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Ask HN: Is it possible to train and improve your memory and recall?
67 points by ishjoh on May 11, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 62 comments
When I search for ways to improve memory there are plenty of articles to do basics like exercise, eat well, get lots of sleep. Assuming you're already doing those things are there other ways to improve your memory and recall?

Ideally I would love to be able to easily recall something I read from a book, or easily recall something someone told me in a conversation.




I have developed my own technique that has worked well for my children and myself. I ask myself after reading a chapter, doing homework or learning new information the following questions. What have I learned? How does this help me? What do I do with this new knowledge? The result is that by thinking about what I have learned I understand it better and it becomes lodged in my memory. I basically make the new information part of my thinking and observing life. When you think how can I use or apply this new information it becomes part of your working knowledge and is not easily forgotten. I have tried many of the other ways of memorizing but have found that if you come to learning with a joy and a willingness to immerse oneself you don't have to work that hard. Always asking questions puts your mind in a state to learn and remember. I hope that this is helpful.


This is what works for me too. My ability to recall information from material I consume took a big hit after years of reading things online that can be forgotten inconsequentially, with no direct implications in real life and no post-reading discussion with peers or teachers such as in a school or academic environment.

What I found is that without a direct challenge to your understanding after reading something, be it through formalised tests, questions or social competition, you forget to learn. Your attention and learning mechanisms become defective.

Asking yourself a few simple questions about what you just read and how it is useful or important to you helps a lot.


According to a teacher friend, asking these questions before helps as well.

Eg, “Why am I going to learn this?”

The other good question I’ve heard is “how does this relate to other things I know? — are there connections?”


Funnily enough, I think this may be accidently done by parents for their kids learning improvement. When they get home at a young age parents, or atleast mine, would ask what I learned in school. My memory from times I answered faithfully vs started answering "nothing" seems to be rooted deeper. Could simply be due to age though.


I think this is a version of what I do via blogging. When I learn something new, writing a blog post about it tends to help it stick better as well as exposing and clarifying remaining misunderstandings.


Thanks, I will definitely try this.


If this topic interests you, I highly recommend the book Moonwalking with Einstein[1], which is written by a journalist about people who participate in memory competitions. These people assert that their memories are no better than anyone else's, but that they have learned a variety of techniques (most outlined in the book) that enable them to have a level of recall that seems supernatural to the uninitiated.

My recollection (hah!) is that there's no known way to just make your brain remember stuff better on its own, but if there is something specifically you don't want to forget, there are a bunch of ways to make sure it doesn't get forgotten.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein


The author Joshua Foer, is the brother of the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).


My personal experience when it comes with improving memory is chess. When I started playing as a kid I could not remember even the first ten moves of games I played. When I got better I was able to replay an entire game if it wasn't too long, and when I studied a lot while playing semi competitively years later I learned to play blindfolded, which I always thought was basically magic and talent growing up.

One interesting thing about the nature of this kind of memory is that chess players, if they're really good can do this with many boards and recall years of games. But only if the positions make sense. When you give chess players a board with randomized, nonsensical placement, most cannot remember it and are no better than your average person.

I took away from it that extreme memory is often related to the skill overall. You can only memorize something if its embedded in a context, deep in your muscle memory and 'makes sense'. I suppose this is why mnemonics exist.


Sounds kind of like Huffman coding - the games you can remember all have a short encoding, and a random board has a long one


More like persistent data structures.

Logical boards are very similar to other logical boards, and only the delta needs to be remembered.


The method of loci, also sometimes called the memory palace method, has been used for hundreds of years to recall information:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

The amount of information that people have reported being able to store using this method is truly remarkable. You might find this case study of an individual who used the method to memorize 65000+ digits of pi interesting:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4323087/


Yes within a field.

Ex: You'll find it impossible to memorize music until you learn how to think and remember notes. Once you understand rhythm (8th notes, quarter-notes), and pitches (C, D, E, F, G, A, B C), you start to remember music.

You then study common patterns, such as Blue's Scale (C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb). Or common chord patterns (I - vi - IV - V progression), and suddenly music is just "oh, right, the common chord progression in this rhythm".

