Memory - Charan Ranganath in podcast with Lex Fridman

This Article is my notes from Fridman podcast, link: https://lexfridman.com/charan-ranganath

Charan Ranganath, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California. His research focuses Memory, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroimaging, EEG, fMRI.

Remembering self

What we remember is not the record that we experienced. We remember the highlights, the best parts, and the bad parts. it's missing a lot of the details.

Our brain is optimized for learn what is most useful in the past and knowning the present and to predicting the future. We usually predict the future right, the bus which you take will not exploded, so you get a illusion that you know everything what will happen. When the illusion is broken, we find something error, that error is the key to learning. the error is where the learning happens.

Do things that are very unpleasant in the moment, because they can potentially provide meaningful memories, stories, or lessons that can be appreciated and enjoyed for many years afterward.

If you having shared difficult, unpleasant, or trying circumstances with other people. Those are the things that you remember the most, and make people feel closer to each other.

Why we don't look back enough? Because we often lack the confidence that they can successfully overcome or face the challenges that they have faced in the past. the actual capability to accomplish tasks or get things done in difficult moments is better than just believing that you can do it. The darker it gets, the better the story will be if you emerge on the other side.

Adolescence

Adolescence is much more important than many people realize. Teenage years are so important for the development of the brain.

People think parents consequential in forming child by making every decision. It does, but not all, children are also forming themselves.

children is learning how to get along with other people, learning who they are and how they function at the adolescent stage. that's more important than the content that children are learning in school. if they get an perfect parent working on them, that can be terribly traumatizing.

Why human don't remember much of the first few years of life?

1. hippocampus taking some time to develop.
2. neocortex is developing rapidly and changing.
3. child's self-sense takes time to develop.

In the first few years of life, kid's internal model if changing rapidly. that is not a bad thing, actually, brain is very evolved to optimize for different stages of life. like prefrontal cortex which is helps us use our knowledge to archive our goals, its takes forever to develop.

1. childhood, frontal cortex is massively reforming. as a child they wander around, they need to learn about the world the culture, the language, the people, the rules. they need to explore. they want to be free, they don't want to be tight, they didn't know what their goals are.
2. young adult, 10 years prime functioning, because they have to hunt and forage, they need to raise child, they need stay focused on the big picture and the long term goals.
3. older, going down and end up being losing all that frontal function. in our society, older is no longer responsible for hunting for studying, they are responsible for teaching, for guiding, to pass on the knowledge to the next generation.

Different types of memory

Episodic memory, semantic memory, working memory, short-term memory, long-term memory, what are the differences between them?

Researchers want to model things for experimental purposes, but in reality, they are all interconnected.

Working memory was coined by Alan Baddeley, its a short-term memory to keep and control the flow of that information in mind, to manipulate it, to use it, to make decisions based on it. we have the alibity that passively storing information, but what is more important is that we also have ability to control the flow of information that's being kept active based on what we are doing.

This working memory, some researchers call short-term memory, is not at all independent from long-term memory.

Working memory help us create internal models of events, help us predict, interpret, example: when you at a child's birthday party, when you just see a candle, you can predict the whole events that happens later. but to build that model, you need to retrieve the knowledge from the Semantic memory, and you need to retrieve the memories for specific events that happened in the past, that's Episodic memory.

How to improve memory

You don't want remember more, you want remember better. brain is designed to use the least amount of energy to get the less information. so if you want to remember everything, it's already failed. It's all about reusing information, making the most of what we already have.

When you are suprise, fear, stress, etc, your brain is realsing a lot of chemicals like norerpinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, those improve the priority of the information that you are processing, and help it memory better.

Attention is a big factor in memory. and attention is something that you can train. How we allocate our attention and how we hold attention on a thing is important. If you are an expert in something, you are training attention.

Memory Palace is a good technique, it's provide a structure for the information, give you the clues to retrieve the information.

Space repetition is another good technique, if you repeat the information over time, you can retain the information better. what behind this is memory is compete, if you remember this information in different times in different places, it's more accessible to you.

Test yourself, when you test fail, you get the error, you get the mismatch, that error is the key for our nerual network to learn. If you constantly pushing yourself to your limit, you will retain the information better. If you are feeling comfortable, you are not learning.

Find the error may let you feel uncomfortable, unconfident, lost hope, You may very very don't want to do it because of this fear, it's hard, but when you get over it, you will realize, that's the best way to learn.

Imagination and actual memory

where did the mental experience come form?

what is the diffrience between we remember something that is happen, and we thinking about something.

prefrontal cortex foucusing on the sensory information

we don't replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads.

imagination is fundamentally coupled with memory in both directions.

Memory sport example

A guy named Scott Hagwood, he has a cancer, he should treat it by chemo, but he afraid that chemo will badly affect his memory, so he want to train his memory skills. He buy a book, and practice it over and over again, and then he go to the memory competition, and win the bet.

The competition usually competition on the arbitary thing, like long list of numbers, words, or cards.

Navigation and memory

When rats puts in a box and chase the cheese, their cell in the hippocampus fire when in diffrence places in the box. So hippocampus forms a map of the box.

And our brain is effectively learning new things based on the old experiences. If you familiar with your local IKEA, you can easily know navigate in another IKEA. you can use the old map everywhere.

