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Comment by ChainOfFools | Hacker News Reader

I strongly suspect this effect is correlated with a weakness in short-term or working memory. Independent of general intelligence is the necessity for those with a weak short-term or working memory to compensate by relying on long-term, in depth understanding in order to JIT the necessary short-term structures into being on the spot, (often repeatedly as these images decay rapidly) in order to solve a problem. Whereas those with a short-term memory advantage can simply rely on memorized sets of arbitrary relationships to address the problem.

In other words if you have a weak short-term or working memory you have to, by necessity, deeply think through everything - whether simple or complex. This may allow spotting the rare inconsistency or opportunity others may not, but as it comes at a performance and time penalty which, under circumstances commonly encountered in one's educational career (timed examinations) it more typically results in filtering such people out of fields where excursive, highly lateral modes of thinking would be beneficial.

To survive this filter one must either acquire (or be gifted with) the talent of exceptionally swift traversal of a large and heterogeneous general knowledge graph, as one cannot rely on a handful of tightly knit but relatively isolated silos of memorized specialization.

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I've always felt like I have awful short term memory. I use tiling WMs so I can see information side-by-side. If I need to type something exactly, I forget the exact details almost immediately.

I need to derive things to understand them, ie music theory. I'm jealous of people who can memorize and take at face value but if I'm looking at a chord, I need to know the components that create that chord, which gets frustrating because music has a lot of rules that seem to be based on vibe and closeness. Two things can be identical but distinct based on their context.

It used to take me 2-3x as long to do homeworks or labs compared to other classmates. Same with work assignments. It often triggers an imposter syndrome type feeling.

Yet I have proof that I'm capable of solving complex problems, I understand certain things almost immediately compared to others, other things I need to study for a long time.

I tend to rarely know an answer on the spot, but I know how to determine many things, by knowing how to find the information needed.

I don't pretend to be a genius, but I have proof via a degree, others opinions of me, and material results that basically say I'm intelligent to a point.

Once I get into a flow I can retain a fairly complex system in my head but before or after that state, it's a terrible blur where I can barely focus my eyes.

Source: Principal Software Engineer, 25+ YOE.

You are far smarter than you think.

Learn to get into flow, and also figure out how to get your state back faster... Once you do, it is a super power.

Simple things like leaving your editor/IDE open, create the same situation you left. I personally use music + IEMs to help me block sound and focus. -30-35 DB off the IEMs, and +70DB off my music... yeah, I don't hear anything.

I learned the editor trick recently, though I'd probably done it un-intentionally for years. I stopped, and I was wondering what the inertia I was facing was. It is only 2-3m to get setup... that's 2-3m to lose my thoughts, etc.

Good luck.

The reason I love vim and i3/kitty so much as a combination is exactly this. I have 4 monitors in the exact state I left them when I get back, with the last TODO comments I added and what the problem was (that I thought about deeply overnight).

For me the best way to get into the flow is by directly getting back to where I left. If I take time to wake up, make breakfast or anything else I usually lost my ideas already and it takes me hours to get back to them.

If you have a truly great idea. Write it down.

Just writing it down, will help you remember. If not: You have the paper.

>Just writing it down, will help you remember.

This is underrated. And, specifically...writing it down, with a pen or pencil. Typing it doesn't seem to have the same effect, even with some ritual of typing it into a fresh/separate document.

I'll second this. And something I've discovered is that using a good pen makes so much difference in the experience of writing.

I used to use whatever cheap ballpoint was around, and I had terrible handwriting. But on a friend's recommendation I tried a fine point gel pen, the Uniball Signo DX 0.38mm. It's such a joy to write with and my handwriting is orders of magnitude more legible.

There's apparently a whole world of pens (and pen enthusiasts) out there: https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens

I use emacs for everything I write for the same reason. Code, email, notes, plans, etc. I do all in emacs. The consistency in editing text helps me focus on what I am writing.

The only other software I usually have running on my work computer is a web browser.

I have ADHD and I relate a lot. Do you as well?

Not OP but identify strongly and yes.

