Does such a theorem/principle exist?

flibbage0

flibbage0

flibbage0

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Ok, this may sound strange but I have heard it before but can't remember the name of it.:o

"When you learn something new, you forget something in its place."

"More you know of something the less you know of another thing."

Thanks (I know it is an odd request)
 
What when Homer says 'everytime I learn something new it just pushes something old out of my brain. Like the time I went on that wine making course and forgot how to drive'

:p

EDIT with something useful:

I dont think the brain works like that, in that you can only hold x amount of information. IIRC its to do wtih how often you access that memory creates or strenghens the links to it making it easier to recall. If you dont remember it the links have started to degrade because you havent accessed it in a while. THis is why something like a smell or a sound can suddenly bring back a memory.

This may all be wrong as Im not a neurologist, I just think this is something I was told one.
 
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Synaptic pruning? Although it's not quite the same as what you appear to be describing.

Or maybe you're thinking of something akin to what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described in his Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.".
 
flibbage0 said:
Its just that I don't think I can remember anything more, Nothing is going in.:(
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You're just doing it wrong, the brain isn't like a bucket, you can't just put stuff into it and expect it to stay there. If anything it's like a bucket full of holes, you just poor water in and it will trickle out pretty quickly, you have to put something in that you solidly understand for it to stick.
 
Fenris said:
You're just doing it wrong, the brain isn't like a bucket, you can't just put stuff into it and expect it to stay there. If anything it's like a bucket full of holes, you just poor water in and it will trickle out pretty quickly, you have to put something in that you solidly understand for it to stick.
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That is a very good analogy, never thought of it like that.
 
flibbage0 said:
That is a very good analogy.
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To be brutally honest it isn't, really. However it's a good start. I always had the same problem in school, I would just read through a textbook and expect to remember stuff, I quickly realised this doesn't work.

Best way to learn anything is to do it over and over again, for physics make up numbers and run them through formula, for philosophy read over something and write down what you understood about it, works for nearly everything.

What subject are you revising for?
 
flibbage0 said:
Ok, this may sound strange but I have heard it before but can't remember the name of it.:o

"When you learn something new, you forget something in its place."

"More you know of something the less you know of another thing."

Thanks (I know it is an odd request)
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the second one is from

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less."
 
Weirdly enough I'm writing an essay about this sort of thing...

There's a few theories floating around on this. Check out a chap called Alan D. Baddeley. He's written a few books on the theories of human memory. The following is taken from The Essentials of Human Memory:

The forgetting of old information caused by new is normally termed retroactive interference (RI). The term "retroactive" implies that the interference works backwards, which of course is not strictly true. What does happen is that the new material somehow supersedes the old. In general this type of interference increases as the amount of new learning increases, and is most dramatic when it is interfering with a relatively weak older memory trace.
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Hope this helps
 
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