The paper is concentrating on a technological approach.
Memory is a 'muscle', it can be trained, it's possible to train yourself to have 100% recall and I think people should concentrate on that as much as physically working out.
I actually think that's the approach schools should take, instead of cramming children full of facts they'll never remember, take a couple of years, train everyone to have a photographic memory, then teach them, no more cramming, no more panicking, no more not understanding, you just absorb everything!
Google 'memory palace' for learning resources on memory etc.
Do you have 100% recall? And if you so, how did you get there, specifically? I'd like to learn more, but there's so much hokum surrounding so called 'memory' techniques it's hard to know where to start. It's kind of like weight lifting that way. :)
> I'd like to learn more, but there's so much hokum surrounding so called 'memory' techniques it's hard to know where to start.
Check out the book "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It" by Kenneth Higbee. It's written by a professor in psychology and he uses it in his classes. The book has the perfect blend between theory of how memory works and practical skills.
The most significant way the book improved my memory is by changing how I conceptualize my memory.
That is to say: the way to improve my memory is not to improve This-Thing-Called-Memory, but to improve This-Skill-Called-Creating-Memories.
This means that I have -- and have to take -- an active and intentional part in really creating the memories I want to later recall.
How do I create those memories? By adhering to some general principles, such as:
Meaningfulness - Does this information make sense to you? If something doesn't make sense, you're very unlikely to remember it. Find a way to impose meaningfulness on inherently non-meaningful information and you will improve your "memory" because you improve your "memory creation skills".
For example, memorizing the digits of Euler's number 2.718281828459045... is difficult because there is no meaning in the numbers. However, if you impose the following meaning on the digits memorization becomes much easier: 1828 is the birth year of Henrik Ibsen, my home country's most famous poet. And 45-90-45 are the values of a particular isosceles triangle where the two legs have length 1.
So the way I remember Euler's number to myself is "two-point-seven-Ibsen-Ibsen-IsocelesTriangle". This is much easier to recall than the seemingly random digits themselves.
There are other principles too, such as: Organization, Association, Visualization, Attention, Repetition, Feedback, Relaxation, Context, Interest, and Chunking. Each of which can help you in forming good memories.
For example, the Association principles has to do with asking yourself "What does this remind me of?" when you want to remember new information. The more answers you can produce to that question, the better you will remember the new information.
In addition to the basic and general principles above, there are more specific memorization techniques, such as: Chain Mnemonic, First Letter Mnemonic, Method of Loci, Peg Mnemonics, etc.
The most basic of these techniques, the one I use a lot, is the Chain Mnemonic. It works by taking whatever you want to remember, divide it into pieces, then represent each piece by a concrete object, then associate each concrete object in the "chain" with the next object.
How to picture objects and how to chain them together is elaborated upon in some detail in the book. It has mostly to do with: make it visually striking, bizarre, shocking, funny, etc. Engage as many of your senses as possible. What does the object sound like, smell like, feel like (dry? wet? sticky? smooth?), etc. I personally find that creating images like this is a skill you improve it the more you practice. Then you chain the images or objects together by having them interact in some way. One object falling on top of and crushing the other object. Or an object turning into another object in a striking way, etc.
It's important to understand that the book only "works" if you turn the principles into habits. My memory is only "improved" when I apply the principles. When I don't apply the principles, there is no improvement.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I'm actually familiar with these principles, but I never bothered to turn them into habits. I find that if I'm interested in a topic, I don't have trouble remembering the details, and if I'm not interested, but need it, I should focus on making it interesting (e.g. making it relevant to my life goals, etc).
I spent a few months early this year reading about all the memory technique books I could find and pretty much all the top specialists admit they don't have photographic memory and that they don't believe in it.
The biggest problem I had was trying to get techniques designed for remembering decks of cards, or the order of royalty or names and occupations in a crowd to be relevant to my work(improving my retention of APIs/classes/etc across a variety of languages and frameworks). I didn't succeed but I honestly didn't put much work into it so that was almost certainly my own fault.
I agree teaching people how to memorize better is extremely useful. When I was a kid my SAT score jumped a couple hundred points after someone taught me how to use mnemonics (e.g., "mundane" is boring just like "mondays"). But it didn't change the fact that I was still just memorizing a list of vocab rather than learning them naturally in context by reading more.
With the years, two things started to emerge to my senses:
- patience: I lost lots of memory capacity (stress, accident), but it seems that memory is really like a cached graph of correlated bits, even if the cache is fubared, the graph incomplete, with enough bits, you can fill in the blanks. Many times names came back as syllabic anagrams of the one I was looking for.