I've always told friends that I have a massive knowledge graph on disk, and very low RAM. Reaching every leaf takes traversing the hierarchy, but it allows me to make connections and remember better over the long term.

People are always blown away by my ability to recall a story perfectly or create 2 page white boarded proofs, but inability to remember my SSN or why I entered a room.

Hey, do you drink alcohol ?

A few years back I accepted a challenge to take a year off drinking from a family member.

I cannot tell you how much it improved my memory.

Before that I was always losing things, frustrated I couldn’t remember the names of things etc.

After about 3 months I felt like I had doubled my memory.

I wasn’t really a heavy drinker, but I would go for a few months having 1-2 beers a day.

Anyway just curious if you drink and have tried taking a break?

Piggybacking to share very similar circumstances and results, though memory improvement while noticeable was not quite as dramatic. What was dramatic? Immediately dropped ten pounds landing me at my ideal weight. Without trying.

This would of course have a positive impact on your vascular health and your brain right ?

Hm... maby I should start drinking and then stop. With any luck my memory is already bottomed out and can only get better.

I'll have a week where I have alcohol in stock, finish it, and not buy it again for a few weeks. So not super regular anymore. I've had drinkier periods but I can't tell if it actually effected anything.

I have never been more seen in my life. It's very frustrating, especially when other people tend to extrapolate the little they know and apply it to everything. It can be frustrating when others are right but for the wrong reasons, and not even know it.

I struggled in math in HS for this reason. Every time a concept was presented to me I felt like I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it, to a degree that I imposed on myself for some inexplicable reason. To answer "but WHY". Almost like a form of self-sabotage in hindsight because I think there are decreasing returns in "truly, deeply" grokking math if you're not going to be pursuing math as a career.

But I also abhor rote memorization. Not because I don't think it's valuable, I just hate extremely repetitive tasks. Close friends of mine with zero interest in the subject just took everything at face level and preferred to rote memorize everything and slap it down as needed. And they tested much better than I did. Neither I or they are more intelligent than one another and these days we all excel at our own areas we enjoy. But for that subject in particular, in a rushed classroom standardized testing situation, I think their approach was "better".

I took your approach to math and it was vital to my scholastic success.

Once my engineering school load got too big for me to continue to use that approach in my math classes, I took an alternative strategy of just accepting theories without deeply understanding them and I had a much harder time applying those particular math concepts outside of those classes.

i imagine this is probably the healthier/much better approach to learning anything. unfortunately society mostly prioritizes extreme speed and shallow understanding of anything due to the upside of moving quickly and making numbers go up at the end of a quarter.

I discovered the difference in these two types of students much later than I would have liked: last year of college. I like you, felt like I really needed to understand the material to do well, and I did, but there were so many students at discussion sections and office hours with much shallower understandings who would perform better on exams and assignments. These students often ask questions like, “is it always the case…” looking for a hammer they can apply to all similar problems rather than trying to understand nuances. Learning how to get an A in the course is very different than learning the course material.

Are you sure that the people who learned the material are dumber than you?

Knowing the range of application of a technique is important.

Just a hunch, but do you find that you perform substantially better if you are an environment where you can talk to yourself out loud as you work through a math or physics problem? If so, this is very much indicative of the phenomenon I'm describing, because what's happening is you're recruiting your audio memory as a compensatory short-term workspace, being able to loop some 2 or 3 additional elements of information in this extra area essentially acts as an extension of your working store. And guess what behavior students are typically prohibited or highly discouraged from doing during an exam?

I further suspect that this is also the mechanism responsible for some people's apparent tendency to do all the talking in a conversation, rather than allow a balanced share of time between conversants. The quick decay of short-term information requires constant refreshing, and talking is one means of augmenting this.

That's really interesting! Do you know any other techniques to hijack our brains for performance boosts?

I'm reminded of the classic Feynman story about discovering the different mental models that he/his coworkers used, and how those models affected thinking: https://youtu.be/Si6NbKqYEd8?t=105

I write. It’s like having an internal monologue slowly repeating you whatever you’re thinking so it let’s the brain re-structure knowledge. It’s super helpful to force myself to pay attention. I rarely read what I wrote but because I did, there’s a higher chance I remembered.

