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Simfish
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Sweet Dreams pg. 168-170
"Episodic memory is not for free. One idea is that it is the very echoic power that makes episodic memory possible. Animals remember thanks to multiple repetitions of stimuli in the world. We remember, it seems, one-shot, but really, it isn't just one-shot. What we remember is stuff that has been played and replayed and replayed obsessively in our brains. "
"The hypothesis is, that until you've acquired the habit of such instant replay, permitting the choice bits of daily life to reverberate for a while in the brain, you won't have any episodic memory. This could account for infantile amnesia, of course, and a further, independent hypothesis is that it is a humans-only phenomenon, an artifact of habits of self-stimulation thatother species can't acquire in the normal course of things."
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So my question is => what do you think of this hypothesis. Is there research to back it up? And my main question, is, perhaps => how do autistic savants who remember virtually everything ( http://www.psych.ufl.edu/~lhermer-vazquez/kimpeak.pdf ) => Sciam on Kim Peek => fit into this model? Do they have a "superior sense" of instant replay?
Another question I've been having: are memories pretty much permanent if one goes into a coma and suffers no brain damage? [thereby ensuring that new memories won't interfere with previous ones?]
"Episodic memory is not for free. One idea is that it is the very echoic power that makes episodic memory possible. Animals remember thanks to multiple repetitions of stimuli in the world. We remember, it seems, one-shot, but really, it isn't just one-shot. What we remember is stuff that has been played and replayed and replayed obsessively in our brains. "
"The hypothesis is, that until you've acquired the habit of such instant replay, permitting the choice bits of daily life to reverberate for a while in the brain, you won't have any episodic memory. This could account for infantile amnesia, of course, and a further, independent hypothesis is that it is a humans-only phenomenon, an artifact of habits of self-stimulation thatother species can't acquire in the normal course of things."
==
So my question is => what do you think of this hypothesis. Is there research to back it up? And my main question, is, perhaps => how do autistic savants who remember virtually everything ( http://www.psych.ufl.edu/~lhermer-vazquez/kimpeak.pdf ) => Sciam on Kim Peek => fit into this model? Do they have a "superior sense" of instant replay?
Another question I've been having: are memories pretty much permanent if one goes into a coma and suffers no brain damage? [thereby ensuring that new memories won't interfere with previous ones?]
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