Augmenting Long-Term Memory

What makes Anki better than conventional flashcards is that it manages the review schedule. If you can answer a question correctly, the time interval between reviews gradually expands. So a one-day gap between reviews becomes two days, then six days, then a fortnight, and so on. The idea is that the information is becoming more firmly embedded in y... See more

Of course, instead of using Anki I could have taken conventional notes, using a similar process to build up an understanding of the paper. But using Anki gave me confidence I would retain much of the understanding over the long term.

One common criticism of systems such as Anki is that external memory devices – systems such as Google, wikis, and notebooks – really ought to be enough. Used well, such systems are, of course, extremely useful as a complement to Anki. But for creative work and for problem-solving there is something special about having an internalized understanding... See more

Given how central memory is to our thinking, it's natural to ask whether computers can be used as tools to help improve our memory. This question turns out to be highly generative of good ideas, and pursuing it has led to many of the most important vision documents in the history of computing. One early example was Vannevar Bush's 1945 proposal** V... See more

If designers waited until all the evidence was in, no-one would ever design anything. In practice, what you want is bold, imaginative design, exploring many ideas, but inspired and informed (and not too constrained) by what is known scientifically.

Systems such as Anki are challenging to use well, and easy to use poorly.

From the memex to the web to wikis to org-mode to Project Xanadu to attempts to make a map of every thought a person thinks: the augmentation of memory has been an extremely generative vision for computing.

It is interesting to consider developing systems which may overcome some or all of these issues.

This suggests to me the need for a separate field of human augmentation. That field will take input from cognitive science. But it will fundamentally be a design science, oriented toward bold, imaginative design, and building systems from prototype to large-scale deployment.