August 2012 – Page 2 – Auxiliary Memory

How Good is Your Visual Memory?

I recently read The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks and I can’t stop thinking about it. Sacks is professor of neurology and psychiatry that writes about medical oddities relating to cognition. The Mind’s Eye is about all aspects of vision and how it impacts the brain, our behavior and our perception of reality.

I’ve always assumed I was an average person, with average abilities, so that I was smarter than some, but dumber than others. That I was stronger than some, and weaker than others. I’ve always assumed I fit comfortably in the middle of the bell curve of what it means to be human, and thus assumed what I see and feel is pretty much what other people see and feel. Reading Oliver Sacks proves that assumption completely wrong.

We all see the world drastically different, both at a physical level and at a conceptual level. People aren’t a homogenous species. If you’ve watched the recent Olympics you know what physical extremes exists. Reading Oliver Sacks will illustrate the cognitive extremes.

Even in the snug middle of the bell curve, we’re all very different. In the last chapter of The Mind’s Eye, Sacks writes about blindness and talked about his essay on John Hull, author of Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. Hull wrote about losing his sight, and slowly forgetting all visual memories until years later he reached what he called “deep blindness.” Hull blew my mind, when he wrote that he felt deep blindness was a richer state of mind.

In his essay on Hull, Sacks seem to imply this was how blindness worked in general. Later he was surprised by all the letters he got from blind people explaining how their blindness had not worked that way. He soon learned there was an array of human responses to going blind.

From this Sacks wrote about visual memory. Sacks himself discovered he himself had poor visual memory when he took a lizard skeleton to his mother and she visually memorized it by turning it 360 degrees, stopping each 30 degrees to memorize that view. She was a surgeon and had expected her son to be a surgeon too, but when she realized he didn’t have her visual memory, she told Sacks he shouldn’t go into surgery. I suggest you find a copy of The Mind’s Eye and read the whole chapter rather than me paraphrasing it all, because it has an astounding amount of information about visual memory to contemplate. Especially the stories about blind people who still feel they live in a visual world – an artificial reality inside their heads.

Like Sacks I have poor visual memory. Sometimes when I listen to music with my eyes closed, I’ll have flashes of visual scenes, but I have no control over them, and they last so little time I can’t study their details. People with great visual memory can study their mind’s image and draw them. A stunning example is Stephen Wiltshire, who draws Rome from one helicopter ride. (See other videos here.)

If I was to go blind, I assume my experience would be pretty much like John Hull, and I’d eventually forget my visual memories and end up in deep blindness. But thinking about this, I wondered if I couldn’t exercise my visual memory, like doing push-ups to make my arms stronger, and develop my visual memory. After I read the last chapter in The Mind’s Eye I started paying more attention to visual details and became fixated on a church steeple I see on my drive to work, atop Audubon Baptist Church. I drive by a 8:25 in the morning when the sun is behind me and there is no shadows, and again at 1:55 when I’m returning from lunch, and it does have shadows.

The first time I noticed this steeple after reading the book, I tried to memorize as much as I could when I was at the light near the church. The steeple sits on a peaked A-shape roof. The steeple has four parts, a square based with one round window per side, an eight-sided level above that with large rectangular windows, an even smaller level above that with wooden shudders, again eight sides I think, and a tall steeple that comes to a very sharp point.

When I got back to work the first time I tried to draw it from memory. But I didn’t have any visual memory. I remember the peaked roof, the four sided box, an eight-sided box on top of it, and another eight-sided box on it, and then the steeple, so I tried to draw those geometric shapes. It was a terrible drawing because I tried to draw all the sides. The next time I drove by I studied it again and realized, duh!, that I only see one side of things, and only a portion of the geometric shapes, and from a certain angle. I had started my drawing with an 3d octagon wire shape, and that’s a conceptual view, not a visual view. So if I’m looking from the side, I’ll see one side of the 4 sides, and 3 sides of the 8 sides, and essentially a very long triangle.

To test my memory just now I found a picture of the church on the web and it’s nothing like what I remember seeing. For some reason I remember the church as having wood siding, and it’s brick. I did remember the wooden slates on the third level, but I didn’t remember the tall windows of the second layer. I’m no Stephen Wiltshire.

I remember having a much better visual memory when I was young and smoked pot. Oliver Sacks said he experimented with large dosages of amphetamines when he was young and for a few weeks could draw quite well, especially from his visual memory. After he stopped taking the drugs he lost all ability to draw. The poet W. H. Auden took Benzedrine to write poetry, because it helped him to concentrate intensely on detailed verbal imagery. I assume drugs in each case helps tune out larger reality so we can zoom in on a single tiny aspect, which helps the brain focus. But can visual memory be enhanced without drugs?

