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Lifehacker
Results for posts tagged "memory" on Lifehacker Australia.
Chris "because I'm a teenage girl" Hardwick has a neat way to remember the music that defines certain times in his life: he makes a playlist (entitled his current age) of his favourite songs every year on his birthday. Along these lines, would love to see Last.FM send out a yearly "your most listened to tracks" email on your birthday.
Weblog ScienCentral reports that when you can't come up with an answer that's sitting on the tip of your tongue, you're best off forgetting about it altogether. That's because, according to a study by experimental psychologists at Canada's McMaster University, the more you struggle to remember a word on the tip of your tongue, the more difficulty you'll have remembering it in the future. Their recommendation: Just look it up, and do so as soon as possible. Do their findings match up with your experience? Let's hear about it in the comments.
When you absolutely have to commit your presentation notes, interview points, or other words to memory, a Tachistoscope, which rotates images at varying speeds, can be the next best thing to a neural FireWire port. Free Windows utility Swiftscope puts that subliminal power on your desktop. Create a simple text file with the lines you need to know, open it in Swiftscope, and set the background and font colours, the timing of the slide changes, and set the app to full-screen mode for total text immersion. Swiftscope is a free download for Windows XP and Vista, and requires Microsoft .NET 2.0 to run.
Windows only: Instead of dropping cash on a new stick of RAM for that old computer, go grab a free licence for the normally $20 memory manager TweakRAM—today only. TweakRAM speeds up your machine by optimising Windows memory management, and when your computer slows to a crawl, you can use TweakRAM to manually free up memory. The developers say:
Scientists have long held that seven items—be they images, numbers, or tasks—was the best a brain could manage to hold at once, but LiveScience points out that, without specific practice, the best-case scenario for most people is three or four. It's a good explanation why phone numbers are written and spoken as three and four-digit groups, and a better reminder that if you've got a lot to do or remember, writing it down is probably the only way to hit 100 percent. What's your personal limit on non-practiced memory? How do you break up tasks and must-remember items into small groups for better recall? Share your successes in the comments, and check out our top 10 memory hacks for some pointers on augmenting your grey matter's somewhat paltry RAM.
Writing things down, on paper or on-screen, is the best way to make sure you remember important info and tasks, but sometimes you've got to rely on your plain old brain to keep essential data sorted and handy. Whether it's a client's name, a password or combination you want stored only in your head, or answers for an upcoming test, there are plenty of techniques and tools to help you lock in important stuff and pull it out when needed. After the jump, we round up some memorable memory-boosting hacks. Photo by furryscaly.
Windows only: Killing runaway, memory-gobbling processes from Windows' task manager is easy—if you know the name of every process and thread on your system and which apps they match up with. Daphne, a free Windows process management utility, gives you a unique set of crosshairs to drag onto the window of any app giving you trouble. There's also a magnifying glass that reveals properties and even passwords of any window it stops on, and Daphne can call back to its DRK database to identify any apps you might want exlained. Daphne is a free download for Windows systems only. For more tools and tips on knocking down memory-grabbers, see our guide to mastering Windows' Task Manager.
Next time you need to quickly memorise a small piece of information, Wired suggests that you may actually have better luck retaining the information if you distract yourself.
In 2007, researchers asked UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country: Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list, some students then had to sit through a slide show and view closely related material (flower: rose). Guess what? The distracted students performed better on subsequent recall tests.Photo by Gaetan Lee.
Create or browse interactive timelines with webapp Dipity. The service can create any sort of timeline you want, but it really shines when creating a personal timeline; that's because Dipity integrates with tonnes of popular webapps, like Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, or any RSS feed, so that all you have to do is provide Dipity with a few usernames or URLs and it'll automatically build your beginning timeline for you. After items are added, click on any item on your timeline or zoom in for a closer look. If you're using it in the personal timeline manner, Dipity is essentially another lifestreaming app along the lines of previously mentioned FriendFeed—it just has a different way of presenting your stream. Dipity also supports manually creating timelines on any subject, but if you want total control over your timeline, check out how to roll your own hosted timeline.
Windows only: Remember everything you've learned using spaced repetition with SuperMemo. From the Wired article on its creator, Piotr Wozniak:
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget.... Twenty years ago, Wozniak realised that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research.
