Ne types vs Ni types and memory

[Skeptic]

I've read somewhere that we use a very tiny fraction of our brains. So yeah, it may be finite, but we certainly don't/will not use it all and may not know what it's to be used for.

I've also read that information your brain deems unimportant will be 'thrown out'. One once described it to me as a warehouse where sacks of memory are strewn about, and the seemingly useless sacks will be thrown out to make way for new ones by the janitors.

That would imply a socionics correlation to memory if a type with undervalued Te throws out real life facts it subconciously deems as unimportant or detrimental to Fe related memories which it would preserve in favor of the Te related information.

Socionics already claims that this already happens to an extent (undervalued Te, valued Fe); whether it's related to memory or not is not within socionic's means to say at this time.

I honestly can't remember the circumstances I was told told these things and can't account for their credibility, but I trust my memory

[Azeroffs]

I've read somewhere that we use a very tiny fraction of our brains.

I read somewhere that that's a myth.

[MatthewZ]

I read somewhere that that's a myth.

I read the same.

[Jarno]

I've read somewhere in a type description that ILI's have the best memory.

Which seems plausible.

[Creepy-Pied Piper]

Removed at User Request

[squark]

If you see, say, and write something you're more likely to remember it than if you do one of those things in isolation. The more senses that are involved - the better the storage. Even though people are often better at one sort of memory storage than another, ie better visual than auditory, they are still more likely to remember that visual input with the added auditory input associated. They help each other. It's like when you run and jump you can get a pretty good jump, and if you jump off of a trampoline you can too, but if you run to the trampoline and then jump off of it, it's better than either in isolation, even if one of those methods by itself yields better results for you normally than the other.

It's like when someone tells you an address, and you write or type it down while repeating it to them, later on, hours and even days later you can easily recall the address from the picture on the screen/paper that's in your head and the sound of it in your ears. But, you can look at an address written down, get distracted by something else, and five minutes later have to check it again because it's gone.

It seems we usually memorize mostly what we pay attention to, so I suppose IEs probably have influence on that.

Gulenko mentions memory in Forms of Thinking, but I'm not sure how it's supposed to work - probably only as far as the kinds of information we're attuned to or not are concerned, too.

Possibly. I have a good memory for numbers, unless they're years. For some reason dates in history don't have any meaning for me (although that probably has very little to do with socionics.) House and building layouts are easy to recall, and I can close my eyes and see various buildings and houses I've visited only once and walk through them in my mind, even if more than 10 or 15 years have passed. I'm not trying to remember any of it when I walk in, and it's not particularly important information, so I don't know why I remember it.

[pianosinger]

Not necessarily type related... (haven't read every post leading up to this one, sorry)

I think each type is going to have its potential strengths and weaknesses when it comes to memory. And even then, it could depend more on interest rather than functions. For instance, I love music and singing, and have memorized hundreds of songs (music and lyrics) that I can sing at a minute's notice (and btw, it drives me nuts to hear someone singing the wrong lyrics; I struggle not to correct them when I know I know the right words). Ask me to recall the quadratic equation, though, and I'm even surprised that I could just now manage to recall the term "quadratic equation," let alone tell you what it is...

[Skeptic]

I read somewhere that that's a myth.

I read the same.

Nah. That's a pop-psych old wives tale.

Overkill guys . However it is true in that while processes do occur in these parts of the brains, we have no direct ability to affect them. However, it's been shown that once we become aware of certain body processes we can regulate it, i.e. listening to a heart beat allows the otherwise unaware individual to speed it up or slow it down without moving. How far reaching this goes is uncertain and hasn't been tested, but it could mean that the brain has potential to be used a lot more. <- Example of wooo

Right.



I think I agree with you… but then I suppose I'm not quite sure where you're coming from when you say this, so maybe I should hold off.

My conflict with this would be whether one regards IE-relevant information as something which exists 'out there'—i.e. as objective properties inherent to the natural world—or 'in here' as something which only meaningfully 'exists' in the context of a human mind to parse, interpret, and/or synthesize it ('metabolize' it). In which case then, so-called information would only be that produced (directly or indirectly) by a valuing mind, and likewise for information. I personally prefer the latter view. From there, yes, suffice to say I think an valuer would of course deemphasize and/or reinterpret -produced information in favor of something more nuanced to . I'll think further on how to clarify this later maybe.

Well given that the IEs have often been described as a lens to see reality it would follow that the world is a mix of subjective IEs. Whether or not it is us who are the subjective ones and not nature (if nature perpetuates the subjective IEs as objective values) is kind of ambiguous; I don't know if we could prove or explain it in favor of either one.

[HERO]

I generally don't have that good of a memory. I find that most conscious memories from the first years of my life (that would be from about 0-6 more or less) are quite fragmentary. And most of my memories are quite vague and not vivid and I don't have a good visual memory at all.
And with movies for example, although I can appreciate some of David Lynch's movies and some of the stories and humanism, I often space out or get easily distracted with movies and find that I wasn't really paying attention at all at certain times. I can also get bored, and often if I'm watching a movie at home, I may often pause it at times, or have to rewind it or something because I wasn't paying attention. As much as I may sometimes try to appreciate Ni-things it can sometimes be a bit of a strain, and I often don't know if I really understand it.
I often have a bad short-term memory, and I may remember a variety of things from the past (usually not extremely distant past or early childhood) especially if it has some sentimental or personal value, or something that interested me. For example, I may be listening to a song, and I find that a melody or something in the song reminds of another song I heard in the past. And usually at first I won't remember what the other song was, until eventually I remember all of a sudden. Or sometimes I know there's a word I'd like to use or remember, and often I have to wait days more or less to remember the word, especially if I have a hard time searching for it. There are probably some times where I never find out what the word I wanted to use was.

