[HN Gopher] How To Remember Anything Forever-ish (2018)
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How To Remember Anything Forever-ish (2018)
Author : Tomte
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-06-02 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ncase.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (ncase.me)
| glouwbug wrote:
| The most efficient computational program would essentially be
| that without a cache miss. A brain that focuses on the now would
| be the equivalent? Memories are passe
| vonnik wrote:
| Here's Michael Nielsen of YC Research on memory, spaced
| repetition and Anki:
|
| http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
| navane wrote:
| The problem with spaced repetition is that sometimes the gap
| never gets bigger than a couple of days. I try to remember piano
| pieces by heart, but I basically have to play them every couple
| of days FOREVER or I'll forget them. If the gap never increases,
| or increases too slow, you're not really "remembering" it with
| spaced repitition, as much as you are just playing them every
| week.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| 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.
| Kelamir wrote:
| It's fairly good. I link to it for newcomers, and for people
| looking for a more advanced explanation I link
| https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
| joshwcomeau wrote:
| This wonderful explorable is by Nicky Case, an all-around
| wonderful person.
|
| She has a Patreon, in case you want to support her work!
| https://www.patreon.com/ncase
| elsherbini wrote:
| Does anyone have a recommendation for a set up for spaced
| repition with the following features?
|
| - Sync across devices
|
| - Plain text representation of cards
|
| - Nice mobile interface (I anticipate usually using my phone, but
| don't want to author cards on the phone exclusively, or be locked
| into an app)
|
| Is the answer anki+ankiweb+ankdroid? Is there a better
| alternative?
| klipt wrote:
| > 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.
| esrh wrote:
| 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/
| zoom_enh4nce wrote:
| Maybe check out mochi.cards?
| graboid wrote:
| 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| For me, the method of loci [0] is much more effective and
| efficient at storing long term memories. I have memory palaces
| still embedded that I can mentally walk through from over a
| decade ago, and I didn't have to spend days of time that I would
| have had to with spaced repetition. If I recall correctly, it
| took me only about an hour to put a palace into place, and after
| that, it's been there since then.
|
| If you have aphantasia though, the method of loci will not help
| you but spaced repetition just might. Different things work for
| different people, of course.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| klipt wrote:
| > 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| While it may be constant over all time (given the convergence
| of a geometric series as you imply), there is still a startup
| cost of brainpower every time one must practice. I'd rather
| get everything done at once than have to practice every some
| number of days, if simply to avoid having the thought of
| practicing in the back of my mind.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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:
|
| ----
|
| 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.
|
| ----
|
| 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?
|
| ----
|
| 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!):
|
| ----
|
| 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 Rene 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...
| macrolocal wrote:
| One thing computer science has taught me is to take indexing
| seriously.
| boppo1 wrote:
| How does this relate for memory? I am a relative layman.
| macrolocal wrote:
| It tends to be easier to remember facts that fit into an
| organizing (data) structure. Memory palaces are an example.
| johtso wrote:
| The Sem Cubed system is an interesting take on indexing
| information for memorisation
| https://www.ludism.org/mentat/SemCubed
| drieddust wrote:
| That interesting, I have a question though.
|
| How do you come up with memory places distinct enough that you
| don't confuse them?
| tarentel wrote:
| I am not op but I use streets I walk down a lot. I've moved a
| lot since I learned this technique about ~12 years ago so I
| have a lot of apartments, hallways, and streets to pull from.
| Although I generally only use it for short term things and
| will use my walk to work even though I don't walk to work
| anymore.
| yuters wrote:
| 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
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