"To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it."

"But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session. Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”"

"Forget about forgetting, said Bjork. People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true."

advice on tweaking conf

"In the middle of the night, Diane Van Deren will leave her house against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She will cut west through the dark canyons with her running shoes and a headlamp, but without a kiwi-sized part of her right temporal lobe. She used to run away from epileptic seizures. Since brain surgery, she just runs, uninhibited by the drudgery of time and distance, undeterred by an inability to remember exactly where she is going or how to get back. "

"We live our lives in fragments, but make sense of them as stories. Scattered islands of experience are drawn together in personal travelogues that attempt explain how our erratic journeys brought us to the present moment."

"The two most important factors that influences how much we remember liking an experience are (1) it’s largest extreme and (2) how it ends. It’s called the peak-end algorithm. It’s why if a concert gets off to a rocky twenty-minute start but ends strong you’ll leave happy, whereas if it starts strong but has a bad final ten minutes you’ll leave disappointed."

a bit on how you can exercise your brain.

"Are their brains bigger than ours? In a public discussion held at New York’s Columbia University this month, the RSC’s Michael Boyd and Dr Oliver Sacks compared notes" via harold jarche

"when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialized version of the effect of serendipity."

good stuff in the comments too

feed it a text file containing the content you want to memorise, and play the file through at progressively faster speeds

memristors are so called because they have the ability to "remember" the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off

clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired

"Studies show we can remember only seven items at a time and can process only four ideas at once, so having an expensive professor read from a textbook is not an intelligent way to transfer information. It's like overloading a computer that doesn't have e

good overview of swap space (circa dec 2007)

a wireless memory card with 2GB capacity. automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.

tasklist /svc /FI "IMAGENAME eq svchost.exe" or just use Process Explorer!

Windows sets aside a blob of system memory called the desktop heap, which it uses to store user interface objects such as windows, menus, and hooks. The interactive desktop heap size needs to be bumped up to a value greater than its default setting of 30

In order to comprehend the continuous stream of cacophonies and visual stimulation that battle for our attention, humans will breakdown activities into smaller, more digestible chunks, a phenomenon that psychologists describe as "event structure perceptio

Some contestants can recall the order of a deck of cards after looking at it for 60 seconds. Learn their tricks.

focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM.

a project of The Center for Digital Storytelling. We will be developing a series of national projects for organizing digital story projects based on the link between narrative and place.

config.trim_on_minimize