Augmenting Long-Term Memory

This places us in a curious situation: we have enough understanding of memory to conclude that a system like Anki should help a lot. But many of the choices needed in the design of such a system must be made in an ad hoc way, guided by intuition and unconfirmed hypotheses. The experiments in the scientific literature do not yet justify those design... See more

I personally find it fascinating that Telstar was put into orbit the year before the introduction of ASCII, arguably the first modern digital standard for communicating text. Humanity had a telecommunications satellite before we had a digital standard for communicating text!

This confidence, in turn, makes the initial act of understanding more pleasurable, since you believe you're learning something for the long haul, not something you'll forget in a day or a week.

While this wasn't too difficult, it was somewhat demoralizing and discouraging. It'd be better if Anki had a “catch up” feature that would spread the excess cards over the next few weeks in your schedule. But it doesn't.

OK, but what does one do with it? ... [N]ow that I have all this power – a mechanical golem that will never forget and never let me forget whatever I chose to – what do I choose to remember? – Gwern Branwen

I've tried one experiment in this vein: miming the action of typing commands while I review my Anki cards. But my subjective impression was that it doesn't work so well, and it was also quite annoying to do. So I stopped.

It's notable that I was reading the AlphaGo paper in support of a creative project of my own, namely, writing an article for Quanta Magazine. This is important: I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project.

Memory researchers have repeatedly found that the more elaborately you encode a memory, the stronger the memory will be. By elaborative encoding, they mean essentially the richness of the associations you form.

One failure mode of this process is if you Ankify*

* I.e., enter into Anki. Also useful are forms such as Ankification etc .

misleading work. Many papers contain wrong or misleading statements, and if you commit such items to memory, you're actively making yourself stupider.