Rather than bascially mapping every coordinate in a space, the brain is form a graph of the space economically. It connects the major landmarks, important things, fill blanks with the details. It contains verifiable details and lots infrences.

Explain FMRI, how it measure brain activity

blood flow in the brain, blood didn't have oxygen on it, is magnetic than blood with oxygen. so we can use the magnetic to see the blood flow in the brain.

When we get a movie of the brain activity, we can observe the brain activity in different regions of the brain.

You can measure brain activity by FMRI after 6 seconds of the actual event. Because the blood flow is slow and so much back and forth in the brain.

Most of cells in the brain are not neurons, they are glial cells, they are supporting the neurons.

Major discoveries in memory

there is so many discoveries and hard to summarize, Charan mentioned a few:

• Our continuous experience is broken into discrete events and stored in memory.
• Study of how much we forget.
• Study of how expertise can memory so much things.
• Discovery of act remembering and change the memory. Strenthen the memory, or weaken the memory, or distort the memory by misinformation.

What is the similarity in humans and mice.

Human is not a big mouse, we got a lot of differences.

1. sensory information is very different. rats explore the world largely by smell.
2. we have language, and social structure.

How does deja vu work?

Deja vu is a experience of feeling like you have been in there before. experience this moment before.

Its artificial memory, mixed things fire together, make you feel like you have been there before.

How do false memories form?

Some times little distortion in filling the blanks in the memory.

If a person think he has a cancer, and he see a doctor, the doctor say things is as your expect. the person will remember the doctor say he has a cancer, but the doctor didn't say that.

The act of remembering can change the memory. if you remember something, and I told you something about the thing you remember, and then somethimes you might remember the original thing and mix it with the new thing I told you.

Social contagion is misinformation spread like a virus. we remember same thing, but I give you a little bit of wrong information, that information become your story of what happened. You and I share memory, I tell you the experience, you tell me the experience, we share the memory, and that become Our memory. The more you trust that person, or the more powerful that person is, the more they can influence your memory.

False memory implant example: During McCain vs. Bush Jr. primary, a poll asked voters: "if they'd still support McCain if he had an illegitimate black child". Many remembered this false info, and McCain lost the election.

People's sense of collective identity is very tied to shared memories. if we have a shared past, we will feel more socially connected. When some people weponize the history, that's scary.

When a group have people who are very dominant, group remembers less from the past, remember more of what the dominant person said.

When a group have a diverse group of people, and give everyone a chance to speak and everyone s being appreciated for their unique contribution, we can get more accurate memory and get more information. but that's require tolerance for discomfort, it's hard especially when we are tired, stressed.

Constant state of wanting

When you get a paycheck every month from your job, you wouldn't get excited about it. That adaptation is a major way connected to strive and not be happy. We are designed to be constantly wanting.

Dopamine is not a pleasure chemical, it's discomfort that energizes you to seek a reward. You can both use the dopamine to motivate you to do things, or you can study this discomfort and tell yourself that you don't want to hear it, its disgrees with your beliefs.

Torture can make people remember anything

CIA, and other justice department, has long history let people say that they want to hear, not necessarily the truth through torture. Their is serval reasons:

1. People get tired of being tortured, they just say whatever.
2. They set a authority figure, keep pressure and keep telling the person he is do this, and the person start to question himself. People in weakened mental state and be guided to remember the false memory.

Heartbreak

Memory is designed to capture things that biologically significant, and relationship is a big part. Sometimes heartbreak comes with massive changes in your beliefs about somebody or regret about what you did.

Lost not only comes from the relationship is over, but also from all the good things. You can change the perspective and grow to new ways.

Feeling of time

Mermory does weird things to time, if you think now and one hour ago, you may sense many differences. But if you think one year ago and one year and a hour ago, you may feel like it's the same time.

During the pandemic, people feel days are long, but weeks are short. Because people are doing the same thing at the same context. nothing is changing, memory is little, so they feel time is short in the long term.

That is because memory shapes our sense of time, and context is so important for memory.

Nostalgia

Felipe de Burgarde, think of nostalgia as a disease, because it bringing people extraordianry unhappiness. But when people get older, nostalgia can be an enormous source of happiness, but it may has the opposite effect if you thinking old days are better than now, and it's over.

Brain computer interface

BCI is developing very interesting techonology like surgical robots. And it has lots of innovation in the future.

Can we modify memory?

In some sense, we can do it behaviorally. like giving pressure, giving misinformation, etc.

But we didn't know what is the memory, Memory is so complicated.

LLM

Social system is complex, like a intersection, every intersection has its own personality, In Boston vs New York vs rural town they are all diffrerent. people are behave dynamically.

What LLM do to solve the problem is to collect a huge amount of data, they don't understand human behavior and what they think, but they can represent how people cross streets.

attention is the core to be intelligent.

Connection between ADHD and memory

Charan is been told he has ADHD, ADHD is associated with differences in preforntal funciton. Attention is shift easily, memory tends to be poor.

People with ADHD often have great memory for the things that they're interested in, and poor memory for the things that they're not interested in.

