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A program that lets you remember everything

6:55 AM Thu, Apr 24, 2008 | Permalink |
Andrew Smith

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Psychologists have known for about a century that humans can remember incredible amounts of stuff with reasonably low effort if they force themselves to recall facts just as they're about to forget them.

There's just one small problem: humans never know when they're just about to forget something.

Fortunately, a mad genius named Piotr Wozniak has devised a computer program called SuperMemo that's apparently pretty good at determining such things. I've never tried it myself, but fans swear it gives them nearly super-human powers of recall, and a massive article in Wired suggests they may be right.

The story goes way beyond software to explore how humans learn and why our increasing knowledge of the brain hasn't made us much better at it.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge -- introspection, intuition, and conscious thought -- but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

Long, but fascinating throughout.

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