The Discipline of Forgetting: Synaptic Pruning, Overfitting, and the Pathology of Perfect Memory
In December 1963, a seventeen-year-old named Randy Gardner decided to stay awake for as long as he could. A Stanford sleep researcher drove down to San Diego to supervise. Gardner lasted eleven days. The progression is instructive—not for the hallucinations that arrived around day four, or the paranoia around day seven, but for a subtler deterioration: Gardner progressively lost the ability to distinguish signal from noise. By day six, every sensory input arrived with equal urgency. A shadow in peripheral vision and a spoken question occupied the same priority tier. The world had become an undifferentiated wall of data, all of it equally important, which is another way of saying none of it was important at all. ...