16 ms·

Are we losing our ability to remember?

243 points by scotthtaylor 6y ago

jfengel 6y ago
Haven't we seen this topic dicussed and dismissed before? I could have sworn...
montalbano 6y ago
I've been wondering the same thing recently. If anyone's interested in learning more about how previous cultures remembered vast amounts of information I would recommend the book I'm currently reading: Frances Yates - The Art of Memory, and the one I'm planning to read next: Mary Carruthers - The Book of Memory. One of the most interesting aspects for me is how the concept of memory in the middle ages was much more closely associated (sometimes conflated) with imagination than it is now. Most people I know now would consider memory and imagination as two quite distinct mental faculties.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Another good one is called “Moonwalking with Einstein.” Very interesting and entertaining, I highly recommend it.
Swizec 6y ago
Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?
- mc32 6y ago
  True but slippery slope and all. We need some basic ability lest we devolve control to things not us. We should still be able to get by without technology in emergency situations (natural events causing power outages, etc). We should not be rendered helpless.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Remember that fire was also a technology at one point. Our species is sustained by technology and there's no going back. There's always going to be some baseline we can't live without.
- Cactus2018 6y ago
  Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.) > ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ... http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
  - shawxe 6y ago
    The irony of reading this, over two thousand years later, translated into a different language, presumably by someone who is, even after all this time, still able to read the original--it's almost like writing helps us remember, as a species, in ways that would have otherwise been almost completely impossible.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - vsareto 6y ago
      If there's one thing technology is good at disrupting, it's tradition
      - pessimizer 6y ago
        I'd say the opposite. The fact that a species memory has been created by the written word and the printing press means that nothing ever dies, and initial mistakes and the achievement of local maxima can be preserved forever. The tyranny of Aristotle over the Dark Ages was no joke. Natural senility as an individual is probably no more than the accumulation of calcified habits, rather than completely biological - the ability to abandon old, wrong knowledge is a sign of youth and indispensable to the learning process. The written word has enabled us to achieve senility as a species.
    - stanrivers 6y ago
      Yes - and writing is a way to extend your memory as well. You can work more complex ideas with yourself, using the paper as storage for what you have already thought through. Can you imagine doing some even simple Calc-type proofs without paper? Not possible. Many things are like that. You give up maybe better memory in your head in exchange for being able to make progress that your couldn’t have made without the tool of writing. Humans are ultimately tool-using animals more or less... makes sense that we use tools that are valuable.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  Yes but its us that live in era of weaponized attention grabbing. People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you. Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Greek oration was all about weaponized attention grabbing and getting people to join your school not those other terrible terrible oh so bad schools. We’ve had weaponized attention grabbing as long as wemve had humans I bet.
    - me_me_me 6y ago
      It was an art of oration. Not a science driven exploitation of basic human instincts. They didn't have a focus groups A-B testing and neurological studies back then. That's a bit like saying that the impact on climate change back 1000 years ago and now is the same, as in both cases we are releasing carbon into atmosphere.
      - marcosdumay 6y ago
        It was the closest they had to a science, and it was aimed at manipulating the listener in a predetermined way. The fact that it was mostly applied at civil politics tells more about their society than about the tool...
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    Writing is a technology. It's disputable if any technology is inherently neutral or not: “One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral.” from https://thecompassmagazine.com/blog/is-technology-morally-neutral-or-a-moral-peril https://thecompassmagazine.com/blog/is-technology-morally-ne...
- in3d 6y ago
  How do you know he wasn’t right and writing indeed worsened our memory? Maybe you’d remember who it was if not for knowing it is written down somewhere.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    And that's the question. Is there more value in being able to remember who the specific philosopher was, or more in knowing how to find that information quickly and easily? To take it a step further - is there more value in individuals remembering the specific philosopher, or in society, anyone in society being able to find out that same information?
- asdff 6y ago
  In a way Socrates was exactly right. Consider Buddhism, a philosophy that lasted orally for hundreds of years before the first texts were written. Even today, buddhist monks use chanting and repetition to memorize these teachings, internalize them, and live them. Sure, you could read these teachings and move on with your life, but can you recite what you just read, or even what you just wrote? Not a chance. Your memory of text is fleeting compared to if you gave focused mental effort committing that text to memory through oral repetition.
Terretta 6y ago
Yes... probably ... what was the question again? // This loss of ability to remember is real and personal. To combat it, once a year, I undertake a two to three week digital detox. No devices, no media, only long form traditional books. Takes a week to overcome agitation from not being able to “consume” digital micro-info-bursts on demand. Following that, my brain begins to restore its ability to build and maintain concepts, built up like Jenga towers or houses of cards while reading. That ability remains until I get lazy, quit taking notes by hand and go back to digital.
- mc32 6y ago
  Once a year is not going to help much, I don’t think. It’s something you have to exercise with some consistency to keep from atrophying.
jraph 6y ago
> So I wouldn’t say we are losing our ability to remember, as I posed at the start of this post. I think people (me included) just don’t do enough work to move stuff from our working memory into our long-term memory. I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful. And for things you do often, you will probably memorize it anyway. Lack of focus leading to not remembering the content of a meeting is problematic though. I don't have this issue fortunately.
- taneq 6y ago
  Yep, I've found I'm less effective at remembering fully detailed information but more effective at remembering 'bread crumbs' which let me quickly find the information in documentation or online. It's sort of like I store the index internally and the data table externally.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    I don't think that is unusual. I also don't try hard to memorise things I know I can trivially lookup. Other things I have a directory called `useful_things` that has markdown files broken down by category I can quickly grep for that thing I remember I needed but not how to do.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    This is also something I've found when hiring. If the position is time sensitive - the fires being put out tend to have a <1 day time limit, I want an older (45+) person in that position. Not for their experience, but for their ability to recall and store memories. In my experience, older employees are able to recall information to solve a problem, but the recall may be incomplete, leading to a quicker, but less effective solution. Whereas, younger employees often need more time because they don't specifically remember solutions, but they are able to find, categorize, and process information faster, often leading to a slower, but more complete and robust solution. Not sure if it's a product of education and upbringing in different worlds, or a product of experience, but it's fascinating to me.
  - 6y ago
davidtranjs 6y ago
I am experiment the same problem. As a software developer, I spend all my day on computer and mobile phone. Recently, I have a the feeling that it take me a while to recall the name of a friend. Or even searching for a solution. It could be the side effect of all of the autocomplete and search result which are accessible within my palm.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  This sounds more like aging.
klmadfejno 6y ago
Author goes from "I can't remember things" to assuming that humans can't remember things. Not especially compelling. Vaguely suspicious the point of the article is to be a covert ad for Obsidian.
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Haha, not at all an advert. Simply saying that I use networked thinking apps (Obsidian, Roam Research, etc.) to help take the load off my working memory.
Lazlo182 6y ago
