Memory

Backlogs are a big weight we don’t need to carry. Dozens and eventually hundreds of tasks pile up that we all know we’ll never have time for. The growing pile gives us a feeling like we’re always behind even though we’re not. Just because somebody thought some idea was important a quarter ago doesn’t mean we need to keep looking at it again and again.

Backlogs are big time wasters too. The time spent constantly reviewing, grooming and organizing old ideas prevents everyone from moving forward on the timely projects that really matter right now.

...It’s easy to overvalue ideas. The truth is, ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and accumulate into big piles.

Really important ideas will come back to you. When’s the last time you forgot a really great, inspiring idea? And if it’s not that interesting—maybe a bug that customers are running into from time to time—it’ll come back to your attention when a customer complains again or a new customer hits it. If you hear it once and never again, maybe it wasn’t really a problem. And if you keep hearing about it, you’ll be motivated to shape a solution and pitch betting time on it in the next cycle.

Ping Practice is a method for developing a practice of unblocking yourself.

You can think of the method a bit like using a pause button or a camera...

When you notice yourself resonating with or resisting something, the method invites you to name what's giving rise to that sensation and then letting it go.

No categorizing or sensemaking. In these tiny moments, you’re simply creating a breadcrumb for your future self.

...A ping can take on any form: word, phrase, title, rhyme, name, lyric, quote, place, color, texture, melody, idea, feeling, etc.

The most important thing about Pings – and what differentiates them from other thoughts – is that a Ping is language that moves you, "clicks," or otherwise causes you to feel something in your body.

You are likely encountering a Ping if the movement or attraction you sense seems intuitive, automatic, reflexive, and happens without thinking...as if what you are encountering relates to something latent within you.

A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not.

Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything.

Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. The use of spaced repetition has been proven to increase the rate of learning.

And anywhere I go
There's always something to remind me
Of another place and time
Where love that traveled far had found me
We stayed outside 'til two
Waiting for the light to come back
But hidden talk I knew
Until you asked what I was thinking

Remind, remind, remind me.

I didn't want to be the one to forget
I thought of everything I'd never regret
A little time with you is all that I get
That's all we need because it's all we can take

I now use Are.na as a Memory Palace, separating my channels into rooms. For example, I have a channel that I call the Computation Room. It’s pretty generic and includes any type of block that relates to computation.

If I notice a pattern in the computation room I create a more specific channel in that room. I think of that more specific topic as an object within the room.

Then there are the adjacent topics that I often find even more exciting to focus on. For those, I choose a name that corresponds with the nature of a room and also its size. For example I have a channel called the Visual Computing Observatory. In my head I am imagining an actual observatory where I am looking and observing and studying a given topic.

Field Companions are everyday objects that have been modified to hold memory in order to share the perspective of our environments.

From stones to sea glass to broken off asphalt, each Companion can be found every day you move through the world and has been given a 1-minute audio recording at the place in the minute it was found.

An experiment in giving inanimate objects and environmental features human agency. What stories could your environment tell if you listened? What place do you want to remember?

Rewind is a personalized AI powered by everything you’ve seen, said, or heard.

My hunch is that digital Luhmann-ism really only provides dividends for a small population of academics and writers of non-fiction who need to cite references or make connections across disparate texts.

For the rest of us, just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of linking or reading or revisiting, that clarifies thought and leads to insight. The rest is all superfluous.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

When Mr. Jobs came back in 1997, in one of the earliest meetings someone was taking notes, writing down what [Mr. Jobs] was saying about what we’re doing.

He stopped and said "Why are you writing this down? You should be smart enough to remember this. If you’re not smart enough to remember this you shouldn’t be in this meeting."

We all stopped taking notes and learned to just listen and be part of the conversation and remember what we were supposed to do. And that became how we worked.

It was very action-oriented. It was built to be like a small start-up where we all are working together on the same things, and we all know what our plans are and what we’re doing.

The visual workspace for notes. Humans have incredible visual-spatial memory. Leverage that with Nototo.

It’s like breadcrums. Or bookmarks. But raw-er. These are a quick capture of my journey through the web. I often think of things from weeks ago that I want to refer to. And I’ve found that I haven’t kept the tab open. So it’s impossible.

