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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information. I am regularly concerned with the number of thoughts and interesting ideas I have each day, and don't manage to write down or otherwise preserve. I have begun recording some minor annotations and idle thoughts on paper a month ago and after reviewing them today, I am shocked at how many I simply do not recall writing down at all. Worse, some of the information has lost context: I wrote it in a certain state of mind, certain emotional state which I no longer have and so the preserved words on paper are missing meaning and appear alien. The situation is so poor that it seems 20% of the material I have recorded has not even been properly preserved from only a month ago.

I find memory endlessly frustrating; we have so many unique thoughts and insights and we are forced to watch them circle the drain. Worse yet, most people aren't even aware this is happening, no internal inventory has been taken to show the poor state of affairs!

The tech community has a fixation on life extension, but I am worried I am not even properly remembering the life I am living right now, nevermind tomorrow.

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I live and work in the country, by a stream. I spend endless hours watching the stream. It is absolutely filled with wildlife; from birds, to turtles, to fish. An interesting thing about watching a stream is that, at first you may be unaware that there are any fish in it at all. I find that it takes me about 2-3 minutes before I spot the first one. Then after time I see another, and another and another. Eventually I am aware that there are hundreds, if not thousands of fish of all shapes and sizes swimming just under the surface. It is incredible, because only moments before I will have seen none of them.

The interesting thing about the stream is that it is different each day. The stream I live near is a tidal stream, since I live by the ocean. Sometimes the tide is high when I go, so the water is brackish. At those times, I can see puffer fish and some kind of long narrow fish with large eyes and fins that look a bit like wings. When the tide is low, the carp swim from upstream along with the turtles. Blue herons stand in the shallower sections trying to catch the endless minnows that skip through the pebbles in the river bed.

I have often thought to record the stream by taking pictures, or video. But then, to what end? What time shall I go? And in what season? And, if I diligently point out the numerous animals that fill the stream, will I not deprive the viewer of the greatest pleasure -- that of discovering an amazing world where one would think that nothing existed?

I think your stream of consciousness is similar. The value is not in the individual thoughts and ideas, but in the experience of those ideas rushing from one place to another. While it is important to spend time to reflect on and view this wonder, it is not necessary to preserve a snapshot of it. Doing so will only distract you from what is happening now.

A person's life is too short to do all the things he or she imagines even in a single day. Do not waste your lifetime by chasing few ephemeral ideas.

Well, some ideas make people rich, so I don't know about that last part, but I like your analogy.

Your analogy is pretty and while I agree with the sentiment I disagree with the scenario presented. I am glad I don't remember everything, yes, clearly perfect memory would be a burden. Rather I am frustrated by my lack of violation, I am not making a conscious choice to remember or forget; the decision is made for me by my flawed existence. The inability to exercise my will and make a meaningful decision over what I remember frustrates me.

That you think life is short is merely because you've forgotten most of it. When you stare at an analog clock, the seconds feel like long eternity.

> Rather I am frustrated by my lack of violation, I am not making a conscious choice to remember or forget; the decision is made for me by my flawed existence. The inability to exercise my will and make a meaningful decision over what I remember frustrates me.

You think your existence is flawed. Have you concsiously choosen this? You just happened to like the idea that you can be better than you are when you first heard of this. And after multiple tries and fails it feels/looks like something is flawed. But I think it's just a downside of that idea. Your observations clearly show that you cannot control your mind. It's just that sometimes visions of better me are in line with what's happening and sometime's are not.

Certainly brings to mind Siddhartha and what he learned from watching the river.

"But of all the water's secrets, he saw today only a single one-one that struck his soul. He saw that this water flowed and flowed, it was constantly flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always eternally the same and yet new at every moment!"

I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information.

I've worked on this for a while. I've written several different memory programs, for helping to review and memorize things. I have some thoughts that may help you feel better:

In the end, spaced repetition is not what causes people to memorize things. You can review an object over and over and over......50 times, or a hundred times, and still not remember it. Other times, something will click in your mind, and you'll remember it the first time, without any repetition.

My hypothesis is that repetition merely increases the chances of your brain being in a state where it will remember the thing you are trying to remember. And certainly there are things you can do to increase the chances of it sticking.

Having a Memory is only half the equation recall is the other. Take a movie you have not watched in a decade and write down what you recall about it and how it ends. Then watch the first half and write down what you remember about the second half. Chances are good you will be able to add a lot more details the second time.

Spaced repition aids both parts of this so not only is the information stored it's also easy to retrieve.

I think this is a big part of the trick. To remember something you need to practice recalling it.