- understanding: hard to define notion, but so many advanced concepts (or not so advanced, but being able to reflect with abstract combinatorics, or numerical abstractions such as logarithmic relationships) become clear without really knowing why. You struggled with them, and some day the rules are just there in your mind and you can recall them more clearly than ever. I guess it creates something different in your brain, some first class configuration that is stabler and thus "helps" in recalling. So try to get a deep understanding of things.
Normal mice put inside a watery maze took more than a minute to locate the submerged platform that would let them escape. But these mice — which had been injected with a curious new molecule — found it in an average of just 16 seconds.
If you have Netflix, I highly suggest watching Black Mirror S1E3 'The Entire History of You', as it is a pretty great dramatization of a total memory record and replay future...
I was coming here to suggest just this. The whole series is brilliant by the way. "Fifteen Million Merits" [0] just keeps haunting me and when I mute Spotify (free) and this pauses an ad, I keep thinking about it.
While I think it will be a while until any implants or brain-computer-interface (neural lace seems vaguely promising, though I wouldn't be the first to volunteer), I think we will relatively soon have cameras and electronics small enough to be embedded into glasses/clothing, that can pretty much record the whole day in good quality, without being really noticeable.
The most nauseating image in that episode was how memory recording turned into total destruction of privacy. Police reading your thoughts is bad; society expecting people to expose their memories and demanding conformity not in behavior, but in internal state, is a nightmare
Vaguely related by topic and somewhat obsoleted if we take the linked article's conclusions as fact -
I've had in mind for a long time the idea for a short story (or perhaps novel) set in a future where one is able to purchase an "intelligence upgrade", given enough money, which bestows upon the customer a stronger reasoning ability and an overall more capable intelligence.
If we accept that particularly capable people (disregarding why they are particularly capable, when adults) then imagine a world where already successful people are able to purchase neural upgrades that enhance the cognitive aspects that let them become as successful as they already were able to become.
On the one hand, this might create an exponentially larger social inequality, if it is true that most successfully people are selfish and take advantage of others. On the other hand (and if you believe that at least 51% of the human race is "good"), it might not. Which one would it be, and would it depend on how and why society got to the point of developing those sorts of neural upgrades? I don't know.
I think that the premise could make for an interesting thought experiment expressed in literary form, even if it would depend on its author's personal beliefs. Alas, I am not a creative writer by any stretch of the imagination.
I think you're spot-on. FYI, the principle that you're working with is called economies of scale -- here it just applies in an unusual context. You usually see economies of scale in most economic feedback-loop situations.
in this case, forget about those 51% - the term you would need to achieve this is altruism, and there are very few people who are truly like that. Don't expect many parents to ignore the clearest way to give their kids massive advantage in life (or later just catch up with rest of the crowd). This is one-way direction.
Most of us are +- OK good morally, but always put their own/family/friends priorities above overall good of society. In described scenario, inequality would get much, much deeper (why stop with memory when you can enhance all senses ie night vision infra zooming see-through sight, cardiovascular system, skeleton and so on).
Classic cyberpunk, not a question if, only when it comes
22 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadMemory is a 'muscle', it can be trained, it's possible to train yourself to have 100% recall and I think people should concentrate on that as much as physically working out.
I actually think that's the approach schools should take, instead of cramming children full of facts they'll never remember, take a couple of years, train everyone to have a photographic memory, then teach them, no more cramming, no more panicking, no more not understanding, you just absorb everything!
Google 'memory palace' for learning resources on memory etc.
Check out the book "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It" by Kenneth Higbee. It's written by a professor in psychology and he uses it in his classes. The book has the perfect blend between theory of how memory works and practical skills.
That is to say: the way to improve my memory is not to improve This-Thing-Called-Memory, but to improve This-Skill-Called-Creating-Memories.
This means that I have -- and have to take -- an active and intentional part in really creating the memories I want to later recall.
How do I create those memories? By adhering to some general principles, such as:
Meaningfulness - Does this information make sense to you? If something doesn't make sense, you're very unlikely to remember it. Find a way to impose meaningfulness on inherently non-meaningful information and you will improve your "memory" because you improve your "memory creation skills".
