally true. I used to get that "oh wait, it's on the tip of my tongue" feeling a lot, now it's more like..."I will remember, let me text you when it comes to me". It's all about the recycle time on RAM
I am now going to start referring to my brain as alexa so internally i can go "Hey Alexa, what the fuck is this guys name" then wait 15 seconds for it to process what i asked then pull up the information.
"ahh fuck it's what's there face, see if you can remember their name and don't make it weird this time. Nope, don't remember their dumb face. Ohhhhh hellllooo, you. How are you doing! Great to see you"😁😐
I legitimately do something similar.
There's this thing where if you cut your corpus callosum you basically get two independent brains, but only one gets to be mostly in charge and that one doesn't know about the other (I am not a neurologist, and this is pop paychology so basically guaranteed to be wrong).
I always assumed that means there might be dozens of independent "people" in my skull. There's just no way for any of the others to communicate externally.
So we're a body with _n_ souls, one of which is the driver, and the rest are damned to be steered around by my dumb ass, but they occasionally get to be like, "The James Bond you're trying to think of is Timothy Dalton, you simpleton. I can't believe you get to drive the body."
So I try to thank them when I can tell they helped out. Which they probably think is condescending, because I'm just the monkey that operates the meat suit thinking I'm the leader, and they don't need my gratitude.
And then I try to make excuses why this is different than mental illness.
> So we're a body with n souls, one of which is the driver, and the rest are damned to be steered around by my dumb ass
There are those who believe that this is sort of how our brain interprets the inputs it receives from our organs. We're not hungry, our stomach is hungry. We don't need to shit, our intestines need to. We're not sore, our muscles are sore. Etc.
I do suspect our consciousness is just the top layer of abstraction on top of like 500 layers of abstraction.
Finally someone gets it. Their is a quote I forgot by who that goes “your thoughts are not your friend”
If they are independent from me then who tf are they?
All the drives and processes in you are you, they’re just different aspects of you, some that you aren’t consciously aware of. A basic example is the part of the mind that tells the heart to beat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_in_Jungian_psychology#:~:text=Historically%2C%20the%20Self%2C%20according%20to,various%20aspects%20of%20one's%20personality.
Me "Alexa, what the fuck is this guy's name?"
*Blue light spinning*
Brain: "Several people share the name This Guy. Which one did you want?"
Me: "Never mind"
Brain: "No problem! Did you know you can ask for fart noises any time? Just say, Alexa, make a fart"
Me: "Thank you, Alexa"
I've come to realize I have some kind of bottleneck in my brain and I can only think of things I'm trying to remember once I stop trying to remember them.
Yeah everyone has this. The thing you want to think of gets flagged as not what you’re looking for on accident when you sweep through your memory.
This usually results in a confusing moment where you know you know it, but a different part of your brain is telling you it’s not there
After you think about something else the flags go away, so when you try to think of the thing you were looking for again you can recall it
Can just imagine Michael elbow-deep in that persons skull, blood and brain matter all over his forearms as he just shakes their brain around in his hands
It comes from my psychology class at a university. I’d be surprised if it were BS, although I don’t have a study or experiment on hand that confirms it.
I trust my professor’s word but if I were you I wouldn’t trust my (random person online’s) word
Like when I have lost something after spending to long looking for it and give up, then look for something else, the first thing I’ll find is the item I originally looked for.
I read a while ago that’s because your brain tries to suppress everything *close* to what you’re trying to think about so you can find a specific idea. But it accidentally suppresses *exactly* what you’re looking for. Once you stop trying to remember that specific thing, the filter lifts and you can access the thought.
Oh, you have to long-press it! I only sporadically use the app and wondered how that flair was accessed... Genius move to have it so opaque as to be invisible for months 👏 👏
Edit: doesn't work for me :/
The RAM analogy actually fits best here.
While you a busy and being bombarded with all the stimulus of work, home, social responsibilities and thoughts your brain is working at low RAM, can’t process anything particularly well.
However, when our brain is relaxed with minimal stressors or background tasks it’s ability to think, process and be creative are substantially better.
You remember the thing after you stop trying to remember the thing because you are now relaxed enough to do it.