How to learn, remember things better

Be a science is enormously enabling of ADHD, you're constantly looking for new things, you're constantly seeking dopamine hit, and people tolerate your late for things. You can freely follow your curiosity.

Structure activities is important, you should learn how to allocate attention. set event boundaries, avoid switch, and goofing time is not wasting time, its an investment for attention.

Multitasking is very bad for memory, according Melina Uncapher's research.

Cal Newport wrote a book called "Deep Work", it's about how to foucs and how to allocate attention.

How Charan become a musician

Charan play trumpet in school, and he start to play guitar, but he just can't got it. it's different from trumpet, he got a lot time to practice, but it's now work.

Since Charan saw bands like Sonic Youth, it blew his mind, he was struggling because he try to write popular music at the time, and what sounded like other bands. he didn't enjoy try to play stuff that other people play.

So he start play what he like, didn't follow others style, and explore the possibilities of different sounds. it's actually fun, the whold world opened up to him.

What Charan like most about human mind

The idea of the internal model, every thing you see, you touch, is connected by internal model.

People needed to hear from scientists, and people didn't get the uncertainty of science and how much we don't know. So he write this book.

difficult unpleasant experiences cause meaningful memories and

My Information System

在信息大爆炸，碎片化的时代，我能随时获取到各种信息，但低质量，信息单一的陷阱离我很近。如何建立起一套个人的信息感知、探索，整理，总结的一套系统对我非常重要。

achieved?	goal	time	method	can improve?	feedback
🐝	Absorb Enlgish Materials regularly	2023-12-31	input,output	yes,I should create a daily routine	?

1. read a book every week.
2. Listen to 3 podcast carefully every week (write summary at blog).
3. Listen 4 podcast get the rough idea every week.
4. Shadowing 1 audio everyday, correct the pronunciation.

records:

• [ ] 2024-01
• [x] 2023-12

Some notes on English

Speaking

important things:

• say the subject first, then describe it
  • I see a girl, with long black hair
  • She eat a carrot that I bought yeasterday
• stress the important words.
• control the speed, don't speak too fast. make sure I can
• express the thought process, when I am thinking, tell others to hold on, wait a second.

sentence

• he wearing a mask
• the thing that xx

What I Mispronounced

• specific
• lauch, lunch
• thing, sing, scene
• top
• spontaneous
• ant
• clear
• really, family
• kind
• leg

IPA

group	type	symbol
vowel	front vowels	i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ
vowel	back vowels	u, ʊ, o, ɑ,ɔ
vowel	central vowels	ʌ,ə
vowel	combined vowels	ɑi, ɑʊ, ɔɪ

Free Will

Robert Sapolsky, an American neuroscientist and professor at Stanford, is hailed as the best science writer. His famous books include "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst", "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", and his latest book: "Determined".

This book is about free will. Everybody thinks they have free will because they can choose, as we know there are alternatives available to us. Sapolsky's point is that choice is not the key to free will. How did you become the sort of person who would have that intent at that point? The answer is because of the biology over which you have no control, interacting with the environment over which you have no control. Genes and environment determine who you are. There is no place for the intuitive notion of free will.

What is distributed causality? How does it influence our actions and decisions?

Our behaviors, our decisions, went on in the neurons a 10th of a second ago. But what stimuli got those neurons to do what?

• Environment like morning's hormone levels
• Plasticity of the brain in the previous months to decades, Trauma, heartache, finding love, finding god, all of those things change the brain.
• Person's adolescence and childhood and fetal life, genes, culture, the way mothers raise their children.

Our brain was being shaped by all of these things. Distributed causality is the idea that the causes of our behavior are distributed across all of these levels.

There is a famous example in neuroscience, the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who had a metal rod go through his head, and he survived. But he developed poor regulation of his behavior. It explains that the frontal cortex is important for regulating behavior.

And there is an experiment that lets people choose to shoot or not based on guessing if the other person's hand is a cell phone or a handgun. And it turns out that all sorts of things modulate people's ability to decide what they're seeing in a fraction of a second. This includes factors like being hungry, tired, stressed, scared, the environment being dangerous or benevolent, and the person's skin color. It shows that the brain will make different decisions based on all of these things in the previous hour.

A study of a bunch of parole board judges is highly likely to predict the outcome of a parole hearing based on how long it has been since the judge had a meal.

We are changed by circumstances

Two people went to the same movie. When they finished the movie, they were both changed. One person says "oh my God, that was so inspirational," and then gave his life savings away to Doctors Without Borders. The other person says "oh my God, the cinematography was so amazing in that movie, I'm going to go to film school." They were both changed by the movie, but in different ways.

Yes, they were both changed. Neither of them chose to change, they were changed by experiences. That is exactly where we get sort of prescriptions.

We, as biological machines, have some insight as to where the buttons and levers are, and to understand what makes certain types of changes more readily happening than others.

There is a whole world of changes you could bring about in people. For example, dictators, ideologues, and genocidal individuals intuitively know how to change people.

If we've been trained to respect that process and reflect on it and understand it, keep these recursive loops building and we can know our machineness.

AI and Free Will

Free will is an emergent property. With enough quantity, you invent quality and out will pop not only consciousness.

The emergence of the individual is really simple, and what's amazing is the simple individual inventing things like philosophy.

