Think about using Mnemosyne to drill the things you notice yourself forgetting, like the authors of papers containing interesting things, solutions to problems you’ve solved and so forth. This might be tricky since there may be too many problems and papers to feed them all into the spaced repetition system, and you only want to recall them randomly. A weird approach here might be to insert a random fraction of the stuff into spaced repetition, so that the maintenance cost doesn’t grow to be prohibitive, but you still get some bonus for extra stuff at the forefront of memory. The SuperMemo guy has gone all-out with the spaced repetition approach to doing memory stuff, and seems pretty happy with it.
Try learning some mnemonic systems for fun. The Dominic system involves learning a list of 100 memorable people and using them as a peg system for storing lists of stuff. Memory Palaces are the classic technique, from way back antiquity, which uses people’s ability to visualize familiar environments to store items to memorize.
The mnemonic systems seem kinda useless since they’re very much geared towards straight up memorization rather than understanding things, but they could still serve as a mental exercise and develop habits that make you remember useful stuff better.
The basic advice to students on mnemonics is to come up with ridiculous and unusual imagery linked to the surface form of whatever you’re trying to memorize, which has always sounded like adding a bunch of noise and junk to your head to me. An Abstract Art of Memory is an article that tries to apply a mnemonic system to imagery that’s actually conceptually relevant to the subject.
I used to discredit all rote memorization as annoying activity that just takes time from actually getting to understand things, but so far my record for actually understanding anything that requires sizable effortful study hasn’t been too good, and I suffer from pretty much all of the problems you listed. I’ve started to think that a habit for memorizing stuff, even if some of it is objectively pretty useless trivia, might have a general beneficent effect on being able to learn and recall important things effectively.
Very cool suggestion! Mnemosyne/Anki/Supermemo, in my mind, usually seem to lend themselves to learning facts about “topics/subjects”—I am quite intrigued by the idea of using it to memorize items from one’s own life! I’ll be pondering this for myself.
Think about using Mnemosyne to drill the things you notice yourself forgetting, like the authors of papers containing interesting things, solutions to problems you’ve solved and so forth. This might be tricky since there may be too many problems and papers to feed them all into the spaced repetition system, and you only want to recall them randomly. A weird approach here might be to insert a random fraction of the stuff into spaced repetition, so that the maintenance cost doesn’t grow to be prohibitive, but you still get some bonus for extra stuff at the forefront of memory. The SuperMemo guy has gone all-out with the spaced repetition approach to doing memory stuff, and seems pretty happy with it.
Try learning some mnemonic systems for fun. The Dominic system involves learning a list of 100 memorable people and using them as a peg system for storing lists of stuff. Memory Palaces are the classic technique, from way back antiquity, which uses people’s ability to visualize familiar environments to store items to memorize.
The mnemonic systems seem kinda useless since they’re very much geared towards straight up memorization rather than understanding things, but they could still serve as a mental exercise and develop habits that make you remember useful stuff better.
The basic advice to students on mnemonics is to come up with ridiculous and unusual imagery linked to the surface form of whatever you’re trying to memorize, which has always sounded like adding a bunch of noise and junk to your head to me. An Abstract Art of Memory is an article that tries to apply a mnemonic system to imagery that’s actually conceptually relevant to the subject.
I used to discredit all rote memorization as annoying activity that just takes time from actually getting to understand things, but so far my record for actually understanding anything that requires sizable effortful study hasn’t been too good, and I suffer from pretty much all of the problems you listed. I’ve started to think that a habit for memorizing stuff, even if some of it is objectively pretty useless trivia, might have a general beneficent effect on being able to learn and recall important things effectively.
Thanks, this is helpful!
Very cool suggestion! Mnemosyne/Anki/Supermemo, in my mind, usually seem to lend themselves to learning facts about “topics/subjects”—I am quite intrigued by the idea of using it to memorize items from one’s own life! I’ll be pondering this for myself.
Trying.
Better memory would be awesome!