9 ms·

Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)

247 points by phreeza 3y ago

tetris11 3y ago
Alzheimer's has to be one of the worst. I do find euthanasia to be a slippery slope[0], but I'll make an exception for Alzheimer's. 0: picture an understaffed and underfunded hospital, with a single nurse walking around calmingly asking anyone if they want it to end
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Making an exception for X is the same slippery slope. And easy talk for people who haven't had a family member die in agony or something like that in a place where they don't allow control over your own life. My life, my terms; if I want out, it needs to be an option. Which is exactly the problem with Alzheimer; cancer is much easier; you are usually lucid but not very happy the last few weeks/months, so let's end it. Alzheimer's they cannot even ask you, as you cannot decide for yourself for probably a long time already.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    I’ve had multiple family members die with Alzheimer’s; can I sign up when young and lucid to die early if I get diagnosed? The sheer horror of forgetting your children and grandchildren sickens me — and I have to say, those relatives were gone long before they were gone.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      > I’ve had multiple family members die with Alzheimer’s; can I sign up when young and lucid to die early if I get diagnosed? In the Netherlands (and I guess other countries), you have to arrange this very early (if you know your family has Alzheimers, like mine). Once you have symptoms or even are diagnosed, you cannot decide anymore. And you'll end up in a home, knowing nothing and no-one and often drugged up, until you die of natural causes (although the last part you don't notice anyway; your family does).
      - grodriguez100 3y ago
        Being diagnosed should not prevent you from making an advance directive as long as you are in full possession of your mental faculties. That’s how it works in Spain at least. In certain cases this may involve a medical evaluation.
        anonzzzies 3y ago
        We had some issues in the family with this, but yes, it might be because the diagnoses was already (perceived to be) too late. I would recommend doing it young if it's a familiar/genetic issue. If not, of course you cannot do that, so you try what you can.
    - grodriguez100 3y ago
      In Spain this is possible. It is called “testamento vital” or “documento de voluntades anticipadas”, and the goal is just that: to declare, in a legally binding way, your wish to receive or not receive certain kinds of medical treatments in the future, in case you can no longer decide when the time comes. This includes euthanasia in cases where it is legally allowed. Alzheimer is one of such cases.
    - bloak 3y ago
      I don't have a lot of experience with Alzheimer's, but in the couple of cases I've observed, though not from very close, the patient didn't seem to be suffering or unhappy at the end. There was a brief intermediate period of paranoia, in which they obviously were unhappy, but then they settled down into a state of complete doolallitude in which they were an expensive burden for professional carers but seemed quite cheerful. That makes the euthanasia question a bit harder.
  - VBprogrammer 3y ago
    We afford old people in their last days less compassion than a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at this as a moral outrage. Our family have recently been in the situation where my partners 85 year old grandfather, who sometimes struggles to remember who we are, had to have his leg amputated due to some metalwork he had implanted in his knee 10 years ago having worn through his skin due to him losing muscle and being very thin from being bed bound. He has approximately zero chance of adapting to having his leg amputated and, in all honesty, most of the family hoped he would die on the operating table as he has no meaningful quality of life.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      > We afford old people in their last days less compassion than a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at this as a moral outrage. Maybe religious groups/political parties/lobbies etc; if they are against abortion, they will definitely be against ending grandma (who doesn't know who you or your grandpa are, but let's not mention that); religious people see it as suicide and murder, so off to hell with 2+ people for every euthanasia.
      - vkou 3y ago
        Ironically, there's a large overlap between those people and people who support capital punishment.
        nippoo 3y ago
        Is there? I'm genuinely curious where this stat comes from.
        vkou 3y ago
        The Venn diagram of states that criminalize abortion and states that carry out the death penalty is nearly a circle... As are the sets of politicians, and the platforms that evangelical organizations tend to endorse. Catholics are an exception, but they are a relatively politically inactive minority in the US. https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/ https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/ [1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing [1] Florida's only yellow because it's still being fought in the courts.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    > My life, my terms; if I want out, it needs to be an option. It’s always an option, it’s just kind of weird that it’s illegal for trained medical professionals to help you do it certainly and painlessly.
    - wakawaka28 3y ago
      It's not that weird. Doctors and the state have perverse incentives. We also discourage suicide for good reasons.
      - cogman10 3y ago
        States with the death penalty are finding it hard to find doctors and suppliers to carry out the punishment. I don't, frankly, think there's a lot of perverse incentive. For the medical field, the incentive is for longevity. Nursing homes make money on occupancy, they aren't going to want to kill off their primary source of income. The state might care, but they have an uphill battle if they tried pulling off soylent green.
        wakawaka28 3y ago
        Killing people to take their organs would be one perverse incentive. Reducing costs to the state would be another. Canada has been taking the lead with euthanasia. They propose it as a solution for such things as depression and poverty, or anything else that would make life unbearable for you (regardless of whether it's reasonable). See: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/another-case-of-a-sick-canadian-offered-death-instead-of-treatment-this-time-a-veteran https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/another-case-of-a-sick-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-r... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christine-gauthier-paralympian-euthanasia-canada-b2238319.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christine-... https://nypost.com/2023/02/24/canada-considers-expanding-euthanasia-program-to-terminally-ill-minors/ https://nypost.com/2023/02/24/canada-considers-expanding-eut... On the other hand, the medical establishment currently has incentives to keep people alive. That can certainly lead to perverse incentives too.
  - ametrau 3y ago
    Just one problem with the is that it becomes in practice a go to option in healthcare for difficult cases as it introduces a moral hazard[1]. Like pure horror of maid abuse in Canada. [1] Kill this patient or let them be bad mark on the hospital’s / care fac’s report sheet?
- Anotheroneagain 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - avery17 3y ago
    Go on then, go cure everyone by feeding them pennies.
    - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
      Tell me how to do it without getting accused of poisoning people.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Making an exception for X might just indicate an ignorance of Y and Z and others.
  - syoc 3y ago
    Or it might indicate an ignorance of X and a better understanding of Y and Z.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  movie "The Father" [0] really drived home the point of how much memory is part of our identity. I highly recommend this movie. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TZb7YfK-JI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TZb7YfK-JI
- BeetleB 3y ago
  Actually a real case in a US state that has death with dignity laws. One requirement of the law is that you can make the decision only when in a very bad state (high pain, etc as certified by a doctor). And only the person can make the decision. Not a loved one. A woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's couldn't make use of this because it'll only get bad when she loses much of her mental faculty. But by that point she is not mentally fit to make that decision. She filed a lawsuit and eventually moved to Europe to get her death with dignity there.
tmountain 3y ago
