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Comment by dgan | Hacker News Reader

My random thoughts : human memory is more like linked lists, rather than hash tables

At some point i was bored and wanted to learn by heart a pretty long poem (Lermontov, Demon). I was able to recite it for 15 min straight t normal talking speed, but if you d ask me to start in the middle, i wouldn't be able to. I had to come back to a known point, and go on from that

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Random access is interesting. I have not used enough alphabet or months name to be able to place them right immediately. On other hand most numbers in 10x10 table come out straight or with pretty fast mental tricks. Or maybe some numeric things are just more memorable for me.

You can get around this by creating memory palaces and breaking up the task into chunks and then inserting the chunks into places within your palace.

Then you have direct access to the start of each chunk, so like a hash table of linked lists.

To throw another anecdote into the bucket, whenever I'm asked for the last four digits of my ssn or phone number, I have to mentally say the whole thing.

I can remember the last four digits of either explicitly but I still say the whole thing back in my head as an error correction mechanism.

It’s like being an LLM: once I’ve got the first three tokens, the rest just flows out but if I remember the last four on their own, there’s a much higher chance of making an error.

I can't find it right now, but there was a conference proceedings detailing efforts structuring human thought around cons cells.

This is also what I realized when memorizing Qur'an. It's really felt when there are some similar "nodes" that makes you confused on what should be the next node. Like if line 1, 16, 78 is almost the same, when you encounter one of them you'll be confused whether to continue to line 2, 17, or 79.

I also have problems continuing with the right verse after the chorus of pop songs.

This is my experience as well. I can memorize a long-ish text, in both English and Spanish, but I cannot start it from any random point. I must start from either the beginning or very precise "known" checkpoints.

Human memory like a linked list! I like this analogy.

This is my exact experience with learning piano. I could autopilot through a song but if I thought too hard about where I was in the piece I would leave my flow and not be able to continue.

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