5 ms·

Ah, the holy grail of not forgetting what you read and learn. For this author, visualizing worked well, for others maybe not. The sad fact is that all memorie

Ah, the holy grail of not forgetting what you read and learn. For this author, visualizing worked well, for others maybe not. The sad fact is that all memories fade over time unless recalled. My opinion: commit only the most important ideas to long-term memory. The rest can be looked up.

analog31 5y ago
Indeed there's a legend that Albert Einstein refused to memorize his phone number because he said it was already in the phone book.
- anitil 5y ago
  That makes me feel better about not knowing my address. I know how to get home and that's good enough. Anyway, I use a PO Box ... that I also can't remember.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  This reminds me of the Extended mind thesis. As long as you're capable of looking it up, it's part of your mind for all practical purposes. Storing it literally in your brain wouldn't add benefit in many (not all) cases.
  - toto444 5y ago
    This does not really apply to language learning.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      It doesn't, and it's interesting to note why - the latency of recall is important with language because it's so often used in daily life and because low latency is needed for fluid conversation. For more scarcely needed information, the latency of recall (200ms vs 10s) doesn't matter, and so it is often preferable to store it outside of the brain. It might still be important to store a pointer to that information with some metadata in the brain so that it can be used in conceptual reasoning. But the actual data can be stored elsewhere (e.g a phone number on a smartphone).
philipswood 5y ago
After playing with memory techniques as a child I've come to the conclusion that forgetting is a feature, not a bug. If you're not remembering something your mind's "garbage collection" system has come to the conclusion that it's not relevant enough for active recall. I'm for changing approaches to the material to change it's relevancy score, but forcing my mind to remember something's turns out usually to be pointless. Also... A mind full of irrelevant visual associations from some mnemonic techniques seems littered and distracting.
read_if_gay_ 5y ago
> My opinion: commit only the most important ideas to long-term memory. The rest can be looked up. Mine's similar: By default, take notes and figure out a way to search them quickly whenever needed. Only memorize those things where lookup adds too much latency/is impractical. For note taking I've found Vimwiki to work well, and fzf.vim for searching. However effectively taking notes is something to be learned, and it's definitely not just "summarize everything you've learned".
- kd5bjo 5y ago
  > Only memorize those things where lookup adds too much latency/is impractical. One particularly useful form of this is keywords and jargon: If you memorize the formal names of nebulous concepts, you’ll be in a much better position to look up the details when you need them. For example: “Encoding scheme derived from a tree of symbol frequencies” => “Huffman Coding” An internet or literature search for the latter term will turn up relevant results much more quickly than searching for the former directly.

analog31 5y ago

Indeed there's a legend that Albert Einstein refused to memorize his phone number because he said it was already in the phone book.

anitil 5y ago
That makes me feel better about not knowing my address. I know how to get home and that's good enough. Anyway, I use a PO Box ... that I also can't remember.
fighterpilot 5y ago
This reminds me of the Extended mind thesis. As long as you're capable of looking it up, it's part of your mind for all practical purposes. Storing it literally in your brain wouldn't add benefit in many (not all) cases.
- toto444 5y ago
  This does not really apply to language learning.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    It doesn't, and it's interesting to note why - the latency of recall is important with language because it's so often used in daily life and because low latency is needed for fluid conversation. For more scarcely needed information, the latency of recall (200ms vs 10s) doesn't matter, and so it is often preferable to store it outside of the brain. It might still be important to store a pointer to that information with some metadata in the brain so that it can be used in conceptual reasoning. But the actual data can be stored elsewhere (e.g a phone number on a smartphone).

philipswood 5y ago

After playing with memory techniques as a child I've come to the conclusion that forgetting is a feature, not a bug. If you're not remembering something your mind's "garbage collection" system has come to the conclusion that it's not relevant enough for active recall. I'm for changing approaches to the material to change it's relevancy score, but forcing my mind to remember something's turns out usually to be pointless. Also... A mind full of irrelevant visual associations from some mnemonic techniques seems littered and distracting.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago

> My opinion: commit only the most important ideas to long-term memory. The rest can be looked up. Mine's similar: By default, take notes and figure out a way to search them quickly whenever needed. Only memorize those things where lookup adds too much latency/is impractical. For note taking I've found Vimwiki to work well, and fzf.vim for searching. However effectively taking notes is something to be learned, and it's definitely not just "summarize everything you've learned".

kd5bjo 5y ago
> Only memorize those things where lookup adds too much latency/is impractical. One particularly useful form of this is keywords and jargon: If you memorize the formal names of nebulous concepts, you’ll be in a much better position to look up the details when you need them. For example: “Encoding scheme derived from a tree of symbol frequencies” => “Huffman Coding” An internet or literature search for the latter term will turn up relevant results much more quickly than searching for the former directly.