18 Preliminaries
term memory is encodedcompletely differentlyfrom short term or sensory/immediate memory- it appears to be encodedsemantically^19 , that is to say,associativelyin terms of itsmeaning.
There is considerable evidence for this, and it is one reason we focusso much on the importance
of meaning in the previous sections.
To miraculously transform things we try to remember from “difficult”to learn random factoids
that have to be brute-force stuffed into disconnected semantic storage units created as it were
one at a time for the task at hand into “easy” to learn factoids, all we have to do isdiscover
meaning associations with things we already know, orcreatea strong memory of the global
meaning orconceptualizationof a subject that serves as an associative home for all those little
factoids.
A characteristic of this as a successful process is that when one works systematically to learn
by means of the latter process, learning getseasieras time goes on. Every factoid you add
to the semantic structure of the global conceptualization strengthens it, and makes it even
easier to add new factoids. In fact, the mind’s extraordinary rational capacity permits it to
interpolate and extrapolate, tofill inparts of the structure on its ownwithout effortand in
many cases without even being exposed to the information that needs to be “learned”! - One area where this extrapolation is particularly evident and powerful is inmathematics. Any
time we can learn, or discover from experience aformulafor some phenomenon, a mathematical
pattern, we don’t have to actually see something to be able to “remember” it. Once again,
it is easy to find examples. If I give you data from sales figures over ayear such as January
= $1000, October = $10,000, December = $12,000, March=$3000, May = $5000, February
= $2000, September = $9000, June = $6000, November = $11,000, July = $7000, August =
$8000, April = $4000, at first glance they look quite difficult to remember. If you organize
them temporally by month and look at them for a moment, you recognize that sales increased
linearlyby month, starting at $1000 in January, and suddenly you can reduce the whole series
to a simple mental formula (straight line) and a couple pieces of initial data (slope and starting
point). One amazing thing about this is that if I asked you to “remember” something that
youhave not seen, such as sales in February in thenextyear, you could make a very plausible
guess that they will be $14,000!
Note that this isn’t a memory, it is a guess. Guessing is what the mind is designed to do, as
it is part of the process by which it “predicts the future” even in themost mundane of ways.
When I put ten dollars in my pocket and reach in my pocket for it later,I’m basically guessing,
on the basis of my memory and experience, that I’ll find ten dollars there. Maybe my guess is
wrong – my pocket could have been picked^20 , maybe it fell out through a hole. Myconceptof
object permanence plus mymemoryof an initial state permit me to make apredictive guess
about the Universe!
This is, in fact, physics! This is what physics is all about – coming up witha set of rules (like
conservation of matter) that encode observations of object permanence, more rules (equations
of motion) that dictate how objects move around, and allow me to conclude that “I put a ten
dollar bill, at rest, into my pocket, and objects at rest remain at rest. The matter the bill
is made of cannot be created or destroyed and is bound together ina way that is unlikely to
come apart over a period of days. Therefore the ten dollar bill is stillthere!” Nearly anything
that you do or that happens in your everyday life can be formulatedas a predictive physics
problem. - Thehippocampus^21 appears to be partly responsible for both forming spatial maps or visual-
izations of your environment and also for forming thecognitive mapthat organizes what you
know and transforms short term memory into long term memory, and it appears to do its job
(^19) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/semantics.
(^20) With three sons constantly looking for funds to attend movies and the like, it isn’t as unlikely as you might think!
(^21) Wikipedia: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/hippocampus.