Augmenting Long-Term Memory

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.

What you Ankify is not a trivial choice: Ankify things that serve your long-term goals. In some measure we become what we remember, so we must be careful what we remember*

* With apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”.

. This is always true, but Anki makes it especiall... See more

there is great value in learning to “think in more memorable ways”.

If designers waited until all the evidence was in, no-one would ever design anything. In practice, what you want is bold, imaginative design, exploring many ideas, but inspired and informed (and not too constrained) by what is known scientifically.

virtuoso skill

Given how central memory is to our thinking, it's natural to ask whether computers can be used as tools to help improve our memory. This question turns out to be highly generative of good ideas, and pursuing it has led to many of the most important vision documents in the history of computing. One early example was Vannevar Bush's 1945 proposal** V... See more

grok

It is interesting to consider developing systems which may overcome some or all of these issues.

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. – Richard Feynman