I just moved to a new country for the first time, and I've been doing a micro journal every day. Basically, I write 3-5 sentences capturing the most meaningful moments of the day. I've been doing this for two months now, and I've already found some benefits--both in gaining equilibrium and dialing up key details in sequence when necessary (i.e., when exactly did I start that home renovation project?). I'm lucky to be young enough that my cognition is still sound, but I can see benefits in this practice as I age.
- em-bee 3y ago
  when i got my first portable laptop (a sony picturebook) i started a travel diary in a similar manner. initially only when i was away from home, but when i moved countries being away from home became a permanent state, so i kept writing almost every day. until it became a habit. i don't review past entries, but like you i sometimes use the diary to research certain facts. interestingly, when i write i always have some kind of audience in mind, my wife, other family members. some friends (the later being inspired by a friend who actually started a semi-public journal he shares with close friends, a circle that i feel privileged to have been invited to. however, i have not actually shared my own diary with anyone yet)
  - nequo 3y ago
    Other than it helping you as a source when you need to recall facts, have you noticed this habit changing you or how you experience going through your day?
    - em-bee 3y ago
      that is a very good question, my initial response was going to be no, but while trying to explain that answer i realized it's not quite true. it does not directly change my habits, but it does give me a better understanding of myself. for example one thing i learned is that it bothers me if i didn't accomplish at least something each day, to the point that i can't go to sleep. the reflection helps me notice smaller accomplishments, so i can sleep easier. part of the benefit is a form of general reflection on the day, even on things that i don't write down. it does help me with is noticing when i get stuck in a rut, where one day after another is the same. like if for the fifth day in a row i wrote: get kids ready for school. work. make dinner. watch tv. it helps me notice these kind of pattern, and also, see how long this was going on. then i can refocus and look what else interesting is happening that i may not have noticed before. so either it changes how i feel about each day or it helps me add activities that break the routine. it also helps me track things that i do want to change. say i set a goal of going for a walk for one hour each day, then this detail, which i ignore most of the time, now gets added to the diary. the diary doesn't so much cause me to change my habits, but rather is available as a tool that i can use to support an intended change of habits. but i don't do this systematically. it's more like an afterthought when other ways to reach the goal fail and i am bothered enough to do something about it. it also helps me realize when i get behind on work. when you are at home busy with kids, sometimes a week can pass by without me realizing it. the daily reflection can act as an intervention. and the diary helps me understand that i didn't waste the week doing nothing.
paganel 3y ago
I couldn't honestly do that, the nostalgia would be too much for me, even for only 10 years ago, even 5. And then how do you process past relationships and marriages? Or the death of loved ones? Or other such traumatic experiences?
- sourcecodeplz 3y ago
  Yeah. I remember vacations the most. And that is enough for me. Live your life one day at a time.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i note them with a simple entry. or i describe the details of the wedding or funeral, and other relevant facts, but i don't write about my feelings. for one, i consider the diary as something others may read some day, i don't necessarily want share my feelings. but also, at least from my experience so far, reading about the facts of a traumatic experience helps me remember the feelings i had at the time. so rereading entries and recalling events is how i process these.
  - paganel 3y ago
    Honest props to you for managing to do that, you're a much stronger person than I am.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      thanks. but i am not sure if it counts, as i rarely go back to actually reread stuff. i am just writing what i have to deal with anyways, as it happens. i mean to say that if i do have the strength to deal with such events, being able to write about it in my diary is not necessarily an indication of that. it rather manifests in other ways. if i may say so, i sense a certain "i wish i had the strength to do that" in your comment. i am afraid that what comes across as strength is rather a weakness, a sort of inability to be affected by these events. it took me decades to understand where that comes from, and still has me wonder, why.
- zvmaz 3y ago
horsellama 3y ago
It’s not clear to me how such a thing can be achieved. They talk about a “memory calendar” and “tags”. Is it like, every day, stop for a minute and “commit” a single word to that day? Then revise the previous ones hoping that they stuck in memory?
- notclive 3y ago
  I was curious too and found http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/02/starting-out.html http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/02/starting-out.html, the tags appear to be a couple of short sentences.
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    He uses a few sentences to describe them but he says that he sees them as pictures on a calendar which he navigates as though he is standing on it, which is a key aspect because he is making use of the method of loci[0]. He then uses those images to start remembering the event pictured in them along with all the other sensations. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
- FranklinMaillot 3y ago
  I use an app called Daylio to do something like that. It's a mood and habit tracker with journaling. I set up a reminder everyday to record my mood, select the activities I'm tracking and write a few words. It takes less than a minute. It gives me weekly, monthly and yearly reports that are fun to see and sometimes insightful as it shows correlations between activities and mood levels. It also randomly shows me journal entries from 6 months, one year and 2 years ago. It's a reminder to reflect on where I was in my life and what I've achieve, or not achieved in that time. https://www.daylio.net/ https://www.daylio.net/
mbustamanter 3y ago
The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes. I am doing an experiment in memory and trying to memorize the name of every U.S. county, with the aid of a map. Several months in I can say that the brain inexorably will tie names together (wether by geographical proximity or etymology, e.g. Imperial-Riverside-San Diego or Redwood-Greenwood), and the addition of new names affects the perception of the ones before, or the perception of words which happen to be county names. I could write an entire essay on the limits of memory, but it would hardly be better than Jorge Luis Borges's story Funes, the memorius. For anyone curious I can name 80% of U.S. counties with the aid of a blank map, and my geographic intuition has improved greatly. Every county (and county name) has a history attached to it, and sometimes when someone tells me where they grew up, I can guess their ancestry more or less, especially if they come from rural areas. It surprises them, sometimes even more when they know I'm not american.
- RobRivera 3y ago
  Memory seems to be cemented when theres some type of value assigned to it, like a useful memory peg I find. A major battle, a geomarker, usually there is SOMETHING noteworthy historical. I may not have put the labor into the volume of counties as you, but I've lived in so many places, and I index local histories of everywhere I live, and it cements so much. Love the effort you put into testing your cognitive faculties!
- gravity2060 3y ago
  This is fascinating. I’m working on a memory project and would really like to get in touch and hear your insights on limits and especially counters to interference with memorization. I’ll put my email in my profile; pure gratitude if you can spare some time to share your wisdom with me.
lobochrome 3y ago
It’s so hard to keep this going, but I’m keeping my paper calendars, which I use for important meetings, weekly to do lists and my training plans. Whenever I think of trashing the old ones I open them up and am so immediately fascinated by that glimpse into my past life. It’s not useful in a self-improvement sense but highly entertaining, for lack of a better word. I guess in general it might make me more self reflective, but then that never had been a weak point for me.
- em-bee 3y ago
  yeah, i can never bear to throw away these things either. i don't use calendars often, but when i do, i want to keep the notes. however moving around makes it very hard to carry this stuff along. so when i get a chance, i leave stuff at my mothers place. and i make photos of noteworthy pages. same when i used whiteboards to track my work (before i learned about kanban)
