That was three days ago. Since then, I've logged into GMail maybe ten or fifteen times, and every single time I've initially typed the old password. Sometimes, I catch myself and change it before hitting "enter", but usually not. Access denied. Oops. It's getting slightly better, but I think it'll be a good few days before I'm entering the new password as automatically as I did the old one.It's not hard to see why this kind of thing happens: I'd typed in the old password hundreds, probably thousands, of times over the course of at least a year. It had become completely automatic. That kind of habit takes a long time to learn, so it's no surprise that it takes quite a while to unlearn (though hopefully not quite as long).
Psychologists will recognize the distinction between declarative memory, my concious knowledge of what my new password is, and procedural memory, my ability to unconsciously type it. It's also commonly known as "muscle memory": this is misleading because it's stored in the brain, like all knowledge, but it nicely expresses the feeling that it's your body that has the memory, rather than "you".
Damage to the hippocampus can leave people unable to remember what happened ten minutes ago, but perfectly capable of learning new skills: they just don't remember how they learned them. But you don't have to suffer brain damage to experience procedural knowledge in the absence of declarative recall. I've sometimes found myself unable to remember my password and only reminded myself by going to the login page and successfully typing it. I knew it all along - but only procedurally.
The thing about procedural knowledge is that when it works, you don't notice it's there. So we almost certainly underestimate its contribution to our lives. If you asked me what happens when I log in to GMail, I'd probably say "I type in my username and my password". But maybe it would be more accurate to say: "I go to the login screen, and my brain types my username and password."
Can I take the credit, given that sometimes I - my conciousness - don't even know the password until my brain's helpfully typed it for me? And while in this case I do know it some of the time, much of our procedural knowledge has no declarative equivalent. I can ride a bike, but if you asked me to tell you how I do it, to spell out the complex velocity-weight-momentum calculations that lie behind the adjustments that my muscles constantly make to keep me upright, I'd be stumped.
"I just sit down and pedal." But if I literally did that and nothing more, I'd fall flat on my face. There's a lot more to cycling than that, but I have no idea what it is. So can I ride a bike, or do I just happen to inhabit a brain that can? Isn't saying that I can ride a bike like saying that I can drive just because I have a chauffeur?
Take this train of thought far enough and you reach some disturbing conclusions. Maybe it's not so hard to accept that various skills lie outside the reach of our concious self, but surely the decisions to use those skills are ours alone. Sure, my brain types my username and password for me, but I'm the one who decided to login to GMail - I could have decided to turn the computer off and go for a walk instead. I have Free Will! Like George W. Bush, I'm the Decider. My brain just handles the boring details.But isn't deciding a skill too? And willing, remembering, thinking, judging, feeling, concluding - I can do all those things, but if I knew how I do them, I'd win the the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine because I'd just have solved the hardest questions of neuroscience. So can I take credit for doing them, or is it my brain?
Ultimately, every concious act must be constructed from unconscious processes; otherwise there would be an infinite regress of conciousness. If the world rested on the back of a giant turtle, what would the turtle stand on? Turtles all the way down?
Link: The Concept of Mind (1949) is a book by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, from which I "borrowed" the ideas in this post, and which was probably the one book that most inspired me to study neuroscience.
8 comments:
The memory research within the cognitive psychology has become very complicated area and, I guess, you could get a lot of replies on ideas how memory traces work during procedural memory (cue-related recollection etc).
I will not delve into that, instead I shall just add some general notes.
a) One interesting note is that not always recognizing what and how you do makes you better at that. A good example is a pro athlete's performance, e.g. a basketball player can dribble, make crazy shots etc, but if that guy started to think how he bounces the ball on the floor, how he is picking that up again etc, his performance would seriously deteriorate (I mean, try walking and thinking about every step you make: how you raise your leg, what the length of your step is going to be, at what angle you are going to lower your leg, how much will you touch the ground before raising the leg again etc). It's something about conscious mind occupying the resources of the unconscious performance. Hence, performance is optimized when spontaneous, i.e. trying to remember the password was useless, when simply typing it was and is the most efficient procedure once it's a spontaneous action?
b) the idea that unconscious actions prepare our conscious decisions is pretty powerful stuff in a sense that it makes us wonder how much we really are responsible for what we do (i guess it gets down to our personality traits and brain mechanisms responsible for it). Yet, legal system tends to look at our actions as if we are fully capable to decide what we want to do, the idea which roots lie in nothing else but a religious aspect of human nature: a free choice between good and evil. I am not going to bash the religion, I have as much respect for it as for it's (partially) contribution to formation of our culture (ancient structures, scripts, famous historical figures), but I can't help myself adding that I wish those people who wrote the Bible knew a little about neuroscience.
c) a side rout from your topic to the point B. There was an article (not in English) about personal privacy regarding legal system. I mean, using 5th amendment you can reserve the right to retrain yourself from actions that will incriminate you. Yet, brain research is, to some point, an objective way to determine what you really are. So, it comes down to how much you can use neuroscience as a forensic countermeasure for objective investigation while brain activity is a part of human behavior which that person has a right to use however that person wants during that investigation. And of course, again an idea that if you can't hide the truth when we look at the brain, then how much are you really capable of controlling it, the conscious mind is really overrated. :)
So much to discuss about this wonderful topic. But hey, I guess it's all about the hardest mystery of science, or at least from the human perspective. :)
Quite a few interesting points from a philosophical angle have been raised in this Post.