Actually for me I perform best when I can hear my inner monologue. If I'm in a social setting learning math it's not ideal at all, because I can't "listen" to myself think: I think through things entirely in my head when I can reason through and almost dictate to myself. But not verbally! It's almost like the moment I try to verbalize anything it gets muddied by whatever weird social/colloquial construct I've made to communicate with others.

Yeah, I basically have no choice but to deeply, truly understand something. If I don't "completely get it", I will struggle endlessly to employ the "knowledge" I have. It's been a lifelong challenge (indeed I barely finished high school because I was actually failing classes because it was impossible to keep up -- yet I am a senior software engineer today), while some people forge ahead seemingly effortlessly, I am still solidifying the fundamentals. To be fair though, my deep understanding of stuff results in pretty comprehensive/effective solutions that consider edge-cases/gotchas/etc. and I think that's pretty valuable. Once I have those "fundamentals", I have mastered that shizzle and it's completely solid in my repertoire basically forever. The decay is VERY slow once I learn something, and I can remember deep details about things for years.

The discussions on this post have been the first time I've really hard people describe this phenomenon in such clarity. It's really nice to know there are other people who are similar to me in this way, as I very very often feel like the "odd one out" in this regard...

I pretty much have the same experience as you! (See my other comment in this thread)

I really agree: this discussion is great!

In my twenties I decided not to get a motorcycle for this very reason. I realized I would have disappeared for six months, learning every aspect of every part. And there were other things in my life that needed doing.

I elaborated as a reply to a sibling comment, but repeat after me: You need to memorize things in math, especially if you want full understanding. It is a necessary tool.

I realized this when I saw one of the higher math geniuses in university, one who really understood most things better than most of us, learn equations and lemmas from flashcards one day.

That memorization may become superfluous after you worked with something for a while, but until then, it is not just tremendously useful, but downright necessary, to make an equation, or set of axioms, theorem, or whatever, just "pop up" in your head while you're thinking something through.

You say:

> I needed to deeply understand it at the most universally root level and create a painstaking mental model of it

That is my modus operandi in math. I want to fully understand it, down to every little detail. But in my experience, memorization is one step for that model to really build itself up, and actually stick.

Reading through the pages of a math book and going "oh, yeah, I totally understood that, neat" is useless if you later encounter a problem and go "huh, so, what was the exact equation of the Fourier transform again"?

And not just because you now have to look it up to apply it, but also because an equation for example is not just a jumble of symbols that you write down and fill in. It has structure, it has meaning. If you can recite it in your sleep, then you also immediately see properties of it when they are relevant, and are able to make further connections.

As Andrew Wiles said: "Math is not a spectator sport."

It's hard to fully bring across what memorization does for math, but since I started just using a flashcard app (Anki) several years ago, I literally sometimes lie in bed at night, eyes closed and no notepad, and work through math in my head, trying to further understand some aspects. And because I can "look" at what I memorized in my head, it works really well.

I agree with this, and the rationalization that I eventually worked out and learned to live with is that as you get into more advanced areas of math, much of what you are learning are building blocks for assembling more complex tools - but those are tools you have no use for yet, and therefore can't hook constituent elements into any existing framework of understanding.

There is no way to pass through these obstacles (without spending the multiple lifetimes it took to forge them from first principles) except to memorize them and gradually extend understanding backwards from that memorization into the broader context of dependencies that converge into its formalization.

But having this predicament explained to me up front, ideally somewhere around the age one learns about something as basic as fractions, would have been enormously helpful.

> except to memorize them and gradually extend understanding backwards

That is not the only reason, but also a big part of it, yes. Some of the things (but not all) that I memorize I admittedly don't fully understand. I try to avoid that, but it happens. Usually though, the sudden realization comes at a later point, when I understood more of something else.

Literally happened last week to me. I had been memorizing a "stupid" theorem for a while[1], not realizing why it's useful, until something I read was about discontinuities in the n-th derivation of a function, and what that means for the terms of the function's Taylor series, and it all lit up in me, tying it all together.

It's a good feeling!

