Conversation, Not Mastery
or the case against total recall
Table of Contents
Cue Fans and Context
I’ve written about cue fans before, which are the web of associations evoked by a cue.
Imagine a memory of yours, maybe a vacation you went on, like to Hawaii.
In this example, “Hawaii 2025” is the cue, and all the possible memories evoked by those two words are part of its “fan”.
The cue fan is never fully activated.
When you hear the cue “Hawaii 2025”, you don’t suddenly remember everything you experienced on that vacation, instead different parts of that vacation get conjured up.
Context, the set and setting in which a cue is encountered, charges a cue with activation energy that spreads through the cue fan, selecting the appropriate referents or associations to evoke.
In other words, which associations a cue evokes depends on the context in which we encounter it.
You’ll remember different parts of your vacation if you’re in a good mood or a bad mood, if you’re with someone who was there with you or if you were with someone who wasn’t, and so on.
The context you’re in “turns on” different associational paths for the cue, which determines which associations are evoked.
Designing Cue Fans With Intention
My mnemonic method revolves around trying to bring some sort of intentionality to which associations get evoked in a cue fan.
This isn’t the kind of thing you can expect full control over without having god-like levels of influence over both your environment and your own biology, however there is plenty of room for improving what cues can elicit even if we can’t expect to have total control over their design.
Currently, most mnemonists focus on single cue-response pairings, which are of course the simplest and most effective way of doing things.
The more associations a cue has, the harder it is to control which associations get evoked, in the same way that it’s easier to manage one employee than it is to manage five hundred.
My method, the memory diner, is still a work in progress, and it involves having a high tolerance for failure. Namely, I don’t expect to have perfect control over the associations that get evoked when I recall a cue (or mental painting).
Aims of the Diner Method
In my diner method, when I “memorize” a book, I’m focusing on remembering the chapter titles and using those titles as cues to reconstruct the arguments of what I encountered in the book.
I do not expect to remember every single association for each idea or argument in that chapter, even if i’ve made “accessory keys” for each page.
Instead I just want to be able to build a solid overview of what was said in a way that I find useful.
Trying to rebuild a perfect picture of the chapter with each and every single one of its associations is not the point of the memory diner.
That kind of mastery requires a more traditional mnemonic approach where each cue has a single association.
There is definitely a place for this kind of approach, however it’s not what I want from the books I read unless I intend on really diving into it.
Most books don’t require that kind of effort.
Instead, I’m satisfied if a chapter title evokes enough associations to meaningfully capture the overall ideas and arguments that were covered across its pages, allowing me to engage in meaningful “conversations” with my memories of the book.
In the memory diner, the goal is to be able to comfortably engage with the ideas and arguments of the books you’ve read.
Just as you don’t need to have direct access to every single particular fact about your friends in order to engage them in conversation, you don’t need to have access to every single association in a cue fan in order to engage with the case/cue itself.
The fact is that these cue fans are a bit like pianos; different notes get hit for different songs, and in the same way, different associations will be evoked under different contexts (or different mnemonic “conversations”).
On Partial Activation
Not all of a cue’s associations will surface every time you encounter it, otherwise context-dependent memory wouldn’t be a thing.
The fact is that cue fans are never fully activated, and that some branches and pathways of the fan will be turned off in some contexts and activated in others.
That means that it is very silly to try to fully “master” your memories, which is a bit like thinking that in order to be a good pianist, you have to hit every single key when playing a song.
Instead, you need to come to terms with the fact that memories are partial things that never fully reveal themselves, only showing you glimpses of everything they actually “know”.
Knowing that cue fans are never fully activated means that when you design these fans, you have to accept that you’ll only ever evoke a portion of their contents when you call on them.
This is okay!
Practice, Context, and Retrieval
The idea is to ensure that the cue evokes the right associations in the right context, which requires more than the simple retrieval practice of flashcards and memory palaces, since what you really want to practice is evoking these associations in the right setting.
That’s one of the reasons why using flashcards to learn foreign vocabulary doesn’t always work, since the context of using a flashcard is very different than the context of speaking a language with a native speaker, or watching a movie, or reading a book.
Context and intent determine which associations are evoked in a cue fan.
When using the memory diner approach to mnemonics, you have to be okay with not remembering every single association.
That’s part of the design!
The goal is to have you engage with the cue’s associations so you can investigate, explore, and integrate your understanding of what you’ve read, not to be able to recite everything word for word.
In the same way, if you want to evoke a particular association for a particular purpose, you’ll want to design a memory exercise around that purpose. Don’t leave context to chance. Designing a cue fan means cultivating some level of understanding over which contexts will activate what parts of the fan. In the memory diner, I’m just interested in exploring ideas, but if I wanted to use those ideas in specific situations, I’d come up with different mnemonic practices built for that purpose.
In other words, context determines which memories are evoked, so design your memory practice with that in mind.