The practice:

• Notice that I have read it and thought about it.
• Capture it here, with assistance from the Apple Shortcut.
• Actually describe it in my own words. This is just the facts ma’am.
• Add a comment if I have one. This is the place for editorializing or opinionated statements.
• These can be anything, it’s not meant to be something important or whatever. That’s decided later.

The points are to capture it, but include some minimal friction so that I actually stop and notice what I am doing here. Describe it in my own words so that I might remember it better later. And then I’m free to close the tabs, with hopefully somewhat less risk. I hope.

Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.

As my experience and confidence as a developer have grown, I’m more willing to remove a fence. Even though I didn’t know it had a name before a few weeks ago, “Chesterton’s Fence” is real. I’ve often been owned by failing to think this way when re-writing code.

It’s not always possible to chase down the exact reason a fence is there. The person who put it there may have moved on from the project. Because I’ve been working on CodePen for so long, I find fences I built five years ago, and I have no memory of why I put them up. That’s okay. I just need to do my best to uncover why.

The important part is not to assume that I know better than the person who made the original decision and take into account nuances or second-order effects that aren’t obvious to me.

Be sure you’ve found a better reason than “because I know better” before you delete a fence.

Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?

Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.

Now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess. For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

Much of what Barthes says about photography rings true only if we are thinking of its traditional chemical/mechanical phase. Polaroids provided instant memories but digital photography seems entirely devoid of any qualities of past time.

...It is ironic, then, that one of the most memorable tributes to Barthes comes in the form of an image that would have been inconceivable without the benefits of digital technology. In 2004 Idris Khan made a photograph entitled "Every page...from Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida," in which he combined the pages in a single image so that Barthes's text and pictures reproduced in the book peer at the viewer through a dense fog of their own making. (The return of the read!) It is as if decaying and enduring memories of the book's successive pleasures—first words and last—have been compacted into a ghostly blur of almost impenetrable purity.

It’s such an eternal cognitive location, night driving.

Different thoughts come when you access that state.

Like writing PowerPoint in hotel lobbies.

...I think you access something other and special when you escape time, escape selfhood, whether that’s driving in the dark or sitting in a hotel lobby or walking, that’s another one.

It does a disservice to this cognitive state to believe that it can be found only with psychedelics or meditation or whatever, whereas there are mundane apertures too.

There are lots of writing techniques you can use to prevent an idea from going viral, and not even being noticed by people not primed to detect it. You might wonder why you’d ever need such techniques, but once you’ve had your fill of viral writing and meme-making (which I have), and are well known enough the default amount of attention you get is > δ > 0 (which I am), this becomes both creatively interesting to explore and pragmatically useful for some topics (for example when you want to openly write controversial things but go unnoticed by trolls primed to attack you for them). The trick is doing antimemetic writing without resorting to brute-force secrecy, cryptography, or steganography. Any idiot can simply write posts in private cozyweb channels, encrypt posts and only share keys with trusted people, or use steganographic deceptions. The real trick is to write in intrinsically anti-memorable ways where despite the reader wanting to retain an idea they think is important, they forget it. Cognitive burn-after-reading techniques.

From the time we learn to walk, we start building up spatial memories—recollections of the layouts of physical spaces and their relationships to the objects in them. These memories tend to form fast and stick around for a long time.

The method of loci hijacks our innate aptitude for remembering physical spaces, using it to help us remember other kinds of information with greater ease.

And when you say you won't forget me
Well I can tell you that's untrue
'Cause every day since you left me
I thought less and less of you

And I've worn out all the reasons
To keep on knocking at your door
Could be the changing of the seasons
But I don't love you anymore

Benjamin: It's like there's this whole life I had, but I can't remember what it was.

On the day she died, I set my phone’s wallpaper to my favorite photo of Peggy—appearing to smile on a ridgeline trail in Missoula, Montana, the bright-yellow balsamroot flowers in bloom behind her. But a month later, I told myself that it was time to stop wallowing. Instead of a memorial photo of Peggy, I opted to try a newer, “dynamic” wallpaper feature called “Photo Shuffle.” Every so often, my iPhone would change my wallpaper and home screen to an image it had grabbed from my camera roll. To help it along, I could offer parameters for the photo choice. Knowing that Apple’s Photos app uses image-recognition software to identify cats and dogs in the camera roll, I chose a “Pets” filter.

Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle. Over the next few months, I watched the photos change in and out at random—always with a dog in focus. Many of the stills were pictures I didn’t remember taking, ones I’d passed over or missed in my melancholic, late-night scrolling. So many were chaotic, blurred streaks of fur and tongues curiously sniffing a lens or bounding out of frame; a lot were objectively bad photos, which I found made them especially funny as iPhone wallpaper.

1. Pause at the end of each chapter and try to recall it (Recall)
2. Highlight relevant passages for later comparative reading
3. Analyze the book once I’m finished
4. Explain it to unfamiliar audiences (The Feynman technique)
5. Review topics I care about at regular intervals (Space repetition)

The diary provides the mental infrastructure that stimulates the mind to remember.

The Ise Shrines at Naiku and Geku, near Nagoya, highly refined idealizations of ancient agricultural storehouses, have been rebuilt at least sixty-one times since first being established. The entire twenty-year building cycle is a continuous, precisely defined ritual. The result is unlike any religious structure in the world, one that is always new, and at the same time over a millenium old.

Looking back at my notebooks now, the information seems fairly sketchy, often abbreviated, and fairly uninformative. The purpose was merely to serve as a reminder for when, that evening, I would write up my notes in a proper field book.

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

Many AI products today are focused on indexing as much as possible.

...But more information isn’t always better. The limits of the ‘index everything approach’.

Index size is a trade-off against retrieval quality. A larger index can capture more information, but it also increases the risk of false positives in retrieval.

I am inclined to believe that the physical aspect of reading a printed book is a significant benefit in one’s retention of its content, but I’m not aware of any proof of this: research is slight and rather ambiguous, suggestive rather than probative. I also believe that writing something out by hand forces you to work at a speed similar to that of careful thought and that this improves your prose — but can anyone prove that? What I do believe/know is that we have not been reading or writing for long enough for any kind of evolutionary changes to have taken place in our brains to make one format obviously better than any other format.

As teachers of architectural design, Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore have attempted to introduce architecture from the standpoint of how buildings are experienced, how the affect individuals and communities emotionally and provide us with a sense of joy, identity, and place. In giving priority to these issues and in questioning the professional reliance on abstract two-dimensional drawings, they often find themselves in conflict with a general and undebated assumption that architecture is a highly specialized system with a set of prescribed technical goals, rather than a sensual social art historically derived from experiences and memories of the human body. This book, an outgrowth of their joint teaching efforts, places the human body at the center of our understanding of architectural form.

Body, Memory, and Architecture traces the significance of the body from its place as the divine organizing principle in the earliest built forms to its near elimination from architectural thought in this century. The authors draw on contemporary models of spatial perception as well as on body-image theory in arguing for a return of the body to its proper place in the architectural equation.

Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. 

Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It’s been around for 198 years. People seem to like it.

Remem monitors your conversation for references to past events, and then displays video of that event in the lower left corner of your field of vision. If you say "remember dancing the conga at that wedding?", Remem will bring up the video. If the person you’re talking to says "the last time we were at the beach," Remem will bring up the video. And it’s not only for use when speaking with someone else; Remem also monitors your subvocalizations. If you read the words "the first Szechuan restaurant you ate at," your vocal cords will move as if you’re reading aloud, and Remem will bring up the relevant video.
There’s no denying the usefulness of software that can actually answer the question "where did I put my keys?" But Whetstone is positioning Remem as more than a handy virtual assistant: they want it to take the place of your natural memory.

A photograph leaves us with an image, and a recording leaves us with sound. But when it's feelings that we want to preserve, not photographs or audio, then they should not be recorded, but rather truly felt. What we truly feel will remain as memories even if we don't try to record them.

In order that the mind may not be taxed, moreover, by the manifold and confused reading of so many such things, and in order to prevent the escape of something valuable that we have read, heard, or discovered through the process of thinking itself, it will be found very useful to entrust to notebooks...those things which seem noteworthy and striking.