bumbledraven 3y ago
> With approaching 4000 images, I need to get through 3 months per day. That rarely happens as my discipline has waned and I've let things slide when I've struggled to remember tags. Spaced repetition might be able to help here. Spaced repetition promises to help us remember an ever-increasing number of things even while spending an essentially fixed amount of time each day reviewing those things. The amount of time spent reviewing is said to depend almost entirely on the learning rate, not on the number of things remembered. https://supermemo.guru/wiki/History_of_spaced_repetition_(print) https://supermemo.guru/wiki/History_of_spaced_repetition_(pr... : > In a long-term process, for the forgetting index equal to 10%, and for a fixed daily working time, the average time spent on memorizing new items is only 5% of the total time spent on repetitions. This value is almost independent of the size of the learning material.
- phreeza 3y ago
  I actually found this article when searching for things related to spaced repetition. But I am wondering how well it would work due to the sequential nature of the stuff being remembered. I think it's probably easier to navigate from one day to the next with the method of loci or similar, than it is to recall a single day just from its date.
  - medstrom 3y ago
    Yes, you wouldn't use a date. A more likely structure would be: - the front of a flashcard shows a photo from 20 June and the back shows a photo from 21 June - the front of another flashcard shows that same 21 June photo and the back shows a photo from 22 June - and so on! If you have multiple photos per day... maybe you could create a mosaic for each day? Bonus if the mosaic randomizes the order of items on every showing, but not necessary. This seems definitely automatable!
    - phreeza 3y ago
      Nice idea, though I guess then in order to actually recall a specific day you'd have to traverse through the entire series? Kind of like a linked list vs an array. Maybe some hybrid approach could work with some "anchor" days that you can get to directly and then traverse from there.
martinthenext 3y ago
In 2016 I created a telegram bot to make it super easy for me to keep daily diary, and I still use it now: https://t.me/DaytobaseBot https://t.me/DaytobaseBot Similar to other folks in the thread, I sometimes go back to old entries and reflect on how my life has changed. I find that my memory constantly simplifies and idealizes the past, and getting to see how it really felt day to day is very helpful.
- hoherd 3y ago
  Do you happen to have the source code publicly available?
  - martinthenext 3y ago
    Yes ofc: https://github.com/martinthenext/daytobase https://github.com/martinthenext/daytobase It is extremely old but probably trivial to upgrade to recent Python. There is also a serverless version [1] and a recently attempted Rust version. I will most likely spend a few hours some weekend writing a Node version soon -- please let me know if you beat me to it :) [1]: https://github.com/2mol/daytobase https://github.com/2mol/daytobase
- bambax 3y ago
  In October 2019 I made a bit that emails me every day and stores the replies in an SQLite database. I narrate each day the following morning, and aslo store random pieces of information (story of a debugging session, opinions on books I read or movies I watch, etc.) I have missed almost zero days since the beginning. One of the most useful feature of this system is to store things people that I meet rarely, tell me. When I meet them again, years later, I can pick up the conversation where it was. Other than that, I rarely go back to read old entries. I sometimes wonder what use AI could make of this.
  - martinthenext 3y ago
    Wow, very similar to what I have been doing but sounds like you had way more consistency. My bot does not remind me to write, it's a neat idea. I was wondering about adding a trivial Langchain+LLaMa thing to it to chat to my old memories, would be cool to explore this indeed
rpastuszak 3y ago
I've been doing the same for the past 5 years. Here's how I do it and what I've learned: https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+Notes https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N... > Yet, I can see no advantage. The great benefit of this process, even as I struggle with it, is it gives me a rounded view of my life. Absolutely, 10000%. Spotting patterns (on a micro and macro scale, "outside" and "inside") is one of the most useful skills I'm getting out of this. I have 1-2 years of journals from the time I was 9-11 years old buried somewhere in a basement 3000km from where I live at the moment. I'm curious to see what I can learn from them after not having seen them for almost 25 years.
rietta 3y ago
So like keeping a Dougie Howzer-style journal on the computer?
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
ooh wow I just let my days pass
bradley13 3y ago
I'm not sure. Maybe it's because I have a poor memory to begin with, but I just don't see the reason for this. It reminds me of older people (mind, I'm over 60 myself) who spend all their time reminiscing. Isn't it better to look forward rather than back? Approaching retirement, my pressing question is: what do I want to do next?
- newman8r 3y ago
  > Isn't it better to look forward rather than back? After looking into some basic Zen philosophy, I think it also makes sense to consider focusing on spending more time in the present. The past and the future being ideas compared to the reality of the present - it's like watching a movie compared to real life. If the plight of the old is to reminisce, perhaps the plight of the young is to daydream. Both are important parts of life, but taking time to appreciate the present is easy to leave out.
- thread_id 3y ago
  I also am over 60 and my philosophy regarding this topic is similar. Life is a series of moments that happen and are over never to be revisted again (unless you make this effort - and good for those who do and get value in their lives for having done so). My memory of the past is also limited - I remember random people and events going back to early childhood for reasons I don't fully understand, but mostly I have forgotten all the eras of my life and I don't really dwell on it. I have no concept of time and it has always been that way and age has had zero impact here. I get it "The unexamined life..." etc. So I invest energy in introspection and self discovery in service of continuous improvment. Whether I am satisfied with the life I have lived or not makes no difference - I cannot go back and change it. However, no longer do I have the luxury of time. By comparison to the journey I have already completed, I have very few moments remaining. And one day.... So I gratfully focus on this moment and all the precious few moments I am graced with.
- kredd 3y ago
  I'm on the younger side, but my parents are in their 70s, and I recall them saying something along the lines of "what is life, if not a collection of memories", and it kinda stuck with me. Most likely it's just some quote they've read in the past, and were just reiterating it, but still. I generally agree with you. There might not be a good reason to look back into the past constantly, but the author ends the post with a personal note about how their mom is going through Alzheimer's. And I can somewhat relate to that, as my grandma used to live with us in the last 10 years of her life, and it was devastating to watch how feeble her memories were getting every day. At some point, when you're just sitting at a dinner table on a Thursday night with people whom you've known for ages, recollecting some memories from the past is just... nice. There really isn't a good reason, or benefit for the future and what not; it just feels good. Thus I can see why someone would want to cherish those times, trying their best to not forget them.
noduerme 3y ago
This strikes me as possibly the most profound form of navel-gazing ever developed, wherein the navel becomes a black hole. If you spend each day remembering all previous days, eventually you'll just be remembering days you spent remembering other days. (Which is what the author is doing: Remembering remembering). Seems rather maddening. Why not learn a language or something?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- phreeza 3y ago
  In fact the research on memorization shows that only a constant amount of time is needed to retain a given fact indefinitely, because the interval between reinforcements can rise exponential. So you can commit a fixed amount of time per day to this practice and retain everything, it does not necessary need to fill up your entire day. Though you are right it seems the author is using a different approach and is struggling with the accretion to some degree.
- svat 3y ago