Its not that people are memorizing more-and-more information. Its that they're memorizing __LESS__ information, but smarter information. Its far easier to remember "Loved" by The Beatles is the common-chord progression in 4/4 common time, rather than actually trying to memorize the individual notes and rhythm.

Then you can kinda-sorta forget little details (maybe play a few mistakes), but no one else remembers it as well as you do (not because your memory is better, because you have a better system of memorizing). So those little mistakes are forgotten by the audience.

-------

I'm playing Age of Empires 2, and the same thing for build orders. As a beginner, memorizing "2 houses -> 6 on sheep -> 4 on wood -> 7th food on boar lure -> 3rd house + mill -> 4 on berries" is difficult.

But then more advanced build orders are "British build order" is same as standard, except with 5 on sheep to handle the +25% bonus to shepherds.

It is said that you can only ever remember 7 things at a time. But those 7 things can be advanced concepts built up of *other* sets of ~7 things.


The basic idea is that you can only hold so many chunks in working memory (which is a necessary precursor to long-term memory), but the more you know, the better you can chunk information, thus remembering more.

There is a similar phenomenon in chess where grandmasters can very quickly memorize a board position from a game, but are basically no better than any random person off the street at memorizing the position of pieces placed randomly in a way that would never occur in a game. They aren't actually memorizing the position of pieces, they're memorizing the game state in a way that makes sense to them and lets them re-create the position of the pieces.

So, practically, a good way to train your memory is to learn more about the area in which you want to be able to remember things.

I don't think this helps with the concrete example of "something someone told me in a conversation" though. It might help with "something I read from a book" though because you could encode that information better if you know more about the subject.


There's been studies of people that have complete recall. People that can remember every day of their lives. They've found that the brain areas that are needed to commit long term memories are larger in them than in most people. There's a suspicion that those people have worked their memory so much that the brain has made the needed change. Implying that the more you try to remember things the better your memory will get. But it's all hypothetical right now.

However you can use memory technics that will help you remember. There's the memory palace, there's creating a story so silly about what you are trying to remember that it helps you remember the items and there's also spaced repetition. Which is a technic that reenforces memories just as the brain starts to forget them.

No one really knows if practice improves memory but it can't hurt.


This is the best answer here. All memories decay unless you practice recall in the appropriate manner. And I agree with the theory that practicing recall is likely to improve your brain's overall capacity for recollection. That would resemble what we see in other aspects of brain function.


Depends on what types of memories but for instance recalling sequences (of numbers for instance) is relatively easy using "memory palaces" given our inate ability to organize information geospatially. The book Moonwalking with Einstein is a great story on that matter, about a journalist teaching himself the skills after all competitors in a memory tournament told him "anyone could do it"


My sense of direction and orientation is nearly non-existent. I have a really hard time imagining physical places. Any alternatives to mind palace for people like me?


I think the underlying idea is patterns in general, so if you're good with music you could use songs to memorize. Patterns just give you better boxes to file information in.


Thanks for the suggestion, searching Memory Palaces shows a lot of material I wasn't aware of.


My memory is generally horrible, but I've learned that my ability to recall things improves greatly if I write them down.

I learned this from maintaining a mood journal for the last year and realizing that I can recall events in my life much more easily than before I did this.

This is also how I learned to program. I rewrite examples in tutorials instead of copying and pasting, and I read things instead of watching videos. It has served me extremely well. I can still mostly implement fundamental data structures without hitting Hacker Rank, for example, despite not having done them in quite some time.

I also don't bother remembering things I can delegate to memory aids, like my email, calendars, or the Reminders app on my iPhone (which is a ROCK SOLID app; kudos to the developers at Apple who maintain this lifesaving tool). This applies to phone calls, shopping lists, personal events, etc. I said that my memory was horrible earlier because without these aids, I will forget (and have forgotten) stuff all of the time!

ymmv, of course. Everyone is different!


Anki flash cards and spaced repetition help encode concepts into your working memory over long enough time horizon.