Here are some interesting quotations on the brain and memory:
The Psychogenic Theory of History

'Since, as the neurobiologist Gerald Edelman has put it, "The likelihood of guessing how the brain works without looking at its structure seems slim," we will begin with a brief overview of brain structure. The brain is composed of over 100 billion neurons, with trillions of connections, dendrites, which are branching extensions from the body of the neuron that pass stimuli received by axons on to other neurons through synapses, the specialized connections between neurons. Since this synaptic activity is either excitatory or inhibitory, much of mental life and therefore also of the social life is either manic or depressive, and one of the main tasks of leaders, as also of psychiatrists, is to adjust through social projects the level of excitation of the brain. Memorization is thought to occur through repeated stimulation of synapses, making them grow bigger and stronger, as neurotransmitters are released across synaptic gaps. Specific memories are stored all over the brain, in a much more fractured way than a computer stores memory in many files. As with a computer, however, the crucial task is retrieval of the memory, using neural networks or brain modules that serve as "indexes" for the fractured memories. As discussed in the previous chapter, early emotional memories are indexed in a network centering in the amygdala, while the conscious self system is indexed more in the hippocampus and orbital prefrontal cortex, giving the brain the ability to retrieve information stored elsewhere and providing a "working memory" system that receives emotional signals from the amygdala. A PET scan of the brain, for instance, made during "free association" shows increased blood flow in this orbitofrontal area, thus showing why the psychoanalytic process can tap into uncensored private thoughts.'

'5:1 The human brain


The amygdala is predominantly excitatory, stimulating externally oriented behavior, and the hippocampus is predominantly inhibitory, comparing current information with existing knowledge. In current situations of danger, the amygdalan system is the first to make your muscles tense and heart beat faster, while the hippocampal-prefrontal cortical system will remember whom you were with and what you were doing during the danger, so as to be able to avoid it in the future. It is the growth of the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and related areas that represents the main evolutionary development of self consciousness (beyond simple growth of cortical storage areas), allowing Homo sapiens sapiens to delay responses while comparing them to past experience and self concepts. When one dreams, one's amygdala lights up in the brain scanner like a pinball machine, as powerful early emotional memories are accessed and incorporated by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex with current daily events into long-term personality modules. The hippocampal-prefrontal cortical and amygdalan memory systems are, in fact, the real "two brains" that dissociate more rational conscious self systems from unconscious emotional memories-not a simple "right-brain," "left-brain" split. The earliest regulation of emotion in a specialized amygdalan-prefrontal-orbital network first occurs during the mother-infant mutual gaze dialogues:

The common involvement [in infants] of orbital, temporal, and amygdala neurons in the processing of sensory (particularly visual) information of emotional significance has suggested that they 'may form part of a specialized neural system for the processing of social stimuli.'..The furthest terminus of this circuit, the orbitofrontal cortex, represents the hierarchical apex of this system. This is functionally expressed in its unique capacity to categorize, abstract, store, and regulate the practicing infant's emotional responses to the face of the attachment figure.

When emotional memories are traumatic either because the trauma was so early that the hippocampus was not yet functional or because it was so powerful that the hippocampal-prefrontal cortical system couldn't fully register it-they become permanent, dissociated fears of anything that might resemble the traumatic situation. Traumas that are inescapable because of helplessness can actually severely damage the hippocampus, killing neurons. Survivors of severe childhood abuse and veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome are found to have smaller hippocampal volumes than other patients.This damage is caused by the release during traumatization of a cascade of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones that not only damage brain cells and impair memory but also set in motion a long-lasting disregulation of the brain's biochemistry. Animals that are traumatized when they are young grow up to be cowardly bullies, with less vasopressin, which regulates aggression, and serotonin, the calming neurotransmitter, which has been shown to be low in delinquents and in children who have been regularly beaten by their parents. Low serotonin is the most important marker for violence in animals and humans, and has been correlated with high rates of homicide, suicide, arson, antisocial disorders, self-mutilation, and other disorders of aggression. Early emotional abandonment by the mother or significant family members regularly lowers the serotonin level of children. Harlow's motherless monkeys who became extremely fearful and socially violent as adults like Coleman's eleven-month-old patient whose serotonin level dropped by half following the death of his sister, demonstrate the dramatic effects of trauma on serotonin levels. Imbalances in neurotransmitter levels resulting from trauma can last for decades in post-traumatic stress disorders and even in Holocaust survivors.

Consciousness which Llinás believes is a 40-hertz oscillation in the entire brain network that binds together cortical and limbic systems is present during wakefulness and dream (REM) sleep. Dreaming is a sort of "down-time" for current experience, when daily memories are evaluated against early amygdalan emotional memories, processed into long-term memory and stored in the neocortex. But traumatic stress seriously interferes with the processing of these memories and their accessibility to consciousness. The fears, anxieties and hypervigilance of traumatic stress sets off a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that disrupts hippocampal functioning, leaving memories to be stored as dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved through normal hippocampal indexing. Van der Kolk believes that often these memories are dissociated because they were never really stored in consciousness in the first place. Moreover, the "lack of secure attachments may produce the most devastating effects," he says, "because consistent external support appears to be a necessary condition in learning how to regulate internal affective states....Dissociation is a method of coping with inescapable stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore current sensory input..." As Eigen puts it in his book, The Psychotic Core, "The aggression perpetrated on the young in the name of upbringing is often tinged with or masks madness. Both parent and child live out this madness in a trancelike state akin to dreaming." It is these early trance states that are repeated in the social trances of history.'