Thursday, August 22, 2013

Reading about crypto made me think that we might store the reality in our memory using one-way hashing, which is why it's easy to recognise the usual surroundings, but difficult to remember them in details.

A side thought: if someone or something doesn't fit the patterns we already have for the similar objects, and didn't happen to grab our attention specifically, then there is a big chance that this person or object won't get registered in the memory at all, simply because it would be too expensive to apply the hashing to the new object. This might explain why people don't notice the little changes around them, too.