Spaced repetition software is designed to maximise absolute throughput. That is, maximise the quantity items-remembered/year.

The way it does this is to open a firehose at your memory. If the information is simple and well presented, then ideally about 90-95% of it will stick.

If you want to retain 1000s of items (like a foreign language) and can accept some amount of loss, then spaced repetition is effective.

But it's not designed to increase the relative chance that any individual item will be remembered. If you want to learn a small number of items with 100% recall, then spaced repetition is a bad way of doing that.

https://www.supermemo.com/help/fi.htm

But it's not designed to increase the relative chance that any individual item will be remembered.

You're talking about what it was designed to do, I'm hypothesizing about what it's actually doing.

what is connected sticks. you remember one thing because it connects to something else you know and you forget another as it's not connected. or much more likely: it is actually in your memory (ie neutral pathways that 'represent' that item exist, but you have no way of actively or consciously recalling it as you cannot find those pathways in your own mind. all that works by association, so connection is key - and then you need strong connection and repeated use to make sure it's not overwritten (the connections get weaker as each neuron makes new or uses other connections) and continues to be connected.

> In the end, spaced repetition is not what causes people to memorize things. You can review an object over and over and over......50 times, or a hundred times, and still not remember it.

Ebbinghaus demonstrated that spaced repetition is what causes people to memorize things, using nonsense words for exactly that purpose, to ensure that there was no possibility of any sort of 'clicking' or semantic processes. Just pure memory based on repetition either massed or spaced.

People who really get into the idea of maintaining a large personal information store generally seem to start fashioning technology that suits them, anything from paper, cards, and filing boxes to original software development.

And the problem of information loss is, indeed, well known. Anyone who has to take meeting minutes and distil them into a report faces a huge task; human conversation regularly drifts off topic.

We have such a highly connected world now that in-brain memory, while still undeniably valuable, isn't quite as important as it used to be - certainly not as much as it was in the ancient era, where oral traditions were the rule. If you want to know general facts and principles, these days, you hit up a search engine. The only part that has to be committed to memory now is the practice and understanding necessary for subject fluency. I don't concern myself with knowing everything, but with being able to act naturally moment-to-moment, following small whims, and yet still progress towards some greater task with a few habits and techniques that will develop it regardless of the angle I am using at that moment.

For my own ideas I use a variety of techniques now: To quickly develop stuff in the near term, I open an empty, private chat room and monologue into it. To visualize, brainstorm, and recall larger things, I make mind maps. For basic to-dos I use plain text or Trello. When I need visuals, I keep around some binder paper to doodle with.

I can completely relate to that frustration. I came from an engineering background before I went to medical school and I struggled a lot with the different styles of learning (applied principles at MIT vs. knowledge acquisition in med school). The biggest mistake you can make is think that your ability to remember is just an innate ability instead of a skill that can be cultivated.

The problem with spaced repetition software is that "SR" is just one of many known cognitive principles to aid in learning and memory. The encoding process is just as, if not more important than, the review process. I highly encourage looking into interleaving vs blocking, overlearning, learning vs. performance, retrieval-induced forgetting, contextual variability, and the (pre)testing effect. Learning how to incorporate these into your existing study process could really help you out.

This is where great existing software (e.g. Anki) falls flat for many people. If you're interested in seeing an alternative approach you can check out my company's platform Memorang (https://www.memorangapp.com). We recently raised a $500K seed round and are working on some really interesting problems around learning and memory, including a new type of spaced repetition that deviates significantly from the deterministic algorithms like supermemo3/Anki. Probably even more interesting, in addition to building apps for students we're also implementing a platform for developers and education entrepreneurs to monetize their efforts.

Although we're still fairly new we finished second to duolingo at the international reimagine education awards last week. Check out Memorang (web/Android) and let us know what you think (or come join us as a dev --> founders@memorangapp.com).

Wish it could import Supermemo knowledge (with history). Simply can't afford switching to a new tool at this point (7 year Supermemo user with thousands of knowledge items).

If i may ask: how do you feel supermemo aided you? How regularly/much do you use it? What items do you store and what card models have you come to prefer (cloze, q-a, ...?) How has this impacted your life?

I have seen some kind of supermemo import for anki, not sure if it's maintained. Possibly it was just a script someone created - sorry can't find it right now.