What?
Pt_ 6y ago
During the pandemic, spending more time at home and less time having real social interactions has lead me to beleive I am forgetting some of my vocabulary or at the least not practicing it enough to keep it in what you describe as "Working memory". Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.
- Loughla 6y ago
  Can you expand on that? And can you describe your living circumstances. I'm relatively isolated due to rural life, and I haven't seen any of that in my life. I tend toward isolation naturally, so maybe that has something to do with it. But I'm fascinated by your statements. Can you go more in-depth, please?
  - Pt_ 6y ago
    Before the pandemic, I was living in London shared flat with my partner and a friend of ours. Had quite a busy social life, working in an office in Soho. Since the pandemic I have moved out of the city and into a more rural isolated area (Did not see any benefit to paying high rent prices in a city when all the facilities were shut down). All of my work has moved to remote working using video conferencing etc. Before we would use Slack a lot, but in-person meetings were a common occurence and I would spend quite a lot of time outside of work with friends or colleagues discussing various topics. Since being in this isolated environemnt I feel that because those interactions are far more rare when they do happen I struggle to recall words or phrases that were once commonplace in my vernacular. This is all very anecdotal evidence of course, but it's somethig i've observed in myself of a number of occasions now.
fridgamarator 6y ago
Peppridge farm remembers
code_scrapping 6y ago
[Off-topic] I see the other post on Scott's blog "My summer 2020 road trip along the Italian Riviera", and I have to give impressions. It's not the first time I hear the story along the tune of "we went on vacation, and it was so strange, everything was deserted, people were masked". There's a reason for that - it's called a pandemic, it's taking lives in the thousands per day. Yet, people still can't seem to rationalize that we shouldn't do unnecessary trips, even if we really, really need a vacation right now (and probably everybody does). The author said they chose Italy because they were "only country that seemed to have a handle on infections". Again - that's because Italy was the hardest hit country at the start of the European side of the pandemic. It's like saying "Wuhan seems to know how to deal with the issue". Usually, I go for the ad-hominem attack "people are too uneducated, they don't understand..." when I see this kind of behavior. But this year - I see it over and over again in highly (formally) educated (PhD-level) people, who keep track with things, are aware - and yet, can't help themselves. Scott certainly doesn't seem like a uninformed person, nor is he blind to the situation. That's the kind of contradictory examples that whisper "this isn't going to be OK, we're always going to have easy short-sighted goals that will justify the risk and make us go downhill". I do see that Scott is the original poster, and would like to hear the rationalization beyond "we really needed a vacation".
yanis_t 6y ago
We are really good at adapting. Today I and my phone can do better at remembering stuff I need, than me without phone 10 years ago. Is this really a problem if you think about it from the standpoint of human evolution?
- redvenom 6y ago
  Well, it could be a problem if we are aiming for human happiness. If there is natural selection going on here, then it would be pushing the people to actually become less able to think for ourselves in terms of creative solutions. Sort of like how bird species on islands sometimes lose the ability to fly. If that is the case, it may be really hard for us to actually reverse our destructive trend against the natural world and then we are really in trouble.
coldpie 6y ago
I strongly suspect the article's title should replace "we" with "I" and ought to be an introspective on the process of aging.
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Actually a good point!
mncharity 6y ago
Imagine AR memory palaces, and memory boards (like crafty photo boards, or tactile Lukasa[1])? As my memory emphasizes spatial, I'm looking forward to exploring. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=lukasa&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=lukasa&tbm=isch
spicymaki 6y ago
I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references. I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on. I think the trend today is to prime the brain with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember. Not exactly sure how I feel about that.
- nishparadox 6y ago
  Ditto. This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)... [0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowledge/ https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...
  - scotthtaylor 6y ago
    Agree 100% — nicely written up!
- snarfy 6y ago
  Some of my most vivid childhood memories are dreams I had. When recalling the events in my life, it's not always easy to recall which were dreams and which really happened. It's terrifying. It's all too much information. I worked on cdrom technology 20 years ago. I don't want to know the sector size is 2532 bytes, but I do.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
httpz 6y ago
My brain is basically a cache for pointers at this point. I always know where to find something I'm trying to remember and I always have my phone on me.
op03 6y ago
Personal staff and underlings are the solution. And friends and family are a great backup. This system works out well if you do a good job of remembering and meeting their needs. Keep notes on the needs of each person you care about. They will then put up with all kinds of forgetfulness and go out of their way to keep you on track.
driven20 6y ago
I second, second brain. heh. I invested like 20 hours setting up my notion just right, and it's so worth it. It's so much more organize than my mucky/intangible brain. I also believe in the GTD philosophy that your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  I used to think this way at the beginning of my career, and I've almost completely changed course since then. I found that organizing and storing information is somewhat overrated unless you are very, very good at knowing ahead of time whether information you have come across will be useful in the future. If you don't, then it's better to just let your brain do the means-testing there naturally -- does something make the cut and you keep coming back to it month after month, year after year? Good news, you'll probably commit it to memory as your brain needs to do so. The problem is that if you overindex on what you choose to organize, you just end up with a bunch of junk and then you have to go back and tend it and delete it and figure out what makes the cut or not. It's such a time intensive chore that takes away useful cycles that I'd rather be spending on deep work. My deep work is rarely information retrieval and organization, but instead handling strategic concerns in the moment and planning for the future -- both of which I need to balance and do with proper judgment. And unfortunately, I do not find setting up a knowledge management system very useful for that. An old-fashioned journal that lets me get out my thoughts in the moment and log it at a point in time is really the best tool for that.
  - driven20 6y ago
    That's a very valid point. I used to call writing in Evernote, writing into the void. Though the beauty of any system is you design it. You get some kind of say in what's important. I trust that more than randomly depending on your brain. The brain can be a weird place. I have embarrassing memories from my childhood, I don't know if it serves me anymore, but they're there. Also, I get distracted too easily, having a list of tasks I'm working on keeps me on track.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user. Kids in school are already struggling with these things. What happens when every child is walking around with facts available instantly and constantly, but no context to manage it?
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Exactly, I agree. Think about 100 years from now — our bodies won't have evolved quick enough (much like our fight or flight mechanism dealing with the stresses of today) to be able to cope.
- asdff 6y ago
  Considering how many children and adults have undiagnosed ADHD, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that advertisers are exploiting these pathologies to great effect. Sidetrack and distract to draw eyes to your product, and with smart glasses you always have that opportunity to introduce an advertisement or track gaze on advertisements ("please watch the ad to continue playing the video!" and pausing the ad when you look away is incoming, I assure you). Personally that sort of stuff is where I draw the line, since it's a redundant consumer product with things I already own. Technology in recent decades has shown that the only utility it provides is analogous to something that already exists and works fine, because companies would rather ship something fast and 'new' than something clever that took time to think about. Like the smartwatch: $300 to poorly replicate half the things your phone in your pocket can already do, oh and you have to charge it every day unlike your automatic watch that was powered by your moving wrist alone. Or smart glasses, which would only serve to distract me in the middle of whatever I was doing at the time (probably with increasingly intrusive advertising like we see in every piece of technology in recent decades), and once again, is entirely redundant with 1/10th of the functionality that my phone in my pocket can do (including AR).