[1] https://www.dsprelated.com/freebooks/sasp/Spectral_Roll_Off....

No! Instead of rushing ahead into meaningless abstraction, you should spend more learning in the world of concrete examples and applications, to provide meat for those abstract skeletons. We don't need a mathematician is who is a poor imitation of a computer or a reference book.

In my experience, it helps to approach from both sides, and that's also part of the point I'm trying to make. If you come only from the "concrete examples and applications" side, you might not actually fully understand, despite thinking you do, and miss some finer subtleties. Those are often the "gotchas" that get pointed out in textbooks (but even then are easily forgotten).

I am definitely a "hands on" math person. Almost every piece of math I learn has application ultimately, personally I would not really be motivated otherwise. I learn math because I want to use it. I then also find joy in the abstract beauty, but I would not uncover that beauty without something I could use it for in the first place in mind. For me specifically, a large application of the math I'm learning is signal processing (both digital and analog), and analog circuits (e.g. "EE stuff").

And in that, some of the learning of "meaningless abstractions" first, and later entangling it with actual application, definitely, positively helped in getting a good understanding of the underlying math, which I can in turn integrate with what I'm doing in the "real world".

The OP article is in part about how people whom memorize things perform worse because their memory is incorrect, while people who understand things will spend more time making sense of a problem of solution instead of more quickly guessing part-blind.

Not-memorizing forces you to practice more and develop deeper intuition which helps you reconstruct info. Memorization is a side-effect or learning, not a cause.

Our brains are connection machines, not encyclopedias.

I think that I truly, positively understand both the Fourier transforms I deal with (FS, FT, DFT, DTFT, as well as their subtle but very important differences), and the Laplace transform and the z-transform. I can recite them just by "concept", that means by knowing what they do, how they work, and why they work, I can piece together the equations in no time. Memorization is not necessary anymore.

But I got there by, at first, "blindly" memorizing FS, FT, DFT, DTFT, and Laplace and z transforms. This allowed me to not only apply them to problems while, at the time, not being fully comfortable with them yet, but also, and this is really the biggest part of the point I'm trying to make, to "look at them" while I was either solving problems or just furthering my understanding of the field when, say, lying in bed before falling asleep.

To an extent that would not have been possible if I had to "refer back" to their definitions on paper.

It was a tremendous tool (that is what memorization is, a tool) to just be able to recite, say, the DFT, or the DTFT, even while my intuition was still gradually building up. And to internally look at the differences between DFT and DTFT. The same is true for the countless other little factoids in my arsenal of flashcards. I literally built a lot of math understanding, both abstract and of actual engineering problems I was working on, when sitting in my car, on my 45 minutes commute to work or back home.

> Our brains are connection machines, not encyclopedias.

And memorization is a tool for making new connections.

> I also abhor rote memorization. Not because I don't think it's valuable, I just hate extremely repetitive tasks.

Memorization leads to a different kind of knowledge, I think. You don't know the thing, you know the steps to reproduce.

It's like my grandmother who knows several songs by heart, but if you ask about the second line in the third verse she'll sing it from the start until she reaches the line in question. For a song this is sufficient, because it is analogous to the primary use cases.

Fully agree. I am annoyed by the educational pendulum swinging so far away from rote memorization that it eliminates it altogether.

I had a very similar experience studying physics and I still have some form of that in my current job as software engineer working on a quite large code base:

I really can't operate on things for which I don't have a deep intuition. If I really have to treat something as a blackbox, I need to explicitly spell out the assumptions and "compress them enough" (which is actually probably also just about building an intuition on those assumptions).

I envy people a lot that can just "copy & paste" some knowledge in their thinking.

I think I now got to the point where I accepted that to be a part of me and made it "my brand" and I see that I can add value with being different in this aspect.

I often wonder how it must feel like to be able to "copy paste" knowledge. If you painstakingly have to sweat through all kinds of things that others can just "copy&paste", it can feel like others are "cheating" - but in the end it's just me being jealous.

This is like reading my life story.

I dropped out of my masters in Statistics because after a point, I had questions and due to circumstances, couldn't find answers by myself and couldn't find help (this is before the days of youtube explosion).