Emergence is the coolest thing on earth, from the ants and the individual neurons to suddenly doing stuff that they can't do. The different molecules that make up H2O and how they interact and produce wetness as an emergent property.

If you put enough ants together, they not only construct an amazing ant society and colony and architecture in their passageways, but they suddenly have the emergent property of being able to speak French.

Frontal Cortex evolution

The frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to mature. It's not fully mature until you're about 25 years old. We have evolved to delay maturation.

The frontal cortex's job is going to be make you do the harder thing. but what is the right thing will take you long time to learn.

Frontal cortex evolution make us as free from genes as possible.

Different mothering styles

How culture shapes the brain, mothering styles is a good example.

In collectivist cultures, like those in Southeast Asia and rice-growing regions, people tend to be more cooperative. They often work collectively with other villages to harvest rice in a single day. The parenting style in these cultures typically involves responding quickly when a baby cries.

In individualist cultures, like those in North America, people tend to be more independent and self-reliant. The parenting style in these cultures typically involves responding to a crying baby a bit later.

Even without free will, there is still steerability

How do you become the person who knows what constitutes a healthy diet?

How did you develop into the sort of person with a frontal cortex that could make you stick with that resolution?

How did you become someone who was fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood where fresh food is readily available?

Remember, all these things are influenced by a tremendous amount of biology and environment. Think about it in a logical way. Do the hard work, go back and remember that all we are is the end product of what came before.

Study of Probability

Lesson 1: Probability models and axioms

topic	details
What is probability?	a framework that dealing with uncertainty How to setup a probability model? basic rules of
Probability models Sample space Discrete Sample space	Sample space, sets 1. list should be mutually exclusive 2. should be collectively exhaustive You can also use T+ H , raining, + H, not raining in coin flip, it's allowed Discrete Sample space, Dice experiment Use a sequential description or tree-based description it's 2 stage. It's has a sample space which is finite.
Continuous Sample space	sample space is infinite. assign probabilities to individual outcome has zero probability, so we assign probabilities to subsets
Ground rules	1. probabilities be number between 0 to 1 2. Probabilities should be Non-negativity: $$P(A)>=0$$ 3. total probabilities sum=1, $$P(\Omega)=1$$ 4. Additivity: if A and B have no common, then $$if A\cap B=\Theta , P(A \cup B) = P(A)+P(B)$$ union of 3 sets,$$ P(A\cup B\cup C) = P((A\cup B)\cup C)=P(A)+P(B)+P(C)$$ it can repeat to any N sets. if A1....Am, disjoint.
subtleties	1. Additivity axiom doesn't quite do the job for everything we would like to do 2. has to do with weird sets, An event is a subset of the sample space, does this mean that we are going to assign probability to every possible subset of the sample space? -- we'd like to, but not always possible, but we are not going to encounter these sets
laws	Discrete uniform law: if all outcomes are equally likely(N of them ). then p(A)=1/N Continuous uniform law: Probability = Area P(X,Y)=0 , any point area =0

Lesson 2: Conditioning and Bayes' rule

All informations is always partial, what do we do to probabilities if we have some partial informations?

this lesson introduce 3 very useful ways, these ways break problem to simple pieces. infer things we have not seen.

Topic	details
Review	set up a model, first is come up with list of all possible outcomes. this is a sample space. 1. distinguishable from each other 2. mutually exclusive how to choose your sample space, depending on how much details you want to capture. its a art. assign subsets, disjoint subsets behave like masses, 0 probability things is not impossible, its only very very low possible. problem solving: - Specify sample space - Define probability law - Identify event of interest - Calculate
New information	you set up a model, and somebody give you a New Information, we should revise our beliefs. $$P(A\mid B) = Probability\ of\ A, given\ that\ B\ occurred$$
How do we revise the probability that A occurs?	Intuitively reasonable way: P(A|B)= part of the A in B.= 2(1+2) definition: $$P(A\mid B)=\frac{P(A\cap B)}{ P(B)}$$ so P A intersection B is the probability of B times the conditional probability $$P(A\cap B)= P(B)P(A\mid B) =P(A)P(B\mid A)$$

Lesson 3

Glucose Revolution

Glucose Revolution is a good book to understand how eat impacts our daily life energy and health.

This book is mainly talk about parts:

• what glucose is , include glucose spikes.
• why glucose spikes is bad for our health.
• what can we do about glucose spikes.

what glucose is

glucose is important for our body, it is the main energy source for our body. but too much glucose is bad for our health. this book is not talk about how to avoid glucose, It's about how to control glucose spikes.

glucose comes from energy from sun which is absorbed by plants. plants store energy with some forms, likes starch, sugar, and fiber.

all those forms of energy called carbohydrates. or carbs for short. Carbohydrates = Starch and Fiber and Sugars (glucose, fructose, sucrose)

As a human, we love to eat carbs especially sugar. but we never live in a world that you can get sugar easily. our brain didn't evolve to stop craving much sugar.

Our body will break down carbs into glucose. and the glucose in our blood will rise when we eat carbs.

why glucose spikes is bad for our health

When many glucose into our body, our cells's mitochondria will drowning in glucose, and release free radicals. too much free radicals will cause oxidative stress. that is why we feel tired after a big meal.

