I feel that in general we are consuming a lot more information than we really need. I am not sure the human brain was evolved to handle a large amount of information that does not have any physical references.
I find myself not only forgetting myriad facts and figures, but also mixing up information or having false memories. Many of my memories have nothing to anchor on.
I think the trend today is to prime the brain with content depending on the context. E.g. before giving a talk, an engineering meeting or leading a training session you can use flash cards to warm up the cache and strategically dump what is not important to remember.
Not exactly sure how I feel about that.
Whenever I do a SEO workshop I ask 3 questions to my audience:
* How often did you Google this week?
* What was the last thing before the last thing that you Googled?
Later, I shoot another question:
* What is the last thing you read, that you googled before, top to bottom?
The use case I optimize websites for is:
* Users do not know when they Google.
* Users do not know what they Google.
* Google is an extension of their thinking.
* They do not read what they find.
* It just need to move them forward in a way.
> So I wouldn’t say we are losing our ability to remember, as I posed at the start of this post. I think people (me included) just don’t do enough work to move stuff from our working memory into our long-term memory.
I'd say we could be better at remembering that some piece of information exists and where to find it instead of having to memorize it. This seems more powerful.
And for things you do often, you will probably memorize it anyway.
Lack of focus leading to not remembering the content of a meeting is problematic though. I don't have this issue fortunately.
Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?
Memory is fundamentally limited anyway. Unless you're going to set up an Anki deck for your Zoom meeting notes, it's unrealistic to try to remember action points from every Zoom call we're on. The brain is an efficient machine, and it will naturally remember things that come up often enough. It works quite well on its own. I don't think I've ever sat down to try to remember how to write a for loop in whatever my preferred coding language is at the time - you just remember it after a few semi-regular lookups.
If you feel your memory is limited in an area you do value instant recall that doesn't inherently produce regular repetition, there are ways to steer your long term memory consolidation. For example, you can train yourself to remember everyone's names when you meet them, if you value that. If you don't value it or put any particular effort into training it, there's no reason to think you've gone senile if you forget the name of most people you meet the first few times.
For most things, I think the second brain solution is ideal. You value something enough to want to be able to recall it at a moment's notice, but you don't have any real need to instantly recall it without reference. We're not taking closed book exams outside of school [1]. This is where all the Zoom notes and book quotes are placed, where you can further digest, interpret and later recall them if and when they become relevant.
[1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/knowledge-building-blocks-the-new-...
I've been wondering the same thing recently. If anyone's interested in learning more about how previous cultures remembered vast amounts of information I would recommend the book I'm currently reading:
Frances Yates - The Art of Memory,
and the one I'm planning to read next:
Mary Carruthers - The Book of Memory.
One of the most interesting aspects for me is how the concept of memory in the middle ages was much more closely associated (sometimes conflated) with imagination than it is now. Most people I know now would consider memory and imagination as two quite distinct mental faculties.
For anybody interested in diving deeper into this subject, I would recommend reading The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. It was written in 2011, but is still very applicable today. Brain plasticity is a real concept and our constant connection to the Internet affects us.
https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
During the pandemic, spending more time at home and less time having real social interactions has lead me to beleive I am forgetting some of my vocabulary or at the least not practicing it enough to keep it in what you describe as "Working memory".
Zoom and the like is far from natural and I find myself searching for words during sentences that I know I would not have in the past.
I pre-date Google and whenever I had technical questions the only way I could get them answered was to explain to the person I was asking exactly what I was doing and why, and they would only answer me if they agreed 100% with what and how I was doing something. If they didn't like either then I didn't get my question answered. This forced me to have to go learn and memorize everything about all aspects of technology just so I didn't get roadblocked by someone having a bad day. Today Google is more of a convenient way to jog my memory - I can function just fine when the internet goes out, read a map if my GPS loses its signal, etc. I don't ever want to be one of those blank people who just stand there and stares when the screen blinks out.
I honestly fear what will happen when we attach more directly to the brain/eye the type of infrastructure and capabilities of a modern smartphone / search engine / assistant device that we now carry in our hands. Like Google Glass or whatever, but more invisible and immersive. I already feel so distracted; memory and focus and analysis sideloaded onto devices, and I'm not even a big phone user.
Kids in school are already struggling with these things. What happens when every child is walking around with facts available instantly and constantly, but no context to manage it?
I second, second brain. heh. I invested like 20 hours setting up my notion just right, and it's so worth it. It's so much more organize than my mucky/intangible brain. I also believe in the GTD philosophy that your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
I strongly suspect the article's title should replace "we" with "I" and ought to be an introspective on the process of aging.
"Something had to be wrong! I started to notice (increasingly!) my inability to recall trivial things; for example, the action points from a Zoom call, or a quote from a book that I had read a couple of months ago. Surely this can’t be normal?"
Except it's fairly normal under stress for people's memory to function more poorly and since we're experiencing a Global pandemic that has completely up ended our normal mode of living I would expect baseline stress for almost every one to be up considerably.
