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Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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