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Sokrates web site of the University Berkeley, lecture on learning. |
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Sokrates web site of the University Berkeley, lecture on learning. |
| What a strange idea, to "remember" someone. As if we would try to reassemble a body torn apart. Anyhow: Recently I tried to remember someone or, correctly speaking, someone's name. I was sitting in my kitchen on a cold winter morning, freezing, the heating turned down, and FM4 was on. Anybody who does not know what FM4 is? Well, it's music, and mostly it's loud music, something to heat up, and I needed that on that cold morning. |
| Wow, that's great, I thought by myself. Great voice! I knew that voice, I've heard it several times before, a decent, high pitched voice, perfect, firm in spite of the breathtaking pitch... It was a man's voice (incredible but true), a black man's voice, it was... it was... Oh come on, I know that name... He recently died... I think, I heard about his death some months ago - or was it some years ago? His last 10 years or so he was in a wheelchair after an accident on stage... |
| The more details I recollected from my incomplete memory, the closer I got to his name. I had begun to walk to and fro in my kitchen, and then I forced myself to say a name as close as possible to the feeling I had. I ended up with something like "Murvin Kayfight", and at the same moment, when I had finished to spell out that approximate name, I suddenly knew his true name (and probably you will know it too, now). |
| I quickly stepped to the table, grasping for any piece of paper (it was a letter's envelope), and I wrote down what I felt was close enough to my feeling, immediately before the real name had popped up. And I discovered several rights and several wrongs in my guess. I underlined all the right phonology in my guess, and obtained the following picture: Murvin Kayfight. Evidently, 7 "hits" were scattered along the whole extension of my guess, and probably exactly that made it a good one. |
| The neuroscientist will know, what happened: I took advantage of the neuronal networks in my brain. Incomplete information can be replenished, if the amount of data specific for this particular engram exceeds a certain critical level ("weight"; McNaughton & Morris 1987). After having recalled several facts associated with the owner of the voice in the radio, spelling aloud a rough guess on his name was sufficient. The additional auditory input, though it was wrong, contained enough relevant material to tilt the balance over to enlightenment within a moment. |
| He made great music, that guy. |
| B.L.McNaughton & R.G.M.Morris (1987) Hippocampal synaptic enhancement and information storage within a distributed memory system. TINS 10: 408-415 |
| 9/01 < MB 2/03 > 10/03 |
