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Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. - Walden, by H. D. Thoreau

— Game of Thrones finale

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This "learning by association" is most evident in medicine: it is often easier to remember the clinical manifestations of a disease or a treatment if you can already associate a peculiar story with them than if you simply and forcefully try to commit them to memory like a list (e.g. warfarin being used first as a rat poison) or if it can be associated with another topic you're familiar with (you can easily remember INH's side effects if you realize they resemble those of vitamin B6 deficiency than if you make them into a list). In congenital heart diseases, you can save yourself a lot of the trouble recalling and comprehending the different aspects of these illnesses by simply understanding and remembering the embryology of the heart. Same goes for a line in a book or a verse in a poem. More is less; the more related information you know, the less effort you need to recall all of them and to memorize new ones. It's as if your whole body of knowledge becomes one tangled web of associations, connections, and tangents. Attention and past knowledge and experience all aid the memorization of the new. A computer, on the other hand, doesn't care about relatability of information. In the end it's all the same; ones and zeros that must be committed forcefully—so to speak—to memory. Which is why it's easier for a computer to remember a long, chaotic string of digits or a grocery list than it is for a human. Human memory probably works like hyperlinks in a wikipedia page. But this is an analogy after all, and analogies can be misleading.

One faulty assumption about human memory is that it can become "full" in the same way a computer's memory becomes full. Yet, what experience and experiment show is that human memory grows in a peculiar way, where "more is less". It grows by association. Before I explain further, here's a very simple observation to think about: why is it easier to remember 9112001 than 7381729? For a computer, the first sequence of 7 numbers take on the same space in its memory as the second sequence of 7 numbers. Its memory does not differentiate information based on ease of memorization, only by how much space it takes on the hard drive. On the other hand, human memory does not seem to have the attribute of "space" or "capacity," and when we say figuratively that one's mind does not have a place for a new information, we often mean that it's becoming very hard to learn anything new at the moment. Human memory has another interesting attribute called "chunking" where associated informations are chunked together to make one information, thereby making it easier to remember them both together, than each alone. The first sequence is easier to remember because usually it resembles a famous date (september 11th, 2001), so all 7 numbers are chunked together into one single information. But the second sequence doesn't ring a bell, so to speak; it's 7 different pieces that all must be committed to memory. In other words: the more related information that you know, the easier it becomes to remember all of them since each connects to the next like links in a chain.

On Mind and Memory When Freud formulated his theories in the early 20th century, he frequently employed metaphors from physics and hydraulics; the mind as a hydraulic machine filled with libido whose force must be channeled and directed into useful and acceptable behaviors (catharsis) or the machine will malfunction. In the age of computers we frequently describe the brain as a supercomputer of carbon and fat. Today, in the age of artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks, we imagine the computers of the future to be brains made out of silicon... Our analogies, it seems, do not explain nor describe the mind as much as create an interpretation, a framework, a spectacle, through which we construct a theory that tries to explain the mind as we want to understand it in the context of the spirit of our age and describe it within the larger framework we—at the time—use to describe the world. These analogies are not scientific descriptions. They are statements of dogma. Today, because we liken the brain to a computer, thus we ask questions like "what is the full capacity of our memory?" and scientists try, with a straight face, to estimate an answer that ends in -bytes. (Last I checked, it's 2.5 petabyte, or 2,500 terabytes). Maybe if the Sumerians were asked, they would've given a count in clay tablets, and the Egyptians in papyrus. The answer (and the question), thus, reveal more about the spirit of our age and the way we approach life and knowledge, than it reveals an actual insight about the mind itself.

By Chiharu Shiota

والجُرحُ في زَمَنِي مَا كانَ مُندَمِلًا حَتَّى أَقُولَ اْستُجِدَّ الجُرحُ أو فُصِدَا مَالَ النَّخِيلُ عَلَى الزَّيْتُونِ مُسْتَمِعًا لِيُكْمِلَ السَّرْدَ مِنْهُ كُلَّمَا سَرَدَا

I fought, I lost, now I rest — Last words of Ser Alliser Thorne

Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second guessing himself, that’s the end. For him, for the clever little twats, for everyone. This is not the end. Not for us. Not if you lot do your duty for however long it takes to beat them back. And then you get to go on hating me, and I get to go on wishing your wildling whore had finished the job. — Ser Alliser Thorne, Game of Thrones

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