And there is a reaction called Maillard reaction. When we cook food, the food will turn brown. that is Maillard reaction. when we add sugar to food, the food will turn brown faster. that browning also happens in our body. and it will cause glycation. glycation is a process that sugar molecules attach to proteins.

The combination of oxidative stress and glycation will inflammation , a body's immune response, long-term inflammation will damage our body. sometimes you can see it in your skin.

So, high glucose in our blood will soon cause body damage, our body has a mechanism to prevent glucose's damage, it's insulin, a hormone that produced by pancreas. insulin will put extra glucose into storage cells, like liver, muscle, and fat cells.

Short term effect:

• Constantly hunger, High glucose -> High insulin -> Quickly drop glucose and Release Hormone that tell body to eat -> hunger
  • That's the reason why we should eat less, we should eat make body feel full but less glucose spikes.
• Craving
• Tired, mitochondria don't work well
• Poor sleep, high glucose spikes drop quickly, your body don't sleep well.
• Sick, after high glucose spikes, your immune system will be weak. case you Cold, flu, and other infections.
• Insulin resistance, pregnancy diabetes is because of insulin level is high when pregnant. cause of the need to grow bady.
• Hot flashes, night sweats.
• Migraine
• Memory and congitive problems

Long term effect:

• Acne and other skin problems
• Faster aging
• Brain damage, Alzheimer’s and dementia
• Cancer risk,
• Poor mood, brain doesn't has sensory neurons, it can't feel pain, but it will feel mental disturbance.
• Gut problems, high glucose spikes would increase leaky gut.
• Heart disease
• PCOS, Polycystic ovary syndrome
• Diabetes
• Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
• Weight gain, high glucose spikes will cause insulin resistance, and insulin resistance will cause weight gain.
• Wrinkles and cataracts

what can we do about glucose spikes

1. Eat vegtables first, then protein, then carbs.
2. Eat more fiber, much more vegtables.
3. Stop counting calories.
4. Flatten your breakfast , In the morning, your body is more sensitive to glucose spikes.
5. Sugar are the same, if you want go get it, if you can get it from whole fruit, that's better.
6. Move dessert to the end of the meal.
   1. “The best time to eat something sweet is after you’ve already eaten a meal with fat, protein, and fiber.”
   2. Don't eat sweet with empty stomach.
7. Vinegar can help lower glucose spikes.
8. Move exercise after meal.
9. Perfer savory over sweet.
10. Cover your carbs with fat, protein, and fiber.

A Walk In The Wood

Chapter 0

The call of the wild

Bill Bryson was moving to a new town, near the town there is a path sign tell that there is a famous trail called AT, Bill call it the granddaddy of long-distance hikes.

AT was 2100 miles long, from America's eastern coast to Appalachian Mountains, Especially virgina protion across fourteen states, it's so wild and full of plump hills, looks very relax, most people will can't insist to go there, and Bill's town is the middle of the on the trail full of dangerous but attracted much peoples.

Bill give himself some reasons to hike the trail:

• fit after years of boring work
• learn from the wild (I think he is not really, he just want something to boast about)
• And global warming, the trail will be changed in the future, many lives was died. and there will be more in the future.

honestly, I think one the first one is part of his real reason, the most impotantly , he is just curious and what to try something new and special, especially dangerous.

anyway, he is decide to go.

Surprise from others

He heared lots of horrible(grue) stories from his friends, include bears, bobcats, poison, or get in trouble unconsciously, the woods were full of danger.

there is some stories:

• a men pee in the midnight swooped by a owl, the scalp was dangling against the moon.
• a snake peeked into a women's warm sleep bag
• campers and bears share tents.
• people suddenly vaporized by bolt lightning.
• tents crushed by huge tree
• swept away by flash flood
• shaking ground

and there is full of diseases with no cure , the mosquitos will kill you or let you stay in a chair. the virus. muders.

and it's was not all time in a year is suitable for hike, most people hike from south to north in spring。 it will take 5 month to walk the trail end to end.

it's a long way of trail, The AT is not the highest but it's big enough, with continous moutains. you can cross 50 snowdens just in a week.

the equipment

Read One Summer America 1927

This place is for record the book One Summer America 1927's reading notes. One Summer America 1927 is a book written by Bill Bryson.

I will note every thing that i don't know for help me learn English.

Chapter 0 Prologue

ON A WARM spring evening just before Easter 1927, people who lived in tall buildings in New York were given pause when wooden scaffolding around the tower of the brand-new Sherry-Netherland Apartment Hotel caught fire and it became evident that the city’s firemen lacked any means to get water to such a height.

In this place i have some unknown words:

• prologue: a book's preface information
• were given pause: were made to stop, here means
• became evident: became clear
• lacked any means: did not have any way

Crowds flocked to Fifth Avenue to watch the blaze, the biggest the city had seen in years.

• flocked: moved or came together in large numbers
• blaze: a large fire

At 38 stories, the Sherry-Netherland was the tallest residential building ever erected, and the scaffolding – put there to facilitate the final stages of construction – covered the top fifteen storeys, providing enough wood to make a giant blaze around its summit.