So that's my hypothesis, which requires less assumptions than "people are losing the ability to remember because of computers" but doesn't result in a blog post where I can talk about Anki or equivalents.
Haven't we seen this topic dicussed and dismissed before? I could have sworn...
Yes... probably ... what was the question again?
// This loss of ability to remember is real and personal. To combat it, once a year, I undertake a two to three week digital detox. No devices, no media, only long form traditional books. Takes a week to overcome agitation from not being able to “consume” digital micro-info-bursts on demand. Following that, my brain begins to restore its ability to build and maintain concepts, built up like Jenga towers or houses of cards while reading. That ability remains until I get lazy, quit taking notes by hand and go back to digital.
Don't know about memory, but without doubt, the web defines our access to information, during the pandemic more than ever. With far-reaching consequences for politics, cognitive abilities, history, power balances, market access, etc. Which is why it's so enormously important to not let us slide control over the language(s) of the web, such as HTML and CSS out of our hands, but retain or regain participation and representation in web standards.
There's a further separation here - let's call them "conscious" and "recognization" and they are processed by two different parts of the brain. I'm doing a lot of generalizing in this explanation and I'm not attempting to be 100% accurate in where things happen - I'm a programmer/architect, not a brain guy.
And it's not just memory, but the processing or "thinking" of that memory. Let's take just one sense, sight, for our example.
When you see something, eventually the signal gets to your "conscious" mind (also, there is a slight delay as your brain processes things). But at the same time that information is processed by the "recognization" part of your brain which will eventually store that information, also, in long term memory. There are a few interesting facts about this that I've seen:
1. there are people who are blind, but not because their eyes are damaged, but because the connection is severed to their "conscious". But their "recognization" connection is still intact. Because of this, even though they can't see, they can recognize faces and even stop before running into a wall. This is because the regognization happens even though you're not consciously aware of it. Something like face blindness is (probably) the opposite. 2. When you're in a parking lot looking for your car and you see your friend, you won't recognize them - this is because the "recognization" processing is only single threaded! 3. You can recognize someone you know from much further than you can make out their face consciously. 4. Recognization looks for very complex patterns - especially faces. Just ask yourself "how" you tell one face from another? That feeling of being being watched may be just that there's something face like in the environment. 5. The recognization will store its information and your conscious mind will look for it where its stored but they don't talk directedly!. So, again, when you see something, that information is sent to both places. But sometimes, especially if you have a chemical issue (e.g. serotonin) (even just a minor issue for that moment, not necessarily a big issue), the recognization process will be fast but the conscious process will be slow. So the recognization will store it, then the conscious brain will check to see if it's stored - and it's there! So your con
Has anyone built something to try to automate setting up spaced repetition?
For example, I've looked up numerous PHP functions on www.php.net, numerous Python functions on docs.python.org, numerous Perl modules on metacpan.org or with the perldoc command, and numerous JavaScript functions on MDN.
It would be neat if there was something that could automatically note what I've looked up, and turn that into flash cards for use with something like Anki.
My brain is basically a cache for pointers at this point. I always know where to find something I'm trying to remember and I always have my phone on me.
Book Suggestion that goes into this problem and offers solutions, I'm listening to the audio version right now: "Think for Yourself" - https://www.amazon.com/Think-Yourself-Restoring-Artificial-I...
I am experiment the same problem. As a software developer, I spend all my day on computer and mobile phone. Recently, I have a the feeling that it take me a while to recall the name of a friend. Or even searching for a solution. It could be the side effect of all of the autocomplete and search result which are accessible within my palm.
I always liked the idea of a second brain, an exobrain done in any form of technology.
I humbling say my exobrain is Evernote as I throw a lot of thing in there after adding some tags. I'm fast approaching the 3000 item mark, which is interesting because I'm gradually losing the capacity to find things as I can't remember what's in there to be searched/found. Day to day things like receipt photos are in some way at the top of my mind, but unique events from past years may be forever buried in there.
Another evidence: I saved an article from 2017 just to find out days later when I searched for its title that I had actually saved the same article back in 2017.
Well, I can't even imagine how this second brain will be like in 2027.
I read somewhere that before the advent of paper and books, ancient civilisations would keep epic stories in their heads. After we started writing things down in larger volumes, committing entire "books" to memory was not needed, so it became less prevalent and eventually stopped altogether.
I guess smartphones may further reduce what we need to commit to memory, which will probably have some implications in terms of neuro-plasticity - i.e. it may well shrink (or at least change) parts of our brains.
I like the idea he raises of Google or search in general being an extension of our memory.
I think as technology evolves, we may see a better version of this idea. The ultimate version of this would be what Connor Macleod is gifted at the end of Highlander 2.
He has this ability to see people's thoughts and help them work together to solve huge problems in the world.
We have lots of chat apps that give us instant communication, but it is not very organized or easy to search like the idea of direct access to someone's thoughts.
