Ask HN: How to Improve Memory?
What is the best way to improve memory?
I know note-taking is important and relevant, but I am more interested in what wetware tricks I can learn. Ideally I want to remember more context when coding, more about the tasks relevant to me, and be able to remember the entertainment I read and watch.
Note: I have aphantasia which means memory palaces don't work for me. I have discovered it is a sliding scale however, as I practice with visualizing and have noticed getting better at it.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 94.1 ms ] threadA big part of this, ironically, came from a discussion of Tears of the Kingdom, where my friend was simply unaware of the mechanisms he was using to solve the little visual puzzles. Once he started understanding how concepts like plane rotation mapped exactly to what that video game required, we both sort of had to pass on a belief in hard aphantasia. YMMV, totally possible that things like this are or at least seem impossible.
At any rate, I’m not sure the presence or absence of visual reasoning skills has much bearing on memory, as this particular guy has an incredible knack for learning languages that I just don’t have in the same degree. At any rate, all I want to do is encourage you in your quest for better memory skills!
On the other hand, I can see hypnagogic images directly before falling asleep. These have fidelity, color, detail, look real, and are definitely visual. I also lucid dream occasionally, and the amount of visual detail there is more than I see in real life because of bad eyesight.
The cube I'm "picturing" in front of me, though, has no visual component at all.
I also remember reading about how in some study they watched the brain activity of people with normal visualization capabilities where the visual components of the brain lit up when they were visualizing but did not light up for people with aphantasia when they were visualizing (or trying to).
If people really have no visual component at all when they picture a cube in front of them, then I would agree that aphantasia is not a thing. But people I talk to go on and on about the level of detail they see and what they use visualization for without even consciously thinking about it.
Quite because that is not how the brain works, when imagining something we merely instantiate a generic of that class, it has no visual component although it has attributes, some of which may convey a visualization - the cube is red, the cube if oriented in the cavalier elevation, you describe it yourself as being "in front of (you)" in what regard could you consider this to be true even if it were inside of your head?
Through language we have been convinced of something that simply is not true, nobody wilfully hallucinates (internally or otherwise), to be aphantasiac is not to be special but to be aware of one's consciousness in a way that most people seemingly are not.
Of course it is self-diagnosed, even a pathological rubber stamp relies entirely on self-reported symptoms.
Interrogate anyone on the subject of their visual imagination long enough and you'll eventually bump up against inconsistencies or otherwise reluctant admission that they don't "see" anything.
Handwritten notes are more memorable than typed notes, as you... note.
For exams, I prime the pump by working sample questions shortly beforehand.
Supposedly making a concerted effort to recall something that you've (almost?) forgotten can also help. One method (hack?) for recalling specific terms or names that you almost remember is going through the alphabet until you hit the letter that it starts with.
If you are watching a movie, you literally have to note an interesting dialogue as something to recall later. Then try to recall it later. But not in your own brain. Talk to someone about it.
Repeat a 10k times with different types of things over a few years and your memory will feel great.
I’ve lost a great deal of working memory over the past few years as I’m just too reliant on offloading anything more than 2-3 bits of info onto a notepad or input box
If you ever observe a fine-dining waiter, they can easily remember and perfectly recall upwards of 20-40 bits of info (highly chunked though so likely only 5-10 I imagine). It’s just repeated practice daily.
If the menu has 32 items, an order of one item fits into 5 bits, without any compression. In reality, if the steak is popular, you can save more bits with Huffman coding.
https://geekodour.org/docs/documents/notetaking/
edit: i still haven't figured out how as a kid i could remember whole chapter literally word-by-word but now I can't even properly remember a phone number. hah.
learning from tiktoks, you won't learn anything, because a moment breaks your concentration between pieces of information. that's why the best way to learn is long-term. go to classes, lessons, write down, read, retell, and all of this together. read not brochures or short books, but full-fledged books, because the integrity of information is absorbed by the body only in this way. if it is absorbed faster, it is lost faster. and you need to nourish your knowledge from time to time, and not just tell yourself "I know everything and that's the end" after university.
you can't fool hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it doesn't work that way.
Sleep, water, exercise, and health eating are huge ones.
For example, there are a lot of studies about a harm of smartphones, especially for the younger generation. I do not consider myself young, but if I want to be as productive as a youngster I must to follow good practices for youngsters. I have never seen any study about usefulness of smartphones for anything like human body (except of business) so I do not feel like I have said anything controversial.
Ignoring books with "bad" words is something I did not invented, it is something obvious and still deserves to be recommended. If I am researching some "abcde" and I have figured up that "xyz" approach is wrong despite any popularity so why to bother about xyz instead of having free memory for something else? I just forgot the scientist who told a lot on this way of discovery.
There are a lot of people who claim that the key to their productivity is calm, I recommend you to get started with Stoic philosophy as one of the most fruitful researches in human history.
Cognitive use is linked (i believe?) to holding off various aging diseases, so ensuring you're using what you don't want to lose seems to be the most important thing. Exercise for all things.
How do you approach brain exercise?
What about living with no smartphone, I do not need to put anything instead of it because I have recognized the malice of this technology really early, because when I see a human with smartphone, the most similar situation I can name is the relations between a human and a dog, and this never cease to amuze me that the dog in this relation is the smartphonee, not the smartphone. Android 2 was beautiful and never tried to enslave me, Android 4 was beautiful technically but its UX started to rot in the meaning of something not exactly for its users.
"Use it or lose it" is a motto of my brain exercises, my focus is not to lose learning abilities. Innocent things like brushing your teeth with not a regular arm but with another (left for most of people) gives surprising results in the long run but the best brain exercise by far is trying to teach someone at something complicated (Math, Programming, Martial arts, Music).
My higher purpose is having fun, but I associate the fun quantity of myself with ability to process Math information. Mathematics is the coolest thing among anything I know.
Yea, i was mostly saying that because it actively promotes such vapid content with ease. It's attention-seeking-algorithms to the max, like social media in general.
Just because it _can_ be good, doesn't mean it is by default imo. Social media in general can also be good, but i wouldn't say it is in general.
As an old man, it is so hard it feels like a form of brain powerlifting.
I really wish I had anki when I was younger. 30 minutes a day of cards on a tough subject and 30 minutes a day of cardio is probably something everyone should do for life.
For example, I love Blockchain technology, but anything like "private blochchain" tells me I need to abandon the whole work. That attitude allows me to read a lot of books.
Do you know what taste is? You always can tell when somebody has a worse taste than you but if two persons have a better taste than you each - you have no ability to tell who is better.
Reducing the domain area - a hacker method to improve memory.
I don't have enough memory to keep track of everything on my project at work. There's too many loose ends. There would still be too many loose ends if I had a better memory, too (for any realistic value of "better"). So I keep all that in a file of notes about the project, and keep it updated as things change.
Ctrl-f beats any memory trick ever invented.
Then you start doing this after closing your eyes. Pick up any scene and then immediately start describing it in as much details as you can. The point is to have details which are really minute and tiny such as how does a chair feel like, what is the texture, what is the color, what does the texture feel like on your hand, how high is the seat, how high are the things around you. Trick is to keep going for at least 1-2 minutes without thinking about what to say next.