  Reminds me of a Borges story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious, https://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pdf https://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pd...) and the article also led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia — “Price has stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse”.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    I came here for this, and I'm glad you beat me to it. I never knew about hyperthymesia though, and it seems shocking that there have been persons affected by it, and it sounds like Borges was in fact prescient.
- ac2u 3y ago
  Perhaps given the author's familial experiences with the tragedy of Alzheimers, it's a sort of therapy. I'm not saying it's effective, but perhaps doing such an exercise and having it lead to the circular "remembering nothing but remembering", it might help folks empathise with the fallibility of the mind when others suffer a disease like Alzheimers. Or maybe the author is just a curious sort. Either way, not my place to judge.
anuptalwalkar 3y ago
I have been using the 1 second a day app from 2016. Today will be the 8th year of my journey, and it feels very nice to look back at the compiled videos. I don’t remember life in 214/15 because of much stress, but 16 onwards is a colorful memory. Shout out to the 1se app! Its been great.
renewiltord 3y ago
Very interesting. Might help very much with "where did the time go?". I'll try to give it a shot, remembering every week.
throwaway122263 3y ago
Years ago I had a really bad breakup. We lived together for about 6 months and she slowly got more and more hostile towards me. She moved out and severed all contact with me. She forgot a couple of her daily journals in a drawer. Well, I had to look because I was so confused as to what happened. Reading through it, I was blown away at how skewed her perception of reality was. The way she recalled events were absolute fantasy. She took all these mundane interactions (a lot of which were genuinely positive) between us and twisted them into somehow being wronged by me. I had always thought of writing in a journal but after reading that decided I never would. It has the potential to crystalize misremembered, or misinterpreted things into reality. She had created a self propelling feedback loop of negativity.
- techno_tsar 3y ago
  Her actions have more to do with her psychology and less to do with her keeping a journal. A lot of people keep journals and it probably has the opposite effect. She sounds emotionally immature.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i can feel for you (i think) but my conclusion would be different. for one, you don't have to write about feelings. second, the problem here is not the feelings themselves but the attribution for the cause. this is something that i learned and confirmed over time, and that this diary seems to demonstrate. namely that as humans we have a tendency to attribute reasons to actions of others that are based on our own feelings and have nothing to do with reality. for example, a few months ago someone yelled at me for bumping into him, claiming to have done that intentionally, when on my side i didn't even feel any contact. so how could this person jump to that conclusion? they clearly didn't stop to think and consider if there could be another explanation. what i learned from this over the years is that whenever something negative happens to me, i stop to think if there could be a good explanation that does not imply some negative intent by anyone else. i have met other people who attribute netative intentions to any thing bad that happens to them, often telling me stories of what they think was someones intention, when there could be a perfectly benign explanation. like one where someones macbook charger got lost, and the person was 100% sure that her colleague took it intentionally in order to be mean, when the begning explanation is that because those chargers look all alike, she probably took it, thinking it was hers, or, maybe it even was hers, and the first persons charger was lost elsewhere. this is a general problem in human interaction. only if we stop attributing negative intention to everything that we don't agree with, will we be able to improve cooperation to work for a better world.
l33tman 3y ago
The Narrative Clip was created partially for this (giving people a photographic memory of sorts), and it was used by a lot of people with alzheimers as it turned out you can remember stuff better if you review every day's memories in the evening, or something like that.
aubanel 3y ago
> My New Year's Resolution in 2019 was to learn the piano. Key to success is building mental representations of music and the keyboard. Increasingly, I do this by playing pieces on my mental piano As a correct pianist (lots of classical study, and sometimes I am paid to play in bars), this seems very weird to me. I don't see how doing this could be any useful for learning, it seems like a waste of effort.
- Andrex 3y ago
  I would say 90% of the struggle of my learning to play piano was developing the correct muscle memory for the right motions for the right measures of the right song. The academic "Can I read and understand this sheet music?" is maybe 10%. It's possible if you put in the decades required to build up all the muscle memory needed for any song you might need to play (or you are a virtuoso), in which case reading and understanding the sheet music may be 90+% of your "practice time"... but the most accomplished pianists I know of still have to practice (with their hands) consistently.
- Hunpeter 3y ago
  I think mental practice (e.g. visualizing yourself playing in the place you will perform next day, going through the sheet music consciously noting your intent and possible difficulties, or memorizing complex passages without the keyboard etc.) is a great complement to actual physical practice. It's no substitute, but at least it can be done basically anywhere.
snitzr 3y ago
I take snapshots on film for fun and sometimes don't develop the film for a few months. When I finally see the photos I've taken, I might have forgotten most of the detail from that time. I see the photo and it jogs my memory. But I'm never sure if my memory is a hallucination extrapolated from the photo or if I'm using the photo to recall something that I just needed help to remember. It's like that experiment that showed people a faked picture of themselves in a hot air balloon. Many of the people shown this false photo would respond by creating false memories. My photos are really me but I wonder how accurate is any recollection beyond the photo.
ler_ 3y ago
Really late to the party on this, but I don't see the purpose of remembering every day without fail. For my part, I have been journaling for a while now, and every day I make a note of something that happened. However, I don't get so caught up with particular moments. If you have enough data, to put it this way, then you notice that most things you do, feel or think are somewhat circular. You come back to certain emotions, you come back to certain perceptions. Remembering by itself, in the absence of reflection, makes little sense. Plus, whenever I do glean something from my previous writings, it is usually due to understanding the general "feel" of a time in my life, not so much memorizing a particular day. >The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes. I like that the author acknowledges that here. Again, though, I do think it matters more to interpret one's experience as opposed to having a perfect recollection of the facts. And, to be fair, what he does, and what I do, sounds more like a way to handle far more existential concerns. I suppose we want to hold on to life, to give it meaning in some way by always being a witness to what has been. Maybe we would all be better served by acknowledging the underlying philosophical conundrum here, haha.
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
Memory is a funny thing. I do not remember anything that I do not actively use, except when I have to. Like the case where I was on the Mexico-US border and I was asked by the kind border police to give the dates of all my travel to the US in the last 5 years. I was travelling from France to the US like every month or two. Well, the perspective to stay in Mexico brought back the travel dates pronto. Or the case I was in a taxi with a Spanish speaking driver who had no idea which hotel to drive me to, in the middle of nowhere. My years of Spanish in high school bloomed up pronto as well. I was able to say "my hotel is mauve with a garden in front and back, there is a view on a white church surrounded by a cemetery" My teacher would have been so proud! (I was incompetent to put it nicely)
majkinetor 3y ago
I highly doubt that this is a good thing to do. Forgetting things seems to be a protective mechanism, otherwise, life becomes too stressful. Humans and other animals focus on negative things and if you do not forget them, your stress level will skyrocket. Recorded cases of people who can't forget and experiments with rats shows us these phenomena.
jzl 3y ago
There are some people, most notably the actress Marilou Henner, who remember and can instantly recall everything they did every day of their life, by date. It’s astounding. More info here: https://youtu.be/hpTCZ-hO6iI https://youtu.be/hpTCZ-hO6iI