Daynil 6y ago
Memory is fundamentally limited anyway. Unless you're going to set up an Anki deck for your Zoom meeting notes, it's unrealistic to try to remember action points from every Zoom call we're on. The brain is an efficient machine, and it will naturally remember things that come up often enough. It works quite well on its own. I don't think I've ever sat down to try to remember how to write a for loop in whatever my preferred coding language is at the time - you just remember it after a few semi-regular lookups. If you feel your memory is limited in an area you do value instant recall that doesn't inherently produce regular repetition, there are ways to steer your long term memory consolidation. For example, you can train yourself to remember everyone's names when you meet them, if you value that. If you don't value it or put any particular effort into training it, there's no reason to think you've gone senile if you forget the name of most people you meet the first few times. For most things, I think the second brain solution is ideal. You value something enough to want to be able to recall it at a moment's notice, but you don't have any real need to instantly recall it without reference. We're not taking closed book exams outside of school [1]. This is where all the Zoom notes and book quotes are placed, where you can further digest, interpret and later recall them if and when they become relevant. [1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-meaning-of-notes/ https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-...
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Awesome write-up!
shrugthug 6y ago
For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us. https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750 https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
- freetonik 6y ago
  Second this recommendation, I enjoyed that book very much. However, I felt defeated by the end, because I couldn't act on the presented information in any meaningful way. Halfway through the book the author tells about how much he had struggled to write and had to isolate himself from technology for a while, but only temporary. He then came back and felt the "shallows" once again.
  - simongray 6y ago
    They did a good follow-up with the author on the Ezra Klein Show podcast a few months back: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klein-show-the-shallows-twitter-facebook-attention-deep-reading-thinking https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klei...
    - freetonik 6y ago
      Oh, this is great, thank you.
- asdff 6y ago
  Very scary and I do get a sense that my recall ability and general focus is severely diminished after a decade of being active on reddit and other places like here. The problem is I'm on this dopamine treadmill. I see a thread with an interesting topic and a lot of comments, and I want to dive in and spend an hour sifting through it. I check my subreddits and HN every day. And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe a little pissed off every now and then. Most articles I read are forgettable and have no impact on my life. There is literally nothing that I've learned on the internet over close to two decades of use that I couldn't learn more thoroughly with a book or by looking at a newspaper, and in recent years it's been getting impossible to find actual factual subject information on the internet that isn't some half assed SEOified article that doesn't even have my answer. I think I'm just gonna pull the plug and block these websites with some browser extension, because I am just too compulsive at this point, too engrained into this automatic unconscious action of cmd+t->news.y->tab->enter to do it under my own volition. Sometimes I sit down and I don't even remember opening HN, but there I am scrolling through the front page. I still need the internet for emails, stack overflow, or finding articles in my field, but that sort of use I will allow because I take that information and synthesize it into something novel and useful. I'm going to pull the plug on being a mindless internet consumer, who leaves no time for actual thinking in between the rampant consumption. Good bye, HN, hopefully for good but we will see how long I'm able to remain disciplined. I'm kinda excited about what sort of mental clarity this might bring me and how much that will improve my life.
Grimm1 6y ago
"Something had to be wrong! I started to notice (increasingly!) my inability to recall trivial things; for example, the action points from a Zoom call, or a quote from a book that I had read a couple of months ago. Surely this can’t be normal?" Except it's fairly normal under stress for people's memory to function more poorly and since we're experiencing a Global pandemic that has completely up ended our normal mode of living I would expect baseline stress for almost every one to be up considerably. So that's my hypothesis, which requires less assumptions than "people are losing the ability to remember because of computers" but doesn't result in a blog post where I can talk about Anki or equivalents.
sixdimensional 6y ago
I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with us. We might be losing our ability to remember, but if it is because we don’t “need” to remember because technology has augmented us... Well, this is why I also am fond of telling people that I have a difficult time separating technology from nature. Even though the two don’t seem like the same thing, technology too becomes part of the natural ecosystem as organisms invent and rely on it. Also, another way of thinking about this is, maybe the ability to recall small detailed facts was evolutionarily less important than building models in our brains. So, we offloaded recording small facts, while I think we still ingest and build/train our neural nets just fine in our brains. Then the only problem I see is, if life becomes all about mental models, when our ability to form new mental models degrades with age, what then? Especially with the rate of technological change, I do see a real likelihood that old mental models get left behind and without the ability to adapt, organisms (i.e.) us could be hosed. Edit: ..and the last sentence could be why the big push for AI and machine learning too - to ensure the models get encoded into the technology too... and be discovered faster, changed more fluidly, etc. Another evolutionary tool.
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree with you (nicely put btw) — what I find disconcerting is the fact that it's happening so quick, i.e. I notice myself evolving and changing over weeks/months and becoming increasingly reliant upon the external data stores. Pretty crazy we can adapt that quick!
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
    Same here. I rely on bookmarks and a lot of organized and tagged notes to recover the right things, but it works great!
  - tcbawo 6y ago
therealx 6y ago
I used to think I was losing my ability to remember things due to the amount of information I was taking in. I no longer think this is true and was simply my own worry. I do review certain things I want to remember in my downtime, but I don't think that is somehow inherently changing some larger picture like my information consumption. Semi-related, do you guys tend to get headaches after long information binges?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- stonedge 6y ago
  Not headaches, but I say that "my brain is tired".
ehnto 6y ago
I have a quirk in my brain that I can't remember strings of numbers if I try to, but if I read it once I'll recall it just fine. It's like my brain realises I am intending to go back and read the string 2 numbers at a time, over and over again, so it doesn't bother remembering. But if I just read it out once and don't think about it until I need to recall it, my brain has the information available for me.
rodolphoarruda 6y ago
I always liked the idea of a second brain, an exobrain done in any form of technology. I humbling say my exobrain is Evernote as I throw a lot of thing in there after adding some tags. I'm fast approaching the 3000 item mark, which is interesting because I'm gradually losing the capacity to find things as I can't remember what's in there to be searched/found. Day to day things like receipt photos are in some way at the top of my mind, but unique events from past years may be forever buried in there. Another evidence: I saved an article from 2017 just to find out days later when I searched for its title that I had actually saved the same article back in 2017. Well, I can't even imagine how this second brain will be like in 2027.
hateful 6y ago