I’m pretty sure it can because of my experiment with looking at the church steeple. If I studied that steeple every day, and tried to draw it every day, and checked my errors every day, I’d learn about seeing and drawing, but I don’t know if I would have a better visual memory. Many of the blind people Oliver Sacks wrote about, have extremely detailed inner worlds. They know they aren’t accurate compared to the outer world they can’t see, but they are very functional models and maps that help them live and work in reality. One blind man even re-shingled his own roof, freaking out his neighbors because he worked at night. Another could design machinery with his inner sight.

I think when I have flashes of visual memory it’s more like dream memory. I have very vivid dreams, but sometimes I’ll have microsecond flashes of dream memory when I’m awake. When I took drugs when I was a kid, some of those memory flashes would last seconds. I remember one of flying over the Golden Gate bridge, as if I was a bird, or riding in a helicopter. Often my flash memories are visions from great heights – and I can’t explain that. A person with good visual memory could retain those images in their mind. I can’t. My memory of them are more like wordy descriptions, which probably explains why I write rather than paint.

I’ve always been impressed by 19th century scientific drawings. Drawing was an important skill to a scientist. I don’t know if this meant they had good visual memory, or just a good eye for detail. And that makes me wonder if I developed an eye for detail would that enhance my visual memory?

I’ve always wondered if painters had to paint 100% of what they put on canvas while observing their subjects, or did they paint some of their pictures from memory. Often when I look at photographs I think I remember in great detail, I’m shocked to find my memories are either wrong or just fuzzy smudges at best. People with perfect visual memories are often autistic. Temple Grandin, a famous autistic person, profiled by Oliver Sacks and featured in the wonderful HBO movie of the same name, thinks in visual imagery. I’ve many times wondered if animals, who don’t have our language skills, think in pictures too.

To be honest, I believe I have a poor visual memory because I go through life not paying attention to visual reality. My life is books and words. I think in concepts. And I wondered if John Hull felt deep blindness was more rewarding because it allowed him to focus more intensely on concepts. Now, I have no desire to go blind, but I can imagine after reading Sacks, that blindness isn’t the sensory depravation I once thought it was.

Also, I wonder if I can improve my current abilities. The cliché is your hearing and touch senses improve if you go blind, but do you have to go blind to improve your other senses? Can one enhance all our senses, or is their a limitation in brain processing? Because I’m getting older and my memory is failing, I pay attention to all that advice about improving memory. I started playing Words with Friends. I used to be terrible at Scrabble, but now I keep 6-8 Words with Friends games going and I can now beat people that used to always stomp me.

I’m confident if I got some drawing books and practiced, or even took some drawing classes, I could improve my drawing skills, but I also wonder if those skills would translate into better visual memory? Is that a physical limitation – you either have it or you don’t?

How good is your visual memory? Post a comment.

JWH – 8/11/12

Living in a 2D World

I’m reading The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, and his chapter on stereoscopic vision made me think about my own vision and how I live my life. I have a bad right eye and I have poor stereoscopic vision. When I close one eye I don’t notice any difference. I was told when I was young that my mind compensates with a pseudo-sense of 3D. Dr. Sacks spends quite a bit of time talking about how much he loves his stereoscopic vision, that he’s even a member of New York Stereoscopic Society and has been a lifelong collector of stereoscopic cameras and viewers. When he lost vision in one eye he wrote quite eloquently about what it means to live in a 2D world after being so attuned to 3D reality. He also chronicles a patient that spent most of her life in a 2D world, and acquired 3D vision late in life.

Sacks mentioned several times in chapter 6 that many people have weak stereoscopic vision and have learned to compensate and don’t even know what they are missing. I guess I’m one of them. But then I got to thinking about my visual world. I spend all day working in front of a computer, and all evening either at the computer, TV set, or reading books, and that means I spend a majority of my day looking at 2D fields, either of LCD or paper. I also love paintings, cover art on books, CDs, LPs, magazines, and photography. I also have a tablet computer and iPod touch – more 2D living.

I wonder if my lack of 3D vision pushed me into enjoying 2D hobbies and jobs? I love hi-rez computer screens. I’m happiest when I’m immersed in one of my 2D worlds. But I’m not alone. Is all our gadgets and screens pushing us all into preferring a 2D world? If I had been born with great vision would I have become a bookworm and computer geek? From reading The Mind’s Eye we are warned very vividly to expect a lot of changes and adapting to failing bodies and brains when we get old. All his case histories are about people adapting, so I assume I adapted before I even knew I was missing anything.