Thank you for this response. Ideally I'm looking for a way to improve my general abilities so that I don't need flash cards, but instead I would just remember something someone has told me, do you know of anything like that?


Regarding what you're talking about, general memory.

You can ensure the physical machinery of your brain is functioning well enough to operate at it's best. There's four keys to help here, first sleep enough to be well rested, second regularly exercise aerobically so your circulation pushes enough blood and nutrients around to feed your brain adequately, third and related take some ginko biloba but do not overdo this (make sure you research this) and finally drink enough water. If your brain was already 100% this will make no change, but for most people they can get significant to dramatic improvements to achieve their latent memory potential.

Then you can program your mind to consider what information is important and attach emotional significance to it, which will help you remember further and easily without repetition or memory palace techniques, though they will take you even further.


I naturally have a bad memory as well.

I haven't found a way to improve general abilities, but Anki has worked well to keep my memories fresh.

(The cost is that I spend an hour a day refreshing my memory. The benefit is that I recall everything that's in Anki.)


Usually the non-tech way would be to associate with bizarre visual imagery. The tech way would be life-logging with a camera on most of the time that extracts a searchable transcript.


Perhaps finding or building an Anki deck on how to improve memory Will improve your memory?

I know some students in medical school, and they swear by Anki to learn all the data they have to learn.


I have an abysmal memory, my mind is more oriented towards mental models and logic versus memorizing facts and events.

I've enjoyed one particular exercise. Its based off a story I read where Navy Admirals are able to study a deck of 52 cards and remember the entire order in 60s. So basically, take N cards and spend 60s memorizing them, then let another 60s pass, then test yourself. I think the most I ever got was like 12 cards.

I tried also doing more long term exercises, i.e here's a sequence of 4 cards, I'll come back in 7 days and try to recall the order.

Overall, the improvements were marginal.

Maybe there are better exercises, but something I've found to be orders of magnitude more effective is simply note-taking. Mac notes are really convenient for this because they're searchable. It's a tedious habit to form and takes discipline when starting, but IMO really pays off in the long run when the content aggregates.

My dream hobby project is to create a kind of "second brain" program that is primarily note taking but sits on top of a "knowledge graph" so i can kind of google search my memory, or view it like a twitter feed. I know there's a million apps our there that probably fit this bill, but I already have a specific vision in mind for this app.


Obsidian mate, try it.


2nded. I sync mine via iCloud, and have a shared sub-folder with my spouse where we keep family/house related knowledge. Between that and Todoist, 2022 has been my best GTD year yet.


Recall for me has always been about muscle memory. If I was in a coma for 2-3 years, would I be able to unlock my password manager app so easily? Somehow it's the muscle memory that goes first, then the actual passphrase. Like, I remember PIN codes because they have a certain 'ring' to them. Like a number has a certain sound to it, you know?


Yes, for a time I committed to learning hanzi on memrise. No only did I get better at the recall, I got better at learning how to learn about recall. Rather than experiencing a linear improvement in recall as I worked through the material, I got better at learning new characters as well. It wasn't clear if I was generally improving at recall in a global sense, or that this was a domain-specific improvement (say by learning to chunk at the level of radicals) or a bit of both. Regardless, the phenomenon had a noticeable effect.

In my academic experience, teachers and professors were so adamant about not memorizing that I had under-utilized it as a skill. It was nice to employ it for once even if just to learn that it is a skill that can be improved.


The book "Deep Work" contains a chapter on memorisation which recommends a few methods (memory palace etc.) and a few exercises (memorise a deck of cards) etc. It starts off with an interesting story about an acquaintance of the author who was memorising iirc The Torah.

My wife's late grandfather used to spend a lot of time memorising religious scripture and solving mathematical puzzles and coming up many by himself.

He was extremely sharp till the second of his death. Very articulate and completely aware of everything. I've come to think of memorisation as mental exercise that spills over into other "parts" of the brain and generally functions as something to "keep you young".


Yes, it is. John von Neumann memorized math formulas. Keats memorized Shakespeare. The whole of Homer's work is oral story-telling passed down through generations of memorizers. There is a World Memory Championships.