There's a further separation here - let's call them "conscious" and "recognization" and they are processed by two different parts of the brain. I'm doing a lot of generalizing in this explanation and I'm not attempting to be 100% accurate in where things happen - I'm a programmer/architect, not a brain guy. And it's not just memory, but the processing or "thinking" of that memory. Let's take just one sense, sight, for our example. When you see something, eventually the signal gets to your "conscious" mind (also, there is a slight delay as your brain processes things). But at the same time that information is processed by the "recognization" part of your brain which will eventually store that information, also, in long term memory. There are a few interesting facts about this that I've seen: 1. there are people who are blind, but not because their eyes are damaged, but because the connection is severed to their "conscious". But their "recognization" connection is still intact. Because of this, even though they can't see, they can recognize faces and even stop before running into a wall. This is because the regognization happens even though you're not consciously aware of it. Something like face blindness is (probably) the opposite. 2. When you're in a parking lot looking for your car and you see your friend, you won't recognize them - this is because the "recognization" processing is only single threaded! 3. You can recognize someone you know from much further than you can make out their face consciously. 4. Recognization looks for very complex patterns - especially faces. Just ask yourself "how" you tell one face from another? That feeling of being being watched may be just that there's something face like in the environment. 5. The recognization will store its information and your conscious mind will look for it where its stored but they don't talk directedly!. So, again, when you see something, that information is sent to both places. But sometimes, especially if you have a chemical issue (e.g. serotonin) (even just a minor issue for that moment, not necessarily a big issue), the recognization process will be fast but the conscious process will be slow. So the recognization will store it, then the conscious brain will check to see if it's stored - and it's there! So your con
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Great explanation, thanks for taking the time to write it!
oregontechninja 6y ago
My memory is better now than ever before. I find it even knows how to forget things I don't care about! Great feature.
ikeboy 6y ago
Ironically enough, facebook messenger appears to be blocking this link from being shared, thus harming our collective memory of it.
tmaly 6y ago
I like the idea he raises of Google or search in general being an extension of our memory. I think as technology evolves, we may see a better version of this idea. The ultimate version of this would be what Connor Macleod is gifted at the end of Highlander 2. He has this ability to see people's thoughts and help them work together to solve huge problems in the world. We have lots of chat apps that give us instant communication, but it is not very organized or easy to search like the idea of direct access to someone's thoughts.
franze 6y ago
Whenever I do a SEO workshop I ask 3 questions to my audience: * How often did you Google this week? * What was the last thing before the last thing that you Googled? For the first question, I get laughs. For the second one blank stares. Later, I shoot another question: * What is the last thing you read, that you googled before, top to bottom? For the last question everybody looks at their feet. The use case I optimize websites for is: * Users do not know when they Google. * Users do not know what they Google. * Google is an extension of their thinking. * They do not read what they find. * It just need to move them forward in a way. We are all users.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  40 years ago it would have been: * How often did you read articles in newspapers this week? * What was the last article before the last article that you read? * What is the last newspaper article that you read, top to bottom? Or, for tech people: * How often did you read manpages this week? * What was the last manpage before the last manpage that you read? * What is the last manpage that you read, top to bottom? We remember things differently depending on what the purpose of the information is, and that hasn't changed. There's absolutely no reason to shame people into "looking at their feet" over it. Throughout the ages, countless people have read the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, but very few people beyond actors who have actually performed it would know who said this, or even in what act it was said: Both by myself and many other friends: But he, his own affections' counsellor, Is to himself--I will not say how true-- But to himself so secret and so close, So far from sounding and discovery, As is the bud bit with an envious worm, Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air, Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow. We would as willingly give cure as know.
  - SstnMbgty 6y ago
    If you ask me to remember the last but one thing I said to someone I live with in my house, or the last thing they said to me, I wouldn't remember that either. This doesn't mean I don't remember them, but my memories of these events are not structured as a temporally ordered list. I can say with high likelihood some of the things I googled recently, and a good selection of the reasons I was googling, just as I can talk about things I discussed recently, even if I can't index them, but expecting that to be addressed in a sorted list is to confuse the simplicity of formulation of the question with simplicity of implementation.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Don't know about memory, but without doubt, the web defines our access to information, during the pandemic more than ever. With far-reaching consequences for politics, cognitive abilities, history, power balances, market access, etc. Which is why it's so enormously important to not let us slide control over the language(s) of the web, such as HTML and CSS out of our hands, but retain or regain participation and representation in web standards.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
I pre-date Google and whenever I had technical questions the only way I could get them answered was to explain to the person I was asking exactly what I was doing and why, and they would only answer me if they agreed 100% with what and how I was doing something. If they didn't like either then I didn't get my question answered. This forced me to have to go learn and memorize everything about all aspects of technology just so I didn't get roadblocked by someone having a bad day. Today Google is more of a convenient way to jog my memory - I can function just fine when the internet goes out, read a map if my GPS loses its signal, etc. I don't ever want to be one of those blank people who just stand there and stares when the screen blinks out.
karmakaze 6y ago
I'm not so concerned about memory any more than calculators made us unable to add. I am concerned that people seem increasingly unable to draw coherent conclusions.
suyash 6y ago
Book Suggestion that goes into this problem and offers solutions, I'm listening to the audio version right now: "Think for Yourself" - https://www.amazon.com/Think-Yourself-Restoring-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1633699218 https://www.amazon.com/Think-Yourself-Restoring-Artificial-I...
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Ordered!
durandal1 6y ago
Pretty sure the three main factors that decreases your ability to retain information is: * Lack of sleep * Stress * Age Usually all three hit at once, as our career peaks in intensity around our late 30s, while also having kids.
- hungryforcodes 6y ago
  Late 30s is most certainly not old.
  - durandal1 6y ago
    As someone over 40 I tend to agree, but it's also old enough to notice the effects on memory retention.
tzs 6y ago
Has anyone built something to try to automate setting up spaced repetition? For example, I've looked up numerous PHP functions on www.php.net, numerous Python functions on docs.python.org, numerous Perl modules on metacpan.org or with the perldoc command, and numerous JavaScript functions on MDN. It would be neat if there was something that could automatically note what I've looked up, and turn that into flash cards for use with something like Anki.
ch33zer 6y ago
I've absolutely noticed this. I generally don't remember what I read on HN, or in documentation. What I do remember is the fact that I've read it, and a vague sense of where, and hopefully a few keywords to type into Google. I actively try to keep my memory sharp by doing recall exercises, but I think it's a losing battle: when we know we can find something later you either consciously or subconsciously do less effort to remember it.
spcebar 6y ago
What were we talking about?
osrec 6y ago
I read somewhere that before the advent of paper and books, ancient civilisations would keep epic stories in their heads. After we started writing things down in larger volumes, committing entire "books" to memory was not needed, so it became less prevalent and eventually stopped altogether. I guess smartphones may further reduce what we need to commit to memory, which will probably have some implications in terms of neuro-plasticity - i.e. it may well shrink (or at least change) parts of our brains.
titzer 6y ago
Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. Names, grey deeds, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovereign voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain and deify me, as if some blithe wine or bright elixir Peerless I had drunk, and so became immortal. - Keats, from memory. edit: Ok, I had to double check and I made a mistake!