I can’t recommend The Mind’s Eye highly enough. It’s fucking intense. It’s the scariest book I’ve ever read. Most people will find this book immensely depressing and horrifying. Zombies and vampires are kittens and puppies compared to what awaits us in old age. It scares me and inspires me at the same time. It’s about people with various kinds of brain damage, usually from dementia, stroke, aging, birth defects, etc., and how they coped when their way of life was greatly disturbed when one day one of their abilities were taken away.

What’s funny is most of the people that Sacks writes about deal with their disability with great bravery, but Sacks tells us how frightening and depressed he got when he chronicles losing vision in his right eye. But even with all his physical failings, this 79-year-old man does more each day in old age than I ever did on any day in my prime.

That’s why this book is so inspiring. We’re all going to die, and more than likely, we’re all going to see our bodies and minds deteriorate before we get to take that long dirt nap. It’s going to be painful, scary, depressing and hard. But Sacks tells us stories about how people go through horrible conditions. If I have a stroke in my future, then I’ve very glad I read this book. I once had a stroke like incidence and the details in this book explained what happened to me. For a short time I lost all language awareness.

We are used to thinking that aging means failure of our physical health. But our brains wear down too, and in many ways. Sacks profiles people who have lost the ability to read or recognize faces or objects, things when we read about them sound bizarre. But if you’ve ever known people who have had a stroke, or dementia, you’ll recognize all of these horrifying failures of brain functionality.

We like to think of ourselves as little souls inside a body. That if we lose a leg or have a heart attack it’s something that’s happening to our body. We seldom contemplate what happens when our soul comes apart? If you woke up one day and couldn’t tell the difference between your wife, mother and daughter, how are you going to react? Quite a few of these stories are about people who have healthy eyes but can no longer process vision in a normal way. Sacks explores many subprograms that make up our visual processing of reality.

If you read The Mind’s Eye you’ll see how everyone adapts their limited senses to reality. No one is 100% functioning in all brain processing. Reading this book makes me realize how I’ve adapted to living in a 2D reality. My brain has adapted my vision so I can drive, walk down stairs, wash the dishes, play ball, catch a Frisbee, but from what I’ve read I’ve never known the beauty of stereoscopic vision as Dr. Sacks describes it. When Sacks lost his 3D vision, he had trouble walking down stairs, taking ahold of objects, and did things like pour wine into people’s laps.

I hope I can remember this book, because when I experience brain damage or mental malfunction, I want to stay calm and not freak out. When my brain starts breaking down and my consciousness observes the world going wacky, I want to go, “Hey, I know what this is, the area of my brain that processes written words must have conked out.” Several people in this book described seeing words as if everything was written in a different language and alphabet. Can you imagine how scary that would be? Hopefully understanding the ideas in The Mind’s Eye might help deal with such experiences – if I can remember.

The thing I fear the most is not remembering who I am. But you know what? People adapt to that too.

JWH – 8/8/12

What 12 Lessons About Life Would You Teach Your Younger Self If You Had A Time Machine?

Nobody likes taking advice from other people.

What if you could get advice from an older, wiser version of yourself? Would you take it? What if you had a time machine and could travel back to visit your younger self and spend one day to help him or her prepare for the future? Would your younger self listen and learn?

What advice would you give you? How would you be convincing. What proof could you bring?

There are two ways to approach this problem. First, you could teach yourself how to get more of what you wanted in this life with hindsight, or you could convince yourself that you should be a totally different person, a better person. If you collected rare baseball cards you could tell yourself how to get the rarest ones for your future self. Or, you could tell your younger self, don’t waste a lifetime on collecting baseball cards, just play a lot of baseball.

As much as I’ve enjoyed my life, as much as I love my wife and friends, I have never been the person I wanted to be because of introverted habits and laziness. I would go back and try to convince my younger self to become a different person knowing full well it would erase me and my current life.

If you had a time machine and could spend a day with a younger self, what age would you target? Why? What would you say?

I’d go back to 1964 when I turned 13, when I understood science fiction. I think Jim-13 could understand Jim-60 and time travel.

Here’s what I’d try to teach Jim-13.

