brain leakage
Some thoughts I need to capture
There's a general perception that as the older we get our perception of the passage of time changes. For me and I think most people, the older I've gotten the quicker that time seems flow. In talking with K about this earlier today I proposed that as we get older our brains hold more and more data, more and more information such as memories, experiences, feelings, etc. As we wind through our day to day moments we have to process and integrate our perceptions into our existing knowledge store. I posit that because older folks have a greater amount of "stuff" stored in their heads, our perception of time seems slower because it takes longer to perform the work of integrating our day-to-day and moment-to-moment perceptions.
K brought up the fact that as we get older we tend to have more responsibilities. She also mentioned that we as adults also have a greater ability to pay focused attention to some task or process (such as sitting and reading a book for an hour). I am sure there are other similar aspects of age that would play into the processing issue.
I want to know if we can measure in some objective way how much data is stored in our heads?
Can we create some kind of test or experiment to measure the volume of data stored in the brain?
There are lots of different ways to approach this I imagine. So far I come up with:
a very general knowledge test: IE. See how much people know, This seems far to subjective.
a very generic knowledge extraction test; IE, keep pulling out any data until the "bowl" is empty and compare across age groups.
Interestingly, the metaphors that underly my understanding of the brain drive some of these tests. I know the metaphors are incomplete or wrong. It's interesting to see the concepts of a "container" that holds some volume of data. Obviously its much more complicated than this. I suspect that really I need to expand the metaphor to include the idea of how our minds process the data. I mean this in terms of what Steven Pinker has referred to as "learning engines" in some of his work. I suppose I can approach this in another ways then. I can try to see if I can measure some aspect of the processing capabilities I mentioned as being affected by having more data stored in our heads .
For instance, some kind of series of tests with different age groups where subjects are given tasks to perform and then are asked questions about the task and their perception of the flow of time.
Ok. I need to go back to work.
Anyways, this is the kind of crap that is always going on in the back of my brain. This one just seemed interesting enough to me to note out here.
There's a general perception that as the older we get our perception of the passage of time changes. For me and I think most people, the older I've gotten the quicker that time seems flow. In talking with K about this earlier today I proposed that as we get older our brains hold more and more data, more and more information such as memories, experiences, feelings, etc. As we wind through our day to day moments we have to process and integrate our perceptions into our existing knowledge store. I posit that because older folks have a greater amount of "stuff" stored in their heads, our perception of time seems slower because it takes longer to perform the work of integrating our day-to-day and moment-to-moment perceptions.
K brought up the fact that as we get older we tend to have more responsibilities. She also mentioned that we as adults also have a greater ability to pay focused attention to some task or process (such as sitting and reading a book for an hour). I am sure there are other similar aspects of age that would play into the processing issue.
I want to know if we can measure in some objective way how much data is stored in our heads?
Can we create some kind of test or experiment to measure the volume of data stored in the brain?
There are lots of different ways to approach this I imagine. So far I come up with:
a very general knowledge test: IE. See how much people know, This seems far to subjective.
a very generic knowledge extraction test; IE, keep pulling out any data until the "bowl" is empty and compare across age groups.
Interestingly, the metaphors that underly my understanding of the brain drive some of these tests. I know the metaphors are incomplete or wrong. It's interesting to see the concepts of a "container" that holds some volume of data. Obviously its much more complicated than this. I suspect that really I need to expand the metaphor to include the idea of how our minds process the data. I mean this in terms of what Steven Pinker has referred to as "learning engines" in some of his work. I suppose I can approach this in another ways then. I can try to see if I can measure some aspect of the processing capabilities I mentioned as being affected by having more data stored in our heads .
For instance, some kind of series of tests with different age groups where subjects are given tasks to perform and then are asked questions about the task and their perception of the flow of time.
Ok. I need to go back to work.
Anyways, this is the kind of crap that is always going on in the back of my brain. This one just seemed interesting enough to me to note out here.