How To Remember Anything Forever-ish (2018)

> I didn't have to spend days of time that I would have had to with spaced repetition

The number of repetitions per item is basically O(1) over your lifespan because of the exponential backoff. If you're spending constant time practicing every day, it's usually because you're constantly adding new items to memorize. If you stop adding new items, the workload decays rapidly.

Maybe loci is faster for you, but it's not obvious to me that's true in general.

Thank you for sending me down this rabbit hole. The Dominic system [0] is quite entertaining in its description:

> Longer numbers become stories. The long number 27636339, for example, could be chunked into 2763 6339 and then converted into BGSC SCCN. If the memorizer has also associated Santa Claus delivering presents with SC, then the chunk 2763 would represent Bill Gates delivering presents while 6339 would represent Santa Claus performing a roundhouse kick. The remembered story, therefore, could be that Bill Gates delivered presents and then got roundhouse kicked by Santa Claus.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_system

One thing computer science has taught me is to take indexing seriously.

There is an important thing to note: Loci is for memorization. Spaced repetition is for retaining knowledge you already memorized. What you memorize with Loki will be forgotten, no matter how good the method is. And spaced repetition alone won't do much to help you memorize. Thus, look at it this way: you can use mnemonics, such as Loki, to memorize certain information, and spaced repetition, say Anki, to retain that knowledge.

That interesting, I have a question though.

How do you come up with memory places distinct enough that you don't confuse them?

Nicky Case is brilliant! I love their work.

Has anyone made an app that combines the Method of Loci with Spaced Repetition?

Each of the loci could also be a card you could put into your shoeboxes, and you could also place shoeboxes of cards at any locus.

Ages ago I made an iPhone app based on the Method of Loci, and also some Unity3D apps that explored the same ideas, which I've written about before, and given a talk about:

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829778

DonHopkins on April 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Simula: A VR window manager for Linux

Great ideas! The Method of Loci is a very powerful concept, that takes excellent advantage of how human memory works, and works nicely with zooming user interfaces, and is a great way to support user-defined editable pie menus that you can easily navigate with gestures.

I've experimented with combining the kinesthetic advantages of pie menus and gesture with the method of loci and zooming interfaces, including a desktop app called MediaGraph for arranging and navigating music, and an iPhone app called iLoci for arranging notes and links and interactive web based applets.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5

>MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club.

>This is a demo of a user interface research prototype that I developed for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club. It includes pie menus, an editable map of music interconnected with roads, and cellular automata. It uses one kind of nested hierarchical pie menu to build and edit another kind of geographic networked pie menu.

MediaGraph Demo Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopki...

>iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp. A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008.

iLoci Demo Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98

Here's some more discussion about window managers, the Method of Loci, MediaGraph and iLoci, and pie menus:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22089694

DonHopkins 81 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes

>Great idea, I totally get it! Your graphics are beautiful, and the layering and gridding look helpful. It reminds me of some experimental user interfaces with pie menus I designed for creating and editing memory palaces: "iLoci" on the iPhone for notes and pictures and links and web browser integration in 2008, and "MediaGraph" on Unity3D for organizing and playing music in 2012, both of which I hope will inspire you for ideas to implement (like pie menus, and kissing!) or ways to explain what you've already created.

>A memory map editor can not only benefit from pie menus for editing and changing properties (like simultaneously picking a font with direction, and pulling out the font size with distance, for example), but it's also a great way for users to create their own custom bi-directionally gesture navigable pie menus by dragging and dropping and "kissing" islands together against each other to create and break links (like bridges between islands). (See the gesture navigation example at the end of the MediaGraph demo, and imagine that on an iPad or phone!) [...]

>I like the idea of moving away from hierarchal menu navigation, towards spatial map navigation. It elegantly addresses the problem of personalized user created menus, by making linking and unlinking locations as easy as dragging and dropping objects around and bumping them together to connect and disconnect them. (Compare that to the complexity of a tree or outline editor, which doesn't make the directions explicit.) And it eliminates the need to a special command to move back up in the menu hierarchy, by guaranteeing that every navigation is obviously reversible by moving in the opposite direction. I believe maps are a lot more natural and easier for people to remember than hierarchies, and the interface naturally exploits "mouse ahead" (or "swipe ahead") and is obviously self revealing.

