Intelligent Memory

Description

Alexander Beiner:

"Duggan draws on the work of Nobel-prize winning neuroscience Eric Kandel and a concept called ‘intelligent memory’ developed by Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Barry Gordon. In his book Intelligent Memory, Gordon explains:

“Intelligent Memory ... is like connecting dots to form a picture. The dots are pieces or ideas, the lines between them are your connections or associations. The lines can coalesce into larger fragments, and these fragments can merge to form a whole thought. This whole thought may be a visual image, a piece of knowledge, an idea, or even a solution to a problem. Individual pieces, the connections, and the mental processing that orchestrates them generally work together so they appear to be a single cognitive event. That's what happens when ideas or concepts "pop" into your mind.”

That Aha! moment that Picasso experienced on seeing the African sculpture is, according to Duggan, the third of four stages we go through when we come up with a new idea. We have to look at all the stages to see how Picasso’s process relates to modern generative AI."

(https://beiner.substack.com/p/lesser-gods-ai-creativity-neuroscience?)

Typology

The Four Stages:

Intelligent memory is a process of connecting dots to form a picture. In order to do that, we need to gather those dots, or points of information and experience. This is the first stage in Duggan’s process, which he calls ‘Examples from History’. This includes everything you’ve read, experienced, or seen and recorded in your memory. In your mind is a vast web of associations and potential connections. It’s so vast and complex that consciously trying to connect all those dots is impossible; the process happens subconsciously.

Generative AI tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT were fed huge chunks of the internet, a vast library of ‘examples from history’ that they use to make associations and then use those associations to generate a painting, legal contract, answer to a text message and or line of code. High level output relies on a lot of data, and humans share this need to some degree; the more we read, and the more experiences we gain in a particular domain (or that we can apply across domains), the more sophisticated and unique our creative output and intuition.

In Picasso’s case, he had his artistic training and countless other examples from history that his brain could connect, and then he was introduced to two new elements: Matisse’s The Joy of Life and the African sculpture. When he saw the sculpture, multiple existing points linked together to create a new idea: Cubism.

But Picasso wasn’t actively trying to come up with Cubism. The second stage in Duggan’s process is called ‘Presence of Mind’. We often get our best ideas when we aren’t trying to. That’s because when we let go or focus on something else, we allow our brains to make those unconscious connections. This is as much an attitude as something we do: it involves staying mindful, curious, open and receptive. We might be taking a shower, or walking the dog, having a conversation about the weather (or dinner with Matisse) when suddenly a new insight or idea pops into our heads. Eureka!

This is the third stage, the Eureka! moment, which Duggan sometimes calls a coup d'Ooeil (strike of the eye in French), borrowing the phrase from Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz. It’s the most exciting of the four stages: a sudden insight that can give us a new solution to a problem. It might be small, like the solution to a Wordle. Or it might be huge, like a new philosophy that leads us to a completely different social reality.

Von Clausewitz’s theories of good military strategy are very aligned with Duggan’s model, and he references him frequently. Von Clausewitz fought in the Napoleonic wars, and wanted to figure out why Napoleon had been so successful as a military strategist. He determined that a large part of it was Napoleon’s ability to follow what Duggan would call his ‘strategic intuition’. This in turn was based on Napoleon’s extensive knowledge of military history, and whatever it was in his attitude and temperament that made him leave space for those Eureka! moments to guide his strategy.

But it’s one thing to have an idea, and another to get an army to follow you to possible death in pursuit of it. Duggan’s fourth and final stage is Resolution - having the courage to stand by your idea and convince others of its value, even when they think it’s absurd."

(https://beiner.substack.com/p/lesser-gods-ai-creativity-neuroscience?)