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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it.

I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.

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I once heard a lecture about „learning how to learn“. There are already a lot of well-researched things one can exploit about the way we process information. What you describe is known as retrieval cue. Our minds seem to be associative^1. It also seems a lot of the learning/processing happens after the actual learning process, which is why resting is important. Spaced repitition is a further method well-proven in practice.

^1 In the early days of AI, the concept of Hebbian learning was popular („neurons that fire together, wire together“). Its implementation is even simpler than gradient descent used today, but never caught on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory

Perhaps not the same one, but there's a fantastic course by Barbara Oakley by this name. I viewed it quite a while back, but the modern incarnation seems to be [0]. In a similar vein, the book "How we learn" by Stanislas Dehane is also very good!

[0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

Same here. I always marvel at this. These recollections can even be years later, and the memory of the place in which I heard the remembered thing is vivid.

There's a podcast I listened to as it came out when I was a teenager. I'm now relistening to it over a decade later, and I distinctly remember walking home from the bus stop with it coming through wired earbuds from my ipod.

"when events are represented in memory, contextual information is stored along with memory targets; the context can therefore cue memories containing that contextual information" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memory

That's spatial memory! I have long walk-and-talks with friends, and sometimes I forget minor details of previous discussions, but not where we were when it was mentioned.

A lot of my friends can't do same trick. But the fascinating part is that it still works for them! Usually they can recall whatever I forgotten after I described the place we were in.

i read a school-assigned book during the loading portions of a certain computer game. the two stories are completely interlinked in my head.

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