Charan Ranganath: recommendation

Transcript context

…So you mentioned space repetition. So do you like this process? Maybe can you explain it? Oh, yeah. If I am trying to memorize something, let’s say if I have an hour to memorize as many Spanish words as I can, if I just try to do half-an-hour and then later in the day I do half-an-hour, I won’t retain that information as long as if I do half-an-hour today and half-an-hour one week from now. So doing that extra spacing should help me retain the information better. Now, there’s an interesting boundary condition, which is, it depends on when you need that information. So many of us, for me, I can’t remember so much from college and high school ’cause I crammed ’cause I just did everything at the last minute. Sometimes I would literally study in the hallway right before the test, and that was great because what would happen is is I just had that information right there. So actually, not spacing can really help you if you need it very quickly, but the problem is is that you tend to forget it later on. But on the other hand, if you space things out, you get a benefit for later on retention. So there’s many different explanations. We have a computational model of this. It’s currently under revision. But in our computer model, what we say is that maybe a good way of thinking about this is this conversation that you and I are having, it’s associated with a particular context, a particular place in time. So all of these little cues that are in the background, these little guitar sculptures that you have and that big light umbrella thing, all these things are part of my memory for what we’re talking about, the content. So now later on, you’re sitting around, and you’re at home drinking a beer and you’re thinking, “God, what a strange interview that was,” right? So now you’re trying to remember it, but the context is different. So your current situation doesn’t match up with the memory that you pulled up, there’s error. There’s a mismatch between what you’ve pulled up and your current context. So in our model, what you start to do is you start to erase or alter the parts of the memory that are associated with a specific place and time, and you heighten the information about the content. So if you remember this information in different times in different places, it’s more accessible at different times in different places because it’s not overfitted in an AI way of thinking about things. It’s not overfitted to one particular context. But that’s also why the memories that we call upon the most also feel like they’re just things that we read about almost. You don’t vividly reimagine them, right? It’s like they’re just these things that just come to us, like facts, right? Yeah.…

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