Last November, DISCOVER and the NationalScience Foundation launched a series of events to explore the biggest questionsin science today. In the first event, “Unlocking the Secretsand Powers of the Brain,” four leading psychologists and neuroscientistsdiscussed the hottest issues in brain research, from predicting human behaviorto manipulating memory to pinpointing consciousness. Hosted by the FranklinInstitute in Philadelphia,the panel was moderated by the award-winning author (and DISCOVER blogger and columnist) CarlZimmer.
Carl Zimmer: I want to start out by talking about how surprisingly bad our brains are. We assume that they perfectly record everything around us, but research shows that we can be blind to things that are staring us in the face. What does this discovery tell us? Sam Wang: We might imagine that the visual part of our brain handles information the way a camera does, or perhaps our memory works the way a computer’s hard drive does. But that’s not the case.
When we process a visual scene, we are in the business of extracting salient features. We might be interested in finding a face in the scene or looking for objects. At the same time, we are in the business of throwing away information. Instead of getting all the pixels of a bottle of water I see, I might want to reduce it just to “bottle of water.” I might not be concerned about the fact that a particular bottle of water looks a little bit different from the other bottles. We toss away things that are not salient.
These shortcuts help us survive. They get us through the jungle. They get us to live another day. What they don’t get us is a little gigabyte hard drive of factual information.
Zimmer: Often it seems that we recall musical memories better than visual ones. Does that offer more clues into how the brain stores information?Daniel Levitin: I think music can tell us a lot about the role that emotion plays in memories, the accuracy of memories, and the way in which knowledge can be encoded into memory.
