Andy Matuschak: uncertainty

Transcript context

…If there isn't, why do we forget so many things? Is there some reason the brain just forgets some of the things we’re coming across? Maybe we were training the ancestral environment to find certain things salient that don’t just map onto books? It’s a good question. We're getting to a part of the cognitive science space that I'm less familiar with and also that I suspect we simply know less about. But let me just riff a little bit. One of the things that we sort of know is this idea of spreading activation. When you go to try to look something up or when you try to deal with a particular situation, there's something almost kind of like DNS exchanges or like routing on a network or something where we start from some point that is like a stimulus, and speaking very informally, we kind of expand outwards from there and there are effectively like weights on those connections. By tuning those weights effectively, we route the packets on the network effectively. Memory is encoded in these weights, at least partially. So if you didn't forget things, then you might just have this weird cacophony on the network and in particular, what's salient? What to do next? Which response seems most appropriate to this question? You might answer those kinds of things very effectively, because all this stuff is coming up for you, that is much less relevant. One of the theories about how well we remember stuff in what circumstances is actually called predictive utility theory. And it suggests that the probability of retrieval of a particular item in a given situation actually does correspond with basically a model of to what extent the brain predicts it will be useful. Right. And then the prediction but doesn't necessarily map on to……

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