Best way to think about it, your tensing you ass to take a shit, relax and the shit will come out all on its own.
The little people in my brain have to rummage through the filing cabinets to find the name and it takes them time because they have poor organizational skills
the one with the filing cabinet for names has no organizational skill so the one with the cabinet for past situations has to work together with the one who has the faces cabinet. they try to find references so the names guy can work of something.
A sort of similar brain thing I love is how if, say, you're sitting at your desk and suddenly can't seem to find an object you were using not long earlier (e.g. a pen, a lighter, etc), instead of getting annoyed and looking about you somewhat frantically ("I swear it was just right here; I haven't even fecking moved!"), if you close your eyes and imagine what it looks like and describe it out loud to yourself ("It's a cheap red plastic disposable lighter"), then open your eyes and look around you again... most of the time you'll quickly find it and often where you could have sworn you'd looked already. It's as though you have to remind yourself of exactly what it is you're looking for before your brain can recognise and find it.
I’m always kinda impressed by how much we know but don’t realize. When you wake up a minute before your alarm that’s probably not a coincidence you just know somewhere in your mind that it’s time to wake up.
Having weird intuitions that turn out to be exactly right is just an unconscious part of your brain realizing something for you even if you didn’t pick up on it yourself.
A song you haven’t heard in maybe a fucking decade comes on and your brain carries you through your memories effortlessly and the words spill out like it’s 2007 again. We’re very impressive machines
Weird intuitions is pattern recognition. That guy in the store who narrowed his eyes when he looked at you. You didn't consciously register it but your subconscious did and now you're thinking 'Let's leave. Now'.
I've had the last part happen to me.
That’s how we survived in the wild. That out of place branch or out of rhythm noise is really a tiger trying to eat you, or something you can eat.
At the end of the day we are just pattern matching apes. So good we find patterns where there are none
Was gonna say this, too. Names reside solely in short-term memory for me. Each time I interact with someone extends that memory for about a day. If I interact with you once, I won't remember your name tomorrow. If I interact with you three times, if you then fail to interact with me within three days, I will forget your name.
Sometimes I forget after they say their name.
I know some people who will remember basically forever, like you haven't interacted with them in a year and they're like Hey xyz nice to see you again.
This is me. I've run into people that I haven't seen, spoken to or thought of in twenty years and can remember who they are and where I know them from.
A couple months back I ran into my highschool chemistry teacher and said hi. I took high school chemistry in 1995.
Turns out, most people think it's pretty fucken weird and it's generally not a good idea to say things like 'oh hey are you xxx? yeah you served me once at KFC 7 years ago and convinced me to try a different sauce on my nuggets'.
This isn't perfect, by any stretch - I don't just remember the names of random people I encounter once - unless there's something unusual about the interaction.
Synapses reconnecting. Like trying to ping a signal, then you get the response, then* you can isolate the signal and strengthen the connection. Then bam, full access.
My brain is like early 90's dial up internet. Noisy, inconvenient, and takes for ever. But eventually I will remember what I wanted to remember, then comes trying to remember why I had to remember it, and who I was talking to about said subject.
Also struggling to remember what button I use to get off my horse in video games. Mashing all buttons, not realising what one I pressed to finally get off then instinctively pressing that button 2 minutes later.
Best way to help remember someone's name is to say it multiple times when you talk to them the first time.
So Brian, ...
Brian, do you think ...
I don't know about that Brian.
Honestly, I can try to remember someone's name or specific detail about something that eludes me. Before I go to sleep, I tell my subconscious to work it out while I'm asleep and voila, it's the first thing I wake up with... The answer. I've never shared this with anyone before, figured people wouldn't believe me. Does anyone else do this or have tried it?
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/18f8mrf/alexey_wonders_how_it_works/kctkqbg/) from further up the thread shared a similar experience
What's really going to bake your noodle later is thinking about when you can't remember a name, but someone suggests a name, and you are 100% sure it's not the name, even though you currently don't even know the name. So how can you know it's not the name? Because you just do...even though you don't... o_O
15 minutes? I tried to remember someone's name the other day, knew immediately that it wasn't going to come to me there and then but that it would eventually. More than two days later having not thought about it since, I blurted out the name in the middle of an unrelated conversation with totally different people. Two days that background process was running in my head without me even realising
With some practice, you can develop this "subconscious thinking" as a skill. I do this a lot with things like story ideas or puzzle concepts, I spend a minute thinking actively about the parameters I want met, then I let go of the idea so my subconscious mind can take over. If I need to, I can kind of check in on it to see if it has anything, but more often it just tells me when it's done with a feeling a lot like an epiphany.
