Bud Vases With Suction Cup

you forgetting or Not To Be

Forgetting evokes an inevitable phenomenon, a kind of natural degradation of memory as the erosion that would erase the traces on the sand. While memory seems to be the clean living, a courageous effort against nature, is associated rather oblivion to the world of inert in nature reasserts itself after death. The analogy is tempting but misleading. I had already told in this previous post about the blackouts how oblivion is a more subtle than that. Not only can you forget to order but we especially oblivion is useful to adapt to change, we avoid the white front of the ATM when our PIN has changed. At random from my reading I discovered many other situations where oblivion is being an assistant to both small and precious our memory ...


The Babel of chattering
Before the 1970s, it was thought that a baby was learning his mother tongue from a blank page, and it was only by dint of drive that succeeded his ear to recognize a particular sound. Yet it was realized that at the age of one month a baby can distinguish sounds very similar like "ba" or "pa". And then, in 1985 it was discovered that six months of English could make babies the difference between foreign phonemes (the Ta 'retroflex' and your 'no retroflex' in Hindi, or two phonemes ki / qi equally exotic language Salish ) that an adult can not even distinguish ! This ability decreases with age and disappears at about 12 months: the exact opposite of what we expected:


Contrary to what one might have thought, a So baby would be born with an innate ability to distinguish a wide range of phonemes, a kind of universal grammar common to all languages. Learning a language the paradoxically forced to "forget" all the sounds are not material to better focus on those that are relevant. At six months are unusual vowels through the cracks and one year is the turn of the consonants. Gradually the intricacies of other languages disappear from his ear and his small inner tower of Babel is volatilized gradually. Once adult Spaniards do not distinguish v a b or u a or that the French do not understand the different r Dutch, the Japanese confuse the and r , the Germans do not distinguish between b and p, s and z etc.. The word "barbarian " does it not for the Greeks all who spoke by onomatopoeia "bar-bar-bar"?

They all look alike!
The same phenomenon of unlearning is at work as regards the recognition of faces.

The faces used in the test (source here )

Why do we confuse the faces of Asians or Africans? This difficulty in recognizing facies other ethnic groups is not related to our prejudices or our unwillingness but is common among all people: for a Chinese, all European faces are identical. But this is not innate indiscrimination: the infants three months are quite gifted to distinguish the features of a variety of African faces, Chinese, European or Middle East . As they grow, infants focus on the types of faces they are frequently exposed and lose their ability to differentiate between other ethnic groups. At nine months the children have been unable to distinguish faces that are not European. This strange unlearning is the price to pay to recognize very quickly members of his own ethnicity and to focus its identification capabilities. As for foreign languages which are no longer able to perceive the subtleties, mentally put away the faces of other ethnic groups in the category "not home", without being able to distinguish them from each other.

Forget the left-right symmetry to read

The mirroring (source here )

We are wired for assimilate an object to its mirror image because apart from the crescent moon whose orientation indicates whether it is increasing or decreasing, most natural objects appear in their profile either right or left. It reason advanced by Stanislas Dehaene to explain why children who learn to write often tend to draw their letters in reverse, as in a mirror, confounding the b and of the p and q . To learn to read and write, then, must also unlearn regarded as equivalent to the left and right ...

Forget learned!
Learning to live is also able to overcome his fears and anxieties, know how to forget a scary bark, a heartache or a big scare in bicycle. How a memory fades from our memory is again quite different from what one might think intuitively.

(source here )

If you train a rats to fear a particular sound by administering a small electric shock every time he hears it, you can pretty easily "deconditioning" by exposing it to sound without shock, or better by involving the food. After a moment, his most frightens our friend the rat. The initial conditioning was it forgotten? Not all of course: it is the galloping so long after you associate with new voters in his shock. The packaging was simply hidden, ready to resume service at the slightest alarm. The observation confirms his little brain after deconditioning original fear is ever present (the amygdala in the brain, remember? We talked about in this post ), but it is inhibited by another area brain (prefrontal cortex). What we take for oblivion is actually a new learning that restrains the first reflex behavior. Moreover, in case of injury in the prefrontal area, the animal remains quite capable of learning a new fear conditioning, but it is much more difficult to unpack.

Same with us humans: we do not forget a traumatic experience by erasing its traces in our heads as if it were a slate. Such memory is not forgotten, he tamed at most. For he lost some of its emotional charge and stop us scratching we must learn to associate with other experiences, positive or neutral: back in the saddle immediately after his fall back on the scene of a personal tragedy , talk about what has hurt us so. Well, I do most of these famous mock 'Cells of counseling "that deploys all emergency when there is a disaster somewhere ...

Not easy to forget in the depths of his brain ...
You've probably been trying to guess the object that was removed from a room or a table that you have observed well in advance? And even if you do not know the answer, your eyes will face longer subconsciously at the location of the missing object. was experienced with volunteers who

(source here )

we presented 216 photographs of faces in front of a landscape. Then participants were asked to choose among three faces, which they had seen the face of this landscape. As they reflected, the researchers analyzed the direction of their gaze and found that when looking at the right place, the hippocampus (the small area of the brain responsible for memory) cell now busily accurate, even if they eventually opted for a bad choice thereafter. They concluded that the memory was indeed present physiologically, but insufficiently strong to awaken the conscience and make the right choice.

Forgetting therefore mean sometimes hide, suppress memories, sometimes lose access to consciousness. Similarly "erasing" a computer file does not erase all the bits that compose it but remove the index used to find them and put them in the correct order. As the experts come to get some files deleted by mistake or malice, sometimes a profound stimulation of certain areas the brain makes memories resurface strongly that we had completely forgotten. Strange creature that definitely oblivion: it hides there in infants, when there's nothing to think and forget where it eludes memory just seems to be lacking. Homer Simpson, a great connoisseur of the human soul, was right: forgetting is essential to learn:



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