Weeding my Mental Garden

I wrote about my ignorance of human memory in a previous post.
I need to dig out the inapt metaphors I have growing in my mental garden. I am starting with the kudzu of conceits, the mental weed that has spread widest: human memory is / is not analogous to computer memory.

In my ignorance, I have easily shuttled back and forth between the positive and negative formations of the metaphor. As I read more deeply on the subject I was tethered to the informing metaphor, and limited by it.

Today I seek freedom. My first step was the trusty folks at Science Blogs, a friendly lily pad floating out in the internet pond.

My first stop was this post at Developing Intelligence, titled 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers. The four differences I highlight below are just the hoe to do the job:

Number 3: The brain is a massively parallel machine; computers are modular and serial

[T]he idea that computers require memory has lead some to seek for the "memory area," when in fact these distinctions are far more messy. One consequence of this over-simplification is that we are only now learning that "memory" regions (such as the hippocampus) are also important for imagination, the representation of novel goals, spatial navigation, and other diverse functions.

Number 5: Short-term memory is not like RAM

[Human] short-term memory seems to hold only "pointers" to long term memory whereas RAM holds data that is isomorphic to that being held on the hard disk.

Number 6: No hardware/software distinction can be made with respect to the brain or mind

the mind emerges directly from the brain, and changes in the mind are always accompanied by changes in the brain. Any abstract information processing account of cognition will always need to specify how neuronal architecture can implement those processes

Number 10: Brains have bodies

despite your intuitive feeling that you could close your eyes and know the locations of objects around you, a series of experiments in the field of change blindness has shown that our visual memories are actually quite sparse. In this case, the brain is "offloading" its memory requirements to the environment in which it exists: why bother remembering the location of objects when a quick glance will suffice?

I'm not saying I got it yet, but I feel that at last there is room for healthy growth.