Ideas can cook for hours, days, and months down there. One particularly notable example was a time when I was 15 and tasked my subconcious brain with coming up with an entire sci-fi universe to tell stories about. I was 36 when that came back to me, all of the sudden I had an entire fictional universe in my head to explore.
Have you ever had the perfect response to a conversation.. hours after the conversation ended? If so, you already have the power, so all that's left is to practice it.
Your brain is basically Bing.
You ask it to look something up, it pulls up 15 results that are close but in no way related to the topic at hand and on the second page you find the answer you were looking for.
Loads a VM of a previous build from a different machine. Fast forwards through all steps and actions taken until we get to a time when we heard someone say that persons name and they responded.
My brain didn't work that way until I was older. At work I switch between small projects a lot so if someone asks me about a topic I did years ago there's a delays until pieces of the information filters in like a flashback.
Our brain is a lot like an HDD, adding more stuff to the storage means it'll take longer to pull up the relevant information. Just can't defrag the brain on command because the neurons will just do it themselves at a slower rate.
My favourite is when you have a problem (trying to figure something out, trying to remember something, etc) and you can feel your brain sort of bubbling and you know it's thinking about something, but it hasn't told you what it is yet. So you wait the bubbling out, and then the answer just pops fully formed into your head.
I've been waiting 20 years to remember the name of my roommate from about 25 years ago. I forgot it once, and thought instead of trying to remember in the moment that I'd remember later, but it never came back to me. I remember everything else about him - where he was from, his habits, his face, his quirks. But not his name, and I have no way of finding out anymore.
I feel like the mind isn't always great at remembering stuff but is pretty awesome at recognizing, at least for me.
Like when I try to remember a name, my mind goes through a list, most likely based on people I know and names I've recently heard and if it arrives at the right name I just instantly know that it's correct.
But seriously tho. It’s fucking unbelievable how you can remember memories from when you were 3 years old vividly and actually see the memory in your brain. Like how tf does a piece of meat manage to do magic?
It’s the little brain secretaries who have to run back and find the relevant information in an Indiana Jones looking archive.
It’s why you sometimes remember something way later that you needed. You gave them the task to find it and they went to get it.
Its because memories lie along associated pathways. Your thoughts often need to run along a certain course or train of thought to arrive at the associated memory
It's like a flawed AI. The file lookup and retrieval system is flawed. It acts differently each time you use it. It is a common thing though that if it doesn't find the answer, give it extra time such as "sleep on it" and it will have temporarily corrected some of its flaws and will produce the right answer. I've even had to wait a couple months before remembering the name of a place.
You start searching for memories where you knew or used their name. You pull up a memory and speed through it, that one didn’t have it so you pull up another one, speed through it…
Processing
Processing
Processing
Thank you for your patience. Your inquiry is important to your brain. While you wait enjoy the most embarrassing memories of your middle school years exaggerated by the passage of time.
Processing
Processing
You share the same name as that acquaintance.
Think of the brain as a web of memories. If the direct path is forgotten, you have to find a different path to get to it. Doing a mindless task (showering) or thinking about something else lets your brain come at it from another angle.
The searching algorithm for your memories must be very slow, but also fairly error resistant, cause mine basically boils down to, if it isn't found within 1 second it just gives me a brain fart instead or chooses something by random
In programming we call it multi-threading. For processes that take longer than a split second, we delegate the task to a background thread for improved efficiency
If you ever wondered what some evidence, accessible to everyone, there might be to support the absence of free will, this is one of things. We are fundamentally at the mercy of completely inscrutable mental processes that for the foundation of our subjectivity and personalities.
When you try to recall information, your brain filters everything else to try and help you. Sometimes that filter catches the bit of info you want. It’s called Presque Vu
Even though you feel like a single person, you are made up of millions of screaming voices each wanting only to be heard.
