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Ask HN: How to Improve Memory?
50 points by fragmenter 82 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 44 comments
What is the best way to improve memory?

I know note-taking is important and relevant, but I am more interested in what wetware tricks I can learn. Ideally I want to remember more context when coding, more about the tasks relevant to me, and be able to remember the entertainment I read and watch.

Note: I have aphantasia which means memory palaces don't work for me. I have discovered it is a sliding scale however, as I practice with visualizing and have noticed getting better at it.




My the most fruitful approach is to wall myself off anything which wastes my cognitive ability. No smartphone except of regular calls, no websites with animations, no any books or articles which contains some words I consider as "bad". Less attention to dull people. Appreciate when your brain suddenly remembers for you something unexpected like the fact which was sitting here for tens of years without any use before you have remembered it successfully, any time I meet this I think deeply about how is it possible to remember anything for so long. Living without any mood disturbances is my top priority.


My concern here is i think we substitute (brain) exercise with mundane (brain) sugars like Social Media, Youtube, infinite scrolls, etc. Removing those is good, but you have to put something back in their place, lest you lose the muscle entirely.

Cognitive use is linked (i believe?) to holding off various aging diseases, so ensuring you're using what you don't want to lose seems to be the most important thing. Exercise for all things.

How do you approach brain exercise?


I do not consider Youtube bad because I never look at it. It is my source of listening long videos, like 7 hours of programming lesson of my favorite programming teacher, you know that it contains some really sophisticated talks.

What about living with no smartphone, I do not need to put anything instead of it because I have recognized the malice of this technology really early, because when I see a human with smartphone, the most similar situation I can name is the relations between a human and a dog, and this never cease to amuze me that the dog in this relation is the smartphonee, not the smartphone. Android 2 was beautiful and never tried to enslave me, Android 4 was beautiful technically but its UX started to rot in the meaning of something not exactly for its users.

"Use it or lose it" is a motto of my brain exercises, my focus is not to lose learning abilities. Innocent things like brushing your teeth with not a regular arm but with another (left for most of people) gives surprising results in the long run but the best brain exercise by far is trying to teach someone at something complicated (Math, Programming, Martial arts, Music).


> It is my source of listening long videos, like 7 hours of programming lesson of my favorite programming teacher, you know that it contains some really sophisticated talks.

Yea, i was mostly saying that because it actively promotes such vapid content with ease. It's attention-seeking-algorithms to the max, like social media in general.

Just because it _can_ be good, doesn't mean it is by default imo. Social media in general can also be good, but i wouldn't say it is in general.


You will lose your congnitive abilities either way, due to old age. Do you have higher purpose behind trying to retain them for as long as possible?


Of course I will lose it - literally every day at least few neurons die irreversably.

My higher purpose is having fun, but I associate the fun quantity of myself with ability to process Math information. Mathematics is the coolest thing among anything I know.


The best brain exercise I have found is trying to learn another language with anki.

As an old man, it is so hard it feels like a form of brain powerlifting.

I really wish I had anki when I was younger. 30 minutes a day of cards on a tough subject and 30 minutes a day of cardio is probably something everyone should do for life.


Is there any research supporting this method, or is it an original approach you've developed yourself?


The approach is research-based but I am not saving these researches for re-reading because my favorite scientific field is Math and Programming, not Medicine.

For example, there are a lot of studies about a harm of smartphones, especially for the younger generation. I do not consider myself young, but if I want to be as productive as a youngster I must to follow good practices for youngsters. I have never seen any study about usefulness of smartphones for anything like human body (except of business) so I do not feel like I have said anything controversial.

Ignoring books with "bad" words is something I did not invented, it is something obvious and still deserves to be recommended. If I am researching some "abcde" and I have figured up that "xyz" approach is wrong despite any popularity so why to bother about xyz instead of having free memory for something else? I just forgot the scientist who told a lot on this way of discovery.

There are a lot of people who claim that the key to their productivity is calm, I recommend you to get started with Stoic philosophy as one of the most fruitful researches in human history.


Why books though?


Sorry for bad grammar, the key in that sentence is "bad words". I use to read a huge number of books about some bleeding edge and it is important to have your own understanding of your way.

For example, I love Blockchain technology, but anything like "private blochchain" tells me I need to abandon the whole work. That attitude allows me to read a lot of books.


But how do you detect that this bad words is bad unless you really deep down all the resources to study. And how you remove bias, appeal to authority fallacy etc.


This is a taste question, and all of my bias problems derive to a way of spending my time.

