Simple Ways to Be Better at Remembering
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The author won the US Memory Championship after just a single year of learning and practicing mnemonic techniques.
Then I moved to "how to develop a perfect memory"[1]. It gives practical tips for remembering lists, numbers, appointments, faces.... It works surprisingly well. The thing is that nowadays, we usually use technology to remember those kind of things.
I think there's a huge difference in the types of contents that are "hackable" and the ones that have to be learnt by assimilation. I can remember 50 digits without any problem, but remembering subtle content from a book, how to use a new API,... it's much more difficult to find mnemonics for that in my experience.
Anyway, I think it's great fun to "hack" yourself to be more efficient, and this, along with speed reading and lucid dreaming could have exponential effects. I'm on it. on both. We'll see.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2691332-how-to-develop-a...
I successfully developed a habit for "quick" questions, where you know the answer instantly once you learned it. Examples: Capital of Malaysia? "Car" in chinese? Phone number of Mom? Images work well, like "what country does this map show?"
For heavy questions the repetition feels like too much work. Deriving equations is probably heavy. Another example would be: List all states of the US.
Deriving equations is not fun for my mind, because it takes seconds or minutes of concentration. For the quick questions, I receive success dopamin before I even notice that it is work. Fun. It becomes a game and I sometimes did a few cards on my smartphone while waiting, for example.
One strategy is to split heavy questions into many quick ones. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do if splitting does not work.
This helps me pause before browsing (should I really be looking at that?) and also study somewhat frequently.
It’s not entirely different than looking at old photos, but the SRS system keeps the memory fresh.
Memory freshening can be used responsibly, as part of a balanced mental diet. However...
I saw a paper go by years ago, on someone who seemed to have outlier excellent memory retention. They could tell you what they did on arbitrary days decades past. It turned out they were just an expert on their own life, spending much time each day refreshing memories.
Less extreme, the story of an elderly widower, who would sit out each day, replaying memories of time with his wife. Each like a little dopamine hit, no app required.
It's called Hyperthymesia [0], the actress Marilu Henner has it and "can remember specific details of virtually every day of her life since she was a small child" [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilu_Henner#Personal_life
Accumulate knowledge in intervals?
SRS (with Anki or not) schedules reviews to try to help you remember. You study 100 facts today. Tomorrow you review them all (this is actually a bit much for someone just starting, but go with it). You get 50 correct, you'll see them again in 2 days. You get 50 wrong, you'll see them again the next day. Eventually, everything you've studied for a long time will either be scheduled for reviews way far out in the future, or you'll be reviewing it frequently (which often means the card is too hard or you otherwise just aren't getting it). You edit the card to break it down ("Columbus sailed on the Pinta, Santa Maria, and Niña in 1492 from Spain.", that's at least 6 facts: name, ships, year, origin).
This is better than the alternative, and the way many of us (or at least my classmates and I) did it in school. We made flashcards and just reviewed all of them over and over again. It was a long slog to get through, and often we'd just skip it rather than deal with it. Or the ones at the bottom of the stack would never get reviewed properly. SRS works in much the same way, but you don't review the full deck each day or even each week. If you learn a fact really well, you won't see it again for months. If you still know it then, you won't see it again until the next year. So the only things you study regularly are new things, or things that aren't (for some reason) sticking.
Anki is a useful (and free) application that will sync across your computers and devices (I make cards on my laptop, but review them on my phone) that implements SRS. You can, through plugins, do a lot of neat things like autogenerate math problems so you aren't practicing the same ones over and over (and risk just memorizing them rather than learning the techniques), or have it render LaTeX to the card. It'll show images, play audio, and more.
By Rote. Material to be learned is repeated [...] It seems to be the least efficient way of remembering.
By Assimilation. Information is learned by assimilation when the structure or substance of the information fits into some memory schema already possessed by the learner. The new information is assimilated to or linked to the existing schema and can be retrieved readily by first accessing the existing schema and then reconstructing the new information. Assimilation involves learning by comprehension and is, therefore, a desirable method, but it can only be used to learn information that is somehow related to our previous experience.
By Using A Mnemonic Device. A mnemonic device is any means of organizing or encoding information for the purpose of making it easier to remember. [...] Any form of processing information in this manner is a more effective aid to retention than rote repetition. "
Is this information (from 1980) outdated? Is "spaced repetition" a newer idea? Is it more effective than assimilation or mnemonic device?
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
If you are using rote, like studying a language's vocabulary, you may have 1000 vocabulary cards that you study over a few weeks or months. SRS will have you practice reviews based on your ability to answer the cards. If I see "cabeza" and think "cabbage", clearly I don't know the word and I mark it as bad. I'll review it the next day. If I get it correct ("head") then the next review will be, approximately, double the time between the previous two reviews (rough progression then of 1 day, 2 days, 4 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, ...).
If I'm trying to study by assimilation (true comprehension), the cards may be more complex or harder. Translate a full sentence (from or to Spanish). Practice a math problem (some tools in Anki let these be generated automatically so you practice the techniques and don't just memorize some answers). It may even be a prompt rather than an explicit Q&A card.
If I'm using a mnemonic device ("The Cab in New Mexico Is Land Cruiser" for the tarsal bones), I may have a card that has "tarsal bones" and on the back has the mnemonic. I may have the mnemonic and the question "T?". I may have the full list of the mnemonic and the bones on the card with parts covered over. It's still using a mnemonic, but, back to SRS, SRS just schedules my practice of it based on my ability to recall in the review session.
* https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebJlcZMx3c
Make more connections to the things you need to remember. Make a tune out of the specifics or make a quick phonetic story out of it.
Good stuff.
I haven't been able to forget my ex's anniversary date because I remember it as "she's a 10/10" (oct 10).
Cramming worked for me, it's just short-term, which can be a problem depending on your goals.
Personally I've tried spaced repetition so many times and things don't stick for me... it just feels like repeated cramming: I'm great while I'm doing the Anki, but next session it's back to square one.
(Chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-...
(Firefox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/harvest-gr...
Training exercise boosts brain power, Johns Hopkins researchers say | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508714 (Oct 2017, 138 comments)
>pdog: Do you know the best exercise for your brain? Actual exercise
>JamesBarney: I hit dual n back pretty hard trying to improve my IQ
I have heard a lot of ADHD people anecdotally benefiting from Dual N-Back and have started using it recently myself. It really feels like a workout!
Take notes as you read? Taking notes is great because you're doing both information input and output, which helps a lot in memorization and assimilation (information fits with previous information).
Shameless plug: I actually just developed a new spaced repetition platform the last few years. I'm not official launched but it's online and works. If anybody is interested in taking part of the beta testing, email is in my profile.