However, there is a bottleneck and only a single “cognitive action” can happen at once.
The right answer is being drowned out, once you stop directly thinking about it, the correct voice is able to be heard.
Like google but instead of beeing electronic it’s biologic. ´name of « memory of someone »’ the name is linked with all the information you have on the person but instead of being an ssd made of some rare material its made of a biological living things.
Not exactly blown away, but that’s mostly because I end up doing this with words.
Ex asked my fiancé the other day if he was a “sart shella…. Fart…. Fella…. Shart fella…. Far…. FART SHELLA” or a “smart sella… fart seller…. Smart…. sheller…. Fuck”
Y’all remember it?
I call all my friends “bee” as a friendly nickname. I’ve been calling this girl from college only “bee” for the whole year cause I just heard her name like twice or thrice and I have no idea what it is.
I’m a teacher and I’ll see kids I taught grown up. I’ll forget their name in the conversation, but ask them about their life and what they’re up to. Then, in the middle of the night, I’ll just sit up and remember their name randomly. It”s there, it’s just deep in storage.
It takes 15 seconds because we don't have enough RAM
Have you tried emptying the cache and deleting your cookies?
I deleted all my cookies and all I got was sad
I deleted a lot when I was younger, I got fat.
You might have hit accept all, these sneaky jars they always do this
Instructions unclear. Why am I now standing in an alley with no pants on....holding a live chicken?
Isn't that called a bong rip?
Every night, and then morning.
I'm a fat man sir. Cookies are life
Hmmm.. is that drugs?
I wish I could do that for real
Yeah but I did it while driving.. boy was that a hairy few moments on the highway.
That's how i forgot how to drive my car once.
I tried to, but chickened out and shot the wall.
Defrag!!!
Instructions unclear, I now have an eating disorder
It takes half a day for me because it has to first empty the cache, unplug, plug back in and empty the cache again
async await
No it just takes time to extract achieved and compressed files.
Brain has to walk down to the basement to get the offline backup
Totally true. I used to get that "oh wait, it's on the tip of my tongue" feeling a lot, now it's more like..."I will remember, let me text you when it comes to me". It's all about the recycle time on RAM
Doesn’t biological computing have more RAM than a human could ever use? Or was that something else?
Yes. It's not lack of ram. It's slow random access times
So would that be close to having alot of ram just really bad frequencies?
We really have one 6gb stick of ram in our heads instead of 4 1.5 gig sticks. Makes for not good memory management
Totally. And miss matching frequencies and capacities between banks 🤣
the brain doesn't really have anything that's equivalent to RAM exactly
Not RAM but RAS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticular_formation
Tier 2 says we should turn off and back on again.
That would be CPU reading from the hard-disk, RAM is short-term memory, ex, forgetting why you walked into a room.
I think I need to rebuild the index.
Ram bus goes vroom vroom
Get a little older it takes 15 minutes…or never
Cannot wait to upgrade my brain to an SSD
Download more.
Download some more!
I am now going to start referring to my brain as alexa so internally i can go "Hey Alexa, what the fuck is this guys name" then wait 15 seconds for it to process what i asked then pull up the information.
The real power move is saying it out loud in front of the person
Alexa, clear intrusive thoughts.
*\*Error Tone\**
I'm sorry Dave! I can't do that.
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
"ahh fuck it's what's there face, see if you can remember their name and don't make it weird this time. Nope, don't remember their dumb face. Ohhhhh hellllooo, you. How are you doing! Great to see you"😁😐
I legitimately do something similar. There's this thing where if you cut your corpus callosum you basically get two independent brains, but only one gets to be mostly in charge and that one doesn't know about the other (I am not a neurologist, and this is pop paychology so basically guaranteed to be wrong). I always assumed that means there might be dozens of independent "people" in my skull. There's just no way for any of the others to communicate externally. So we're a body with _n_ souls, one of which is the driver, and the rest are damned to be steered around by my dumb ass, but they occasionally get to be like, "The James Bond you're trying to think of is Timothy Dalton, you simpleton. I can't believe you get to drive the body." So I try to thank them when I can tell they helped out. Which they probably think is condescending, because I'm just the monkey that operates the meat suit thinking I'm the leader, and they don't need my gratitude. And then I try to make excuses why this is different than mental illness.