• storeys, confusing to story(stories),
  • Story (Singular): Refers to a narrative, account, or tale. For example, "She told a story about her travels."
  • Stories (Plural): Refers to more than one narrative or level of a building. For example, "The book contains multiple stories," or "The building has multiple stories."
• facilitate: to make something possible or easier
• erected: ED
• summit: here is not means meeting, it's means the top of a mountain or hill

From a distance, the building looked rather like a just-stuck match.

• match here is not means compare or competition, it's means a stick to make fire.

Two pilot

The big fire on the building apartment reduce the heat of Two Pilots, They are doing a legendary challenge flight, they want to break the record of the longest flight. also it's not only competation of personal, it's also some kind of competation between countries. America as the aviation birth place, now is behind the Europe.

About how they archieve this challenge, the most important part said by one of the pilot Chamberlin was control the fuel only let the airplane just stay in the air. The stay at air time is 51 hours eventually and far more than the record.

They had welcomed by crowds of people, when they landed, the 2 pilot was very thirsty, and tired, by the fault of the groud crew who forget to bring water to them, the didn't drink water for 2 days. anyway the flight is so successful, The New York Time has reported them and said they are very hope to fly to Paris.

我对认知心理学的学习

English Verison

我正在阅读《Cognitive Psychology for Dummies》这本书，我的目的是：

• 理解人类学习、认知、知识的基本原理
• 学习最佳学习方法，特别是如何提高英语学习能力
• 提高阅读能力，因为我之前没有完整地读过一本书，所以想尝试这个挑战。

第一部分：认知心理学入门

认知心理学是研究思维能力和认知过程的科学。它关注人们的感知、注意、记忆、推理、问题解决、决策、阅读和口语等方面。

认知心理学的结构如下：

• 应用：教学、学习和自我提升。
• 信息处理框架
  • 输入 => 感知 => 注意 => 存储（短期记忆、长期记忆）=> 输出（问题解决、决策、语言等）
• 输入：大脑如何从感官中解释信息。
• 存储：大脑如何存储信息。
• 语言和思维：大脑如何处理信息，做出决策。

认知心理学如何研究？

• 实验室测试
• 计算机建模（书中提到神经网络可以模拟并成功解释人类行为）
• 脑损伤患者研究
• 分析大脑

认知心理学主要研究领域：

• 感知
• 记忆
• 语言
• 思维

人的认知上存在一些限制，有时候可能会导致灾难，例如荷兰开通的一条道路隧道连接史基浦和阿姆斯特丹，交通事故率远高于其他隧道。这是因为隧道的设计有一个锥形，当经过时大脑的视觉系统会认为出口距离较远，但实际上并不是。当司机通过出口时，车速很高来不及减速，到出口时突然减速，导致事故发生。

利用大脑的存储机制来减少创伤后伤害的一个例子：因为大脑的长期存储需要睡眠来存储记忆，所以在创伤事件发生后阻止当事人睡眠可能会减少随后的有害影响。相反，如果你正在进行重要的学习，最好是睡好觉，不要试图利用睡眠时间拜佛脚。

概要性来说，我们可以掌握一些技巧，来提高学术或学习技能：

1. 提升感知和注意力

• 注意生物钟：找到你学习的最佳时间，生物钟有最佳学习时段，好好休息，养成规律，别熬夜。
• 大量练习：提升能力的不二法门，通常对于感知和运动类都有效，对于智力学科比如学数学可能无效。
• entry point 进入注意力时间：你可以创建一个脚本，开始你的日常例行程序，比如玩三分钟的愚蠢游戏（不多不少），或者倒个茶。
• 聚焦注意力的技巧：
  • 在开始学习前，轻度到中度运动15分钟，
  • 关闭分心的事物，如手机、Facebook等。
  • 如果你有两个不同任务，属于不同的领域，可以多任务处理(后续章节会详细讲解原理)。（但是可能会降低你的效率）
  • 避免分心，研究显示说话声音是最容易分心的东西（来自广告电视周围人都会），尝试找到一个安静的环境。

2. 提高学习和记忆能力

• 一些记住东西技巧
  • 分块，将大量的信息分成小块
  • 分层，分类
  • 联想，使信息更个性化，例如用易于记忆的东西替换要学习的词语。或者将要记住的列表编成一首歌。
• 长期记忆机制
  • 分割学习、练习，短时间冲刺的学习，比长时间连续奋战更好。
  • 做测试，很好的强迫关联记忆。
• 干扰会导致遗忘，想办法专注
• 预热和放松有助于更快地检索信息。考试或者答辩时尽量让自己的相同的环境.

3. 提高阅读和写作能力

如何提高阅读能力

• 尽可能多地阅读。（看似废话其实很有用）
• 推荐的阅读过程
  • 浏览或预览文本
  • 有目的地阅读
  • 使阅读个性化
  • 抱着目的，问题去阅读
  • 翻译成自己的语言
  • 让它变得有趣
  • 利用上下文理解思想
  • 做笔记并回来看
  • 保持节奏，不要中断，不知道的单词就跳过。
  • 多读 如何提高写作能力
• 理解格式
• 先计划再写
• 想象你正在向朋友讲述和解释你的想法。

4. 更有效地利用你的思维能力

• 使用理性逻辑
• 系统化计划
• 创建和使用子目标
• 自动化思考过程
• 逆向思考
• 成长开放心态

Cognitive psychology

CN中文版

I'm currently read the book: "Cognitive Psychology for Dummies", What I want to get from this book:

• How human learning, cognitive things, knowledge, what is the basic fundamental
• The best(or good) way to learning, especially how to improve my english learning
• Improve my reading, cause I'm not read a complete book, I want try this challenge.

