The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'd really love to improve my memory, but the popular approach to this sort of baffles me. Memorizers construct large memory palaces and winding trails to recall specific, precise bits of information, like numbers or the words of a speech down to the letter, and this is synonymous with memory improvement. But is this not just trivial recall that could be handled easily by a computer, or a scrap of paper? Consulting my internal memory palace is no different from consulting a library. And it's obviously additional. When we talk about memory, we really mean that natural faculty through which things float into our mind as they appear relevant, the source of all creativity. This faculty of memory can be improved through exercise and health and frequent use, and reduced through idleness and so on.
...But is that it? This memory pretty much determines your intellectual life, it determines whether a book will benefit you or be meaningless. Memory is everything. So where are the great writers and studies showing how to optimize this function? Surely it's not just "eat vegetables, do cardio, sleep well", right?
I've made it a habit to put everything worth memorizing into an Anki card on my phone. Names of acquaintances I have met, dates of historical events I am interested in, vocabulary, formulas and constants that I use in my line of work or hobbies, phone numbers, just to name a few common ones. Spaced repetition is the only method that has worked for me. Memorizing the major system also helps for memorizing numbers. I review the cards once a day on my phone, it takes me less than 5 minutes.
More options
Context Copy link
Regarding the distinction you make between improving deliberate information recall and improving spontaneous/sublime association: John Crowley's fantasy novel Little, Big has a character who uses a memory palace (aka. the method of loci) not just to commit facts to memory, but also to do detective work in the sense of joining the dots together. The palace is a place for reflection and discovery. At one point her attention is drawn to a room of the palace by a cowbell ringing in it, so the palace formalizes and increases awareness of the process of recognizing the relevance of a memory. Another character uses his palace (by physically walking around the real analogue of the imagined place) to perfectly preserve emotionally significant experiential memories.
This is a fictional portrayal which verges on astral projection sometimes. I have no idea to what extent it's grounded in reality, or even to what extent the author thought it was, and I haven't tried to emulate it. I've read somewhere that the method of loci was developed by ancient rhetors to memorize speeches, which sounds more like what you were complaining about.
I agree with lagrangian that rote memorization doesn't preclude forming associations. Organizing information in preparation for rote memorization can require decisions about what associations to make: if you want to memorize the periodic table, do you memorize periods or groups at a time, or mappings between atomic numbers and elements, or mappings from a given element to its immediate neighbours? In making this decision you are effectively selecting triggers of relevance and the information that should float into your mind in response to them.
More options
Context Copy link
Reminded of the story about … was it Leonardo? … who said that he wrote everything down because once he wrote it down he would remember it and never need the piece of paper again.
(Aware of the irony that I have half remembered a story about memory.)
More options
Context Copy link
+1 to spaced repetition.
The other technique I will add, which I think underlies memory palaces, is...let's call it "deep engagement." Rather than just trying to remember rotely, deeply engage with the knowledge by connecting it to other knowledge. You've now added multiple recall points to your brain for the single fact, and as long as any of them are intact, you can get the fact.
In the case of memory palaces (which I find overhyped and not personally useful), that knowledge is a location in the memory palace. E.g. if yours is Pokemon, and you are trying to remember a grocery list, maybe you pictured Pikachu eating a watermelon. The element of the memory palace itself (Pikachu) is by design easy to remember. The visual of Pikachu eating a watermelon connects to enough other things (my memories of eating watermelon, a chuckle at the visual there, etc) to provide redundant encoding of "watermelon."
In the case of learning physics, you can:
In the case of politics, you can:
So, no, it isn't - it's redundant encoding that gives you more threads by which to remember. In CS terms, I no longer have to linearly loop through my list-o-facts; instead, I map quickly to the needed fact via any of a number of hashes (connections).
You remind me of this article
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2007/03/25/how-to-ace-your-finals-without-studying/
Back in high school, I was on the "academic bowl" team (it's academic jeopardy) and our team captain was some dude with glasses from Myanmar. His skill at the game was truly astonishing, and when I asked him how he learned, he said he spent hours reading wikipedia each night. Unsurprisingly, I tried a few variations on this and none of them bore fruit. But as @self_made_human mentions, there's a degree to which this memory faculty feels sort of natural, like we're each given the capacity we need for our interests. If you find yourself going on Wikipedia binges, making deep connections, reading tons of books and forgetting them shortly after, most probably it's a defect in your natural memory; you should be remembering everything you have interest in. Otherwise it's likely a disease.
This is a good analogy. We don't often talk about how inefficient the written word usually is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Write it down , periodically refer to it by glancing at it and mentally reciting it, at which point it should be easy to commit it to memory. Look for patterns in numbers or words.
More options
Context Copy link
The only reliable/efficient way of memorizing large amounts of information I'm aware of is spaced repetition. I'm too lazy to make Anki cards, but I do try and apply the practice to reviewing the copious amounts of notes I need to memorize, and it does work.
On the nootropic side, ashwagandha is more or less robustly shown (going off last time I read up on it) to have mild benefits for memory. There's not really much you can do to improve it above your usual baseline unless you're a dementia patient needing memory enhancers really.
"Great writers" such as Gwern or Scott both do their best to note down things, and are also blessed with great memory by default, which strongly correlates to intelligence anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link