For example, memorizing the digits of Euler's number 2.718281828459045... is difficult because there is no meaning in the numbers. However, if you impose the following meaning on the digits memorization becomes much easier: 1828 is the birth year of Henrik Ibsen, my home country's most famous poet. And 45-90-45 are the values of a particular isosceles triangle where the two legs have length 1.
So the way I remember Euler's number to myself is "two-point-seven-Ibsen-Ibsen-IsocelesTriangle". This is much easier to recall than the seemingly random digits themselves.
There are other principles too, such as: Organization, Association, Visualization, Attention, Repetition, Feedback, Relaxation, Context, Interest, and Chunking. Each of which can help you in forming good memories.
For example, the Association principles has to do with asking yourself "What does this remind me of?" when you want to remember new information. The more answers you can produce to that question, the better you will remember the new information.
In addition to the basic and general principles above, there are more specific memorization techniques, such as: Chain Mnemonic, First Letter Mnemonic, Method of Loci, Peg Mnemonics, etc.
The most basic of these techniques, the one I use a lot, is the Chain Mnemonic. It works by taking whatever you want to remember, divide it into pieces, then represent each piece by a concrete object, then associate each concrete object in the "chain" with the next object.
How to picture objects and how to chain them together is elaborated upon in some detail in the book. It has mostly to do with: make it visually striking, bizarre, shocking, funny, etc. Engage as many of your senses as possible. What does the object sound like, smell like, feel like (dry? wet? sticky? smooth?), etc. I personally find that creating images like this is a skill you improve it the more you practice. Then you chain the images or objects together by having them interact in some way. One object falling on top of and crushing the other object. Or an object turning into another object in a striking way, etc.
It's important to understand that the book only "works" if you turn the principles into habits. My memory is only "improved" when I apply the principles. When I don't apply the principles, there is no improvement.
The biggest problem I had was trying to get techniques designed for remembering decks of cards, or the order of royalty or names and occupations in a crowd to be relevant to my work(improving my retention of APIs/classes/etc across a variety of languages and frameworks). I didn't succeed but I honestly didn't put much work into it so that was almost certainly my own fault.
- patience: I lost lots of memory capacity (stress, accident), but it seems that memory is really like a cached graph of correlated bits, even if the cache is fubared, the graph incomplete, with enough bits, you can fill in the blanks. Many times names came back as syllabic anagrams of the one I was looking for.
- understanding: hard to define notion, but so many advanced concepts (or not so advanced, but being able to reflect with abstract combinatorics, or numerical abstractions such as logarithmic relationships) become clear without really knowing why. You struggled with them, and some day the rules are just there in your mind and you can recall them more clearly than ever. I guess it creates something different in your brain, some first class configuration that is stabler and thus "helps" in recalling. So try to get a deep understanding of things.
http://www.ludism.org/mentat
Normal mice put inside a watery maze took more than a minute to locate the submerged platform that would let them escape. But these mice — which had been injected with a curious new molecule — found it in an average of just 16 seconds.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/28/memory-isrib-peter-walte...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089049/?ref_=ttep_ep2
While I think it will be a while until any implants or brain-computer-interface (neural lace seems vaguely promising, though I wouldn't be the first to volunteer), I think we will relatively soon have cameras and electronics small enough to be embedded into glasses/clothing, that can pretty much record the whole day in good quality, without being really noticeable.
Ie. externalised total memory record/replay.
I've had in mind for a long time the idea for a short story (or perhaps novel) set in a future where one is able to purchase an "intelligence upgrade", given enough money, which bestows upon the customer a stronger reasoning ability and an overall more capable intelligence.
If we accept that particularly capable people (disregarding why they are particularly capable, when adults) then imagine a world where already successful people are able to purchase neural upgrades that enhance the cognitive aspects that let them become as successful as they already were able to become.
On the one hand, this might create an exponentially larger social inequality, if it is true that most successfully people are selfish and take advantage of others. On the other hand (and if you believe that at least 51% of the human race is "good"), it might not. Which one would it be, and would it depend on how and why society got to the point of developing those sorts of neural upgrades? I don't know.
I think that the premise could make for an interesting thought experiment expressed in literary form, even if it would depend on its author's personal beliefs. Alas, I am not a creative writer by any stretch of the imagination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
Most of us are +- OK good morally, but always put their own/family/friends priorities above overall good of society. In described scenario, inequality would get much, much deeper (why stop with memory when you can enhance all senses ie night vision infra zooming see-through sight, cardiovascular system, skeleton and so on).
Classic cyberpunk, not a question if, only when it comes
I have problems parsing and understanding this title.