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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Cross-talk, memory limitations
Message-ID: <1991Jan23.050328.8357@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 23 Jan 91 05:03:28 GMT
References: <9093@uwm.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 56

In article <9093@uwm.edu> markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
>
>   What would happen if the brain began to run out of memory?  I tried
>imagining that a while ago.  Basically what I saw was this.
>
 We would grow old and die.

>   We use a sparse coding to represent concepts.  If that coding becomes too
>crowded, then you'll progressively see more and more interference between
>related concepts any time you tried to "recall" any specific concept.  In a
>word: cross-talk.

 You are making many assumptions about how information is represented.  I
doubt that there is any justification for them.

>   It happened to me a couple times recently, though not necessarily because my
>brain's running out of space, nor because of any memory deficit (I have very
>strong associative memory capibility).  But the experience is real interesting.
>
>   The first time I was trying to bring up a word describing a child who was
>well ahead of development typical of his or her age ... and with a slightly
>sexual connotation.  The word is "precocious", but I kept coming up with
>"prodigious".
>
>   The second time, more recently, I was trying to come up with a word
>describing an event that defines future history, or an event which enables
>similar future events to happen.  The word here is "precedent", but I kept
>coming up with "prerequisite".

 This type of behavior is often seen.  It probably occurs even more often in
young people with presumably plenty of spare memory.  It is completely
consistent with my (unpublished) model of the mind, but apparently
inconsistent with yours

>   What struck me the second time this happened was the similarity of the
>two words (precocious and precedent) which I had momentary difficulty
>recalling...

 That similarity fits well with my model.

>   What was interesting about both situations was that they happened long
>enough that I could actually sit back any analyse the situation in progress.
>What kept happending was that the wqord in question would actively block
>out the other word and sometimes even the underlying concept itself.

 Actually you mis-analyzed the situation because you based your analysis on
an incorrect model.  But instead of recognizing it as a failure of your
model you have added additional complexity such as assumptions about
memory overflow.


-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940