I use it to memorize Latin (and some Greek) vocabulary. What I use mostly is Q-A. Typically it looks like this:

Q. lat. adj. black (shiny)

A. niger, -a, -um

And the other way:

Q. niger, -a, -um

A. black (shiny)

So when I enter the knowledge, I write in a .txt file the first form, and the script I run generates the second. (I read on Supermemo's website it's good to test the reverse case too, so by default I do this for all knowledge items). Over time I found it was useful to prefix vocabulary with the language (lat.) because you'll typically have the same words in another language (grk.) and if it's an adjective or adverb to append (adj./adv.) after the language prefix (I wanted a single database). For verbs I found it's sufficient to write the English part as the infinite to .. (e.g. Q. lat. to kill, A. neco (1). I will occasionally write the word with macrons in brackets after the word if it's weird, e.g.

Q. lat. adv. daily

A. cotidie (cotIdiE)

I wanted to separate the two because real Latin literature does not contain the long/short macros and I wanted to condition myself to that from the start.

I use cloze mainly for grammar.

I use Supermemo daily and it takes about 20-30 minutes to memorize what is currently ~6500 items. My daily workload is between 70-100 items and my recall is about 85%. I will admit that I'm extremely hard on myself and will only score a 5 if it's absolutely perfect.

Whatever I've looked at before of Supermemo -> Anki import did not get it right 100%. I don't want my repetition history or workload screwed around with. I also want the ability to go back to Supermemo if it doesn't work out. Unless I feel comfortable that I can switch between both systems seamlessly I'll probably never switch. I run my Supermemo on a Windows VirtualBox in Linux so it can stay that way forever.

I would probably never use Supermemo for a "live" language. It would be a waste of time, imho. For languages which are not really spoken like Attic Greek or Latin, it is indispensable.

My only real problem with Supermemo is that there is no way to access it over the Internet. The database lives in that Virtualbox Windows. It would be amazing if it had the ability to spawn a little webserver that you could do your drills from.

> a new type of spaced repetition that deviates significantly from the deterministic algorithms

Could you go into more detail about this?

And then what?

You remember everything about your life - for what benefit/purpose/reason? Even if we could remember everything we don't have the time, attention, or brainpower to dutifully filter and process three hundred million seconds (~10-20 years) of memories before making a decision, every decision.

You write down all your interesting thoughts and ideas - for who, for what? Other people have already a lifetime of thoughts themselves and more they wish they could think.

Is it almost more interesting to forget, and then you can re-experience things anew and not get bored of 'seen that, done that, been there'?

I wonder if one meaningful way forward is artificial brains/compute engines (probably required to be sentient AI - but maybe not?) which can combine and work on the thoughts and scale of thousands, then millions, of people.

"And then what?"

Nutritional deficiencies. Aging. Lack of sleep. A variety of diseases. Use of certain drugs (like marijuana).

All of these have been documented to affect memory.

Also, I think one's attitudes towards the past will affect one's memory of it. For example, I am very present- and future-oriented. I rarely dwell on the past or review my day (or my past life in general), I don't keep a journal. I also don't ascribe much importance to most day to day events. As a result (combined with some of the other factors I listed above), I don't really have a great long-term memory. Many of the things in my childhood, and even up to college and beyond are lost to me. Even when I've kept a journal, when I've gone back, I didn't remember many of the things in it. However, I think if I reviewed my journal from time to time, thought about what happened in the past more, or made an effort to remember it, I'd have a better long-term memry. Spaced repetition.

No, I meant more "why do you (parent poster) want to remember everything?". OK so hypothetical world where you remember everything ... then what? What's different, why do you want that? Humans don't have the brainpower to make use of memories of everything.

'Having loads of memories' is not exactly the same thing as 'learning more' or 'having clear focus on a goal', or 'intuition', or 'improved decision making', or 'being able to do more things', or 'knowledge', or 'wisdom' - and "I wish I remembered everything" sounds more on the lines of anxiety or hoarding, than a genuinely useful thing to desire.

And that wasn't said in the context of learning a subject, it was in the context of "remembering moment by moment thoughts" and "living well". Specifically, how do you live more-well by remembering what you thought about music one day four years ago when watering some house plants?

How many minor things do you think you've made a mistake over, repeatedly, but never learned a lesson from because each individual time was separated by months so you'd forgotten by the time you do it next?

The answer is, you don't know, because you can't remember any of them.

If they weren't bad enough mistakes to remember, how much can they really matter?

There are techniques with better payoff and retention. Check the memory systems advocated by David Roth or Harry Lorayne, or the locus method (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci)

Read also: Moonwalking with Einstein

Seconding this recommendation -- this book was a really fun (and fast!) read and was really eye-opening about how real memory tricks work and started to get me thinking about the utility of having vast amounts of information memorized.

Also see the Mentat Wiki:

http://www.ludism.org/mentat

They've got many great, practical articles on mnemonics and other memorization techniques.