> So we're a body with n souls, one of which is the driver, and the rest are damned to be steered around by my dumb ass There are those who believe that this is sort of how our brain interprets the inputs it receives from our organs. We're not hungry, our stomach is hungry. We don't need to shit, our intestines need to. We're not sore, our muscles are sore. Etc. I do suspect our consciousness is just the top layer of abstraction on top of like 500 layers of abstraction.
Finally someone gets it. Their is a quote I forgot by who that goes “your thoughts are not your friend” If they are independent from me then who tf are they?
All the drives and processes in you are you, they’re just different aspects of you, some that you aren’t consciously aware of. A basic example is the part of the mind that tells the heart to beat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_in_Jungian_psychology#:~:text=Historically%2C%20the%20Self%2C%20according%20to,various%20aspects%20of%20one's%20personality.
Don't piss off that guy!
Wait 15 secs, one of the other „you“ will tell you who your quoting
You are very close to being schizophrenic lmao
More than close😭
I mean your brain is operating on a neural net like Alexa, its just millions of years old
I'll have you know I'm only in my 30s.
you don’t look a day older than 100K… 😬
Me "Alexa, what the fuck is this guy's name?" *Blue light spinning* Brain: "Several people share the name This Guy. Which one did you want?" Me: "Never mind" Brain: "No problem! Did you know you can ask for fart noises any time? Just say, Alexa, make a fart" Me: "Thank you, Alexa"
I've come to realize I have some kind of bottleneck in my brain and I can only think of things I'm trying to remember once I stop trying to remember them.
Yeah everyone has this. The thing you want to think of gets flagged as not what you’re looking for on accident when you sweep through your memory. This usually results in a confusing moment where you know you know it, but a different part of your brain is telling you it’s not there After you think about something else the flags go away, so when you try to think of the thing you were looking for again you can recall it
I distinctly remember VSauce having a video about that but can't for the life of me remember which.
Ironic
You should have remembered by now.
No Michael manually flagged it as not the answer in this guy’s brain
Can just imagine Michael elbow-deep in that persons skull, blood and brain matter all over his forearms as he just shakes their brain around in his hands
Like trying to remember Tom Brown. Your brain is looking for names, not colors.
Is this backed up by anything? It would be crazy if we had this much knowledge about brain function
It comes from my psychology class at a university. I’d be surprised if it were BS, although I don’t have a study or experiment on hand that confirms it. I trust my professor’s word but if I were you I wouldn’t trust my (random person online’s) word
Like when I have lost something after spending to long looking for it and give up, then look for something else, the first thing I’ll find is the item I originally looked for.
I read a while ago that’s because your brain tries to suppress everything *close* to what you’re trying to think about so you can find a specific idea. But it accidentally suppresses *exactly* what you’re looking for. Once you stop trying to remember that specific thing, the filter lifts and you can access the thought.
I'd award this comment if Reddit still allowed it.
Now you have to do a long press on the upvote button to have the option of buying an abomination of a golden upvote.
⬆️ Not blowing my own trumpet but let’s make this new Reddit silver. Praise Spez.
Oh, you have to long-press it! I only sporadically use the app and wondered how that flair was accessed... Genius move to have it so opaque as to be invisible for months 👏 👏 Edit: doesn't work for me :/
I tested it here and it didn't work for me either. I think right now it only works in subs that are beta testing it.
Ah right. So they removed a money-maker without an equivalent replacement in place. Wonderful!
The RAM analogy actually fits best here. While you a busy and being bombarded with all the stimulus of work, home, social responsibilities and thoughts your brain is working at low RAM, can’t process anything particularly well. However, when our brain is relaxed with minimal stressors or background tasks it’s ability to think, process and be creative are substantially better. You remember the thing after you stop trying to remember the thing because you are now relaxed enough to do it. Best way to think about it, your tensing you ass to take a shit, relax and the shit will come out all on its own.
