Thoughts on forgetting

Aug 27 2022

Forgetting is part of the human experience, and one can argue is a vital part of functioning if one thinks of the affliction of many veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Is Anki a way to never forget? I would say yes and no, as in my own experience I have noticed that the Anki cards tend to mature with age in a certain quality where they grow a special familiarity on an innate level. On the flip side, though, some cards do not grow this varnish and become more ephemeral as time passes, and I do not know the fundamental reason for this divergence in paths.

One hypothesis I have had is that the initial state of the learning plays a large role, kind of like in the Big Bang, where cards first learned in context and for that matter at any point learned in context or amongst other factoids that enhance and support it tend to age like squeezed grapes and not like squeezed apples. Thus, I think it may be of utmost importance with cards that seem to be slipping away in your mind or that you have a sense you would not be able to answer a question about on a standardized exam to do a quick Google search or Amboss search in order to help lay a foundation that is going to set up better learning in the future. In other words, if a certain concept is diverging down the path of decreasing familiarity as you know the wording of an Anki card innately somehow, then maybe take the time to reacquaint yourself with that card like an old friend. Likewise, we sometimes take the people we have known a long time for granted, when if we sit down again with them for a while we may realize that there are dimensions and interests we never knew existed.

With this said, I do think it is important to be able to learn things without context, in a rote memorization manner, as there are some things that don't make a lot of sense. That chief example that I come up with first is with lab values, where the come to mind from some deep recess and not from some cute connection with another concept. In this case, from my current understanding of how the brain works, your biological neural net has just grown axonal connections between the concept “hemoglobin” and “male” and “13.5-17.5.” This is valuable knowledge, but I do think that if somehow we can combine this rote memorization with some kind of connection either through they are already learned concepts or through mnemonics of some kind then the likelihood of forgetting will go down since multiple pathways lead to the same output.

Remembering is a gift and also occurs intentionally, so the moral of this short article may be to be choosy with what you remember and how. Maybe invest time in rediscovering concepts from a different angle: It may uncover a whole new way of looking at the world.