Give up my addiction to science fiction. I have a life-long addiction to fantasy that I overindulge with books, television and movies. I’d work very hard to convince my younger self to never look at television again, and to promise to read no more than one novel a month. I’d try to convince him to read more non-fiction and classics. I’d tell him when he did read SF, to find and read the very best science fiction, but no more than four SF books a year. I’d try to convince him to seek out SF books that taught him more about reality and not use science fiction to escape reality.
Study science and mathematics. I wouldn’t try to help my younger self get rich by telling him to buy key stocks, or which horses or football teams to bet on. I’d try to teach him that the key to a good life is working hard at something you love and that being a scientist is probably the best way to spend a lifetime.
Give up junk food, eat healthy, and exercise. I was an active kid, and skinny until after I got married, but I have an addictive personality and I ate lots of junk food. Seeing Jim-60 weighing 234 pounds would probably be pretty convincing evidence.
Don’t get involved with drugs. Hey, I grew up in the 1960s, so that will be a hard lesson to teach. I might tell him to experiment under certain social conditions, but convince Jim-13 that drugs will waste a lot of time and money.
Pay more attention to other people. I’ve always been introverted, self-centered and egocentric. I’d try to convince Jim-13 that getting out of his head and focusing on what’s going on in other people’s heads will lead to more social success and a richer life.
Warn him about sex. Hey, he’s 13. I’d try to convince him that all those gazillion hours of sex fantasies won’t get him laid. I’d try to teach him not to think about what he wanted but learn to observe women and study what they wanted. I’d tell him, yes, all the girls have pussies, but the organ you really want to lust after is brains. I’d tell him to learn to dance.
Take good notes. I’d try very hard to teach Jim-13 to keep a journal, studying the art of writing as deeply as possible, learn to draw and sketch, and take one photo a day.
Find ways to make money and save it. I’d teach him working provides social contacts and access to mentors, and that saving money will mean freedom to do more. I tell him that easy money from time travel tips is wrong and a waste of time.
Finish school as fast as possible and get into college as soon as you can. I’d convince Jim-13 that it’s very important to become independent as soon as possible and college is one way to do that. Try to get in by 16.
Move in with your grandmother. My parents were alcoholics and at age 13 I was about to go through some very bad years. If I could have gotten away from them it really would have helped me tremendously. And my grandmother managed an apartment building in her old age, and could have used the help. If I could have grown up living in one place and had a stable life for junior high and high school I would have been a much different person. I’d tell my younger self to not leave Miami until after college – to even get into the University of Miami for college. Maybe even study marine biology. I’d also advise him to leave for grad school and to study physics or astronomy then.
Find mentors. I think the key to success is to start work young and find mentors that can help you understand the game in any situation.
Learn to focus and work hard. I’d tell Jim-13 to push himself to work a little harder at his favorite projects each day. To learned to focus his concentration a little harder on every task each day. If you can spend 30 minutes focused on learning calculus one day, try for 31 the next. If you can grind on a telescope mirror for 2 hours on one day, try for 2 hours and 5 minutes the next. If you can run four miles one day, try for 4.1 the next. Just keep pushing your body and mind to go further.

I know this is a fantasy and time travel isn’t possible. But playing this little thought experiment is very educational. I can always pretend its advice for Jim-13 from Jim-60, but it could be advice for Jim-80 to me at this moment.

But if this little fantasy was possible it would have played out different than what I wanted.

Convincing my younger self of all of this would be hard. If I could print out all my blog posts into a book, I give him that. I might bring an iPad to show him how far out technology gets. I might bring him the book Replay by Ken Grimwood. I might bring him a photo album of my life.

I was a bullheaded kid, so I’m not sure I could have convinced him of anything.

I’m pretty sure he would have demanded that Jim-60 stay in 1964 so he, Jim-13 could return in the time machine to 2012.

I would have agreed.

JWH – 8/4/12

The Syncing Nightmare of Too Many Computers, Backups and Cloud Drives!

The Problems:

I have three home computers, three work computers, four external hard drives, and six cloud drive accounts, with tens of thousands of original files that are multiplied into hundreds of thousands stored on backup and cloud drives.
I have personal files and work files but often I want access to both kinds no matter where I’m at.
If I delete a file from the computer I’m working on, it’s not deleted from all the backed up copies.
Every time I look at a different drive I have to constantly decide again if I want to keep or delete a file.
Because I have 4 PCs, 1 Mac and 1 Linux machine I really don’t have a primary My Documents folder.
I have copied files in so many locations that I’m not sure which is the primary backup anymore.
I had a 1.5 TB drive fail and lost 200+ documentaries I was saving.
I have too many files from using personal computers for over 30 years.

