On "misremembering"

My classmate Mike in Virginia sent me this article from the Washington Post, "Why some misremembering might show your memory is functioning properly."  It's not about Alzheimer's disease or dementia, but it's still a very fascinating review of some things we're learning about how the brain works, written by a researcher in neuroscience.  

What initially caught my attention in the article was that it began with the work of  Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  Their partnership was the subject of the book The Undoing Project by one of my favorite authors, Michael Lewis.  My son got me this book for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I loved it.  It followed the careers of the two pioneering psychologists through their research years, through the breakup of their partnership, and to the death of Tversky from cancer.  Both would have received the Nobel Prize, except the recipient must be living.  So Kahneman accepted it for them both.  If you follow this stuff, you'll know that they came up with the concept of "heuristics" which now governs many statistical processes that we engage in.  This includes methods to detect viruses in your email.

If you're interested in the topic of the WaPo article, you should read it.  The upshot of it is that your brain is constantly assessing the meaning of inputs of varying quality from a myriad of sources.  For example, your ability to quickly assess the speed of a moving object that may not be in the center of your vision.  How clearly is your eye, working with your brain, able to discern it?  Is it in focus?  Then the registers in the parts of your brain containing your working memory can get filled up and make cognitive activities difficult.  This is easier to understand if you know how dependent your computer's processing ability is on its own memory.

The assumption in the 1960s, when Kahneman and Tversky were working together, was that there are a lot of deficiencies in how the brain works.  That's why people make mistakes.  One thing they studied was why military pilots made errors and crashed airplanes.  Some of their techniques improved pilot performance.  And they had other amazing insights regarding how people assess situations and make decisions.

However, the author of the article (who is working in this field) refers to newer research showing that the brain does an incredible job with the resources it has.  For example, it won't use up valuable space in working memory with unnecessary details about a topic, when that space could be used for more important information. 

ALZForum comes out tomorrow morning.  I'll see if there's anything interesting there.