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drieddust 1 hour ago | parent | context | flag | on: How To Remember Anything Forever-ish (2018)

That interesting, I have a question though. How do you come up with memory places distinct enough that you don't confuse them?

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By using distinctly fabulous, immoral, outrageous, scandalous, obscene, and titillating places and things.

I wrote more about why the Church suppressed the Method of Loci (because it works!):

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22090159

DonHopkins on Jan 19, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Nototo – Build a unified mental map of notes

Not under-investigated, just suppressed! ;)

The Method of Loci is an ancient technique that used to be taught for thousands of years as a standard part of a classical eduction, way back when people needed to remember things before the invention of smartphones and printing presses. But in the middle ages it was banned for being immoral! Apparently, some bad apples were abusing the Method of Loci to remember "immoral" things they shouldn't be thinking about, using "fabulous" images they shouldn't be imagining.

https://www.guildsomm.com/4cb697f52c/discussion_forums/f/gen...

>Remember to use physical objects in these palaces since they have easily imaginable traits; when you are dealing with more abstract or untranslatable ideas it is best to convert them into objects based on the way the words sound, so Valmur becomes Val Kilmer, Les Preuses becomes purses, etc. Additionally, you don’t need to be concerned with reality when making these memory palaces. The more slapstick, unique and vivid they are, the easier they will stick. Raunchy imagery always works well, to the point where some religious orders in the middle ages banned the practice because it was deemed immoral.

Memory Palace techniques have been known as the Mind Palace, Method of Loci, and Memory Journey, Art of Memory, Ars Memorativa, Memorative Art, Mnemotechnics, Architectural Mnemonic, Graphical Mnemonic, and Textual Mnemonic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

https://books.google.nl/books?id=MRFFAQAAQBAJ&printsec=front...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory

>The most common account of the creation of the art of memory centers around the story of Simonides of Ceos, a famous Greek poet, who was invited to chant a lyric poem in honor of his host, a nobleman of Thessaly. While praising his host, Simonides also mentioned the twin gods Castor and Pollux. When the recital was complete, the nobleman selfishly told Simonides that he would only pay him half of the agreed upon payment for the panegyric, and that he would have to get the balance of the payment from the two gods he had mentioned. A short time later, Simonides was told that two men were waiting for him outside. He left to meet the visitors but could find no one. Then, while he was outside the banquet hall, it collapsed, crushing everyone within. The bodies were so disfigured that they could not be identified for proper burial. But, Simonides was able to remember where each of the guests had been sitting at the table, and so was able to identify them for burial. This experience suggested to Simonides the principles which were to become central to the later development of the art he reputedly invented.

>He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and the images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written upon it.

>[...] However, this transition was not without its difficulties, and during this period the belief in the effectiveness of the older methods of memory training (to say nothing of the esteem in which its practitioners were held) steadily became occluded. In 1584, a huge controversy over the method broke out in England when the Puritans attacked the art as impious because it was thought to excite absurd and obscene thoughts; this was a sensational, but ultimately not a fatal skirmish. Erasmus of Rotterdam and other humanists, Protestant and Catholic, had also chastised practitioners of the art of memory for making extravagant claims for its efficacy, although they themselves believed firmly in a well-disposed, orderly memory as an essential tool of productive thought.

>One explanation for the steady decline in the importance of the art of memory from the 16th to the 20th century is offered by the late Ioan P. Culianu, who argued that it was suppressed during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when Protestants and reactionary Catholics alike worked to eradicate pagan influence and the lush visual imagery of the Renaissance.

>Whatever the causes, in keeping with general developments, the art of memory eventually came to be defined primarily as a part of Dialectics, and was assimilated in the 17th century by Francis Bacon and René Descartes into the curriculum of Logic, where it survives to this day as a necessary foundation for the teaching of Argument. Simplified variants of the art of memory were also taught through the 19th century as useful to public orators, including preachers and after-dinner speakers.

"The Art of Memory" is also the title of a 1966 book by Frances A. Yates about the history of mnemonic systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory

Here's some racy discussion from that book about those problematic morally reprehensible corporeal images:

https://books.google.nl/books?id=MRFFAQAAQBAJ&printsec=front...

