It's quite interesting that Anki(It's a Japanese 暗记 for those who don't know where the name comes from) is mentioned a few times but no body mention "Memory palace"[1] and "Major system"[2] yet. Both methods try to hack some features/bugs of our brains built by mother nature during million years of her evolutionary development. Most memory athletes use some variation of these methods to achieve astonishing performance. There's a Dr. Yep can remember a 65 thousands of English word and the locations (i.e. page number and the sequence on that page) of each word on a Chinese/English dictionary.
The trick is investing some time to build a personalized memory system, then use the system to remember other things like passport number, credit card , phones etc. It might not be attractive to most people because today we have smart phone to help us. But for learning new knowledge, combination of both space repetition and memory system is quite interesting. Here's what I did: I use a Anki alternative called Memrise[3] to build a Major system. (I also have Anki installed but just prefer Memrise). Then I use Major system to review the concepts I've learned. Major system here is the equivalent of Anki as a tool for short term place holder of space repetition, not directly used for learning. I found brain Anki is better than smartphone Anki/Memrise although I built former Anki with later Anki.
Come on fellow hackers, hacking your brain is very rewarding
I considered working on this, but I'm just not excited enough about remembering. Thanks google. Oh and Einstein said (according to Shaq) you should never remember what you can go lookup.
The beauty of the human memory system is not whether or not you can remember a thing, but the correlations and relationships between them. A convenient lookup mechanism doesn't help there.
Interestingly (or perhaps not) the book that introduced me to all this was Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer, who was apparently coached by Ed Cooke, one of the co-founders of Memrise.
Ed Cooke is the guy who interviewed Dr.Yip who memories the whole dictionary along with page number and location in the page where the word is on. Search Youtube. It's amazing. Josh Foer later learnt an Africa language in 22 hours.
For example:
I already have major system built so I have Tea as 1, Honey(for me it's visualized as a sexy woman) as 2, Ham as 3 etc. Then I have basic Pandas function of axes(), ntype(), empty() etc. Then I will imaging : A crazy guy is destroying a Tea tree with an Ax, I'm practicing typing on the breast of the sexy woman, There's an Ham with big hole so it's almost empty on the table... It's very easy to remember no more than 10 functions in a few minutes. It's just function names but at least it gives you a clue to go over all the functions and recall the usage before you forget. Can not replace Anki but you can recall what you learnt anytime and anywhere. Such as before you sleep.
The trick is investing some time to build a personalized memory system, then use the system to remember other things like passport number, credit card , phones etc. It might not be attractive to most people because today we have smart phone to help us. But for learning new knowledge, combination of both space repetition and memory system is quite interesting. Here's what I did: I use a Anki alternative called Memrise[3] to build a Major system. (I also have Anki installed but just prefer Memrise). Then I use Major system to review the concepts I've learned. Major system here is the equivalent of Anki as a tool for short term place holder of space repetition, not directly used for learning. I found brain Anki is better than smartphone Anki/Memrise although I built former Anki with later Anki.
Come on fellow hackers, hacking your brain is very rewarding
[1]https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci
[2]https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Major_System
[3]https://www.memrise.com/en/