Wired an interesting article on a guy who, after a detailed study of how human memory works, has developed SuperMemo, a software program that will allow you to remember many more things than you currently can:
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.
While initially I found myself tempted by the idea of trying this software, or at least the techniques used in it, I soon decided that in my current situation in life, I don’t really want to memorize anything so desperately. More generally, if I read something, and then I forget it later because I did not encounter it again in my readings soon enough, I believe that it was not important enough to remember in the first place. I only want to memorize the things that keep showing up in my readings.
Your mileage may vary. And even if it doesn’t, you should still read the full article. It’s rather long, but parts of it are quite interesting.
I agree… I think if something is important enough, it tends to keep popping back on my radar with enough frequency for me to eventually process. The critical problem for me with regard to factual memory (as opposed to procedural) is actually different — recalling more than 1 connection (say 10-15) relevant to a piece of integrative writing. This is like trying to recall 10-15 flash cards of varying ages.
But that’s the beauty of blogging. If I forget an important thought in such a piece, I post a comment to add it 🙂
The underlying premise here seems suspicious, that information review for the sake of information review is an important human activity. Most of the time, I review information with a specific end in mind.