“The secret to accelerated learning is superior organization” – Kevin Horsley, Unlimited Memory
When I was in high school, I competed in Academic Decathlon. It was a competition involving tests on Math, Music, Art, Science, History, Literature, and Economics. The first question I would get asked is, “why in the heck would you want to do that?” But subsequently I was asked, “How are you able to remember all this information?” Back then I didn’t have a good answer besides just spending more time making sure the it sticks in my head. But now as I’ve become more aware of how learning works, I’ve realized my skill was never information storage. It was information retrieval.
The Art of Storage
An important concept in computer science is caching. It’s a process to save data separately for faster retrieval rather than sifting through the whole storage. This is done on your device right now with hardware called RAM. This way your device has near-instant access to recently used memory which is a huge speed gain. However, the concept of caching is not unique to digital environments. We do it in real life such as leaving out books open on our table rather than putting it back on the shelf. Or putting our leftovers in the front of the fridge rather than the back. These save us time not only in the storage process but also in the retrieval process since they’re quickly accessible. Caching is something we already employ in our daily lives.
A theory now being proposed is that memory works in a similar fashion. Michael Ramsca, who leads a team at the University of Tübingen, argues that our notion of cognitive decline through age is actually the longer searching process of information through a brain with more data. “Through a series of simulations, the researchers showed that simply knowing more makes things harder when it comes to recognizing words, names, and even letters” [1]. We may not be suffering from storing information in our memory challenges, but on retrieving it.
If this is true, we could presumably use the same techniques for memory as in computers for our own brains for memory storage. The issue is that those techniques are designed to solve different problems. The algorithm used in RAM is LRU or Least Recently Used [1]. We save what we were just using because that’s most likely what we’ll want to access. We know our memory generally is stronger for more recent than older events so it’s certainly a fair algorithm. But we may not want to access memories organized by time. There will be more important memories far out in the past. Time is not a good marker for our problems. We need a better way to cache information in our heads.
Creating Your Palace
In order to create our cache effectively, we need to properly organize our memory. Kevin Horsely offers the Car Method for this task [2]. We have something we are already familiar with, such as our car and house, and put in new information there. Because your car is already part of your long-term memory, it is much more likely the information will stay there for you to access.
This method dates back to Greek times but it is fascinating why it works so well. The reason could be that what we are effectively doing is creating RAM in our own heads. Usually we treat our brain like a void for information to seep in. By just forcing a memory in maybe we can pull it back out easily. But by flipping the architecture so that there are storage bins for information, it becomes very easy to access what we would like and ensure it stays organized.
I didn’t practice these techniques fully in high school since I was not aware of them. But there were certain aspects of them that I unconsciously used. Rather than sponging in all the information, I would whiteboard out all relevant facts organized by subject, section, piece, and heading. During competition my brain recognized where the pertinent fact was organized in my memory so I knew I just needed to access that part. That organization became my cache.
Limitless
There is also an interesting question we can ask: Is our memory access limitless? The unique perspective of the car method is that we create different types of caches. For knowledge about cooking, you can store it only in the palace of your kitchen. Properly organize your recipes, condiments, veggies all in different cupboards and leave them there for the future. That leaves the rest of your house, car and more places for other categories of memories. You can even store information encoded in stories. Really the limit is only in the types of things you are familiar with and how effectively you can categorize it.
Restructuring how you create memories is an exponential advantage. And perhaps it’s the advantage that those who believe they have poor memories are missing. In fact, Kevin Horsley admits to have been labeled as struggling when it came to memory retention as a child but used these techniques to now be a grandmaster in memory competitions. I certainly hope to fully implement and practice these ideas in the near future to see where they take me. It’s not easy, but the goal is to make the process of memory conscious so that we can better hold on to it. By organizing our information, we effectively cache our minds.
[1] Algorithms to Live By – Brian Christian and tom Griffiths
[2] Unlimited Memory – Kevin Horsley