247 points by phreeza 3y ago

Alzheimer's has to be one of the worst. I do find euthanasia to be a slippery slope[0], but I'll make an exception for Alzheimer's. 0: picture an understaffed and underfunded hospital, with a single nurse walking around calmingly asking anyone if they want it to end

anonzzzies 3y ago
Making an exception for X is the same slippery slope. And easy talk for people who haven't had a family member die in agony or something like that in a place where they don't allow control over your own life. My life, my terms; if I want out, it needs to be an option. Which is exactly the problem with Alzheimer; cancer is much easier; you are usually lucid but not very happy the last few weeks/months, so let's end it. Alzheimer's they cannot even ask you, as you cannot decide for yourself for probably a long time already.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  I’ve had multiple family members die with Alzheimer’s; can I sign up when young and lucid to die early if I get diagnosed? The sheer horror of forgetting your children and grandchildren sickens me — and I have to say, those relatives were gone long before they were gone.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    > I’ve had multiple family members die with Alzheimer’s; can I sign up when young and lucid to die early if I get diagnosed? In the Netherlands (and I guess other countries), you have to arrange this very early (if you know your family has Alzheimers, like mine). Once you have symptoms or even are diagnosed, you cannot decide anymore. And you'll end up in a home, knowing nothing and no-one and often drugged up, until you die of natural causes (although the last part you don't notice anyway; your family does).
    - grodriguez100 3y ago
      Being diagnosed should not prevent you from making an advance directive as long as you are in full possession of your mental faculties. That’s how it works in Spain at least. In certain cases this may involve a medical evaluation.
      - anonzzzies 3y ago
        We had some issues in the family with this, but yes, it might be because the diagnoses was already (perceived to be) too late. I would recommend doing it young if it's a familiar/genetic issue. If not, of course you cannot do that, so you try what you can.
  - grodriguez100 3y ago
    In Spain this is possible. It is called “testamento vital” or “documento de voluntades anticipadas”, and the goal is just that: to declare, in a legally binding way, your wish to receive or not receive certain kinds of medical treatments in the future, in case you can no longer decide when the time comes. This includes euthanasia in cases where it is legally allowed. Alzheimer is one of such cases.
  - bloak 3y ago
    I don't have a lot of experience with Alzheimer's, but in the couple of cases I've observed, though not from very close, the patient didn't seem to be suffering or unhappy at the end. There was a brief intermediate period of paranoia, in which they obviously were unhappy, but then they settled down into a state of complete doolallitude in which they were an expensive burden for professional carers but seemed quite cheerful. That makes the euthanasia question a bit harder.
- VBprogrammer 3y ago
  We afford old people in their last days less compassion than a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at this as a moral outrage. Our family have recently been in the situation where my partners 85 year old grandfather, who sometimes struggles to remember who we are, had to have his leg amputated due to some metalwork he had implanted in his knee 10 years ago having worn through his skin due to him losing muscle and being very thin from being bed bound. He has approximately zero chance of adapting to having his leg amputated and, in all honesty, most of the family hoped he would die on the operating table as he has no meaningful quality of life.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    > We afford old people in their last days less compassion than a dog. I look forward to the day when we look back at this as a moral outrage. Maybe religious groups/political parties/lobbies etc; if they are against abortion, they will definitely be against ending grandma (who doesn't know who you or your grandpa are, but let's not mention that); religious people see it as suicide and murder, so off to hell with 2+ people for every euthanasia.
    - vkou 3y ago
      Ironically, there's a large overlap between those people and people who support capital punishment.
      - nippoo 3y ago
        Is there? I'm genuinely curious where this stat comes from.
        vkou 3y ago
        The Venn diagram of states that criminalize abortion and states that carry out the death penalty is nearly a circle... As are the sets of politicians, and the platforms that evangelical organizations tend to endorse. Catholics are an exception, but they are a relatively politically inactive minority in the US. https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/ https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state/ [1] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing [1] Florida's only yellow because it's still being fought in the courts.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > My life, my terms; if I want out, it needs to be an option. It’s always an option, it’s just kind of weird that it’s illegal for trained medical professionals to help you do it certainly and painlessly.
  - wakawaka28 3y ago
    It's not that weird. Doctors and the state have perverse incentives. We also discourage suicide for good reasons.
    - cogman10 3y ago
      States with the death penalty are finding it hard to find doctors and suppliers to carry out the punishment. I don't, frankly, think there's a lot of perverse incentive. For the medical field, the incentive is for longevity. Nursing homes make money on occupancy, they aren't going to want to kill off their primary source of income. The state might care, but they have an uphill battle if they tried pulling off soylent green.
      - wakawaka28 3y ago
        Killing people to take their organs would be one perverse incentive. Reducing costs to the state would be another. Canada has been taking the lead with euthanasia. They propose it as a solution for such things as depression and poverty, or anything else that would make life unbearable for you (regardless of whether it's reasonable). See: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/another-case-of-a-sick-canadian-offered-death-instead-of-treatment-this-time-a-veteran https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/another-case-of-a-sick-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-r... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christine-gauthier-paralympian-euthanasia-canada-b2238319.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/christine-... https://nypost.com/2023/02/24/canada-considers-expanding-euthanasia-program-to-terminally-ill-minors/ https://nypost.com/2023/02/24/canada-considers-expanding-eut... On the other hand, the medical establishment currently has incentives to keep people alive. That can certainly lead to perverse incentives too.
- ametrau 3y ago
  Just one problem with the is that it becomes in practice a go to option in healthcare for difficult cases as it introduces a moral hazard[1]. Like pure horror of maid abuse in Canada. [1] Kill this patient or let them be bad mark on the hospital’s / care fac’s report sheet?
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
[flagged]
- avery17 3y ago
  Go on then, go cure everyone by feeding them pennies.
  - Anotheroneagain 3y ago
    Tell me how to do it without getting accused of poisoning people.
Waterluvian 3y ago
Making an exception for X might just indicate an ignorance of Y and Z and others.
- syoc 3y ago
  Or it might indicate an ignorance of X and a better understanding of Y and Z.
passion__desire 3y ago
movie "The Father" [0] really drived home the point of how much memory is part of our identity. I highly recommend this movie. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TZb7YfK-JI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TZb7YfK-JI
BeetleB 3y ago
Actually a real case in a US state that has death with dignity laws. One requirement of the law is that you can make the decision only when in a very bad state (high pain, etc as certified by a doctor). And only the person can make the decision. Not a loved one. A woman diagnosed with Alzheimer's couldn't make use of this because it'll only get bad when she loses much of her mental faculty. But by that point she is not mentally fit to make that decision. She filed a lawsuit and eventually moved to Europe to get her death with dignity there.

tmountain 3y ago

I just moved to a new country for the first time, and I've been doing a micro journal every day. Basically, I write 3-5 sentences capturing the most meaningful moments of the day. I've been doing this for two months now, and I've already found some benefits--both in gaining equilibrium and dialing up key details in sequence when necessary (i.e., when exactly did I start that home renovation project?). I'm lucky to be young enough that my cognition is still sound, but I can see benefits in this practice as I age.

