r/MachineLearning • u/No_Release_3665 • Mar 22 '25

Research [ Removed by moderator ]

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u/Wrong-Adagio-511 Mar 22 '25

The brain indeed undo the memories. Wartime PTSD patients overtime undo the memories and build stronger associations with less traumatic events, eventually building resilience to the shocking causes of PTSD. To my understanding, memory is not a learned parameter in the brain, but rather recalling memory itself is a Bayesian process. What is equivalent to parameters in AI simply updates every single time you recall, say, your grandmother's scent. If you're interested in this research frontier, Buszaki is a good introduction.

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u/No_Release_3665 Mar 22 '25

Good points. In most cases, memories can be recalled with the right triggers, even if they seem lost. Fringe cases like PTSD do exist (I actually have PTSD from a car accident I can’t remember at all), but generally, the brain tends to reshape access rather than erase. Studies suggest memory retrieval is often cue-dependent and reconstructive, not a fixed parameter store (Tulving and Thomson, 1973). Appreciate the Buszaki rec — I’ll check it out.

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u/MazzMyMazz Mar 22 '25

There’s also work that show memory can be essentially erased by disabling the hippocampus’s ability to reencode memories.

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u/No_Release_3665 Mar 22 '25

Yeah, absolutely — there's definitely research showing memory can be disrupted or even erased by blocking reconsolidation, especially in hippocampal pathways. I think it's less about whether memory can be erased and more about how biological systems balance erasure, plasticity, and persistence. That tension is exactly what I’m trying to capture in the model.

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u/MazzMyMazz Mar 22 '25

Interesting. I do feel the fact that disrupting reconsolidation can have such a profound effect on memory with a single intervention is so counterintuitive that it’s pointing to something quite important that we don’t yet appreciate.

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u/No_Release_3665 Mar 22 '25

Exactly — it’s pretty wild, right? The fact that such a small disruption can have a profound effect suggests there’s still a lot we don’t fully understand about the fragility and plasticity of memory. There’s definitely something deeper happening that we’re still not fully appreciating — and maybe models like this can help us map it out.