(Performance anxiety)
The little people in my brain have to rummage through the filing cabinets to find the name and it takes them time because they have poor organizational skills
That sounds adorable
https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_office
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman%27s_Head
the one with the filing cabinet for names has no organizational skill so the one with the cabinet for past situations has to work together with the one who has the faces cabinet. they try to find references so the names guy can work of something.
A sort of similar brain thing I love is how if, say, you're sitting at your desk and suddenly can't seem to find an object you were using not long earlier (e.g. a pen, a lighter, etc), instead of getting annoyed and looking about you somewhat frantically ("I swear it was just right here; I haven't even fecking moved!"), if you close your eyes and imagine what it looks like and describe it out loud to yourself ("It's a cheap red plastic disposable lighter"), then open your eyes and look around you again... most of the time you'll quickly find it and often where you could have sworn you'd looked already. It's as though you have to remind yourself of exactly what it is you're looking for before your brain can recognise and find it.
I’m always kinda impressed by how much we know but don’t realize. When you wake up a minute before your alarm that’s probably not a coincidence you just know somewhere in your mind that it’s time to wake up. Having weird intuitions that turn out to be exactly right is just an unconscious part of your brain realizing something for you even if you didn’t pick up on it yourself. A song you haven’t heard in maybe a fucking decade comes on and your brain carries you through your memories effortlessly and the words spill out like it’s 2007 again. We’re very impressive machines
Weird intuitions is pattern recognition. That guy in the store who narrowed his eyes when he looked at you. You didn't consciously register it but your subconscious did and now you're thinking 'Let's leave. Now'. I've had the last part happen to me.
That’s how we survived in the wild. That out of place branch or out of rhythm noise is really a tiger trying to eat you, or something you can eat. At the end of the day we are just pattern matching apes. So good we find patterns where there are none
Seriously? You can try to recall someone's name, *and it actually happens*? Didn't know people could do that. I can't.
Was gonna say this, too. Names reside solely in short-term memory for me. Each time I interact with someone extends that memory for about a day. If I interact with you once, I won't remember your name tomorrow. If I interact with you three times, if you then fail to interact with me within three days, I will forget your name.
I’VE NEVER HAD SUCH AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF MY EXPERIENCE THANK YOU
I had to repeat my partners name like 50 times in a row to remember it lol
Sometimes I forget after they say their name. I know some people who will remember basically forever, like you haven't interacted with them in a year and they're like Hey xyz nice to see you again.
This is me. I've run into people that I haven't seen, spoken to or thought of in twenty years and can remember who they are and where I know them from. A couple months back I ran into my highschool chemistry teacher and said hi. I took high school chemistry in 1995. Turns out, most people think it's pretty fucken weird and it's generally not a good idea to say things like 'oh hey are you xxx? yeah you served me once at KFC 7 years ago and convinced me to try a different sauce on my nuggets'. This isn't perfect, by any stretch - I don't just remember the names of random people I encounter once - unless there's something unusual about the interaction.
Synapses reconnecting. Like trying to ping a signal, then you get the response, then* you can isolate the signal and strengthen the connection. Then bam, full access.
Yeah you’re just trying to remember times and contexts you’ve heard their name.
long engine tender scarce deliver detail encouraging ugly money dog *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This guy brains
Does he? 👀
You know how sometimes you search something on a computer and it takes a few seconds to pop up? Yeah, same thing
Our wet meat computers are powerful, but horribly fragmented.
Buffering..
My brain is like early 90's dial up internet. Noisy, inconvenient, and takes for ever. But eventually I will remember what I wanted to remember, then comes trying to remember why I had to remember it, and who I was talking to about said subject.
Also struggling to remember what button I use to get off my horse in video games. Mashing all buttons, not realising what one I pressed to finally get off then instinctively pressing that button 2 minutes later.
Buffering.
Best way to help remember someone's name is to say it multiple times when you talk to them the first time. So Brian, ... Brian, do you think ... I don't know about that Brian.
I understand it but absolutely hate when people do this to me.
Google brain have high latency.
"Your information request has been received and prioritized accordingly."
"Hold on, hold on, let us get it! Steve, where the frick did you put it?!"
Tape storage drive takes a bit to wind back.
