Comment by meesterdude
10 years ago
One of the problems of keeping everything in your head is trust. People forget! Maybe you have a great memory, but eventually it'll forget things. And it should! otherwise there won't be room for any new stuff. I don't think we have infinite storage available; at some point things have to be erased to make room.
But also, keeping that stuff in a system you can trust frees your brain to do other things. Instead of falling asleep reminding yourself to buy milk tomorrow, you can leave it to the system to remember. The system being anything - a notebook, an app, or what have you. There is some good evidence that this kind of delegation allows for more high-level thinking to come about, since your brain is more free to do other things.
Now, as you've touched on - sometimes technology screws you one way or another, and that trust is broken. So if you have no redundancy or backup or plan for that dependency, maybe you'd be better off keeping things in your head.
But you are human and your head is human by extension. it is faulty, imperfect, and not nearly as good at storing things as pretty much anything else. Even if its good now, it won't necessarily always be, and isn't in such good shape for a lot of folk. So I would not paint it in such a rosy light.
I'm curious, Have you done any experimentation with Method of loci?
Yeah, I've messed around with Method of Loci off and on over the years, but it hasn't done much for me. Probably I'd just need to put the effort in to it, and I haven't. My natural tendency has been a grab bag of sorts; if I want to recall something, I think about a category -- "people", "projects", "trivia", etc. -- to kind of prime my brain in some way I don't really understand, and then it just pukes out a bunch of stuff until the thing I'm looking for pops up. Like, if I'm trying to remember an actor's name, it goes, "face -> action movie -> movie box was dark blue at night -> heat -> Val Kilmer". It's usually pretty quick.
You're right though, brains are pretty fallible. If something's really really really important, I do have backups. Usually email, or text, or paper.
...but, honestly? I'm scared to death of old age. It scares the piss out of me. One of the things about it that really gets to me is the idea that I might be 90 one day and not recognize people I care about, or remember anything about myself, or have any idea what's going on around me. The smartest elderly people I know are all very mentally active, and always have been, so even though there isn't good scientific evidence for the prevention of alzheimer's through puzzles and brain teasers and the like, I do it anyway.
Figure out a way to cure cancer and you can be immortal-- just consume as much telomerase as you need.