You would probably like Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein.

Developing memory is not a panacea for intelligence or a replacement for sound thinking. Some elite memory athletes assert that they're not that smart and attribute their success only to working very hard at memorizing.


Von Neumann had a memory that was considered exceptional even amongst those of the various geniuses of his time. He's one of very few humans regarded as having had close to a photographic memory.


Yup! And it was no genetic accident. He practiced hard.


Come on. Read what Von Neumann could do since a young age. He memorized eight volumes of the most comprehensive History of the World textbook of the time. He remembered every date, every name, every place and the page where they appeared. If I remember correctly, while doing his Math PhD he took an interest in Chemical Engineering and studied the whole degree in two weeks. Very smart but normal people take 4-6 years to do the same. I don't know you, but I find the denial of inborn talent very cruel: "See, the reason you can't understand fraction in 11th grade is because you haven't worked hard enough otherwise you would be von Neumann". As someone who started tutoring younger people in the last year of high school I've found plenty of lazy smart who need a push and plenty of stupid hard workers who suffered while unable to understand the material.


Once you read a little deeper, you'll discover that Johnny's father had him tutored privately from early childhood by some of the greatest minds in Hungary at the time, and during a real golden era for academia in that country. He literally practiced memorization.

The alternative explanation is magic. Take your pick.


Here's an interesting "explain it like i'm five" that you might find interesting.

ELi5: What happens in your brain when you forget something? and then how does the brain recall forgotten information?

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uneyo3/e...


Recent studies[1][2] have shown that memories are much more interlinked in the brain than previously thought.

Similar to the chess examples elsewhere in this thread, the key to a good memory is utilizing more of the brain when storing them. When reading a book, if you vividly experience a certain passage instead of just reading/memorizing the words, the text will become more easily accessible in various situations, e.g. when you feel similar to the main character.

For conversation, trying to recall the context (place, time, surroundings), may just bring the quote you search for to the forefront.

This is distinct from how you store "facts", which is more like a hash table you can scan through. Episodic memory is more abstract and can be suppressed by a number of factors, such as negative emotions about parts of the context.

Disclaimer: not a neurologist, mostly speaking from own experience.

1: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220407141911.h...

2: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-memories-brain-potent...


Summarizing your request from comments, you're looking to improve what I'd call your random recall of unstudied things.

That's something I'm naturally pretty good at (which is a blessing and a curse), so I don't really know how to help you, but I can confirm it gets a lot harder when my exposure to the thing to recall was when I was tired, or not eating well, and regular excercise helps with mental tasks in many ways; distractions usually don't help, but the distractions may be memorable, so there's that.

I think this can probably be somewhat trained. Reading books and taking quizzes about the books could be a way, but if you study the book instead of read it, you're practicing studying, not whatever this unstudied recall is. You could try taking the quizzes immediately after, until you get good, then try to increase the time between exposure and recall. There's some amount of content where you watch a film clip and then they ask you about details, but those are usually trying to trick you/are more about attracting your attention to one thing so you ignore something else.


The way I remember things for tests is to summarise something to as little as possible. Then without looking, write out the summary. If I have to check my notes, I complete it and then try again. Once I have written it out independently, I can express the ideas in more detail if pressed. You should revise the notes at least once a day. If there is something you had forgotten, write them out again.


Yes!

There are individuals who create memory palaces and are able to memorise hundreds and hundreds or random letters or numbers. This is just practice, anyone could do it.

Beyond that it becomes easier to remember things as you know more about a topic. This is because of associativity that happens, and the synpapses will allow for associativity and priming. This will create networks that you can pull from!


Tangentially related but I was reading about hafiz recently, people who entirely memorized the Quran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafiz_(Quran) Wondering the technique they use can be applied to other fields as well.


Yes, absolutely. Try mental math, there are lots of good apps out there. You have to make it a habit to see results.


Can you elaborate on the good apps?


The one I use is just called Mental Math. There are a lot of them out there, just find one that works for you.


I have my personal method for memory and it served me well for now. When you are reading book read chapter title than take couple minutes and think "How/why would I do that".