Part 1 Getting Started with cognitive psychology

Cognitive Psychology is a science of study mental abilities and processes about knowing. Interested in all the things that people preceiving, attending to, remembering, reasoning, problem solving, decision making , reading and speaking.

The structure of cognitive psychology is the following:

• Applications: teach,learn and self-improve.
• Information-processing framework
  • INPUT=>Perception=>Attention=>Storage(Short-term memory,Long-term memory)=>OutPut(Problem solving,Decision making,lauguage...)
• Input: how the brain interprets the information from the senses.
• Storage: how the brain stores the information.
• Language and thought: how brain process the information. make decisions.

How Cognitive Psychology do researching?

• Testing in the laboratory
• Modelling with computers(the book metioned nural network to mimic and successful explaining human behaviour)
• working with brain-damaged people
• Analysing the brain

Main areas that cognitive psychology investigates:

• Perception
• Memory
• Language
• Thinking

There are some limitations of human psychology that can cause problems, Example: the road tunnel opened in the Netherlands connecting Schiphol and Amsterdam result was a higher rate of traffic accidents. that's because the tunnel had a tapered design, brain's visual systems think the exit being father away, but in fact not. when the driver cross the exit, the car's speed is much high, so the driver had suddently slow down then cause the accident.

A example to use the brain's storage mechanism to reduce tragedy harms: Because brain's long term storage need sleep to lays down the memory, so preventing a person from sleeping in the aftermath of a traumatic event may reduce the subsequent harmful pychological effects. on the contrary if you engaged in important learning , it's better to take good sleep. not try to use the sleep time to holding the Buddha's feet.

Before we finally read the book, we can get some techniques to improve our academic or learning skill:

1. Engaging your perception and attention

• Netural body cycle: find your best time to learning, body has clock
• Massive practice: works for perceptual an motor skills, not work for intellectual subjects.
• Capturing attention: you can create a script by start your routine, like playing silly game for 3 minutes(not more, not less).
• Focusing attention techniques:
  • mild to moderate exercise 15 minutes before attempt to learn.
  • turn off distractions like mobile phone,facebook.
  • multitask, if the two tasks use different aspects of your working memory. (May lower performance)
  • avoid distraction, by researches, speech is the most distract things than other, try find a quit enviorment.

2. Improving your learning and memory

• Remember Techniques
  • Chunking, group incoming information that's largely into small chunks
  • Levels of processing framework
  • Mnemonics, make information personally, like replace the words that's you're trying to learn with something easier to learn. Put the lists to remember into a tune to form a song.
• Storing for the long term
  • Distributing practice, short bursts learning is better than long time study.
  • Testing what you know, this cause you to form new links in your memory.
• Avoid interference to forgetting
• Pre-heat and relax help you retrieving information quicker.

3. Polishing up your Reading and Writhing skills

How to Improving Reading

• as much and as often as possible.
• recommend reading process
  • Skim or preview the text
  • Read with purpose
  • Make your reading personal
  • Ask questions
  • Translate into your own language
  • Make it Interesting
  • Use context to make sense of ideas
  • Make a note and come back to it
  • Keep the flow, don't mind the word you don't known.
  • Read more

How to Improving Writing

• understand the format
• planing and writing
• imaging you are speaking and explaining your idea to your friends.

4. Using your thinking powers more Effectively

• Using rational logic
• Planing systematically
• Creating and using sub-goals
• Automating components
• Working backwards
• Growth mindset

Part 3 Memory

Long Term Memory

Long Term Memory is all the things you remember and know, such as skill, events, facts, words.

The processing allows you to remember information for a long time is memory process, there is a frame work called levels of processing framework can help us learn things, there are three levels of processing:

• Shallow processing: This involves processing information based on its physical characteristics, such as its appearance or sound. Shallow processing is relatively superficial and does not involve much semantic or meaningful processing.
• Intermediate processing: This involves processing information based on its meaning or semantic content. Intermediate processing involves deeper and more meaningful processing than shallow processing.
• Deep processing: This involves processing information based on its meaning and relating it to other information in memory. Deep processing involves the most meaningful and elaborate processing and is associated with the best memory retention.