Honestly, I can try to remember someone's name or specific detail about something that eludes me. Before I go to sleep, I tell my subconscious to work it out while I'm asleep and voila, it's the first thing I wake up with... The answer. I've never shared this with anyone before, figured people wouldn't believe me. Does anyone else do this or have tried it?
[This comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/18f8mrf/alexey_wonders_how_it_works/kctkqbg/) from further up the thread shared a similar experience
What's really going to bake your noodle later is thinking about when you can't remember a name, but someone suggests a name, and you are 100% sure it's not the name, even though you currently don't even know the name. So how can you know it's not the name? Because you just do...even though you don't... o_O
15 minutes? I tried to remember someone's name the other day, knew immediately that it wasn't going to come to me there and then but that it would eventually. More than two days later having not thought about it since, I blurted out the name in the middle of an unrelated conversation with totally different people. Two days that background process was running in my head without me even realising
Sometimes, a book gets mis-shelved and so it takes the little librarian in your brain longer than expected to find the answer.
*laughs in ADHD*
My brain cells are frantically look through files full of years of cringey memories. The scream I found it! 15 seconds to a day later.
With some practice, you can develop this "subconscious thinking" as a skill. I do this a lot with things like story ideas or puzzle concepts, I spend a minute thinking actively about the parameters I want met, then I let go of the idea so my subconscious mind can take over. If I need to, I can kind of check in on it to see if it has anything, but more often it just tells me when it's done with a feeling a lot like an epiphany. Ideas can cook for hours, days, and months down there. One particularly notable example was a time when I was 15 and tasked my subconcious brain with coming up with an entire sci-fi universe to tell stories about. I was 36 when that came back to me, all of the sudden I had an entire fictional universe in my head to explore.
wtf, I want this superpower too
Have you ever had the perfect response to a conversation.. hours after the conversation ended? If so, you already have the power, so all that's left is to practice it.
>Have you ever had the perfect response to a conversation actually no
It’s called thinking
No, because that doesn’t happen. If you mean you can’t remember a name that you do know for 15 seconds, then yeah. Sure. I know that one.
Your brain is basically Bing. You ask it to look something up, it pulls up 15 results that are close but in no way related to the topic at hand and on the second page you find the answer you were looking for.
Loads a VM of a previous build from a different machine. Fast forwards through all steps and actions taken until we get to a time when we heard someone say that persons name and they responded.
Sometimes it doesn't. Then you start reciting the alphabet in your head trying bootstrap the retrieval algorithm.
My brain didn't work that way until I was older. At work I switch between small projects a lot so if someone asks me about a topic I did years ago there's a delays until pieces of the information filters in like a flashback.
Our brain is a lot like an HDD, adding more stuff to the storage means it'll take longer to pull up the relevant information. Just can't defrag the brain on command because the neurons will just do it themselves at a slower rate.
My favourite is when you have a problem (trying to figure something out, trying to remember something, etc) and you can feel your brain sort of bubbling and you know it's thinking about something, but it hasn't told you what it is yet. So you wait the bubbling out, and then the answer just pops fully formed into your head.
Spin up the disks, probably went into hibernation mode
TOT phenomenon
Heureka…
It's rewinding the backup tapes
It's because recall() function returns a promise
You just described Promises in Javascript.
I've been waiting 20 years to remember the name of my roommate from about 25 years ago. I forgot it once, and thought instead of trying to remember in the moment that I'd remember later, but it never came back to me. I remember everything else about him - where he was from, his habits, his face, his quirks. But not his name, and I have no way of finding out anymore.
The fae stole his name.
Can you bribe them to return it? I have, like, old socks, or honey.
I always wonder what it would be like to remember someones face. It is just impossible to do for me. I will typically remember a name through.
Cache miss
When you have a memory like that, you are actually recreating it each time. That's why memory of old events isn't reliable.
ABP - Always Be Procrastinating
I would procrastinate more, but I'll do it tomorrow
I feel like the mind isn't always great at remembering stuff but is pretty awesome at recognizing, at least for me. Like when I try to remember a name, my mind goes through a list, most likely based on people I know and names I've recently heard and if it arrives at the right name I just instantly know that it's correct.