Eventually through serendipitous circumstances, I enrolled in a computer course and realized that I no longer had this "why" problem anymore when it came to programming - I could get answers quickly AND it allowed me to express myself the way I wanted. Didn't turn back after that.

My short term memory sucks too. I need many exposures to retain the information for a standardized test.

I wonder if intelligent people with poor short term memories are more impressed with LLMs than those with good short term memories because that was my immediate reaction and why it is basically unthinkable for me to unsubscribe from chatGPT4.

As a paired cybernetic system I gain enormously more from LLMs compared to myself with a good short term memory and paired.

I think the deep thinker/modeler's time has come. The non-deep thinker/modeler with great flash memory time has come and gone.

My pet theory is that this is closely related to the "two cultures" in mathematics with "problem solvers" vs "theory builders": is it easier for you to put more strain on your working memory to solve a problem, or would you rather put in more up-front conceptual effort to reduce that strain?

I'm not a mathematician, but I've seen a similar bifurcation in programming styles and preferences: something like "debuggers" vs "abstraction builders". Would you rather have less to learn up front at the expense of needing to track more details as you're working, or would you rather spend time learning or developing a conceptual foundation to reduce ongoing pressure on your working memory?

I figure this is why discussions about keeping programming "simple" are so unproductive: people end up talking past each other because one camp values reducing up-front complexity, the other reducing ongoing complexity, but everybody talks about it as if there's only one simple–complex dimension.

I think I am almost grasping what you are saying, but am not sure.

Those short memory people (who I think I may be among) that GP said about relate to which group of mathematicians and programmers?

I am one of those that prefer to reduce complexity and prefer lower level programming. I think that such a type of person likes C for example.

Ah, I am one of those the tprefer to reduce complexity and prefer higher level programming. Such a person likes Python, for example :-)

A distinction you might find interesting:

Systemic thinking - considering the system as a whole. Systematic thinking - considering the components of a system step-by-step.

It's not that people disagree about which approach is more effective, it's about whether the person cares more about theory or practice (or in what balance, people are not binary). The theory hat doesn't like practice, and says "theory improves practice" as a fig leaf. The practice hat doesn't like theory, and says "practice improves theory" as a fig leaf.

Of course both are important at a global scale. But one person can focus on one side and make an contribution.

Agree with this; also, it feels like you are reading out the same theories I have somewhere in my brain and that's a weird sensation.

A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head). People who can see images in their head learn to do arithmetic early on with visual algorithms, which are fundamentally not good for understanding as well as rather error-prone (because the brain remembers gestalts, not finicky details like where a decimal is).

Aphantasiacs are forced to learn to do math differently, and use some different part of the brain as 'scratch space'. In my case it's the language brain: calculations which are set aside live in the same part of your brain that can repeat what was said a moment to you without understanding it. Turns out, though, that this verbal part is quite _accurate_ at remembering things, and this makes it easier to juggle multi-step calculations without paper.

We are definitely aware of the same phenomenon! Check out a reply I made elsewhere in this thread which addresses compensatory recruiting of ones verbal/ audio immediate recall as an extension of working memory store.

> A related theory: being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia (not being able to see pictures in your head)

This is the kind of condition I wonder if I have. Because on one hand, if I do a visualization exercise I would describe it as foggy at best. Then again, I struggle to understand how our brains could be wired that differently from person to person, that we could have or lack certain mental senses. I would suggest that everyone has some latent capability, whether they recognize it or not. After all the visual cortex is quite important.

In the context of your example, those good at mental math might see a chalkboard like image of the problem with all the detail. Those who struggle might be distracted visualizing the items that are being counted themselves, and all their detail.

For another riddle, consider the question of whether one recognizes their thoughts as an internal monologue or not, and how that relates to communication and action.

I would emphasize that people who are good at mental math tend to not see a chalkboard, while those are less good at it tend to. Relying on visualization is, I have noticed from asking around, a weakness. Of course it's just anecdotal but the pattern seems pretty pronounced to me. (I polled a hundred people at one point and saw this pattern reflected in the responses)

I agree, though, that visualization is probably latent even in people who can't do it. I notice it when half asleep for instance.

