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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

After I read “Moonwalking With Einstein”, I pretty much think it’s a gimmick and still a lot of work. Spaced repetition is probably a better technique.

The main idea that seemed to work is the visual association. The visual of Moonwalking with Einstein, for example, was one of his mneumonics.

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One of the things I learned about memory when I was reading tons of papers on this stuff is that usually people need to have comprehension of something before they will remember it. As an example, when I was teaching English to high school students in Japan one time I told the students to bring their textbook the next class (we usually didn't use it). I spoke English. The next day, not one of the 30 or students brought their text book. I asked the students, "Does anyone remember me saying something last class?" Not one student remembered. I had a teacher teaching with me ("team teaching" -- very good idea) and he remembered me saying it. It was then that I really grasped the concept: if you don't understand, you won't remember. In fact, you might not even remember that something you didn't understand had occurred.

I think what visualisation (especially with story telling) does is create a framework for comprehension. It gives logic to the thing you are memorising. This is especially good when you are memorising a list of arbitrary facts that have no inner logic themselves. People who are studying Chinese characters often create stories (ala Hesig) and I can verify that it makes them easier to remember. Without an inner logic, it's really hard to hang on to.

My feeling (which corresponds to my experience) is that when memorising things that already have an inner logic, there is no need to visualise or create stories. For example, if you memorise example sentences rather than vocabulary or grammar, visualisation doesn't help. The logic already exists within the sentence.

> is that when memorising things that already have an inner logic, there is no need to visualize or create stories

That matches closely with what I observed of how it's difficult to memorize prose in a completely foreign language, yet it seems one can recall song lyrics in that language with just one or two listens. It seems that any sort of internal structure can serve as scaffolding and reduce the task from brute-force memorization to some sort of "interpolation."

I don't necessarily agree with this. As a french native who has grown up to english music, I realised years later as my english improve that I 'remembered' the english songs lyrics from previous years by basically 'mapping' the english to french equivalent phonemes, NOT by words. In fact the stuff I 'remembered' made no sense at all, or were quite funny, a posteriori.

I have to admit as a Canadian I only just recently learned what "Terror de nose eye you" meant in the French lyrics of the national anthem ;-) But I think even that creates a kind of weird internal logic that you can remember. That memory must be at least 40 years old for me.

Aside: 13 years of French lessons and I'm hopeless. A big pile of Japanese books and no lessons and I'm fluent. I always found that interesting.

This. I wanted to make this comment. I was quite interested in improving my both long and short term memory and I came across "Moonwalking with Einstein" book. While the methods such as "menomics" and "memory palace" presented in this book were quite interesting, I learned over a period of time that it doesn't help much.

There is quite a lot of information out there and we need to compress it in someway, intelligently so that we could retrieve it in when the need arises. The important part of the retrieval process, I believe, is getting all the relevant information along with the required ones and I honestly don't see how menomics and memory palace could help.

*mnemonics

Yeah, I read that book as well and felt the same way.

I think in many ways working memory is the most important thing - sure I can learn these methods to memorize 1000 random facts - but what 1000 random facts will help me in my daily life?

Maybe it's more useful for people doing medicine or something similar.

I see method of loci more as "ram", whereas spaced repetition is moving things into a hard drive. For example, when reading, I'll often use a mental room with 10 spots x 3 key points per spot to keep an outline.

Periodically, I'll go back and walk through the outline, looking up details where I have gaps (ie spaced testing). It's helpful that a spatial path lets you easily keep the temporal structure of the narrative.

It seems hard to apply spaced repetition to numeric information or names of people you've just met at a party.

> It seems hard to apply spaced repetition to numeric information or names of people you've just met at a party.

Spaced repetition is one of the only ways to learn names in my experience. If I learn someone’s name and then don’t see them again for 2 weeks, chances are I will have forgotten. Even if I see them once a month for a year, there’s a good chance I will forget each time.

If I see them the next day after I learned their name I will remember. If I see them a week after that I will still remember. If I see them a month after that chances are I will still remember.

If I had first e.g. read the person’s academic paper or a few of their blog posts or the like, there’s a good chance putting a face to the name once will be sufficient.

* * *

If you can get a photo of the person, then you can work learning their name into some kind of deliberate flash card routine, and that will be more effective overall than relying on chance encounters and less embarrassing than repeatedly asking.

I would recommend that teachers of lecture courses put a few minutes a day into doing spaced repetition of students’ faces/names, starting before the start of the term: teachers who can remember students’ names make a big impression.

Right, spaced repetition isn't good at memorising things quickly. Where it shines is that it lets you decide the things you want to keep in your long term memory.

there is no peer reviewed study that corroborates the claims made in that book. it's mostly a gimmick. it's like trying to learn how to become taller, which s absurd but not much different from learning how to suddenly become good at memorizing stuff.

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