">A brain “stores” memories like files on a hard drive

Nobody thinks this"

If you ask them directly and they bring it up to conscious recognition, no, approx. nobody thinks this.

However, if you witness people's actions when they set out with the deliberate goal of learning something, they clearly act as if they believe they can write something "once" to the "brain's hard drive" and retain it indefinitely by sheer force of will, and that failure to do so is a moral or character failing. Articles like this are important to correct people's implicit, unexamined beliefs.

Of course if you've been on HN for a while, you've had spaced repetition of the importance of spaced repetition (albeit perhaps not on the optimal schedule), so you may feel it's very common knowledge. It isn't. Only a few subcultures have heard of it; the broader culture is ignorant of these ideas.

I mean, is this really not common knowledge? I am having trouble coming up with examples from my real life where people aren't aware of it. Sports? Practice. Spelling? Practice. Theater? Rehearse. It's practically an automatic response when people ask how to get better.

I don't think this is a mystical life hack, we do this with babies, children, students, and I have never heard an adult seriously suggest that they can memorize something in one go.

Well, okay, maybe the president and people with photographic memories. But in general? If people decide they want to learn something they definitely are aware it will take work and practice and repetition. Maybe they don't want to do that work, but I doubt they're truly surprised when they don't make progress.

@jerf refers to "spaced repetition" which is a specific form of the "practice" you mention. Basic practice is of course ubiquitous. Spaced repetition is less common, but becoming better known.

Incidentally:

You mention sports practice. This is a really fascinating topic, possibly different from mental recall such as spelling and theatre lines.

A beginner in a sport can practice in a very general manner, since anything they do is likely to produce improvement. Someone who has just started learning tennis may benefit from the occasional game of squash or badminton, for example. Put another way, in problem space they are very distant from the target, so any effort has a reasonable chance to take them in a direction which is vaguely towards the target.

An expert athlete, however, must practice very specifically. They are very close to the target: only movement directly toward the target is useful. The tolerance is far less, the number of directions they can take is far fewer.

Additionally, the extremely fine control of the musculoskeletal system necessary for athletes degrades slightly with absence from practice. The specific activity must be regularly practiced to achieve peak performance, and ensure the neurological specialisation is maintained. This is why professionals must "warm up", to ensure the nervous system is tuned to peak performance. (Avoiding injury is a separate and complicated issue.)

Spaced repetition is related to this, since athletes must indeed practice/train. But the time element here is very complex, and unique to the sport, the athlete, and much more. Frequency, rest, intensity, endurance and more are in that mix. Add mood, motivation etc and it becomes almost overwhelmingly complex. Possibly why some of the finest athletes aim to take emotions out of the mix: simplicity and reliability. Perhaps!

A lot of this is still poorly understood, as it is with memory and recall.

I see, I see. That makes sense, thanks.

I'm also an athlete (I teach karate) and agree with your assessment. I feel myself get worse at techniques if I don't exercise and reinforce the motions at least weekly. I generally have the class do basically the same core techniques at the beginning, then rebuild any lost reflexes in intermediate drills, and finish with no more than three new (related) techniques per day.

There is never a time when anyone no matter how skilled won't benefit from practicing even the most basic of basics once you're at a high level. They're never quite perfect! In fact the more advanced the student, the more likely they'll benefit from going back to the basics and really re-evaluating how the basics work given their new expertise.

"It's practically an automatic response when people ask how to get better."

Again I say, look to people's actions, not their words. By their actions, a lot of people show that they believe that they can be exposed to the material either once, or a very small number of times, and retain it indefinitely (along with understanding not only the material but all implications of the material, automatically), and that when the material is not retained, it is perceived as a moral or character failing. If this was not true, "cramming" wouldn't even be a word.

This is merely one of the many places where what people say they believe deviates from what they demonstrate by their actions that they believe.

Further, I think it's also pretty obvious that many of the people who do in fact study, do so very inefficiently because they do it without knowledge or understanding of the issues raised by spaced repetition. I don't think you can just apply it blindly, but at the same time, you need to be aware of the basic issues and incorporate the insights. Another one of the classic study errors, at least from the perspective of retaining the material indefinitely, rather than just for a single test, which the structure of our modern formal schooling encourages, is to study this week's material this week and ram it into my head, then study next weeks material next week and ram that into my head, and so and so forth, rigidly partitioning what I study, based on the assumption that, again, once I jam it into my brain it'll stay there indefinitely. The correct way to study for something very heavily fact-based (like a medical program) in the steady-state is to spend maybe 60% on this week's stuff, 20% on last week's stuff, and the remaining 20% scattered through the stuff that you've had the hardest time retaining from the previous weeks, not 100% on this week's topic, and not X% on this week's topic and 100-X% evenly spread through "review" on the rest of the course, though that latter one is at least close enough to work.

> A brain “stores” memories like files on a hard drive

> Nobody thinks this

Ahhh... I don't know. That was certainly a fiction that a number bosses where happy to foist on my generation back in the day. It makes for a very convenient basis to blame the junior for virtually anything.

>Brains don't forget because they can't find the file...

They sort of do. The act of remembering alters the connections to other information made. Later, when trying to recall something again, the original connections may no longer work leaving you unable to find the information.

>The power of neural networks is that they discover patterns on their own. Thats the whole f*ing point of neural networks.

They can only find patterns in what they're told to.

> They can only find patterns in what they're told to.

I disagree.

If you feed a bunch of images into a CNN, it doesn't just learn flower, cat, etc. It learns more fundamental things such as edges, textures, patterns. see: https://distill.pub/2018/building-blocks/

Moreover, you can use simple reward signals, such as "progress forward", to learn complex locomotion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx_bgoTF7bs

If you still think these represent "find[ing] patterns in what they're told to", I would argue you only think that because the scale of these experiments is so small.

>If you feed a bunch of images into a CNN, it doesn't just learn flower, cat, etc. It learns more fundamental things such as edges, textures, patterns.

Inputting a bunch of pictures is telling it to find patterns in those pictures. And though some of those patterns are fundamental things, at some point it will need to be told what patterns are useful.

That they are limmited to seeing things that they see is trivially true of all things that see.

That they are limited to seeing things that they are told to see is not.

>Brains don't forget because they can't find the file...

Isn't this what the expression "It's on the tip of my tongue" refers to? You know you have the name/word/??? somewhere in your brain, but you can't access it.

Thats a good point