Do you know what taste is? You always can tell when somebody has a worse taste than you but if two persons have a better taste than you each - you have no ability to tell who is better.

Reducing the domain area - a hacker method to improve memory.


Have you looked into Anki/Supermemo? e.g., https://jmcavanagh.neocities.org/ankiforscience/ankiforscien... provides a great example of using it to remember scientific facts, derivations, algorithms, etc


you can't fool your memory, if you have fewer connections between neurons in your brain, it's more limited, if you have more, you'll remember more things. There are different types of memory - conscious, unconscious, short, long.

learning from tiktoks, you won't learn anything, because a moment breaks your concentration between pieces of information. that's why the best way to learn is long-term. go to classes, lessons, write down, read, retell, and all of this together. read not brochures or short books, but full-fledged books, because the integrity of information is absorbed by the body only in this way. if it is absorbed faster, it is lost faster. and you need to nourish your knowledge from time to time, and not just tell yourself "I know everything and that's the end" after university.

you can't fool hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it doesn't work that way.


Are you okay trying something from the early 2000s internet? If that is the case, then you might try this following exercise. Look at things around in your room and then immediately start describing them with as much detail as you can. The whole exercise sort of grates your brain against reality and this makes it much better to come up with things where it needs to and remember it.

Then you start doing this after closing your eyes. Pick up any scene and then immediately start describing it in as much details as you can. The point is to have details which are really minute and tiny such as how does a chair feel like, what is the texture, what is the color, what does the texture feel like on your hand, how high is the seat, how high are the things around you. Trick is to keep going for at least 1-2 minutes without thinking about what to say next.


this is the bellcurve meme, only think has worked for me is note taking and making it easy for me to recall when i forget. I've accepted that I've bad memory and I just try to work around it, but i agree with the other comment in this thread about practice, once you practice enough it becomes sort of can switch to that way of thinking and usually that puts you in sort of the right path to recall the right thing. all this is just personal experience.

https://geekodour.org/docs/documents/notetaking/

edit: i still haven't figured out how as a kid i could remember whole chapter literally word-by-word but now I can't even properly remember a phone number. hah.


Anki/SRS, sleep, blueberries, daily cardio. Do all of those and you should have memory improvements.


It's just a lot of practice. Pay attention to something you want to remember. Then recall it a bit later.

If you are watching a movie, you literally have to note an interesting dialogue as something to recall later. Then try to recall it later. But not in your own brain. Talk to someone about it.

Repeat a 10k times with different types of things over a few years and your memory will feel great.


Id say the best i ever done was to practice recall. Just try to think about the subject when you are bored, recall facts, add some concious integration after the learning.


I already do this but after someone on HN marked this practice as "best I ever done" I am going to practice this as a conscious thing.


Take notes, on your computer. Keep the notes in one place (at least for each topic).

I don't have enough memory to keep track of everything on my project at work. There's too many loose ends. There would still be too many loose ends if I had a better memory, too (for any realistic value of "better"). So I keep all that in a file of notes about the project, and keep it updated as things change.

Ctrl-f beats any memory trick ever invented.


Writing by hand is the best, but if you don't want to do that, speak out loud. If you don't want to do that, read it and memorize it many (10+) times. Just like how I can still remember all the prices for common items from when I was a cashier even 15 years later, stuff you touch often sticks in your head, so constantly expose yourself to the information you need to know at all times.


Try stories, decide what you want to memorize and make up a very silly story that incorporates the items you want to memorize. The more ridiculous the better. Replay the story in your mind until it sticks. It's much easier than lists and it has the added advantage that you can pick an item and see how it relates to the other items by following the story from the item forward.


Use it or lose it!

I’ve lost a great deal of working memory over the past few years as I’m just too reliant on offloading anything more than 2-3 bits of info onto a notepad or input box

If you ever observe a fine-dining waiter, they can easily remember and perfectly recall upwards of 20-40 bits of info (highly chunked though so likely only 5-10 I imagine). It’s just repeated practice daily.


3 bits of info is a single digit. 20 bits is about 6 digits, or 2 English words. Of course needing to encode arbitrary information makes it harder than this but it still seems quite low. Are you counting bits in some other way?


This is kind of silly, because waiters don't remember orders in bits, but...

If the menu has 32 items, an order of one item fits into 5 bits, without any compression. In reality, if the steak is popular, you can save more bits with Huffman coding.


Exactly. OP is implying that even a single item is too much for them to remember and they would need a notepad, so I must be misinterpreting what they mean by "bit".


bit as in a piece of information, just a bit of data


How did you determine you have aphantasia? I definitely feel as if I cannot visualize things the same way as others, if at all.