243 points by scotthtaylor 6y ago

Haven't we seen this topic dicussed and dismissed before? I could have sworn...

I've been wondering the same thing recently. If anyone's interested in learning more about how previous cultures remembered vast amounts of information I would recommend the book I'm currently reading: Frances Yates - The Art of Memory, and the one I'm planning to read next: Mary Carruthers - The Book of Memory. One of the most interesting aspects for me is how the concept of memory in the middle ages was much more closely associated (sometimes conflated) with imagination than it is now. Most people I know now would consider memory and imagination as two quite distinct mental faculties.

burlesona 6y ago
Another good one is called “Moonwalking with Einstein.” Very interesting and entertaining, I highly recommend it.

Swizec 6y ago

Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?

mc32 6y ago
True but slippery slope and all. We need some basic ability lest we devolve control to things not us. We should still be able to get by without technology in emergency situations (natural events causing power outages, etc). We should not be rendered helpless.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Remember that fire was also a technology at one point. Our species is sustained by technology and there's no going back. There's always going to be some baseline we can't live without.
Cactus2018 6y ago
Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.) > ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ... http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html
- shawxe 6y ago
  The irony of reading this, over two thousand years later, translated into a different language, presumably by someone who is, even after all this time, still able to read the original--it's almost like writing helps us remember, as a species, in ways that would have otherwise been almost completely impossible.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vsareto 6y ago
    If there's one thing technology is good at disrupting, it's tradition
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      I'd say the opposite. The fact that a species memory has been created by the written word and the printing press means that nothing ever dies, and initial mistakes and the achievement of local maxima can be preserved forever. The tyranny of Aristotle over the Dark Ages was no joke. Natural senility as an individual is probably no more than the accumulation of calcified habits, rather than completely biological - the ability to abandon old, wrong knowledge is a sign of youth and indispensable to the learning process. The written word has enabled us to achieve senility as a species.
  - stanrivers 6y ago
    Yes - and writing is a way to extend your memory as well. You can work more complex ideas with yourself, using the paper as storage for what you have already thought through. Can you imagine doing some even simple Calc-type proofs without paper? Not possible. Many things are like that. You give up maybe better memory in your head in exchange for being able to make progress that your couldn’t have made without the tool of writing. Humans are ultimately tool-using animals more or less... makes sense that we use tools that are valuable.
me_me_me 6y ago
Yes but its us that live in era of weaponized attention grabbing. People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you. Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Greek oration was all about weaponized attention grabbing and getting people to join your school not those other terrible terrible oh so bad schools. We’ve had weaponized attention grabbing as long as wemve had humans I bet.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    It was an art of oration. Not a science driven exploitation of basic human instincts. They didn't have a focus groups A-B testing and neurological studies back then. That's a bit like saying that the impact on climate change back 1000 years ago and now is the same, as in both cases we are releasing carbon into atmosphere.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      It was the closest they had to a science, and it was aimed at manipulating the listener in a predetermined way. The fact that it was mostly applied at civil politics tells more about their society than about the tool...
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  Writing is a technology. It's disputable if any technology is inherently neutral or not: “One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral.” from https://thecompassmagazine.com/blog/is-technology-morally-neutral-or-a-moral-peril https://thecompassmagazine.com/blog/is-technology-morally-ne...
in3d 6y ago
How do you know he wasn’t right and writing indeed worsened our memory? Maybe you’d remember who it was if not for knowing it is written down somewhere.
- Loughla 6y ago
  And that's the question. Is there more value in being able to remember who the specific philosopher was, or more in knowing how to find that information quickly and easily? To take it a step further - is there more value in individuals remembering the specific philosopher, or in society, anyone in society being able to find out that same information?
asdff 6y ago
In a way Socrates was exactly right. Consider Buddhism, a philosophy that lasted orally for hundreds of years before the first texts were written. Even today, buddhist monks use chanting and repetition to memorize these teachings, internalize them, and live them. Sure, you could read these teachings and move on with your life, but can you recite what you just read, or even what you just wrote? Not a chance. Your memory of text is fleeting compared to if you gave focused mental effort committing that text to memory through oral repetition.

Terretta 6y ago

Yes... probably ... what was the question again? // This loss of ability to remember is real and personal. To combat it, once a year, I undertake a two to three week digital detox. No devices, no media, only long form traditional books. Takes a week to overcome agitation from not being able to “consume” digital micro-info-bursts on demand. Following that, my brain begins to restore its ability to build and maintain concepts, built up like Jenga towers or houses of cards while reading. That ability remains until I get lazy, quit taking notes by hand and go back to digital.

mc32 6y ago
Once a year is not going to help much, I don’t think. It’s something you have to exercise with some consistency to keep from atrophying.

jraph 6y ago

> So I wouldn’t say we are losing our ability to remember, as I posed at the start of this post. I think people (me included) just don’t do enough work to move stuff from our working memory into our long-term memory. I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful. And for things you do often, you will probably memorize it anyway. Lack of focus leading to not remembering the content of a meeting is problematic though. I don't have this issue fortunately.

taneq 6y ago
Yep, I've found I'm less effective at remembering fully detailed information but more effective at remembering 'bread crumbs' which let me quickly find the information in documentation or online. It's sort of like I store the index internally and the data table externally.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  I don't think that is unusual. I also don't try hard to memorise things I know I can trivially lookup. Other things I have a directory called `useful_things` that has markdown files broken down by category I can quickly grep for that thing I remember I needed but not how to do.
- Loughla 6y ago
  This is also something I've found when hiring. If the position is time sensitive - the fires being put out tend to have a <1 day time limit, I want an older (45+) person in that position. Not for their experience, but for their ability to recall and store memories. In my experience, older employees are able to recall information to solve a problem, but the recall may be incomplete, leading to a quicker, but less effective solution. Whereas, younger employees often need more time because they don't specifically remember solutions, but they are able to find, categorize, and process information faster, often leading to a slower, but more complete and robust solution. Not sure if it's a product of education and upbringing in different worlds, or a product of experience, but it's fascinating to me.
- 6y ago

davidtranjs 6y ago

I am experiment the same problem. As a software developer, I spend all my day on computer and mobile phone. Recently, I have a the feeling that it take me a while to recall the name of a friend. Or even searching for a solution. It could be the side effect of all of the autocomplete and search result which are accessible within my palm.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
This sounds more like aging.

klmadfejno 6y ago

Author goes from "I can't remember things" to assuming that humans can't remember things. Not especially compelling. Vaguely suspicious the point of the article is to be a covert ad for Obsidian.

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Haha, not at all an advert. Simply saying that I use networked thinking apps (Obsidian, Roam Research, etc.) to help take the load off my working memory.

Lazlo182 6y ago

What?

Pt_ 6y ago

During the pandemic, spending more time at home and less time having real social interactions has lead me to beleive I am forgetting some of my vocabulary or at the least not practicing it enough to keep it in what you describe as "Working memory". Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.