em-bee 3y ago
when i got my first portable laptop (a sony picturebook) i started a travel diary in a similar manner. initially only when i was away from home, but when i moved countries being away from home became a permanent state, so i kept writing almost every day. until it became a habit. i don't review past entries, but like you i sometimes use the diary to research certain facts. interestingly, when i write i always have some kind of audience in mind, my wife, other family members. some friends (the later being inspired by a friend who actually started a semi-public journal he shares with close friends, a circle that i feel privileged to have been invited to. however, i have not actually shared my own diary with anyone yet)
- nequo 3y ago
  Other than it helping you as a source when you need to recall facts, have you noticed this habit changing you or how you experience going through your day?
  - em-bee 3y ago
    that is a very good question, my initial response was going to be no, but while trying to explain that answer i realized it's not quite true. it does not directly change my habits, but it does give me a better understanding of myself. for example one thing i learned is that it bothers me if i didn't accomplish at least something each day, to the point that i can't go to sleep. the reflection helps me notice smaller accomplishments, so i can sleep easier. part of the benefit is a form of general reflection on the day, even on things that i don't write down. it does help me with is noticing when i get stuck in a rut, where one day after another is the same. like if for the fifth day in a row i wrote: get kids ready for school. work. make dinner. watch tv. it helps me notice these kind of pattern, and also, see how long this was going on. then i can refocus and look what else interesting is happening that i may not have noticed before. so either it changes how i feel about each day or it helps me add activities that break the routine. it also helps me track things that i do want to change. say i set a goal of going for a walk for one hour each day, then this detail, which i ignore most of the time, now gets added to the diary. the diary doesn't so much cause me to change my habits, but rather is available as a tool that i can use to support an intended change of habits. but i don't do this systematically. it's more like an afterthought when other ways to reach the goal fail and i am bothered enough to do something about it. it also helps me realize when i get behind on work. when you are at home busy with kids, sometimes a week can pass by without me realizing it. the daily reflection can act as an intervention. and the diary helps me understand that i didn't waste the week doing nothing.

paganel 3y ago

I couldn't honestly do that, the nostalgia would be too much for me, even for only 10 years ago, even 5. And then how do you process past relationships and marriages? Or the death of loved ones? Or other such traumatic experiences?

sourcecodeplz 3y ago
Yeah. I remember vacations the most. And that is enough for me. Live your life one day at a time.
em-bee 3y ago
i note them with a simple entry. or i describe the details of the wedding or funeral, and other relevant facts, but i don't write about my feelings. for one, i consider the diary as something others may read some day, i don't necessarily want share my feelings. but also, at least from my experience so far, reading about the facts of a traumatic experience helps me remember the feelings i had at the time. so rereading entries and recalling events is how i process these.
- paganel 3y ago
  Honest props to you for managing to do that, you're a much stronger person than I am.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    thanks. but i am not sure if it counts, as i rarely go back to actually reread stuff. i am just writing what i have to deal with anyways, as it happens. i mean to say that if i do have the strength to deal with such events, being able to write about it in my diary is not necessarily an indication of that. it rather manifests in other ways. if i may say so, i sense a certain "i wish i had the strength to do that" in your comment. i am afraid that what comes across as strength is rather a weakness, a sort of inability to be affected by these events. it took me decades to understand where that comes from, and still has me wonder, why.
zvmaz 3y ago

horsellama 3y ago

It’s not clear to me how such a thing can be achieved. They talk about a “memory calendar” and “tags”. Is it like, every day, stop for a minute and “commit” a single word to that day? Then revise the previous ones hoping that they stuck in memory?

notclive 3y ago
I was curious too and found http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/02/starting-out.html http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/02/starting-out.html, the tags appear to be a couple of short sentences.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  He uses a few sentences to describe them but he says that he sees them as pictures on a calendar which he navigates as though he is standing on it, which is a key aspect because he is making use of the method of loci[0]. He then uses those images to start remembering the event pictured in them along with all the other sensations. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
FranklinMaillot 3y ago
I use an app called Daylio to do something like that. It's a mood and habit tracker with journaling. I set up a reminder everyday to record my mood, select the activities I'm tracking and write a few words. It takes less than a minute. It gives me weekly, monthly and yearly reports that are fun to see and sometimes insightful as it shows correlations between activities and mood levels. It also randomly shows me journal entries from 6 months, one year and 2 years ago. It's a reminder to reflect on where I was in my life and what I've achieve, or not achieved in that time. https://www.daylio.net/ https://www.daylio.net/

mbustamanter 3y ago

The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes. I am doing an experiment in memory and trying to memorize the name of every U.S. county, with the aid of a map. Several months in I can say that the brain inexorably will tie names together (wether by geographical proximity or etymology, e.g. Imperial-Riverside-San Diego or Redwood-Greenwood), and the addition of new names affects the perception of the ones before, or the perception of words which happen to be county names. I could write an entire essay on the limits of memory, but it would hardly be better than Jorge Luis Borges's story Funes, the memorius. For anyone curious I can name 80% of U.S. counties with the aid of a blank map, and my geographic intuition has improved greatly. Every county (and county name) has a history attached to it, and sometimes when someone tells me where they grew up, I can guess their ancestry more or less, especially if they come from rural areas. It surprises them, sometimes even more when they know I'm not american.

RobRivera 3y ago
Memory seems to be cemented when theres some type of value assigned to it, like a useful memory peg I find. A major battle, a geomarker, usually there is SOMETHING noteworthy historical. I may not have put the labor into the volume of counties as you, but I've lived in so many places, and I index local histories of everywhere I live, and it cements so much. Love the effort you put into testing your cognitive faculties!
gravity2060 3y ago
This is fascinating. I’m working on a memory project and would really like to get in touch and hear your insights on limits and especially counters to interference with memorization. I’ll put my email in my profile; pure gratitude if you can spare some time to share your wisdom with me.

lobochrome 3y ago

It’s so hard to keep this going, but I’m keeping my paper calendars, which I use for important meetings, weekly to do lists and my training plans. Whenever I think of trashing the old ones I open them up and am so immediately fascinated by that glimpse into my past life. It’s not useful in a self-improvement sense but highly entertaining, for lack of a better word. I guess in general it might make me more self reflective, but then that never had been a weak point for me.

em-bee 3y ago
yeah, i can never bear to throw away these things either. i don't use calendars often, but when i do, i want to keep the notes. however moving around makes it very hard to carry this stuff along. so when i get a chance, i leave stuff at my mothers place. and i make photos of noteworthy pages. same when i used whiteboards to track my work (before i learned about kanban)

bumbledraven 3y ago

> With approaching 4000 images, I need to get through 3 months per day. That rarely happens as my discipline has waned and I've let things slide when I've struggled to remember tags. Spaced repetition might be able to help here. Spaced repetition promises to help us remember an ever-increasing number of things even while spending an essentially fixed amount of time each day reviewing those things. The amount of time spent reviewing is said to depend almost entirely on the learning rate, not on the number of things remembered. https://supermemo.guru/wiki/History_of_spaced_repetition_(print) https://supermemo.guru/wiki/History_of_spaced_repetition_(pr... : > In a long-term process, for the forgetting index equal to 10%, and for a fixed daily working time, the average time spent on memorizing new items is only 5% of the total time spent on repetitions. This value is almost independent of the size of the learning material.

