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.
> 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.
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.
I've thought this too but I've seen some things that put this assumption into question [0]. The way that I've dealt with it in Anki specifically is by decreasing my leech threshold such that knowledge that isn't working well in the exponential-backoff strategy simply gets removed from my reviews.
Interesting. Another approach might be to apply mnemonic techniques (like method of loci) to leeches to make them memorable so they're no longer leeches.
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.
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:
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.
>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.
>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.
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...
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.
There is an important thing to note: Loci is for memorization. Spaced repetition is for retaining knowledge you already memorized. What you memorize with Loki will be forgotten, no matter how good the method is. And spaced repetition alone won't do much to help you memorize. Thus, look at it this way: you can use mnemonics, such as Loki, to memorize certain information, and spaced repetition, say Anki, to retain that knowledge.
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.
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.
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 passé
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.
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)
You're telling me you're gonna play the same piece every other day for years, decades, and then you won't be able to play it again in 3 days? That seems very hard to believe, and it sounds more like you're not confident in your brain's ability to grow muscle memory.
Your experience with piano notes is interesting, I used to play the guitar 20-ish years ago, and what I find interesting is that even after 20 years of not playing my fingers still can play some compositions even though I don't remember notes anymore. Of course during my time with guitar I would spend hours practicing and at some point I would practice compositions every single day, maybe this is the main reason why I still remember how to play those compositions.
29 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 72.3 ms ] threadIf 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
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.
[0] See eg the experience here https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/ukavcj/9_year_ankiver...
How do you come up with memory places distinct enough that you don't confuse them?
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...
> 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
Not sure about that, as I mentioned I still remember things from years ago via loci.
- 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?
I think it's the best answer since Anki is open source and you can even write python extensions for it.
[0] https://github.com/klieret/ankipandas/
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.
http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
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.
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