Talking with Bill Nye the Science Guy is like meeting your best-loved HS scientific discipline teacher in a legal profession — the conversation might flail wildly , but you learn something at every wind . This week , I picked his brain about , well , wit .
Are there similarity between computing machine memory and human memory ?
Everybody remember numbers and computers call up numbers . People remember procedures and computers certainly remember procedure . But the other affair that ’s still important is that your percept as a man is affected subtly by all this poppycock that you ca n’t quite articulate . You run your life agree to all this poppycock that ’s hap to you . All of your storage impress everything you do whereas with a computer , there ’s adaptative software and things , but it ’s more literal .
So one of the significant deviation between computers and people is the subconscious ?
Yes . This business of “ Drink Coke , ” the thing they would do in moving picture theaters [ in experiments back in the late 1950s ] . On some level , that really work . Apparently it has to be an crucial image . The matter that have the cat is , you show a nude woman for less than the clip you may comprehend it , so 1/16th of a 2d , or about 60 msec . The next icon a man is expose to will be remembered well . If you ’re a hunter or if you ’re attempt to make a determination when driving , you make that decision based on clobber that you ca n’t quite perceive . So the quality of a computer memory is only as good as the instruments that are feed it .
So what ’s particular about how the human brain stores memory ?
It ’s not how large your mental capacity is . The pregnant thing is how well the brain is connected . Apparently there is redundance in memory : You hive away the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at dissimilar speeds . That speed would depend on the frequency of utilization and the importance of the cognition . If you have a storage , “ A burner is hot ; do not adjoin burner , ” you might salt away that in a few billet to make trusted you have it . It would be very powerfully reinforced . ride a bike is apparently very well fixed . But as the cerebellum degrades with years , so does the calibre of those memory . The memory are there , but they ’re not as just .
You did an episode of your show covering addiction . What were the key brain outcome there ?
There are two really strike things . First , whether it ’s Methedrine or alcohol or gambling where there ’s no chemical involved or drug call for at all , all the investigator are studying dopamine . Intropin is this brain chemical substance that gets to your Intropin sensory receptor and make you glad . You get doing the addictive behaviour to find well and then your receptor get overload with dopamine , then you stop doing the addictive matter and some of the receptors have shut down and you do n’t have enough dopamine to feel good . So then you feel bad and go back to the addictive demeanour to get more dopamine . The strange matter is that it works with what we think of as upper and sedative drug and whatever you call gambling — sidewaysers .
Are smartphones and Google going to take the place of our memory ?
I do n’t recollect so . If you memorize the periodic table it will pelt along you up if you ’re a chemist , but by and big , the grounds you have a occasional table is so that you could store that information outside of your body . That style it frees up some part of your brain to do something else , does n’t it ? Intuitively you want some position [ such as your phone ] to store phone numbers , so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks .
So you ’re say that even before the iPhone and Google and everything , we were offloading info ?
That ’s what makes a homo a man , if we store information outside our body . If you put a blaze on a lead , a streak of paint or ax chop on a Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , it shows other world where the trail is . It ’s storing data outside of your bodies . It ’s the hallmark of being a homo . I mean , dogs and other animals differentiate tree — and I ’m all for that — but it is n’t quite the same .
So we ’re not going to get stupider as a outcome of using computers ?
Boy , I do n’t think so . It ’s different skills . For example , I ’m so old — here you might say , “ How older are you ? ”
How old are you ?
I am so old , I get into engineering schoolhouse with a microscope slide linguistic rule . And I left engine room schooling with a figurer . I can still use a swoop rule but it ’s not a skill you especially take any longer . And you’re able to go on and on about these kid today , they do n’t know where the decimal point is , back in my Clarence Day … Fine ! But you do n’t really take to study the slideway rule . It ’s a nerveless thing , but a figurer is much better .
And now they have an iPhone instead of a TI - whatever .
So the first reckoner that almost everybody could afford and had was the SR-50 , Texas Instruments SR-50 . Do you bang what the SR meant ? “ swoop rule . ” It was as good as a lantern slide rule , an SR-50 . It was that good . I always say when you see that old black - and - white footage of the rocket on the launch inking pad and it accrue over and explodes , that ’s because people had sliding board rules . Not have the decimal point is a real drawback . You want the denary point , take it from me .
In geographic term , GPS has done that too , right ? hoi polloi do n’t have to remember anymore .
The US Navy has several multitude on every ship that can navigate by the genius . They do n’t fool with that . Have you ever heard of the electro - magnetic pulse ? The US Navy is very sensitive to this failure mode where people blow up enough weapon system mellow in the atmosphere and a significant fraction of the satellite are handicapped . What are you going to do ? You ’re a ship at ocean in a trackless sea . Cadets from the Naval Academy live how to voyage by the ace .
It almost makes me recall of the volume Dune and the mentats , the human information processing system .
speak of human computing gadget , there is a guy advert Art Benjamin , he ’s a human computer . He say it ’s a science he learned as a kid . Now he ’s a math professor at Harvey Mudd . He can notice the square root of a six digit identification number in a few seconds . Practice .
But is that acquirement less telling to kidskin now because they have computers ?
I do n’t bang , I cerebrate it ’s middling impressive . It might be more impressive because it might be that arithmetic is even further from a child ’s routine experience . I mean , how can you do it as tight as a machine ? And I run across so many people who are intimidated by arithmetical .
Thanks to Bill , the one and only Science Guy , for a lively discussion that also concern on global warming , the irresponsible behavior of Glenn Beck , why the internet may keep another Hitler and how estimable salmon are at smelling . As always , you may catch his bead of wisdom — and find out more about his war against ignorance — on his website .
Brain sketch byPatrick J. Lynch , medical illustrator , used under Creative Commons license
Thanks to Don for his arrangement serving
Memory [ Forever]is our week - recollective consideration of what it really means when our computer memory , encoded in morsel , menstruate in a million directions , and might truly survive forever . Read more on human memoryhere .
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-your-faulty-brain-on-a-microchip-5495086
Memory forever
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