How do you know they have better payoff and retention?

I don't have any studies, but check the wikipedia page for examples of Memory Championship winners using the method to, for example, memorize a deck of shuffled cards or a random sequence of digits. I bet Moonwalking with Einstein would have some references in the scientific literature.

The issue with the methods is that you have to use them actively. As the author's mentor says in the book: most of the memory champions have horrible memory in normal situations, they were just desperate to change that, so they pursued mnemonic techniques. You might have an elaborate system to remember hundreds of playing cards in a loci palace (which takes months and lots of repetition to develop!!) and still frequently lose your key or forget names.

You can develop/discover and consciously apply mnemonic techniques for each situation (eg remembering names at a party by associating the name with prominent features of the face or funny analogies) but if you don't use them they'll be of little help.

Bill Clinton (or was it JFK??) is said to have all his life kept a notebook with him and scribbled down any personal facts revealed in a situation - name, alma mater, etc - and was then able to recall them when meeting the same person years later. He must have had an impressive system and much dedication - but also must have been a bit awkward to talk to when everything you say is recorded (apparently a good listener though).

Also http://artofmemory.com/ for 5,000+ pages of free content about memorization techniques.

Are you taking any anti-anxiety medications like Clonazepam? Many medications have a negative effect on memory, but benzodiazepines are well known for this.

First thing to check when you suspect memory issues are medications.

I'm on no prescriptions of any kind. I am not describing memory loss, but instead the amount of thoughts lost in "filler time". What were you thinking about between the parking lot and the front door? What did you think about while brushing your teeth? How did you decide what to eat today? A lot of mental decision making and "down time" thoughts never end up in short or long term memory at all.

Mindfulness meditation as described by Jon Kabat-Zinn might be helpful to you. I would describe it as learning to become more aware of yourself, including becoming more aware of your own thinking.

Most of us, even if we know that we have filler time (I call it autopilot), aren't aware of how often it occurs.

Be careful though, some of that filler time is a necessary part of memory consolidation and baking in new things we have learned. Eliminating it entirely would probably be counterproductive.

Just my speculation of course.

Not sure if spaced repetition is the best resource we have. I haven't researched it, but the question I have is: how much of everyday's information is stored in the unconscious. Using hypnosis people can remember long forgotten things(assuming these are actual memories and not produced by imagination).

I have actively tried to use unconscious processes to remember some trivial stuff. Easiest way to experiment this is when you can't remember someone's name. You know the feeling when you almost got the name, but it still manages to escape your mind. What I have done is just say to myself: This name will pop into my mind once I stop trying to remember it. And more often than not, once I have concentrated on something else(it usually takes few minutes), this name will pop suddenly into my mind. Same technique can be used with lost keys etc.

I find it interesting that we can schedule some tasks in our minds. A la "Start searching my lost keys, please". And upon completion it will trigger a notification.

What also helps is to try to actively recall the context in which an item was learned: What's her name? Oh, i met her at a party. It was at Steve's place. She was holding a glass, possibly with water. She was with someone, i think her cousin... etc

I deal with this by adding as much state-of-mind detail to my notes and idea-scribblings as I feel necessary to enable me to come back and maybe use it later. I don't worry about why I can't remember my exact state of mind, because even in operating systems, process-checkpointing and -migration is difficult. Front-load that difficulty with metadata!

I'll just throw this here

I've tried to make a point of commenting more and more on news articles and discussion boards

not because the world really needs to hear my thoughts

but it seems like a useful way of capturing my still fairly rough thoughts about whatever I just read (with the nice bonus that sometimes the rest of the universe comes along and tells you what's wrong with your thought, or how to improve your thoughts)

its a way to ever so slightly embed my ideas in my head

(having typed that out, the thought occurs to me that maybe I should occasionally make anki flashcards out of comments that seem especially worth remembering)

------- -------

writing stuff down, it used to bother me that I'd have ideas, and then by the time I tried to turn them into writing, the elegance of the idea had seemed to evaporate

or that the mechanical process of writing it down had distracted me from improving my idea

I've come to think that that's not really good way to think about it

that if I can't satisfactorily write down my idea, it needed improving anyways

Exercise makes you learn better: http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitness/archive/2012/10/12/...

Walk every day, reviewing your interesting ideas, they will last with you.

I did and continue trying to do (it is harder now).

There's a very convincing and well researched book on this issue: Spark! How exercise will improve the performance of your brain.

The gist: aerobic exercise helps neurogenesis and connectivity in the brain. Running is best if i remember correctly, or maybe that was just my private conclusion.

> I find it very frustrating that spaced repetition is the best recourse we (humans) have to remember information.