phreeza 3y ago
I actually found this article when searching for things related to spaced repetition. But I am wondering how well it would work due to the sequential nature of the stuff being remembered. I think it's probably easier to navigate from one day to the next with the method of loci or similar, than it is to recall a single day just from its date.
- medstrom 3y ago
  Yes, you wouldn't use a date. A more likely structure would be: - the front of a flashcard shows a photo from 20 June and the back shows a photo from 21 June - the front of another flashcard shows that same 21 June photo and the back shows a photo from 22 June - and so on! If you have multiple photos per day... maybe you could create a mosaic for each day? Bonus if the mosaic randomizes the order of items on every showing, but not necessary. This seems definitely automatable!
  - phreeza 3y ago
    Nice idea, though I guess then in order to actually recall a specific day you'd have to traverse through the entire series? Kind of like a linked list vs an array. Maybe some hybrid approach could work with some "anchor" days that you can get to directly and then traverse from there.

martinthenext 3y ago

In 2016 I created a telegram bot to make it super easy for me to keep daily diary, and I still use it now: https://t.me/DaytobaseBot https://t.me/DaytobaseBot Similar to other folks in the thread, I sometimes go back to old entries and reflect on how my life has changed. I find that my memory constantly simplifies and idealizes the past, and getting to see how it really felt day to day is very helpful.

hoherd 3y ago
Do you happen to have the source code publicly available?
- martinthenext 3y ago
  Yes ofc: https://github.com/martinthenext/daytobase https://github.com/martinthenext/daytobase It is extremely old but probably trivial to upgrade to recent Python. There is also a serverless version [1] and a recently attempted Rust version. I will most likely spend a few hours some weekend writing a Node version soon -- please let me know if you beat me to it :) [1]: https://github.com/2mol/daytobase https://github.com/2mol/daytobase
bambax 3y ago
In October 2019 I made a bit that emails me every day and stores the replies in an SQLite database. I narrate each day the following morning, and aslo store random pieces of information (story of a debugging session, opinions on books I read or movies I watch, etc.) I have missed almost zero days since the beginning. One of the most useful feature of this system is to store things people that I meet rarely, tell me. When I meet them again, years later, I can pick up the conversation where it was. Other than that, I rarely go back to read old entries. I sometimes wonder what use AI could make of this.
- martinthenext 3y ago
  Wow, very similar to what I have been doing but sounds like you had way more consistency. My bot does not remind me to write, it's a neat idea. I was wondering about adding a trivial Langchain+LLaMa thing to it to chat to my old memories, would be cool to explore this indeed

rpastuszak 3y ago

I've been doing the same for the past 5 years. Here's how I do it and what I've learned: https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+Notes https://untested.sonnet.io/Stream+of+Consciousness+Morning+N... > Yet, I can see no advantage. The great benefit of this process, even as I struggle with it, is it gives me a rounded view of my life. Absolutely, 10000%. Spotting patterns (on a micro and macro scale, "outside" and "inside") is one of the most useful skills I'm getting out of this. I have 1-2 years of journals from the time I was 9-11 years old buried somewhere in a basement 3000km from where I live at the moment. I'm curious to see what I can learn from them after not having seen them for almost 25 years.

rietta 3y ago

So like keeping a Dougie Howzer-style journal on the computer?

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

ooh wow I just let my days pass

bradley13 3y ago

I'm not sure. Maybe it's because I have a poor memory to begin with, but I just don't see the reason for this. It reminds me of older people (mind, I'm over 60 myself) who spend all their time reminiscing. Isn't it better to look forward rather than back? Approaching retirement, my pressing question is: what do I want to do next?

newman8r 3y ago
> Isn't it better to look forward rather than back? After looking into some basic Zen philosophy, I think it also makes sense to consider focusing on spending more time in the present. The past and the future being ideas compared to the reality of the present - it's like watching a movie compared to real life. If the plight of the old is to reminisce, perhaps the plight of the young is to daydream. Both are important parts of life, but taking time to appreciate the present is easy to leave out.
thread_id 3y ago
I also am over 60 and my philosophy regarding this topic is similar. Life is a series of moments that happen and are over never to be revisted again (unless you make this effort - and good for those who do and get value in their lives for having done so). My memory of the past is also limited - I remember random people and events going back to early childhood for reasons I don't fully understand, but mostly I have forgotten all the eras of my life and I don't really dwell on it. I have no concept of time and it has always been that way and age has had zero impact here. I get it "The unexamined life..." etc. So I invest energy in introspection and self discovery in service of continuous improvment. Whether I am satisfied with the life I have lived or not makes no difference - I cannot go back and change it. However, no longer do I have the luxury of time. By comparison to the journey I have already completed, I have very few moments remaining. And one day.... So I gratfully focus on this moment and all the precious few moments I am graced with.
kredd 3y ago
I'm on the younger side, but my parents are in their 70s, and I recall them saying something along the lines of "what is life, if not a collection of memories", and it kinda stuck with me. Most likely it's just some quote they've read in the past, and were just reiterating it, but still. I generally agree with you. There might not be a good reason to look back into the past constantly, but the author ends the post with a personal note about how their mom is going through Alzheimer's. And I can somewhat relate to that, as my grandma used to live with us in the last 10 years of her life, and it was devastating to watch how feeble her memories were getting every day. At some point, when you're just sitting at a dinner table on a Thursday night with people whom you've known for ages, recollecting some memories from the past is just... nice. There really isn't a good reason, or benefit for the future and what not; it just feels good. Thus I can see why someone would want to cherish those times, trying their best to not forget them.

noduerme 3y ago

This strikes me as possibly the most profound form of navel-gazing ever developed, wherein the navel becomes a black hole. If you spend each day remembering all previous days, eventually you'll just be remembering days you spent remembering other days. (Which is what the author is doing: Remembering remembering). Seems rather maddening. Why not learn a language or something?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
phreeza 3y ago
In fact the research on memorization shows that only a constant amount of time is needed to retain a given fact indefinitely, because the interval between reinforcements can rise exponential. So you can commit a fixed amount of time per day to this practice and retain everything, it does not necessary need to fill up your entire day. Though you are right it seems the author is using a different approach and is struggling with the accretion to some degree.
svat 3y ago
Reminds me of a Borges story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious, https://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pdf https://vigeland.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/funes%20borges.pd...) and the article also led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia — “Price has stated that she, like Funes, views her memory as a curse”.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  I came here for this, and I'm glad you beat me to it. I never knew about hyperthymesia though, and it seems shocking that there have been persons affected by it, and it sounds like Borges was in fact prescient.
ac2u 3y ago
Perhaps given the author's familial experiences with the tragedy of Alzheimers, it's a sort of therapy. I'm not saying it's effective, but perhaps doing such an exercise and having it lead to the circular "remembering nothing but remembering", it might help folks empathise with the fallibility of the mind when others suffer a disease like Alzheimers. Or maybe the author is just a curious sort. Either way, not my place to judge.