Loughla 6y ago
Can you expand on that? And can you describe your living circumstances. I'm relatively isolated due to rural life, and I haven't seen any of that in my life. I tend toward isolation naturally, so maybe that has something to do with it. But I'm fascinated by your statements. Can you go more in-depth, please?
- Pt_ 6y ago
  Before the pandemic, I was living in London shared flat with my partner and a friend of ours. Had quite a busy social life, working in an office in Soho. Since the pandemic I have moved out of the city and into a more rural isolated area (Did not see any benefit to paying high rent prices in a city when all the facilities were shut down). All of my work has moved to remote working using video conferencing etc. Before we would use Slack a lot, but in-person meetings were a common occurence and I would spend quite a lot of time outside of work with friends or colleagues discussing various topics. Since being in this isolated environemnt I feel that because those interactions are far more rare when they do happen I struggle to recall words or phrases that were once commonplace in my vernacular. This is all very anecdotal evidence of course, but it's somethig i've observed in myself of a number of occasions now.

fridgamarator 6y ago

Peppridge farm remembers

code_scrapping 6y ago

[Off-topic] I see the other post on Scott's blog "My summer 2020 road trip along the Italian Riviera", and I have to give impressions. It's not the first time I hear the story along the tune of "we went on vacation, and it was so strange, everything was deserted, people were masked". There's a reason for that - it's called a pandemic, it's taking lives in the thousands per day. Yet, people still can't seem to rationalize that we shouldn't do unnecessary trips, even if we really, really need a vacation right now (and probably everybody does). The author said they chose Italy because they were "only country that seemed to have a handle on infections". Again - that's because Italy was the hardest hit country at the start of the European side of the pandemic. It's like saying "Wuhan seems to know how to deal with the issue". Usually, I go for the ad-hominem attack "people are too uneducated, they don't understand..." when I see this kind of behavior. But this year - I see it over and over again in highly (formally) educated (PhD-level) people, who keep track with things, are aware - and yet, can't help themselves. Scott certainly doesn't seem like a uninformed person, nor is he blind to the situation. That's the kind of contradictory examples that whisper "this isn't going to be OK, we're always going to have easy short-sighted goals that will justify the risk and make us go downhill". I do see that Scott is the original poster, and would like to hear the rationalization beyond "we really needed a vacation".

yanis_t 6y ago

We are really good at adapting. Today I and my phone can do better at remembering stuff I need, than me without phone 10 years ago. Is this really a problem if you think about it from the standpoint of human evolution?

redvenom 6y ago
Well, it could be a problem if we are aiming for human happiness. If there is natural selection going on here, then it would be pushing the people to actually become less able to think for ourselves in terms of creative solutions. Sort of like how bird species on islands sometimes lose the ability to fly. If that is the case, it may be really hard for us to actually reverse our destructive trend against the natural world and then we are really in trouble.

coldpie 6y ago

I strongly suspect the article's title should replace "we" with "I" and ought to be an introspective on the process of aging.

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Actually a good point!

mncharity 6y ago

Imagine AR memory palaces, and memory boards (like crafty photo boards, or tactile Lukasa[1])? As my memory emphasizes spatial, I'm looking forward to exploring. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=lukasa&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=lukasa&tbm=isch

spicymaki 6y ago

I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references. I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on. I think the trend today is to prime the brain with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember. Not exactly sure how I feel about that.

nishparadox 6y ago
Ditto. This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)... [0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowledge/ https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...
- scotthtaylor 6y ago
  Agree 100% — nicely written up!
snarfy 6y ago
Some of my most vivid childhood memories are dreams I had. When recalling the events in my life, it's not always easy to recall which were dreams and which really happened. It's terrifying. It's all too much information. I worked on cdrom technology 20 years ago. I don't want to know the sector size is 2532 bytes, but I do.
- leetcrew 6y ago

httpz 6y ago

My brain is basically a cache for pointers at this point. I always know where to find something I'm trying to remember and I always have my phone on me.

op03 6y ago

Personal staff and underlings are the solution. And friends and family are a great backup. This system works out well if you do a good job of remembering and meeting their needs. Keep notes on the needs of each person you care about. They will then put up with all kinds of forgetfulness and go out of their way to keep you on track.

driven20 6y ago

I second, second brain. heh. I invested like 20 hours setting up my notion just right, and it's so worth it. It's so much more organize than my mucky/intangible brain. I also believe in the GTD philosophy that your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.

yowlingcat 6y ago
I used to think this way at the beginning of my career, and I've almost completely changed course since then. I found that organizing and storing information is somewhat overrated unless you are very, very good at knowing ahead of time whether information you have come across will be useful in the future. If you don't, then it's better to just let your brain do the means-testing there naturally -- does something make the cut and you keep coming back to it month after month, year after year? Good news, you'll probably commit it to memory as your brain needs to do so. The problem is that if you overindex on what you choose to organize, you just end up with a bunch of junk and then you have to go back and tend it and delete it and figure out what makes the cut or not. It's such a time intensive chore that takes away useful cycles that I'd rather be spending on deep work. My deep work is rarely information retrieval and organization, but instead handling strategic concerns in the moment and planning for the future -- both of which I need to balance and do with proper judgment. And unfortunately, I do not find setting up a knowledge management system very useful for that. An old-fashioned journal that lets me get out my thoughts in the moment and log it at a point in time is really the best tool for that.
- driven20 6y ago
  That's a very valid point. I used to call writing in Evernote, writing into the void. Though the beauty of any system is you design it. You get some kind of say in what's important. I trust that more than randomly depending on your brain. The brain can be a weird place. I have embarrassing memories from my childhood, I don't know if it serves me anymore, but they're there. Also, I get distracted too easily, having a list of tasks I'm working on keeps me on track.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user. Kids in school are already struggling with these things. What happens when every child is walking around with facts available instantly and constantly, but no context to manage it?

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Exactly, I agree. Think about 100 years from now — our bodies won't have evolved quick enough (much like our fight or flight mechanism dealing with the stresses of today) to be able to cope.
asdff 6y ago
Considering how many children and adults have undiagnosed ADHD, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest that advertisers are exploiting these pathologies to great effect. Sidetrack and distract to draw eyes to your product, and with smart glasses you always have that opportunity to introduce an advertisement or track gaze on advertisements ("please watch the ad to continue playing the video!" and pausing the ad when you look away is incoming, I assure you). Personally that sort of stuff is where I draw the line, since it's a redundant consumer product with things I already own. Technology in recent decades has shown that the only utility it provides is analogous to something that already exists and works fine, because companies would rather ship something fast and 'new' than something clever that took time to think about. Like the smartwatch: $300 to poorly replicate half the things your phone in your pocket can already do, oh and you have to charge it every day unlike your automatic watch that was powered by your moving wrist alone. Or smart glasses, which would only serve to distract me in the middle of whatever I was doing at the time (probably with increasingly intrusive advertising like we see in every piece of technology in recent decades), and once again, is entirely redundant with 1/10th of the functionality that my phone in my pocket can do (including AR).

