The Importance of the Memory and Intelligence Connection by Dr. Timothy Smith

Photo Source: Unsplash

Memory from the human experience plays a crucial role in how we make sense of our world and the complex social interactions most experience daily. Fond memories of a perfect summer moment with a true love or the elation of winning a championship build our characters and produce the foundation of our self-perception. Moreover, our memory and its capacity to hold information that we analyze to make decisions helps build our human intelligence. For example, a teacher could ask a student to add five plus seven in her head, and the student would reply with twelve. However, if the teacher asked the student to add 121 plus 145 plus 14 plus 111, the student would have to pause and work to keep the numbers in her head and do the addition probably a bit slower than the first problem before saying "391."

The ability to remember, recall, and process complex information differentiates human intelligence. An individual who can add well but cannot remember numbers will struggle with adding long strings of numbers unless they can write them down and do the addition on paper. Such a statement may sound obvious, but it points out an essential element of the fascinating research into brain implants designed to improve human memory. The study conducted by Dr. Dong Song, Director of the USC Neural Modeling and Interface Laboratory at the University of Southern California at the forefront of human-machine interfaces, suggests that some forms of memory loss due to brain injury or neurodegeneration from Alzheimer's Disease may be recoverable with brain implants. (foresight.org)

Dr. Song's work, in part, focuses on developing a brain prosthesis that can take information from one part of the brain, skip past the damaged part of the brain, and convert the signal into a form that the downstream part of the brain understands. Such a bypass system depends on complex artificial intelligence that learns to convert the starting signal into the downstream form. The modeling of such signals has demonstrated some success in decoding 30-50% of the signal. Such progress suggests that the potential for developing prostheses for memory and other brain functions may one day materialize. Still, the nature of intelligence and its connection to memory implies that memory will not be enough. The ability to analyze and make decisions with the memories must also exist in equal parts.

Computers far exceed the human capacity for storing and retrieving information accurately and reliably. Still, a human's intelligence, creativity, and survival skills at this point on earth infinitely exceed our computer assistant, which partly derives from the interplay between intelligence and memory. Humans may not accurately store the entire Library of Congress in their heads. However, the selection of information from the human brain and how we process it in the context of our world for survival demonstrates our unique intelligence. The same can go for other animals and plants. The ability of a loggerhead sea turtle dropped in the ocean off of Florida to survive and find other members of its species wildly exceeds the ability of a smartphone dropped into a barrel in Yosemite National Park. The nature of intelligence and its connection to memory deserve much greater attention as we play with the idea of intelligent machines.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.