Thanks to you, "Neuroskeptic", for this wonderful thought provoking essay.
It is, in fact, these very intangible matters that gripped the attention of the ancient Sages in India literally millenia of years ago!
Their 'Findings' in brief are:
Even the so called "I" or 'you' is such a bundle of thoughts only - a procedural memory learnt ever since the creation began.
In order to really know who or what that "I" is, one has to 'unlearn' everything. This unlearning is not an infinite regress of consciousnesses. If this can be experientially 'seen', one would find that:
there is no-thing like an identifiable "I" contracted or constrained within the head (brain);
whatever "that" "I" is, it is ineffable, indescribable, beyond space-time, Infinite (not an elongated finity but un-dimensional), unborn and immutable.
"that" is the same everywhere, in everyone, all the time.
And "that" you are!
I wish modern day Neuroscience looks deeper into these aspects and scans the brains of a number of individuals who claim to have arrived at this understanding by themselves without the aid of any neuroscience. Examples are there in every country including the West and not merely esoteric India.(I can give the names and e-mails of a number of them from the UK)
regards,
ramesam
It seems like when I am depressed I am more conscious of things that are normally automatic.In a better mood everything seems much more automatic and spontanous almost to the point where it seems like someone else is doing the thinking.
Sergei: Thanks the comment. Re: a) that's definitely true - "using the Force" i.e. relying on your unconscious skills is often the only way to perform well at high speed; concious deliberation is great if you have plenty of time. Incidentally "using the Force", like "muscle memory", neatly expresses the feeling that our procedural knowledge isn't "ours", it's external.
Re: b), I agree. Although in fact, I don't think it's neuroscience so much as just logic. Our concious acts must emerge from unconscious processes because otherwise there'd be an infinite regress. That was Gilbert Ryle's argument and he knew very little if any neuroscience (partly because he was writing in the 40s, partly because he was a philosopher not a scientist.)
There's pretty good evidence that extinction does not involve unlearning - it involves learning a new, negative association (ie., typing the old password is associated with not gaining access to the website.) If you eventually learn perfectly, and no longer type the old password at all, it would be very easy for you to start typing it "automatically" if you suddenly changed it back, showing that you never actually lost the association that keeps you perseverating now. (Note that this literature is mostly in rats, not in people, but there's a good deal of evidence suggesting that the same principles apply to associative learning.)
The same thing happened to me with facebook, but now every few times I enter the wrong password, it thinks somebody is trying to break into my account and makes me change it again. It's been going on for about 3 weeks. It also won't let me change it back to the original password, because it's not longer "secure".
"....do I just happen to inhabit a brain .....?"
Do we inhabit our brains or do our brains inhabit us would depend on if consciousness is a by product of our very complex brains or if it is something separate from our physical bodies altogether.
If the former then procedural memory would inform declarative memory and freewill goes largely out of the window, if the latter then declarative memory uses procedural memory to achieve its ends (riding a bike, running up stairs etc) leaving freewill largely intact but giving us the problem of how a disembodied psyche affects a corporeal body.
I remember when I moved house recently having to change my route home from work. For a couple of weeks I had to physically fight to make the car go down a different route made all the harder by the fact that the first part of the journey was the same.
I have noticed the same thing as Anonymous @ 0429 hrs too. It is also interesting to note that you can improve performance at a task (presumably by improving one’s procedural memory) by imagining performing the task. I remember shooting an almost perfect 23/24 clays at my first clay pigeon shoot by watching the preceding competitors shoot and imagining myself shooting their clays at the same time. When it came to my turn it felt that I had been shooting all my life.
By the way can anyone tell me how to utilize the HTML tags I really imagined parts of that in italics with other parts in bold but somehow it all came out the same?
Mike Lisieski: That's a good point. I should have said "relearning" not "unlearning".
I have mostly relearned my password now. I no longer type the old one but I still have to consciously decide what to type...
Late, but I felt I had to comment.
I have brain damage in the form of lots of tiny lesions spread throughout my brain. I'm extremely familiar with knowing things without knowing how I know them; I often live days that way, obviously knowing what I'm doing but not feeling as if I know what I'm doing at all. It's a bit mind-bending. I have to trust that I know what I'm doing even if I'm not entirely sure what that is or is going to be. I know it can't be "turtles all the way down" else this sort of thing couldn't happen. (Anecdote, but still.)
Occasionally, I fail to think in words and speech becomes very difficult if possible at all -- yet sometimes I can still type. Words flow from my brain to my fingers and I don't know what I'm typing until it's on the screen. I still find that creepy. Useful, but creepy.
I would say deciding is a skill. I tend to have trouble deciding (e.g. being unable to choose what to eat out of a full cabinet and so not eating). I would say it's generally an innate skill and one that's malfunctioning in me. (And yet I decided to do this? Not worth me trying to figure out.)
I guess my brain damage has made me acutely aware of the unconscious processes of my brain if only because processes both conscious and unconscious fail at times. When the "boring details" go wrong, they suddenly become very important.
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