>What we are reading is very extraordinary indeed. For scholasticism in its devotion to the rational, the abstract, as the true pursuit of the rational soul, banned metaphor and poetry as belonging to the lower imaginative level. Grammar and Rhetoric which dealt with such matters had to retreat before the role of Dame Dialectic. And those fables about the ancient gods with which poetry concerned itself were high reprehensible morally. To move, to excite the imagination and the emotions with metaphorica seems a suggestion utterly contrary to the scholastic puritanism with its attention severely fixed on the next world, on Hell, Puratory, and Heaven. Yet, though we are to practice the artificial memory as a part of Prudence, its rules for images are letting in the metaphor and the fabulous for their moving power.

>And now the imagines agentes make their appearance, quoted in full from Tullius. Remarkably beautiful or hideous, dressed in crowns and purple garments, deformed or disfigured with blood or mud, smeared with red paint, comic or ridiculous, they stroll mysteriously, like players, out of antiquity into the scholastic treatise on memory as a part of Prudence. The solution emphasizes the reason for the choice of such images is that they 'move strongly' and so adhere to the soul.

>The verdict in the case for and against the artificial memory, which has been conducted in strict accordance with the rules of scholastic analysis, is as follows:

>"We say that the ars memorandi which Tullius teaches is the best and particularly for the things to be remembered pertaining to life and judgment (ad vitam et iudicium), and such memories (i.e. artificial memories) pertain particularly to the moral man and to the speaker (ad ethicum et rhetorem) because since the act of human life (actus humanae vitae) consists in particulars it is necessary that it should be in the soul through corporeal images; it will not stay in memory save in such images. Whence we say that of all the things which belong to Prudence the most necessary of all is memory, because from past things we are directed to present things and future things, and not the other way round."

Lots more on the Memory Techniques Wiki:

https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Main_Page

Here's some more recent research -- isn't the point of memorizing to cause lasting changes to the brain?:

An ancient memorization strategy might cause lasting changes to the brain

Using the memory techniques of the pros alters patterns in brain activity, new research says

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14950798/memory-palace-me...

That was a heroic read, but well worth it IMO. I’m a daily Anki user and this has given me some good ideas.

I think anki is still probably the way to go. It doesn't store your cards in plain text, they're in a sqlite database instead. I use ankipandas[0] to read, manipulate and analyze my cards though.

[0] https://github.com/klieret/ankipandas/

Anki checks two of these boxes, but the data is stored in SQLite. It is a nice program, open source and actively developed, with many online resources available and a large community.

My advice would be, if you happen to already write your notes in some plain text format, to create your flashcards in your notes. E.g. if you use one of the fancy new PKM tools like Logseq/Obsidian/etc. you can use one of the available plugins to sync to Anki (or roll your own script, thats what I do). For me thats a solution with which I feel very comfortable (and I am rather picky and have tried out a lot of tools and workflows). Main advantages for me:

1. your notes and SRS questions are not separated

2. you have full control over your data

3. you don't have to use the editor of any SRS app, instead you can use whatever tool/editor you are most comfortable with

4. By syncing to Anki, I get all the nice stuff that comes with Anki: mobile clients+sync, nice statistics, endless styling customizability.

> Is the answer anki+ankiweb+ankdroid?

I think it's the best answer since Anki is open source and you can even write python extensions for it.

Maybe check out mochi.cards?

Your experience with piano notes is interesting, I used to play the guitar 20-ish years ago, and what I find interesting is that even after 20 years of not playing my fingers still can play some compositions even though I don't remember notes anymore. Of course during my time with guitar I would spend hours practicing and at some point I would practice compositions every single day, maybe this is the main reason why I still remember how to play those compositions.

Think of SRS software as an entry point into spaced repetition and not something you can completely offload the repetition scheduling to (which is the common perception), something to just get a feel of the movement.

Once there prepare to detach completely from any software, so much so that all you should need now is a piece of paper stuck on the wall with symbols to help you repeat things.

The final stage would then be to detach from anything but your mind (which incidentally is the whole point of this exercise)

Attach first, then detach.

You're telling me you're gonna play the same piece every other day for years, decades, and then you won't be able to play it again in 3 days? That seems very hard to believe, and it sounds more like you're not confident in your brain's ability to grow muscle memory.