It's not. At least, not at the expense of other things. Memorization is but one piece.

The book "Make it Stick" goes into this and a lot of other techniques that blend together, but SRS is not the whole of it by a long ways.

Would you mind telling me what those other techniques are?

Have you used them, and how well have they worked for you?

I'm trying, and I have no basis to back this up, so value this what you are paying for it... =)

A couple of the techniques are:

* Mix things up. Doing "learning" in an all of one thing, then all of another, is less helpful than mixing up topics. Baseball players that practice hitting 20 fastballs, then 20 sliders, etc. do less well OVERALL than one where the pitcher randomly picks a type of pitch one after another.

* Learn in different ways, or using different answers. If you're learning to sight read music, read the measures backwards. Or down one side and up the other. When you're memorizing words, come up with a different sentence to use the word in, each time. Come up with a word that rhymes with the correct word. Describe a picture that would characterize the word/concept. Sing the word in a song.

* Synthesize, synthesize, synthesize. (overlapping the previous point) - when coming up with an answer to a question, consider different questions that have the same answer. What things are LIKE this answer? What things are different? Picture yourself using this word/concept in some setting. (Things I like to do are picturing myself in my house. Or outside. Or in the winter, or naked, or with a famous person (perhaps also naked).) The point is to create imagery associated with the thing you're learning.

A lot of this boils down to getting at the memory through many different neural pathways. SRS is just a way to strengthen ONE of those ways, which is important, but ideally you want to use many. One strong rope holding you from falling down a cliff is good. Many, possibly even weaker ones, can be much better.

exactly. it's all about association and the connecting and strengthening of neural pathways.

I used to get upset when I would forget an idea. Thing was, I could remember having the good idea but not the idea itself. Now, I simply get back into the same state, it will come back to the surface in its own time.

I don't think those thoughts get lost: I think they end up tuning your future thoughts.

Your reaction to those random thoughts is used as feedback to your subconscious and brain structure as to how it should organize and what kinds of thoughts it should generate in the future.

My model for notes is converging on Org Mode.

But... With a review process every day and every week, GTD-style. I see this need from my notes over the last couple of years from the job. Not usable for documentation (as I had planned) or helpful for other people.

I read about a guy at MIT(?) that could be mobile with a relevant setup years ago. It should be simpler now than it was for Mann et al. Just use an eyeglasses screen (Google, where are you?) and a chording keyboard strapped to your hand.

> But... With a review process every day and every week, GTD-style. I see this need from my notes over the last couple of years from the job. Not usable for documentation (as I had planned) or helpful for other people.

I've resorted to a big folder of paper for this very reason. I really want to do it all electronically, but my experience is for my own part I'm too likely to go off and start jotting notes in some random file somewhere, or test a new tool, and the notes end up sitting there, not getting referenced because I forget all the places I've made notes.

I've started looking at a computer screen as a window into a space that is otherwise largely hidden. The problem is there can be clutter everywhere you're not looking, and things get forgotten, or lost, unless they're regularly reviewed.

Paper solves that for me by being physically there, cluttering up my desk if I don't organise them, or in my notebook, making it easy do review and distill. Even when there's a lot of them, the physical bulk of it creates an implicit reminder to flick through it and see if its still relevant. Whatever is not still relevant goes in an archive for scanning.

Things that requires too much writing for me to want to do it on paper I still do electronically, but I'll make a paper note of it: e.g. it may be referenced from my list of projects.

I still hope to find an electronic setup that I can stick to consistently, but I think for that to work for me, I'd need to e.g. be able to dedicate a large enough workspace to be able to set aside a separate screen to keep my notes up and physically visible all the time (even if just as an icon on the desktop), or find another way of keeping them "physically there" in the same way.

I keep all notes in Org Mode, stored in a simple and shallow hierarchy in my Dropbox. (~/Dropbox/orgs/w for job notes. Etc.)

Since I have Emacs open anyway, the notes are just a few chars away.

(The best feature with Org Mode is that after I learned it, the note taking doesn't take much attention; it is transparent for cognitive load in a way that only a Pilot G-TEC-C4 + paper ever was for me. I only think about what I want to add, not how to do it. Ymmv.)

My main problem is to access those notes from phone/ipad/etc. I started https://github.com/berntb/attorg but got lost in the GUI/UX.

sounds like a typical case of "perfect is the enemy of good (enough)"

Looking at Twitter, a lot of those daily thoughts should be circling the drain.

But vacri, none of our minds create such worthless inanities! Historians will pore over our thoughts enchanted as if by beautiful snowflakes.

;o)

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