In my youth, I had a decent but unremarkable memory. I tended to remember things I had learned fine, but wasn’t good at remembering “facts” that I didn’t immediately put to use, such as names and dates.

This changed perceptibly in 2015, when I challenged myself to read 100 books in a year. (There may have been other factors, including several months of travel, and getting into music, but the reading binge seems like the most likely cause.)

I didn’t make any special effort to remember the books I read. It would be another year before I tried taking serious reading notes, and this was also before my spaced repetition phase. So I remember little about many of the books I read (that year, and in general). I like the Emerson (?) quote:

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

Still, something about trying to absorb that many stories and names and facts, without getting them muddled, caused a change that’s still apparent a decade later, even though I have never managed to read that many books in the years since, and in the past few years, have been lucky if I read more than 20.

Since then, there are two other things that I believe have also strengthened my memory in a non-trivial way: journalling in a way that leans heavily on autobiographical memory, and writing down my dreams. More on the exact details, and why I think it helped, at the end of the post.

This is relative to my baseline. I’m not a memory athlete with impeccable recall. I can’t count cards, and sometimes I drink out of other people’s cups. I forgot about the idea for this essay for several days after I came up with it, and also often forget to eat breakfast.

My casual study of memorization techniques is not one of the three things that seem to have made a significant difference, though I’m sure it helped. For a while, after reading posts on the SuperMemo blog, and Michael Nielsen’s superb essay on spaced repetition (among others: 1, 2), I got really into it, and memorized a lot of digits of Pi and other useless things using Anki.

I made the rookie mistake of importing huge decks into Anki, and then got bogged down by the tiresome reviews of material that wasn’t worth learning in the first place, and eventually gave up on it. It still auto-starts when my computer boots.

In addition to spaced repetition, I read about memory palaces (which I never managed to get to work effectively, though it maybe helped for memorizing a long poem), and tried to start a Zettlekasten.

In short: I had a phase where I was into memory, but it didn’t really stick or produce huge results.

However, two things did noticeably help, in a way that felt similar to reading all those books in 2015, though less dramatic:

1. I have kept paper-and-ink journals on and off for most of my life. Mostly, it’s a pretty boring then I did this then I did that history, with occasional complaining/philosophizing/rubber-duck-debugging thrown in. At some point, I became more zealous about never missing a day, to the point of backfilling days or weeks from memory (and notes) if I get behind. This is kind of a burden. It’s unclear if journalling makes me happier, or if it’s just that feeling guilty about not journalling makes me unhappy. But regardless of the benefits or drawbacks of journalling, having to remember and re-construct what I did, sometimes days or weeks later, means I have to make effortful use of my memory on a daily basis.
2. For a while, I wrote down my dreams every morning. This was very tedious and not all that psychologically insightful: they were mostly insipid, sordid, or bonkers, and I rarely found deep insights in them, or strong correlations with my recent activities. It also took ages, because if you actually remember your dreams, the amount of data is equivalent to a screenplay for a feature length film. (This was part of the motivation for creating a personal symbol shorthand.) However, there’s something unique about remembering your dreams. It feels like they’re always at the perfect point on the forgetting curve for a review. They’re almost always hard to remember. But I know that if I try hard enough, in the right patiently-non-effortful sneaking-up-on-the-memory way, there’s guaranteed to be something there to remember. Remembering my dreams feels like strength training for the memory-retrieval networks of my brain.

The common thread in these observations is that memory improves with use. Saying “I have a terrible memory for names” can be a self-defeating self-fulfilling prophesy. Instead, try, “Samantha. Good to meet you!”, and then, under your breath, Samantha. Samantha. Sam-an-tha. And then, fifteen minutes later, “I was talking to … sam… sam-an-tha—”. You get the idea!

Maybe these three techniques apply more broadly. I hope so! If you’ve found a helpful technique/essay/book, or I forgot something when I was writing this post, please reply by email or leave a comment.