4 ms·

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 thin

by Cozumel 10y ago

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.

torkable 10y ago
[citation needed]
lj3 10y ago
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. :)
- emilga 10y ago
  > 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.
  - p1esk 10y ago
    Have you improved your memory using that book? If yes, can you tell us about it?
    - emilga 10y ago
      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.
- sanswork 10y ago
  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.
rawnlq 10y ago
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.
agumonkey 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by Cozumel 10y ago

torkable 10y ago

[citation needed]

lj3 10y ago

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. :)

emilga 10y ago
> 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.
- p1esk 10y ago
  Have you improved your memory using that book? If yes, can you tell us about it?
  - emilga 10y ago
    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.
sanswork 10y ago
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.

rawnlq 10y ago

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.

agumonkey 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]