Self-diagnosed. I just know I cannot think visually, or if so very poorly. You most likely have aphantasia as well. It affects 1% of the population.


Anecdotally, I’ve discussed this a lot with my friend who claims to have aphantasia, I’ve walked away less convinced. I think visual/spatial reasoning can be anywhere on a spectrum, but it likely can be improved. I recommend trying to develop this form of reasoning- it wasn’t hard at all for my friend, after a few algebra problems, to get a lot closer to accurate graphical reasoning. Once you go from “here’s what y = 3x approximately looks like” to “here’s what z = 2x + 3y looks like” it’s pretty easy to start describing shapes and talking about what they’d look like rotated about an axis, etc.

A big part of this, ironically, came from a discussion of Tears of the Kingdom, where my friend was simply unaware of the mechanisms he was using to solve the little visual puzzles. Once he started understanding how concepts like plane rotation mapped exactly to what that video game required, we both sort of had to pass on a belief in hard aphantasia. YMMV, totally possible that things like this are or at least seem impossible.

At any rate, I’m not sure the presence or absence of visual reasoning skills has much bearing on memory, as this particular guy has an incredible knack for learning languages that I just don’t have in the same degree. At any rate, all I want to do is encourage you in your quest for better memory skills!


I don't believe there is such a thing as aphantasia insofar as one does not hallucinate "inwardly" and that the "condition" is merely an artifact of the terminology we use to describe imagining something.


I am a person self-diagnosed with aphantasia. I can for example think of a cube that is placed in front of me. I can spin it on an axis and have a rough idea of where the rotated edges should be. I wouldn't be able to draw it, though, because I would just be guessing about the proportions, or reverting to tricks to draw perspective. Because I don't see the cube in any way. It's completely invisible. It's just an idea of what the cube's position might be in the space directly in front of me.

On the other hand, I can see hypnagogic images directly before falling asleep. These have fidelity, color, detail, look real, and are definitely visual. I also lucid dream occasionally, and the amount of visual detail there is more than I see in real life because of bad eyesight.

The cube I'm "picturing" in front of me, though, has no visual component at all.

I also remember reading about how in some study they watched the brain activity of people with normal visualization capabilities where the visual components of the brain lit up when they were visualizing but did not light up for people with aphantasia when they were visualizing (or trying to).

If people really have no visual component at all when they picture a cube in front of them, then I would agree that aphantasia is not a thing. But people I talk to go on and on about the level of detail they see and what they use visualization for without even consciously thinking about it.


>The cube I'm "picturing" in front of me, though, has no visual component at all.

Quite because that is not how the brain works, when imagining something we merely instantiate a generic of that class, it has no visual component although it has attributes, some of which may convey a visualization - the cube is red, the cube if oriented in the cavalier elevation, you describe it yourself as being "in front of (you)" in what regard could you consider this to be true even if it were inside of your head?

Through language we have been convinced of something that simply is not true, nobody wilfully hallucinates (internally or otherwise), to be aphantasiac is not to be special but to be aware of one's consciousness in a way that most people seemingly are not.

Of course it is self-diagnosed, even a pathological rubber stamp relies entirely on self-reported symptoms.

Interrogate anyone on the subject of their visual imagination long enough and you'll eventually bump up against inconsistencies or otherwise reluctant admission that they don't "see" anything.


See https://www.waysidebooks.com/pages/books/10833/bruno-furst/s...


Did this book have a positive impact on you? Could you tell me more about how it influenced you? It seems to be an obscure book.


It was a common book in public libraries when I was a kid. It's full of various mnemonic tricks. I remember it though I don't remember every little thing in it.


Sleep makes a huge difference, followed by walking or any other exercise (outside seems better than inside.)

Handwritten notes are more memorable than typed notes, as you... note.

For exams, I prime the pump by working sample questions shortly beforehand.

Supposedly making a concerted effort to recall something that you've (almost?) forgotten can also help. One method (hack?) for recalling specific terms or names that you almost remember is going through the alphabet until you hit the letter that it starts with.


I improved my memory after I addressed my multiple vitamin deficiencies, esp vitamin D. All my grogginess disappeared after a few weeks of heavy vitamin supplements.


Sketch the things of interest / your representations of them on a paper. It will improve your ability to keep larger structures in your head, also later without the paper.


Look of interesting suggestions here.

Sleep, water, exercise, and health eating are huge ones.


Improve muscle memory. Body will do the recall.


Meditation, cardio, nutrition, practice, etc.




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