Ask Lemmy

Really, what you are asking about is called metamemory. Knowing the jargon in the domain might help you find more useful information. Neuroscientists have examined how the brain monitors and corrects error. For example, here is a paper that examines what regions of the brain appear to be responsible for error correction in a semantic recall task. In some sense, you are right, there are multiple parts of the brain working on recall and error correction at once, but you should really think of the brain as a larger system whose components work together in the same way the fuel injectors and pistons of an engine are part of a larger whole.

Heuristic processing, determination based on induction rather than certainty.

let's use "on the roof again" by as an example, a 90s pop punk song.

ask your brain "who made this song?"

very rapidly it goes

music people!

not all music people.

and discards bands who definitely don't sound like it: instrumental bands, classical music, slower love ballads, female singers (since the lead singer is a male in this case).

and now there's a way smaller pool to choose from, so your brain keeps going, matching broad strokes to the broad strokes you remember from the song you're thinking of, until one band sticks out as the most likely candidate, and usually at the end you can stick that determination to a specific memory you have of looking at the album cover while you listen to the song, or some concrete moment in which a line struck you and that more concrete memory helps confirm your final answer.

this is also why people can remember things "for sure" that turn out to be incorrect, because they've gone through the heuristic process and determined a most likely answer that may not be correct, because it takes much less processing power and time to heuristically determine an answer rather than specifically determining it answer, and heuristic processing does work well most of the time.

I don't know the exact neuroscience behind it, but suspect this relates to the fallibility of memory, and whatever goes in in the brain during learning and reasoning.

So you know of multiple bands and songs, you attempt to relate a specific band and song, but because of some murky memories and rough recall, you briefly relate the wrong pieces of information, recognize the mistake, and correct for it. How that process works precisely may vary across people and their methods of recall and knowing.

In a way I suspect that the false-positive you mention may be a sort of synaptic shortcut to the correct information through whatever systems are at play in the brain for this reasoning. For some it may be that this process of rapid error correction is sometimes faster than immediate, accurate recall, or may be more of an unconscious aspect of accurate recall.

That’s the simulation buffering. I won’t go into the math, because I don’t understand it, but as the universe expands, the quantum field is stretched. This requires more and more memory to access specific data. Every conscious thought, by an increasingly populated universe, contributes to this expansion and destabilization of memory. This entropy requires the simulation to compartmentalize data to make memory more efficient. It’s why the answer is always on the tip of your tongue. Eventually the connections will be so disparate along the quantum field that everyday tasks will take longer and longer.

TLDR: The universe has dementia.