/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11917246
>To remember long speeches, ancient Greek and Roman orators imagined wandering through “memory palaces” full of reminders. Modern memory contest champions still use that technique to “place” long lists of numbers, names and other pieces of information.
The first article brings up memory palaces, but its a mnemonic technique that never worked for me, because it relies on a vivid and stable mental imagery capability, which I lack. However the fact that the technique works at all and links conceptual/memory reference to internal mental spatial navigation as directed by grid/place cells further suggests that maybe this hypothesis is on to something, not to mention the fact that grid/place cells reside in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex - memory regions of the brain.

Also I just realized perhaps this concept might partially explain the tip of the tongue phenomenon wherein general concepts associated with a word are recalled and in working memory but the specific word associated with that concept is unable to be recalled temporarily. So the conceptual grid cells are firing but there is an error upstream in recalling the specific word associated with the concept

This really feels like it could be the missing link in the model of unsymbolized thinking and what underlies it. But there's no way to be certain right now. And to clarify I'm not saying the grid/place cell activation thing is limited to unsymbolized thinkers either because the same grid/place cells activate in everyone, but that they simply have more awareness of it somehow and it alone can function as a primary method of thinking, a lot of anecdotal accounts corroborate this but nothing actually studied and verified in a lab I think. Still I firmly believe there is some link between grid cell function and unsymbolized thinking.