> those good at mental math might see a chalkboard like image of the problem with all the detail

Experiments with chess players and memorization shed some light on this.

DeGroot’s research showed the average person is quite poor at recalling chess positions from real games, while chess masters have almost perfect recall even after seeing the board for only a few seconds.

However, when the chess masters were given completely random arrangements of pieces on the board (as opposed to positions from real chess games), they were no better than the average person.

This and other experiments suggest it’s not a visual snapshot, but functional knowledge and chunking, such as knowing pawns typically protect one another in diagonal chains, etc.

I recall from talking with high rated chess players, they rarely visualize the board in the mind’s eye, but they just know things without thinking, like, a bishop on d3 attacks the square h7 and not h6. Not from rote memorization, but from playing and seeing that sacrificing a bishop on h7 is a thematic attacking pattern.

Incidentally, that's one of those anecdotes that sounds deep but is really perfectly obvious if you play chess at a moderate level, or, like, ask someone who does. It would be much more surprising if it didn't work that way (chunking the board into patterns).

> being good at math, especially mental math, correlates with aphantasia

as someone who used to do math competitions as a kid, everyone I knew who was "good" at mental math had a good number sense, a big bag of tricks for doing different things with numbers, and practiced with their bag of tricks.

I did math competitions also, but I'm not really talking about the specialized tricks like fast multiplication or square root algorithms. I'm just talking about basic stuff, like computing tips or taking percents. Most people simply cannot add or multiply numbers in their accurately, by any method.

In my experience short term and long term memory recall speed and accuracy are strongly correlated. It's unlikely someone will be able to swiftly traverse a large long term memory graph, in a manner that would allow you to derive deep insights not just recalling a single piece of information, but have a poor short term memory.

However I do believe long term memory is more robust so if you're in a mentally compromised state, such as having a headache, it will be less affected. So if you have to work through a hard problem on a deadline but have a headache, you can rely on heuristics stored in long term memory rather than deriving everything in short term memory.

Correlated but at what level of the bell curve? I think they are correlated but vary a lot within similar bands, to the point where the broad correlation is actually not interesting and the within-band correlation is much more so.

Adding on, there's a definite weird trade off going on between memory and creativity that I think is very under-appreciated. I think memory acts as a bind on creativity, and it's really easy to make this intuitive with any number of examples whether it be youth or marijuana/psychedelics. When you reduce your ability to access memory you seem to gain an ability to explore new spaces. Likewise the more you learn and build structures in your brain around concepts, the harder it is to accept and process novelties. Feels like there's some similar trade offs going on as with this deep vs fast thinking.

My big stumble in math came when I stopped being able to self-prove everything I saw.

At some point you must memorize in math.

That point is very early. Math finally really took off for me when I realized that, no, it's not enough to understand an equation, or a set of requirements, etc., when I'm introduced to it. I have to actually memorize it. Literally with a flashcard app that I open every day.

By rote memorization, it is available in my head immediately, and I can use it to reason through things, without having to derive anything. It helps tremendously.

Then, at some point, it will become so familiar and understood through working with it, that the rote memorization becomes superfluous. For example, I've worked with the Laplace Transforms and the various Fourier Transforms (FS, FT, DFT, DTFT) so intensely by now, that I can absolutely just recite them by concept and understanding of why they are what they are.

But until then, rote memorization is basically a necessary tool to work with math.

The moment that made me realize that was when I saw a math genius at university, one who clearly understood the topics extremely well, going through his flashcards.

I can entirely relate to this.

About three weeks into my first undergraduate class on abstract algebra, it dawned on me that the instructor wasn't giving me math tests. He was giving me vocabulary tests. In that class, most of the answers to questions flow straight from the definitions. Once I broke out the flashcards and started memorizing definitions, that class became almost trivial.

I used flashcards in all my classes after that to memorize terms, definitions, and concepts. Math and engineering are, for me anyway, like a foreign language. To converse in that language fluently, one must be very comfortable with the vocabulary. It just makes sense.

