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Recreating Biological Short Term Memory
Prologue
Among the cognitive capabilities humans and other animals possess, memory is one of the most advantageous and profound, it lifts us from living in the moment, makes us aware of time and is the foundation (along with other forms of memory) for learning, knowing and a host of other higher cognitive skills and abilities, so it stands to reason that if we are to recreate intelligence ( which for practicality we can narrowly define as a list of cognitive abilities ) we will need to recreate Short Term Memory ( STM from now on ), and this is what this post is about ( I’d recommend the wiki as additional reading along with the sources listed later ).
What/How does STM works
Well, I’ve been searching for a simple answer for over 20 years and the sad truth is that we don’t precisely know yet, like with many biological/intelligence related issues disentangling the brain and extracting clear functional correlations and systems has proven difficult ( but then again I think we are just starting out ).
So instead we will go backwards from the functional part and create/fill in the blanks ( with some observance to biology when it’s functionality relevant ) so without further ado, here’s one such arrangement:
What most people probably associate with short term memory is holding or storing past information in your brain during some time ( usually in the seconds: 10-20, to minutes with rehearsing), so the basic functionality (on the way in or encoding ) consists of being presented with a stimuli, here the first one at t0 being the number 6 and storing it in STM, a second stimulus presented later t1 the letter K is then stored into STM and so on, let's look at the other side of STM, decay and getting information out or Memory Recall :