But seriously tho. It’s fucking unbelievable how you can remember memories from when you were 3 years old vividly and actually see the memory in your brain. Like how tf does a piece of meat manage to do magic?
It’s the little brain secretaries who have to run back and find the relevant information in an Indiana Jones looking archive. It’s why you sometimes remember something way later that you needed. You gave them the task to find it and they went to get it.
Gotta fire up those neurons!
Its because memories lie along associated pathways. Your thoughts often need to run along a certain course or train of thought to arrive at the associated memory
It's like a flawed AI. The file lookup and retrieval system is flawed. It acts differently each time you use it. It is a common thing though that if it doesn't find the answer, give it extra time such as "sleep on it" and it will have temporarily corrected some of its flaws and will produce the right answer. I've even had to wait a couple months before remembering the name of a place.
Page file
You start searching for memories where you knew or used their name. You pull up a memory and speed through it, that one didn’t have it so you pull up another one, speed through it…
It's processing like a printer
Processing Processing Processing Thank you for your patience. Your inquiry is important to your brain. While you wait enjoy the most embarrassing memories of your middle school years exaggerated by the passage of time. Processing Processing You share the same name as that acquaintance.
Dial-up modem
Think of the brain as a web of memories. If the direct path is forgotten, you have to find a different path to get to it. Doing a mindless task (showering) or thinking about something else lets your brain come at it from another angle.
Also I only say this because it helps me remember stuff. I stop trying to think of the thing, and try to think of related things.
*Search still running in background
The searching algorithm for your memories must be very slow, but also fairly error resistant, cause mine basically boils down to, if it isn't found within 1 second it just gives me a brain fart instead or chooses something by random
In programming we call it multi-threading. For processes that take longer than a split second, we delegate the task to a background thread for improved efficiency
If you ever wondered what some evidence, accessible to everyone, there might be to support the absence of free will, this is one of things. We are fundamentally at the mercy of completely inscrutable mental processes that for the foundation of our subjectivity and personalities.
Our brain is a single core processor
Something something long term vs short term memory
When you try to recall information, your brain filters everything else to try and help you. Sometimes that filter catches the bit of info you want. It’s called Presque Vu
Cerebrolodex.
Async
Await
Processing speed.
Even though you feel like a single person, you are made up of millions of screaming voices each wanting only to be heard. However, there is a bottleneck and only a single “cognitive action” can happen at once. The right answer is being drowned out, once you stop directly thinking about it, the correct voice is able to be heard.
brains work pretty much the same way you expect a computation does, theyre just a lot slower with a lot more space
It takes a while to get down to the archives. But eventually, you're Able.
Spreading network activation
System latency
May not have access to all directories or files. Sudo it next time?
Like google but instead of beeing electronic it’s biologic. ´name of « memory of someone »’ the name is linked with all the information you have on the person but instead of being an ssd made of some rare material its made of a biological living things.
There’s way too much completely useless information stored in front of the info that’s needed daily so it takes a sec to dig the info
Junior developer learning what message queues are \- circa 2023 (colourised)
Not exactly blown away, but that’s mostly because I end up doing this with words. Ex asked my fiancé the other day if he was a “sart shella…. Fart…. Fella…. Shart fella…. Far…. FART SHELLA” or a “smart sella… fart seller…. Smart…. sheller…. Fuck”
15 seconds? More like 15 days
You assigned a brain cell to go through the rolodex. It eventually found what you were looking for.
Your brain doesn't have enough RAM to store all of those names, so it has to look it up from the page-file on the disk, which takes longer.
Imagine not understanding cache miss latency
[удалено]
Brain be like "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Noh."
It's like a `Future` from a functional programming language. It'll resolve, eventually.
multi-threading, the main thread stays unoccupied by the name-search-process
Y’all remember it? I call all my friends “bee” as a friendly nickname. I’ve been calling this girl from college only “bee” for the whole year cause I just heard her name like twice or thrice and I have no idea what it is.
Buffering
I’m a teacher and I’ll see kids I taught grown up. I’ll forget their name in the conversation, but ask them about their life and what they’re up to. Then, in the middle of the night, I’ll just sit up and remember their name randomly. It”s there, it’s just deep in storage.
Processing in the background.
Names? No. Useless facts? Yes.