Well put, and I like that analogy. You have to learn the vocabulary, and only then are you well equipped to discuss grammar and finer subtleties of the language. It goes hand in hand.

You have to remember things in math. You don’t have to memorize by rote. I’m very close to finishing a degree in pure and computational math and I’ve never sat down to consciously memorize anything. I don’t really study much for exams either. I just work on the assignments and then show up and do my best for the exams. My grades are pretty much average but they’re not a priority for me.

For me, memorizing math means just working on problems until the theorems and definitions are like muscle memory. I know other people get by on flash cards but I can’t stand them.

Heck, I just wrote a midterm in network flow theory today and they gave us a sheet with all the theorems and definitions in the course up to this point. Needless to say, memorizing that sheet wouldn’t help you at all on the proofs. You have to actually practice writing proofs to get good at it.

I strongly relate to your analysis, as I have often found myself overwhelmed due to a lack of working memory capacity, which has often resulted in failing a whiteboard interview, or being unable to provide a short answer to a question that I have never thought about before.

I am more comfortable with deep thinking, or reflection, which allows me to come up with more complex analysis, while this process translates quite well when I have homework challenges.

I used to test some of my mental capacity with pseudo-IQ tests and realized that the factor that would penalize me the most was lack of time.

Hmm. So, we don’t know if working and short term memory are even the same thing. We also cannot say for sure that the same type of processes would be handled by short term and long term memory, so it’s not clear that you can substitute one for the other or for the same stuff. Both memories could just be feeding working memory and other structures for processing but serve different things.

It also may well be that the opposite is true — STM is prioritized by people who haven’t learned to properly recruit for profound structures. Speed may well have been a survival advantage a million years ago, but it’s not clear that this hasn’t changed since.

We also don’t know if the computing model of the brain is even appropriate at all. Humans have always assumed that the latest state of technology can represent the brain: clay and waterworks, mechanics, computers, etc.

At the end of the day, we don’t know how much we actually know about how the brain works because we don’t know what we don’t know…

I have a childhood brain injury that affects my working memory and sequencing ability, among other things. I think in pictures with a verbal commentary, although words disappear soon after I think them. My brain stores information everywhere it can fit: in emotions, music, patterns, movement, etc. Interpreting reality is fraught with error. You describe the effect very well.

I am working on a personal knowledge system to compensate. What are your ideas on this subject?

Popular PKS systems expect the user to adapt to "the system," rather than adapting to the user's particular set of needs. I consider each user to be a unique combination of common components.

A lot of replies here talk about short term memory, needing to truly understand information on a deep level and have the "why?" question answered, using software to externalize information and a lot more that I can't really mention right now on a phone in the middle of the night browsing HN and coming across this gem.

A lot of this stuff seems highly related to ADHD. I exhibit them, and have done quite some amateur research myself on these behaviors and others seem to relate as well.

P.S: I am also an i3wm user btw ;)

The way I’ve always thought about it is having a small working memory has forced me to approach problems algorithmically from an early age. For small to medium sized problems this puts me at a speed disadvantage, but when problems grow large enough to exhaust everyone’s working memory, the wholistic thinkers stumble while I am at home.

Interesting. I've always hypothesized the opposite: IQ is basically the same as working memory.

If you do a quick search for "IQ vs working memory", all the results show a positive correlation.

On the other hand, if my hypothesis was true, we would have discovered it already, so it's probably wrong.

Everything I've read about IQ says that short-term memory correlates to long-term memory. Well, except for the fact short-term memory goes down from the age of 25 and long-term memory goes down only much later around 60.

This explanation fits me to a T.

Am I projecting or does this sound like an compensating strategies for an intelligent person with an executive dysfunction disorder?

To someone with ADHD (me) it does look like it. I seem to be one of the few people who want to discuss the correlation between ADHD and all of these traits, but unfortunately one of my replies didn't garner the attention I wanted.

Yeah same here. I sometimes wonder if these coping strategies result in a late diagnosis (if diagnosed at all).

This is a really interesting idea. I throw some money toward seeing this hypothesis tested or further explored.

Ben Stiller do it meme

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