How to classifying Long-term memories, that is the structure:

• Explicit Memory: what memory you can decribe and speak out
  • Episodic memory, remembering life events
  • Semantic memory, know the facts
• Implicit Memory: what memory you usually didn't know you can do it, such as how you swiming
  • Procedural memory: how to do things
  • Priming memory: Repetition of information and where a recent event or things influences your behaviour
  • Associative learning: where you learn to link events or objects as being related
  • Non-associative learning: Habits

how you Storing Long-term memories:

1. Stabilisation of the cells in the memory centres of the brain, take minutes or hours
2. Reorganisation of the parts of the brain , days to months or years

how to enchancing this storing progress:

• Drugs that stimulate the central nervous system. Endorphins released following exercise is the naturally-occuring stimulants.
• Sleeping after learning

what will reducing storing progress:

• Electric shocks to the brain
• A lack of oxygen to the brain
• Certain drugs (propranolol to treat post-traumatic stress disorder)

how you retrieval memory:

• active/conscious retrieval
• unintentional retrial
• recognition

Afghanistan women droped out school

As UN report, 80% children and young women in Afghanistan dropped out school, 1.2million people can't get into school after Taliban issued the injunction of women education.

http://www.inewsweek.cn/world/2023-03-06/17761.shtml

Tragedys in the world

Today is 2023, and I seen so many tragedys in the world. I realized that I need to do somethings, not just sit and watching. Even I'm too small, but I can do something.

I will explore the story of real people in the War, Incident, and tradegies. find the root reason, the human behavior, the psychology, etc.. that why bad things happen, what may lead the tradegies happy, and how to stay vigilant and avoid it.

The topic I want write in the future maybe:

• The war in Syria
• Afghanistan Women Rights
• The war in Ukraine and Russia
• The Story of Pig Butchering Scam

Afghanistan Women Rights

• Afghanistan women droped out school

learn piano

this place for log my experience of learn piano.

timeline:

• 2022-06-25 start from zero.

A method to accumulate words for learning English

为了学好英语，我曾经使用了下面的方法, 这个方法主要通过收集视频中的单词，并用脚本管理背诵，我坚持了一段时间，最后放弃了review单词，转为纯学习内容，只花很少的精力在单词上。

1. 找到自己感兴趣的听力素材，比如我《the Daily》,《Friends》
2. 从素材中分词，将所有单词计入词汇库
3. review：词汇库,扫描 标记认识的、不认识的单词(图三)
4. 听、读：将不认识的单词高亮在素材上(文章就在网页标红，视频就在字幕标红)再仔细过一遍（图一、二）
5. 如此 听读素材->review 往复循环，直到熟悉所有单词

图一: 听看

图二：读

图三：review单词

此方法优点：

1. 量大，frends 20分钟一集的素材，包含500个单词，一天熟悉上千个单词不成问题，适合快速提升。
2. 关联记忆，从素材内容中记忆，而不是单独的记某个词
3. 高亮，一篇文章几百个词认识和不认识的混在一起，难以触发想象记忆，标红之后迅速引起注意，加深大脑搜索。
4. 可量化，建立个人单词库，可以渐渐知道自己掌握多少个单词，方便制定相应的量化目标。

素材-整体进展

名称	单词量	remain unknown
The Supreme Court Considers a Football Coach’s Prayers	866	0
Friends s1e1	296	0
The Life and Career of Colin Powell	590	7
Friends s1e2	151	0
Death of a Crypto Company	457	105
How Expecting Inflation Can Actually Create More Inflation	244	102

日志

20220719 update

太开心了，我的单词app终于可以用了，collect，review，and highlight ，每天可以以非常高的效率过几百上千个单词了。等我调教好，我把这个产品封装出来。

今天：

• 完成english vocabs app
• 收集完成，《The Supreme Court Considers a Football Coach’s Prayers》《friends s1e1》,过了一遍单词

数据

• 个人词汇库总数1141
• 不熟悉320个，新词率28%

funny from 《friends》

• grab a spoon
• spell out with noodles
• fifth date rule
• accidentally break something valuable of hers. Leg?

20220728 update

同步这几天进展，这几天不断刷了2集friends, 2篇the daily 文章，单词库积累到1887，新词324分，虽然这几篇基本都理解了，在文章中听到词也能理解，但是单独的去看这些词还是不能立马想起来。

这几百个词形成了比较大的阻力，每次review需要完全过完这些单词，导致了很高的启动成本，后面准备引入collections概念，将不同素材的单词隔离，在复习素材的时候，只管当前素材的词，降低难度。

这几天过来下，这种学习方法还是挺满意的，昨天去跑步，过了2遍the daily, 我把这种方式叫做《沉浸式量化学习》，用大量饱和式素材听看，加上量化的单词，素材管理，来快速突破几个level。

现阶段挑战目标：在9月底达到2万的单词积累量。

20220729 update

将collection功能开发完成，对之前收集的单次进行简单分类，发现4篇素材里，第三篇的词最多，占了绝大部分，其他的只有20多个不认识了.

其实在一定比例下，就可以跳过，去寻找新素材了（在不断地碰撞中发现单词的出现情景，是非常有效的记忆方式）。

数据、进展

• 素材4篇，总词汇1887，Remain Unknown 213
• 今天将素材123刷了一遍，Colin Powell那篇一百多个新词，是真的累
• 新增一篇《Death of a Crypto Company》，911个单词，真可怕看来又是一场恶战，不过在素材分割处理之后，压力减轻好多，开始喜欢这种搞定一篇，再搞定一篇，进度不断往前涨的感觉了。

20220730 update

1. 完善了分词高亮功能，解决误高亮问题
2. 继续刷一遍Colin Powell，friends s1e2, 来不及刷crypto 。。o(╥﹏╥)o。，虽然比较吃力，但是还没有失控。