I've absolutely noticed this. I generally don't remember what I read on HN, or in documentation. What I do remember is the fact that I've read it, and a vague sense of where, and hopefully a few keywords to type into Google. I actively try to keep my memory sharp by doing recall exercises, but I think it's a losing battle: when we know we can find something later you either consciously or subconsciously do less effort to remember it.
I have a quirk in my brain that I can't remember strings of numbers if I try to, but if I read it once I'll recall it just fine.
It's like my brain realises I am intending to go back and read the string 2 numbers at a time, over and over again, so it doesn't bother remembering. But if I just read it out once and don't think about it until I need to recall it, my brain has the information available for me.
I used to think I was losing my ability to remember things due to the amount of information I was taking in. I no longer think this is true and was simply my own worry.
I do review certain things I want to remember in my downtime, but I don't think that is somehow inherently changing some larger picture like my information consumption.
Semi-related, do you guys tend to get headaches after long information binges?
Personal staff and underlings are the solution. And friends and family are a great backup. This system works out well if you do a good job of remembering and meeting their needs. Keep notes on the needs of each person you care about. They will then put up with all kinds of forgetfulness and go out of their way to keep you on track.
Imagine AR memory palaces, and memory boards (like crafty photo boards, or tactile Lukasa[1])? As my memory emphasizes spatial, I'm looking forward to exploring.
Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.
Names, grey deeds, dire events, rebellions,
Majesties, sovereign voices, agonies,
Creations and destroyings all at once
Pour into the wide hollows of my brain
and deify me,
as if some blithe wine or bright elixir
Peerless I had drunk,
and so became immortal.
- Keats, from memory.
edit: Ok, I had to double check and I made a mistake!
Pretty sure the three main factors that decreases your ability to retain information is:
* Lack of sleep * Stress * Age
Usually all three hit at once, as our career peaks in intensity around our late 30s, while also having kids.
I'm not so concerned about memory any more than calculators made us unable to add.
I am concerned that people seem increasingly unable to draw coherent conclusions.
Ironically enough, facebook messenger appears to be blocking this link from being shared, thus harming our collective memory of it.
My memory is better now than ever before. I find it even knows how to forget things I don't care about! Great feature.
Author goes from "I can't remember things" to assuming that humans can't remember things. Not especially compelling. Vaguely suspicious the point of the article is to be a covert ad for Obsidian.
What were we talking about?
What?
We are really good at adapting. Today I and my phone can do better at remembering stuff I need, than me without phone 10 years ago.
Is this really a problem if you think about it from the standpoint of human evolution?
[Off-topic] I see the other post on Scott's blog "My summer 2020 road trip along the Italian Riviera", and I have to give impressions.
It's not the first time I hear the story along the tune of "we went on vacation, and it was so strange, everything was deserted, people were masked". There's a reason for that - it's called a pandemic, it's taking lives in the thousands per day. Yet, people still can't seem to rationalize that we shouldn't do unnecessary trips, even if we really, really need a vacation right now (and probably everybody does).
The author said they chose Italy because they were "only country that seemed to have a handle on infections". Again - that's because Italy was the hardest hit country at the start of the European side of the pandemic. It's like saying "Wuhan seems to know how to deal with the issue".
Usually, I go for the ad-hominem attack "people are too uneducated, they don't understand..." when I see this kind of behavior. But this year - I see it over and over again in highly (formally) educated (PhD-level) people, who keep track with things, are aware - and yet, can't help themselves. Scott certainly doesn't seem like a uninformed person, nor is he blind to the situation. That's the kind of contradictory examples that whisper "this isn't going to be OK, we're always going to have easy short-sighted goals that will justify the risk and make us go downhill".
I do see that Scott is the original poster, and would like to hear the rationalization beyond "we really needed a vacation".
Peppridge farm remembers
I once took a class in college, “Cars and Culture”. I never forgot a line from that class - that “cars provided an extension of our legs”.
Ever since then, I have told many people and thought to myself many times, that tools, take Google for instance (search and indexing), knowledge management systems (Wiki and other techniques) - these are all extensions of our brains.
We evolve with technology, and it evolves with us. We might be losing our ability to remember, but if it is because we don’t “need” to remember because technology has augmented us... Well, this is why I also am fond of telling people that I have a difficult time separating technology from nature. Even though the two don’t seem like the same thing, technology too becomes part of the natural ecosystem as organisms invent and rely on it.
Also, another way of thinking about this is, maybe the ability to recall small detailed facts was evolutionarily less important than building models in our brains. So, we offloaded recording small facts, while I think we still ingest and build/train our neural nets just fine in our brains.
Then the only problem I see is, if life becomes all about mental models, when our ability to form new mental models degrades with age, what then? Especially with the rate of technological change, I do see a real likelihood that old mental models get left behind and without the ability to adapt, organisms (i.e.) us could be hosed.
Edit: ..and the last sentence could be why the big push for AI and machine learning too - to ensure the models get encoded into the technology too... and be discovered faster, changed more fluidly, etc. Another evolutionary tool.