Daynil 6y ago

Memory is fundamentally limited anyway. Unless you're going to set up an Anki deck for your Zoom meeting notes, it's unrealistic to try to remember action points from every Zoom call we're on. The brain is an efficient machine, and it will naturally remember things that come up often enough. It works quite well on its own. I don't think I've ever sat down to try to remember how to write a for loop in whatever my preferred coding language is at the time - you just remember it after a few semi-regular lookups. If you feel your memory is limited in an area you do value instant recall that doesn't inherently produce regular repetition, there are ways to steer your long term memory consolidation. For example, you can train yourself to remember everyone's names when you meet them, if you value that. If you don't value it or put any particular effort into training it, there's no reason to think you've gone senile if you forget the name of most people you meet the first few times. For most things, I think the second brain solution is ideal. You value something enough to want to be able to recall it at a moment's notice, but you don't have any real need to instantly recall it without reference. We're not taking closed book exams outside of school [1]. This is where all the Zoom notes and book quotes are placed, where you can further digest, interpret and later recall them if and when they become relevant. [1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-meaning-of-notes/ https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-...

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Awesome write-up!

shrugthug 6y ago

For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us. https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750 https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

freetonik 6y ago
Second this recommendation, I enjoyed that book very much. However, I felt defeated by the end, because I couldn't act on the presented information in any meaningful way. Halfway through the book the author tells about how much he had struggled to write and had to isolate himself from technology for a while, but only temporary. He then came back and felt the "shallows" once again.
- simongray 6y ago
  They did a good follow-up with the author on the Ezra Klein Show podcast a few months back: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klein-show-the-shallows-twitter-facebook-attention-deep-reading-thinking https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/7/1/21308153/the-ezra-klei...
  - freetonik 6y ago
    Oh, this is great, thank you.
asdff 6y ago
Very scary and I do get a sense that my recall ability and general focus is severely diminished after a decade of being active on reddit and other places like here. The problem is I'm on this dopamine treadmill. I see a thread with an interesting topic and a lot of comments, and I want to dive in and spend an hour sifting through it. I check my subreddits and HN every day. And for what? I get nothing out of it, maybe a little pissed off every now and then. Most articles I read are forgettable and have no impact on my life. There is literally nothing that I've learned on the internet over close to two decades of use that I couldn't learn more thoroughly with a book or by looking at a newspaper, and in recent years it's been getting impossible to find actual factual subject information on the internet that isn't some half assed SEOified article that doesn't even have my answer. I think I'm just gonna pull the plug and block these websites with some browser extension, because I am just too compulsive at this point, too engrained into this automatic unconscious action of cmd+t->news.y->tab->enter to do it under my own volition. Sometimes I sit down and I don't even remember opening HN, but there I am scrolling through the front page. I still need the internet for emails, stack overflow, or finding articles in my field, but that sort of use I will allow because I take that information and synthesize it into something novel and useful. I'm going to pull the plug on being a mindless internet consumer, who leaves no time for actual thinking in between the rampant consumption. Good bye, HN, hopefully for good but we will see how long I'm able to remain disciplined. I'm kinda excited about what sort of mental clarity this might bring me and how much that will improve my life.

Grimm1 6y ago

"Something had to be wrong! I started to notice (increasingly!) my inability to recall trivial things; for example, the action points from a Zoom call, or a quote from a book that I had read a couple of months ago. Surely this can’t be normal?" Except it's fairly normal under stress for people's memory to function more poorly and since we're experiencing a Global pandemic that has completely up ended our normal mode of living I would expect baseline stress for almost every one to be up considerably. So that's my hypothesis, which requires less assumptions than "people are losing the ability to remember because of computers" but doesn't result in a blog post where I can talk about Anki or equivalents.

sixdimensional 6y ago

I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”. Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains. We evolve with technology, and it evolves with us. We might be losing our ability to remember, but if it is because we don’t “need” to remember because technology has augmented us... Well, this is why I also am fond of telling people that I have a difficult time separating technology from nature. Even though the two don’t seem like the same thing, technology too becomes part of the natural ecosystem as organisms invent and rely on it. Also, another way of thinking about this is, maybe the ability to recall small detailed facts was evolutionarily less important than building models in our brains. So, we offloaded recording small facts, while I think we still ingest and build/train our neural nets just fine in our brains. Then the only problem I see is, if life becomes all about mental models, when our ability to form new mental models degrades with age, what then? Especially with the rate of technological change, I do see a real likelihood that old mental models get left behind and without the ability to adapt, organisms (i.e.) us could be hosed. Edit: ..and the last sentence could be why the big push for AI and machine learning too - to ensure the models get encoded into the technology too... and be discovered faster, changed more fluidly, etc. Another evolutionary tool.

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Yeah, I agree with you (nicely put btw) — what I find disconcerting is the fact that it's happening so quick, i.e. I notice myself evolving and changing over weeks/months and becoming increasingly reliant upon the external data stores. Pretty crazy we can adapt that quick!
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
  Same here. I rely on bookmarks and a lot of organized and tagged notes to recover the right things, but it works great!
- tcbawo 6y ago

therealx 6y ago

I used to think I was losing my ability to remember things due to the amount of information I was taking in. I no longer think this is true and was simply my own worry. I do review certain things I want to remember in my downtime, but I don't think that is somehow inherently changing some larger picture like my information consumption. Semi-related, do you guys tend to get headaches after long information binges?

deleted 6y ago
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stonedge 6y ago
Not headaches, but I say that "my brain is tired".

ehnto 6y ago

I have a quirk in my brain that I can't remember strings of numbers if I try to, but if I read it once I'll recall it just fine. It's like my brain realises I am intending to go back and read the string 2 numbers at a time, over and over again, so it doesn't bother remembering. But if I just read it out once and don't think about it until I need to recall it, my brain has the information available for me.

rodolphoarruda 6y ago

I always liked the idea of a second brain, an exobrain done in any form of technology. I humbling say my exobrain is Evernote as I throw a lot of thing in there after adding some tags. I'm fast approaching the 3000 item mark, which is interesting because I'm gradually losing the capacity to find things as I can't remember what's in there to be searched/found. Day to day things like receipt photos are in some way at the top of my mind, but unique events from past years may be forever buried in there. Another evidence: I saved an article from 2017 just to find out days later when I searched for its title that I had actually saved the same article back in 2017. Well, I can't even imagine how this second brain will be like in 2027.