The Goals:

I want two perfectly organized Master Filing Systems, one personal, one work.
I want the easiest system possible for maintaining order and security.
I want to get rid of the external hard drives.
I want the fewest copies that equals the maximum security.
I want each of my Master Filing Systems to be backed up.
I want the files to have an organization structure that makes it obvious where everything is and belongs.
I want this to be my last file reorganization that will last me the rest of my life.
I want to clean out all the clutter and ancient files I no longer need.

Questions to Consider:

Can I trust a cloud drive like Dropbox or SkyDrive to be my Master Filing System? This certainly would make using six computers and my mobile devices the easiest to use.
Would it be practical to use a cloud drive as my Master Filing System, and then use software to mirror the cloud to local computers as backups?
Which cloud drive service is worthy of being my Master File Location?
How do I handle deleted files so the deleted files are removed from all the backups, but yet stored somewhere for long term recovery?
Do I need to worry about music files now that I have Amazon Cloud Player, Google Music, Rdio, and Rhapsody?
How do I keep my photos organized in my Master File Location and in-sync with gallery sites like Picasa?
What’s the best place to store emails?
Should I have a Master Deleted File System?
Does any cloud drive service offer a journaling file system?
When I create a Master Filing System, what folder structure should I use?
Are some file types too large to save permanently?
Can Dropbox or SkyDrive work like a roaming profile/home drive on a Windows Server?

Some Answers to Help Decide:

Dropbox offers it’s Packrat feature of unlimited undeletes for $39/yr.
Using Dropbox means spending $139 a year minimum – the price of an external drive, but external drives take power, eventually, die, fill full of clutter, and take work to move from computer to computer.
Dropbox and SkyDrive have virtual drives making them easier to use than Amazon Cloud Drive, and allowing software like Second Copy to access them.
Dropbox virtual drives are available for all my my computers and devices.
Second Copy would let me replicate files from cloud drives to my PCs, thus making them the backups and not the cloud drives.
I could buy Dropbox for my personal Master File System and use SkyDrive for my work Master File System. (I have a 25gb SkyDrive account because of work).
I have a 50gb Amazon Cloud Drive account that I could use as a cloud backup.
If I use Dropbox as my Master Filing System I could go around to all my computers, backups and other cloud drives and re-file all the files I want into it. That might be the easiest way to create a Master Filing System.
For $25 a year Amazon keeps up to 250,000 songs for me in their Cloud Player and a copy in the Cloud Drive. They also give me 50 GB of cloud space for other files. Is this secure enough for maintaining my music library?

Are Some Files Too Big To Store Permanently?

When I lost the 1.5 TB of documentaries from my HTPC I began to wonder if some files are too large to save permanently. At Dropbox’s rates, I’d have to spend $1500 a year to have maintained my documentary collection online. I’m not going to do that. Nor do I want to run a home server with backups to support such a library. Maintaining 140 GB of music files is annoying enough, with copies on my main computer, two other computers, two external drives and at Amazon and Google. But keeping a perfect copy of my music library in sync is a nightmare. Then I have a large library of audiobook files scattered across several computers to worry about. Are they even worth the worry when I spend 99.9% of time listening to books from Audible.com?

The solution here is just to live with what Netflix, Audible and Rdio provides to me, and not try to own my own library of movies, music and audiobooks. This would certainly simplify a good deal of file management.

Conclusions:

Writing all of this helped me to think things through. I’ve decided to make Dropbox my Master Filing System for personal files. Currently I have 13 GB of free space, but I might have to up it to 100 GB ($99/year). I haven’t decided if I want to spring for the $39/year Packrat feature, but it’s tempting. It will probably take me months of going through all my file locations and filing what I want to save into my new Master Filing System. I certainly hope that Dropbox doesn’t go out of business.

I’ve been using Dropbox for a while now, but as a test, I’ll start using it as my primary My Documents folder for all my devices to see what happens.

For a backup to my Master Filing System, I’ll use Second Copy to replicate Dropbox to a folder on my local hard drive. I haven’t decided if I’ll replicate to two different machines or not.

I might reduce my home computers from three to two and get rid of all the external hard drives. Since I’d run Windows Media Center on both of them, I might mirror my recorded shows to both machines, but this means maintaining 2 TB drives on both machines, and I’m not sure I like that. I’m awful tempted to give up trying to save recorded video or even collecting DVDs.

If I succeed with using Dropbox as my Master Filing System and I get a new computer, it will be very easy to set up and start working. Just install Dropbox client and my software. Then create a backup folder and start replicating Dropbox files to it as the new primary backup.

Settling on Dropbox means my home files will be available at work, but also on my iPad and iPod touch or even any computer I sit down to use as long as it’s on the internet. Let’s hope this works out.

JWH – 8/3/12