anuptalwalkar 3y ago

I have been using the 1 second a day app from 2016. Today will be the 8th year of my journey, and it feels very nice to look back at the compiled videos. I don’t remember life in 214/15 because of much stress, but 16 onwards is a colorful memory. Shout out to the 1se app! Its been great.

renewiltord 3y ago

Very interesting. Might help very much with "where did the time go?". I'll try to give it a shot, remembering every week.

throwaway122263 3y ago

Years ago I had a really bad breakup. We lived together for about 6 months and she slowly got more and more hostile towards me. She moved out and severed all contact with me. She forgot a couple of her daily journals in a drawer. Well, I had to look because I was so confused as to what happened. Reading through it, I was blown away at how skewed her perception of reality was. The way she recalled events were absolute fantasy. She took all these mundane interactions (a lot of which were genuinely positive) between us and twisted them into somehow being wronged by me. I had always thought of writing in a journal but after reading that decided I never would. It has the potential to crystalize misremembered, or misinterpreted things into reality. She had created a self propelling feedback loop of negativity.

techno_tsar 3y ago
Her actions have more to do with her psychology and less to do with her keeping a journal. A lot of people keep journals and it probably has the opposite effect. She sounds emotionally immature.
em-bee 3y ago
i can feel for you (i think) but my conclusion would be different. for one, you don't have to write about feelings. second, the problem here is not the feelings themselves but the attribution for the cause. this is something that i learned and confirmed over time, and that this diary seems to demonstrate. namely that as humans we have a tendency to attribute reasons to actions of others that are based on our own feelings and have nothing to do with reality. for example, a few months ago someone yelled at me for bumping into him, claiming to have done that intentionally, when on my side i didn't even feel any contact. so how could this person jump to that conclusion? they clearly didn't stop to think and consider if there could be another explanation. what i learned from this over the years is that whenever something negative happens to me, i stop to think if there could be a good explanation that does not imply some negative intent by anyone else. i have met other people who attribute netative intentions to any thing bad that happens to them, often telling me stories of what they think was someones intention, when there could be a perfectly benign explanation. like one where someones macbook charger got lost, and the person was 100% sure that her colleague took it intentionally in order to be mean, when the begning explanation is that because those chargers look all alike, she probably took it, thinking it was hers, or, maybe it even was hers, and the first persons charger was lost elsewhere. this is a general problem in human interaction. only if we stop attributing negative intention to everything that we don't agree with, will we be able to improve cooperation to work for a better world.

l33tman 3y ago

The Narrative Clip was created partially for this (giving people a photographic memory of sorts), and it was used by a lot of people with alzheimers as it turned out you can remember stuff better if you review every day's memories in the evening, or something like that.

aubanel 3y ago

> My New Year's Resolution in 2019 was to learn the piano. Key to success is building mental representations of music and the keyboard. Increasingly, I do this by playing pieces on my mental piano As a correct pianist (lots of classical study, and sometimes I am paid to play in bars), this seems very weird to me. I don't see how doing this could be any useful for learning, it seems like a waste of effort.

Andrex 3y ago
I would say 90% of the struggle of my learning to play piano was developing the correct muscle memory for the right motions for the right measures of the right song. The academic "Can I read and understand this sheet music?" is maybe 10%. It's possible if you put in the decades required to build up all the muscle memory needed for any song you might need to play (or you are a virtuoso), in which case reading and understanding the sheet music may be 90+% of your "practice time"... but the most accomplished pianists I know of still have to practice (with their hands) consistently.
Hunpeter 3y ago
I think mental practice (e.g. visualizing yourself playing in the place you will perform next day, going through the sheet music consciously noting your intent and possible difficulties, or memorizing complex passages without the keyboard etc.) is a great complement to actual physical practice. It's no substitute, but at least it can be done basically anywhere.

snitzr 3y ago

I take snapshots on film for fun and sometimes don't develop the film for a few months. When I finally see the photos I've taken, I might have forgotten most of the detail from that time. I see the photo and it jogs my memory. But I'm never sure if my memory is a hallucination extrapolated from the photo or if I'm using the photo to recall something that I just needed help to remember. It's like that experiment that showed people a faked picture of themselves in a hot air balloon. Many of the people shown this false photo would respond by creating false memories. My photos are really me but I wonder how accurate is any recollection beyond the photo.

ler_ 3y ago

Really late to the party on this, but I don't see the purpose of remembering every day without fail. For my part, I have been journaling for a while now, and every day I make a note of something that happened. However, I don't get so caught up with particular moments. If you have enough data, to put it this way, then you notice that most things you do, feel or think are somewhat circular. You come back to certain emotions, you come back to certain perceptions. Remembering by itself, in the absence of reflection, makes little sense. Plus, whenever I do glean something from my previous writings, it is usually due to understanding the general "feel" of a time in my life, not so much memorizing a particular day. >The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes. I like that the author acknowledges that here. Again, though, I do think it matters more to interpret one's experience as opposed to having a perfect recollection of the facts. And, to be fair, what he does, and what I do, sounds more like a way to handle far more existential concerns. I suppose we want to hold on to life, to give it meaning in some way by always being a witness to what has been. Maybe we would all be better served by acknowledging the underlying philosophical conundrum here, haha.

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

Memory is a funny thing. I do not remember anything that I do not actively use, except when I have to. Like the case where I was on the Mexico-US border and I was asked by the kind border police to give the dates of all my travel to the US in the last 5 years. I was travelling from France to the US like every month or two. Well, the perspective to stay in Mexico brought back the travel dates pronto. Or the case I was in a taxi with a Spanish speaking driver who had no idea which hotel to drive me to, in the middle of nowhere. My years of Spanish in high school bloomed up pronto as well. I was able to say "my hotel is mauve with a garden in front and back, there is a view on a white church surrounded by a cemetery" My teacher would have been so proud! (I was incompetent to put it nicely)

majkinetor 3y ago

I highly doubt that this is a good thing to do. Forgetting things seems to be a protective mechanism, otherwise, life becomes too stressful. Humans and other animals focus on negative things and if you do not forget them, your stress level will skyrocket. Recorded cases of people who can't forget and experiments with rats shows us these phenomena.

jzl 3y ago

There are some people, most notably the actress Marilou Henner, who remember and can instantly recall everything they did every day of their life, by date. It’s astounding. More info here: https://youtu.be/hpTCZ-hO6iI https://youtu.be/hpTCZ-hO6iI