hateful 6y ago

There's a further separation here - let's call them "conscious" and "recognization" and they are processed by two different parts of the brain. I'm doing a lot of generalizing in this explanation and I'm not attempting to be 100% accurate in where things happen - I'm a programmer/architect, not a brain guy. And it's not just memory, but the processing or "thinking" of that memory. Let's take just one sense, sight, for our example. When you see something, eventually the signal gets to your "conscious" mind (also, there is a slight delay as your brain processes things). But at the same time that information is processed by the "recognization" part of your brain which will eventually store that information, also, in long term memory. There are a few interesting facts about this that I've seen: 1. there are people who are blind, but not because their eyes are damaged, but because the connection is severed to their "conscious". But their "recognization" connection is still intact. Because of this, even though they can't see, they can recognize faces and even stop before running into a wall. This is because the regognization happens even though you're not consciously aware of it. Something like face blindness is (probably) the opposite. 2. When you're in a parking lot looking for your car and you see your friend, you won't recognize them - this is because the "recognization" processing is only single threaded! 3. You can recognize someone you know from much further than you can make out their face consciously. 4. Recognization looks for very complex patterns - especially faces. Just ask yourself "how" you tell one face from another? That feeling of being being watched may be just that there's something face like in the environment. 5. The recognization will store its information and your conscious mind will look for it where its stored but they don't talk directedly!. So, again, when you see something, that information is sent to both places. But sometimes, especially if you have a chemical issue (e.g. serotonin) (even just a minor issue for that moment, not necessarily a big issue), the recognization process will be fast but the conscious process will be slow. So the recognization will store it, then the conscious brain will check to see if it's stored - and it's there! So your con

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Great explanation, thanks for taking the time to write it!

oregontechninja 6y ago

My memory is better now than ever before. I find it even knows how to forget things I don't care about! Great feature.

ikeboy 6y ago

Ironically enough, facebook messenger appears to be blocking this link from being shared, thus harming our collective memory of it.

tmaly 6y ago

I like the idea he raises of Google or search in general being an extension of our memory. I think as technology evolves, we may see a better version of this idea. The ultimate version of this would be what Connor Macleod is gifted at the end of Highlander 2. He has this ability to see people's thoughts and help them work together to solve huge problems in the world. We have lots of chat apps that give us instant communication, but it is not very organized or easy to search like the idea of direct access to someone's thoughts.

franze 6y ago

Whenever I do a SEO workshop I ask 3 questions to my audience: * How often did you Google this week? * What was the last thing before the last thing that you Googled? For the first question, I get laughs. For the second one blank stares. Later, I shoot another question: * What is the last thing you read, that you googled before, top to bottom? For the last question everybody looks at their feet. The use case I optimize websites for is: * Users do not know when they Google. * Users do not know what they Google. * Google is an extension of their thinking. * They do not read what they find. * It just need to move them forward in a way. We are all users.

kstenerud 6y ago
40 years ago it would have been: * How often did you read articles in newspapers this week? * What was the last article before the last article that you read? * What is the last newspaper article that you read, top to bottom? Or, for tech people: * How often did you read manpages this week? * What was the last manpage before the last manpage that you read? * What is the last manpage that you read, top to bottom? We remember things differently depending on what the purpose of the information is, and that hasn't changed. There's absolutely no reason to shame people into "looking at their feet" over it. Throughout the ages, countless people have read the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, but very few people beyond actors who have actually performed it would know who said this, or even in what act it was said: Both by myself and many other friends: But he, his own affections' counsellor, Is to himself--I will not say how true-- But to himself so secret and so close, So far from sounding and discovery, As is the bud bit with an envious worm, Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air, Or dedicate his beauty to the sun. Could we but learn from whence his sorrows grow. We would as willingly give cure as know.
- SstnMbgty 6y ago
  If you ask me to remember the last but one thing I said to someone I live with in my house, or the last thing they said to me, I wouldn't remember that either. This doesn't mean I don't remember them, but my memories of these events are not structured as a temporally ordered list. I can say with high likelihood some of the things I googled recently, and a good selection of the reasons I was googling, just as I can talk about things I discussed recently, even if I can't index them, but expecting that to be addressed in a sorted list is to confuse the simplicity of formulation of the question with simplicity of implementation.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Don't know about memory, but without doubt, the web defines our access to information, during the pandemic more than ever. With far-reaching consequences for politics, cognitive abilities, history, power balances, market access, etc. Which is why it's so enormously important to not let us slide control over the language(s) of the web, such as HTML and CSS out of our hands, but retain or regain participation and representation in web standards.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

I pre-date Google and whenever I had technical questions the only way I could get them answered was to explain to the person I was asking exactly what I was doing and why, and they would only answer me if they agreed 100% with what and how I was doing something. If they didn't like either then I didn't get my question answered. This forced me to have to go learn and memorize everything about all aspects of technology just so I didn't get roadblocked by someone having a bad day. Today Google is more of a convenient way to jog my memory - I can function just fine when the internet goes out, read a map if my GPS loses its signal, etc. I don't ever want to be one of those blank people who just stand there and stares when the screen blinks out.

karmakaze 6y ago

I'm not so concerned about memory any more than calculators made us unable to add. I am concerned that people seem increasingly unable to draw coherent conclusions.

suyash 6y ago

Book Suggestion that goes into this problem and offers solutions, I'm listening to the audio version right now: "Think for Yourself" - https://www.amazon.com/Think-Yourself-Restoring-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/1633699218 https://www.amazon.com/Think-Yourself-Restoring-Artificial-I...

scotthtaylor 6y ago
Ordered!

durandal1 6y ago

Pretty sure the three main factors that decreases your ability to retain information is: * Lack of sleep * Stress * Age Usually all three hit at once, as our career peaks in intensity around our late 30s, while also having kids.

hungryforcodes 6y ago
Late 30s is most certainly not old.
- durandal1 6y ago
  As someone over 40 I tend to agree, but it's also old enough to notice the effects on memory retention.

tzs 6y ago

Has anyone built something to try to automate setting up spaced repetition? For example, I've looked up numerous PHP functions on www.php.net, numerous Python functions on docs.python.org, numerous Perl modules on metacpan.org or with the perldoc command, and numerous JavaScript functions on MDN. It would be neat if there was something that could automatically note what I've looked up, and turn that into flash cards for use with something like Anki.

ch33zer 6y ago

I've absolutely noticed this. I generally don't remember what I read on HN, or in documentation. What I do remember is the fact that I've read it, and a vague sense of where, and hopefully a few keywords to type into Google. I actively try to keep my memory sharp by doing recall exercises, but I think it's a losing battle: when we know we can find something later you either consciously or subconsciously do less effort to remember it.

spcebar 6y ago

What were we talking about?

osrec 6y ago

I read somewhere that before the advent of paper and books, ancient civilisations would keep epic stories in their heads. After we started writing things down in larger volumes, committing entire "books" to memory was not needed, so it became less prevalent and eventually stopped altogether. I guess smartphones may further reduce what we need to commit to memory, which will probably have some implications in terms of neuro-plasticity - i.e. it may well shrink (or at least change) parts of our brains.

titzer 6y ago

Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. Names, grey deeds, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovereign voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain and deify me, as if some blithe wine or bright elixir Peerless I had drunk, and so became immortal. - Keats, from memory. edit: Ok, I had to double check and I made a mistake!