Examples: "Linear systems with 2 variables" just think about it builds you understanding and it is easier to remember something you understand. Than you read chapter and get second opinion on problem. Bonus point if book has exercises on end of chapter. Then after thinking and before reading go to last exercise in chapter and read it, to answer "why" question, best exercises for this are "Alice have 3 apples ..." style exercises. Try to solve it before reading.

This method works best for STEM books, but it can be fun to try it on history, fantasy books if the have spoliery chapter titles.


Based on how memory/forgetting curves work, there's nothing better than spaced repetition apps like SuperMemo. No matter how good your baseline recall is, you can't remember something forever without intermittent retrieval.


I don't know of any methods to generically improve memory, but repetition and/or writing have always helped me. Repetition is what it sounds like: say or think what you're trying to memorize to yourself many times. Writing (NOT typing, but actual handwriting!) and taking notes also help, and can be used in conjunction with repetition.

The most effective unintentional method of memorization is to be profoundly embarrassed or frightened by forgetting or not knowing something - it will stick with you forever. I don't know of any way to systematize that though.


I'm certainly no expert but the two methods I know about are spaced repetition [0] and mnemonic devices ([1]?).

The basic idea of spaced repetition is that we tend to forget things on an exponential curve with some exponent. As the item is re-enforced in our memory, the exponent gets smaller so that we remember it longer.

Many flash card systems use some type of spaced repetition [2], using information on what item you got wrong to adjust the estimated exponent. For practical purposes, this means reminding yourself of an item you just learned in the next minutes, hours and days will help re-enforce it and then reminding yourself in the coming days, weeks and months to help keep it.

The basic idea behind mnemonic devices, as I understand it, is that we are predisposed to remember experiences rather than facts, so turning facts into experiences helps with recall. This is one tactic to help people recall large numbers of digits of Pi, say, by converting the digit sequence into an experience (walking through a house with each number representing an item, color, etc.). I've also heard this is why people with synethesia are better at recalling some types of information.

There are many articles about memory competitions and various methods to help prep for such competitions [3]. There's also a cottage industry of memory coaching [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic#Applications_and_exam...

[2] https://faqs.ankiweb.net/what-spaced-repetition-algorithm.ht...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Memory_Championships

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htbVrli2fvA


Anecdotal experience, but I spent 2 years studying medicine and during those years I did notice my memory getting much better (due to the large material one should learn), even my working memory - and it was the same way for my classmates as well.

Unfortunately since then it receded, so you sort of have to use it afterwards as well (What I use for CS is more of like indexing then memorization — I remember quite well whether I have met an information and where (often remembering the query that will show me the same page))


Yep, information recall abilities are definitely a set of learnable skills. There are a few resources and recommendations here: https://libguides.cam.ac.uk/wolfsoncollege/memoryskills

Don't forget that technology can be a useful fallback and/or way to confirm that you remembered details correctly (and you won't, always; it's always possible to improve, though). Good luck!


This looks like an excellent resource, thank you!


> Ideally I would love to be able to easily recall something I read from a book, or easily recall something someone told me in a conversation.

You did this throughout school, didn't you? Read a book, took notes, identified the key topics and summarized them with your own insights.

Reading a book 'for fun' and then doing the above is much harder. For one thing, there is no teacher curating the books for length and clarity, and there is no test you're preparing for.


https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Quantum_Country


I use one other technique: I keep a diary of what I most want to remember of the day.

Writing things down helps fix them in memory.


Yes, it’s possible to train and improve nearly everything that people think are natural talents. The problem is that it takes a lot of work and it’s easier to think “I’m not the kind of person who can…” than do the work.


Short term or working memory is a component of cogntitive ability. Cognitive ability has been EXHAUSTIVELY tested by many many organisations to a high degree. It cannot change significantly for the better.


There is a whole system called SuperMemo designed to help with memorizing things. You might want to check it out. Good luck!


For a particular task, absolutely.

Will gains in that task generalise? Ay, there's the rub.


Dual N-back had measurable results for me.




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