I once sent a camera to a client, with a request that she keep a visual diary of her newly completed house. For a number of months she duly sent me one photograph a day, of whatever caught her attention, and it was fascinating seeing the spaces from her point of view.

In part it's simply about amassing the archive, but it's also about understanding the implications of every design decision and bringing this knowledge to bear on new projects. You have to keep pushing the learning process.

Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.

More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.

These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)

It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did.

The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season!

Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience.

Another form of chronological file is a tickler file. This is always an arrangement by date. It may be a card file or a file with folders. As its name suggests, it "tickles" the memory; it is used as a reminder to someone that something must be taken care of on a certain date.

Here space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory—what a strange thing it is!—does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space.

Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.

We will continue to see the Pyramids as a height of human achievement through the next millennium. Shakespeare will stand the test of time. Einsteins theories will never lose their magnificent intellectual splendour. We remember the scientific discoveries and the story of a serpent swallowing its tail as the metaphor for benzene or Einstein’s magnificent thought experiment about standing on top of a light beam traveling as an elevator. We even will honour the decisions taken in history, Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington or Churchill’s decisions in World War II or even the business decisions by Andy Grove or Rothschild or J P Morgan.

Code though, code won’t stand the test of time. Nobody will be praising the beauty of the code that sent the first man to walk on the moon, or the code that enabled a 100 billion messages to be sent between all of us, daily. Once writ down and made concrete it becomes invisible. We use it like disposable bricks that make up an edifice.

There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While most of our self is led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden.

Thermal information is not differentiated in our memory; rather it is retained as a quality, or underlying tone, associated with the whole experience of the place. It contributes to our sense of the particular personality, or spirit, that we identify with that place. In remembering the spirit of a place, we can anticipate that if we return, we will have the same sense of comfort or relaxation as before.

Memory and fantasy are related, as are recollection and imagination; one who cannot remember also cannot imagine, as memory is the very soil of imagination.

A fagot is a bundle of branches tied with a string. They used to be kept in a corner of a barn or shed, and people used to hide things (wine, valuables, etc) behind them often for a long time, and forget about them. It is a way of saying that [a thing] is very good, but has been forgotten for a long time and recently re-discovered.

What would be the use, for instance, in giving the plan of the room that was really my room, in describing the little room at the end of the garret, in saying that from the window, across the indentations of the roofs, one could see the hill. I alone, in my memories of another century, can open the deep cupboard that still retains for me alone that unique odor, the odor of raisins drying on a wicker tray. The odor of raisins! It is an odor that is beyond description, one that it takes a lot of imagination to smell. But I've already said too much. If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy.

We tend to think of our memory as a cerebral capacity, but the act of memorizing engages our entire body. Remembering is not solely a mental even; it is also an act of embodiment and bodily projection. Memories are not only hidden in the electrochemical processes of the brain; they are also stored in our skeletons, muscles, senses, and skin.

Mantis has become an extension of my brain, and extra memory storage space that never forgets anything and thus, I am convinced, is a reason for major memory lapses on my part. Why should I make an effort to remember the author of that paper on the courtship behavior of Cyphoderris when I can quickly look it up?

The bloodless ghosts of memory.

Rachel: Look, I know you think she was the one, but I don't. I think you're just remembering the good stuff. Next time you look back...I really think you should look again.

As the piece evolves, you try to protect those original, effusive sentences.
Only to realize, at last, that what you're writing won't come together until they've been removed or revised.

What were you trying to protect?
The memory of the excitement you felt when those words "came to you."
(Where did they "come" from?)
You were protecting the memory
of the excitement of really concentrating,
of paying close attention to your thoughts and, perhaps, your sentences,
the excitement of feeling the galvanic link between language and thought.

My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy.

Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory any more?

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.

It would be easy to impose on the office a whole welter of detail, explanation, and background that was actually gleaned only later and not part of my arrival and dazed scurrying about with the Iranian Crisis at all. Which is a quirk of temporal memory—one tends to fill in gaps with data acquired only later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord's exit through the back of the retina.