Long Term Memory

Ethnographic & User Data, Long Term Memory, Newsletter, Product Design Strategy, Reference, Short Term Memory, Users, Working Memory

Expanding and Shrinking Horizons

by Olga Werby • June 6, 2024

It’s a Father’s Day weekend, and we have a lot to celebrate. My son’s graduation ceremony is on Father’s Day! He earned his doctorate in physics! He is also a great dad to a little girl and his birthday is a day before. It’s a full weekend of joy! Fatherhood can be complicated and all complicated things make great stories. I’ve considered which of my books has the most interesting father story and decided that Mirror Shards must be the one. So I’ve setup a giveaway of that ebook on Amazon for the next 5 days. Happy Father’s Day! When we are young, our conscious thoughts rarely extend beyond the immediate reality of our lives — playing with toys, visiting playgrounds, eating snacks, and receiving love and attention from our parents. Children seldom think beyond the next day or two. The ability to envision a longer future signifies maturation. As we grow older, our mental horizons broaden, we become more aware of the world, develop an interest in others, and learn to plan for the future. Yet, as we age, these horizons often narrow again. Some interpret this as a kind of selfishness of old age, but it truly reflects…

The Fragility of Normal

by Olga Werby • February 12, 2023

Fortune: May you live in interesting times

We all want to go back to normal. We cry about it and complain: “Enough is enough. We want our lives back.” This need to “go back to normal” is always with us, although maybe on a different scale post-pandemic. But even before Covid, there were always things that disturbed our perception of normal: new teachers, new housing, new jobs, new routines, stores and restaurants closing, cars that break down, challenging illnesses, new bus routes. Towards the end of our vacations, we come to realize that, although adventures are fun, it is good to be home where things are as we expect them to be. This want of predictability, for having our expectations met, is at the crux of a deep-seated need for normalcy. We have a limited capacity for taking in and processing information — we have limited short-term memories. When there is a flood of unfamiliar data, we get overwhelmed. We end up not having enough cognitive and emotional capacity to handle the new stuff on top of all the other things we have to do. Sudden change makes life feel overwhelming. Anchoring Errors This brings me to anchoring errors, which are basically little cognitive traps our minds…

Memories

by Olga Werby • June 13, 2020

It’s been a hard month… a few months. I have been working on SupermarketScience.com almost nonstop. I worry about the families with kids — what will they do come September? The choice of sending your children to school (and thus risking COVID exposure not only to the kids but to the whole families) and keeping them home (at the risk of jobs and emotional stability) is stark. I’ve proposed a few solutions, you can find them here. I hope this will help some families. I will continue to post more curriculum (but perhaps not at the breakneck rate I’ve done in the past months). I will also share some ideas and their implementations for families who will make the decision to rethink how they want to approach educating their kids. Everything is on the table now — at times of crisis and chaos, the most change is possible. I have put all writing and editing on hold for the moment but will get back to it this month. I will release my AI novella and start to push my next novel towards the finishing line. Given how everything, including the publishing industry, is in flux, I think I will stick…

Memory and Storytelling

by Olga Werby • March 29, 2018

Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. — Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness, page 121 Our memories are not static. Each time we reach for one, we refresh and form new neuron connections, in fact changing the memory itself via our contemplation of it. Like Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — we can observe a particle’s momentum or its position but not both simultaneously — each time we recall a particular event, we change it due to that recollection. After the mental touch, the memory is no longer the same. And this is true not just in some metaphorical sense, but in a real, tangible, physical way — the act of recall alters the neuron structures forever! And yet we eagerly recollect our favorite memories, and we just as eagerly try to forget the painful ones (and the very act of thinking of those painful memories makes them that much stronger, that much more connected and integrated into our neural memory networks). Social groups have always been aware of this property of memory. Cultures are molded out of stories, songs, epics, ballads, and now memes that bind us…

The Post-Password Era Begins

by Natesh Daniel • December 9, 2013

In November of 2012, Wired Magazine wrote a cover story titled, “Kill the Password,” in which Mat Honan retold how hackers stole his identity and hijacked his social media accounts. After some research, Honan shared just how easy it is for hackers to steal passwords, often with some fairly low-tech methods. Fast forward to October 9, 2013, when Adobe Systems emailed its users that hackers had stolen encrypted user passwords. However, the fact that Adobe was hacked wasn’t the problem. The email was sent to call attention to the real problem: “We recommend that you also change your password on any website where you use the same user ID or password.” Yikes! How many web-based accounts do I have that use the same user name? In January of 2012, I began documenting all the web-based accounts I use. 66 of 167 web accounts use the same user name. 40 use another. How many use the same password? Coincidentally, 66 use the same password. Despite how obviously vulnerable I am, I might have been complacent enough to ignore my own security negligence had two more Internet companies not emailed me about Adobe’s password breach. On November 16, Eventbrite emailed me to recommend that I change my password on their site because…

p-Prims about Memory

by Olga Werby • August 12, 2011

Memory can be tricky—somethings seem to come to mind without bidding, while others are stubbornly evading our efforts at recalling them. We have many explanations for how and why somethings are easy to remember and others take so much effort; or why some people are very good at mnemonic feats and others not so much. Many of these mental models of how memory works are faulty (or simply not true) and are based on folksy wisdom passed from one generation to the next. Some of these wisdoms involve tricks for remembering things. For example, my Russian grandmother suggested tying corners of handkerchief to aide memory—if you notice a knot on the corner, you know that there’s something you supposed to remember. Since I don’t carry a handkerchief, I use my rings for the same effect—move a ring from finger to another (where it typically doesn’t belong) and then at least I know that should be keeping something in mind. Of course this strategy does nothing to help you remember what it is you are supposed to remember, but that’s another problem. So I thought to put together a little list of memory-related p-prims—a set of beliefs—that are common in our culture. Below,…

Re “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits”

by Arun • October 27, 2010

Carey, B. (2010). “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits.” New York Times Online. Retrieved on 26 October, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html The main topic of this article is to dispel a few beliefs about effective study habits. According to this article, research has clearly demonstrated that we don’t have credible evidence for the utility of popular learning-style approaches that we follow. The article also outlines a few simple techniques that can reliably improve how much we learn from studying. Personally, I wish I read this article when I was a full time student as it might have helped me to be a better learner. Conceptual Design: With each of us having specific learning styles, a designer for a learning product can build a system that adopts to our learning styles. For example a system can test its users and determine their learning style and focus on a approach that might make the user learn faster and better. If the learning is tough, learners (Students) might lose interest and motivation. So effective approaches of learning such as variability in setting and materials must be used to improve learnability and retention. Such design approaches would make learning easy and engage the users…

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