Making A Start
Our journey is now entering its fifth year. It all started when Alan and Ernst met thanks to the introduction of a common friend.
At this point, Ernst had spent a year or two of train commutes looking at how memorization works. Why do standard spaced-repetition algorithms work astonishingly well but consistently end up frustrating learners? At this time, Alan was looking for ways to introduce spaced repetition in the classroom. The working well part of it - the frustrating learners part not so much.
So we took the plunge and founded Scintilla.ai. We fixed spaced repetition and introduced it to 10,000 pupils in the classroom. Job done!
Ebbinghaus, H, (1885), Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
Peterson, L.R., & Peterson, M.J. (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 193-198
Missing a Trick
Job done? Not quite. We had just addressed one aspect of memory: How to revise. Our data showed that Ebbinghaus (1885) was right. Forgetting follows exponential decay. With a great memory, you start with flatter forgetting curves. But they are still exponential. You need longer spacing between revisions and not so many. But no matter how good your memory is: without revision, exponential decay will get the better of you and wipe out all your knowledge eventually. We had found a better way to revise, but there was much more to do.
In line with Peterson and Peterson (1959), we measured shockingly steep forgetting curves. Memory strength started with no more than 18 seconds. It takes dozens of cleverly spaced revisions to make knowledge sink in.
The Forgetting Monster
There it was! The Forgetting Monster in all its ugliness, greedily erasing knowledge. And it is doing it faster than spaced repetition can fight it. It has exponential decay on its side and it will win eventually. We can delay our defeat, but we cannot escape it.
But who wants to know stuff anyway? This is the Modern World! You can always look things up. No need to strain your brain with knowledge!
If only we had a guard against the monster. A hideaway, a shield, a slingshot?
The Pleiades
But one day, we stumbled over the story of the Greek myth of Orion and the Pleiades.
Many cultures across the globe tell a similar myth: A hunter figure is chasing after 7 females in order to assault them. They are often sisters who are eventually turned into stars to protect them. We can watch the story in the night sky: The Pleiades rise above the horizon and they are closely followed by the constellation of Orion the hunter.
So far, so good. But there is something else. All of the myths have 7 sisters. But the Pleiades only have 6 visible stars.
The myths have to explain one star away. The Greek have one of the sisters fading away after having fallen in love with a mortal. Australian aboriginal cultures have one sister dying or being abducted. The Onondaga Iroquois of North America have one of the stars singing and thus fading away.
But why would you not just have 6 sisters to begin with? One possible answer is that the story may be tens of thousands of years old. Today, two of the stars in the Pleiades sit on top of each other and the naked eye can only see one spot. But 70,000 to 100,000 years ago these two stars were a bit further apart and someone back then will indeed have seen 7 Pleiades.
So what we possibly have is a story invented by someone in Africa before humans even left the continent. And it spread into the four corners of the world. And it was not carried in a book but imprinted in human minds from generation to generation. We have defeated the Forgetting Monster for millennia!
Your Memory is Great!
Our memory is great! Just not for everything. It is made for hunter-gatherers.
For them, locations are important. How many places can YOU recognize? Thousands! Your kitchen, your bedroom, your local pub and store, your parent’s house, the Eiffel Tower, and Big Ben. There are at least 50 locations on your way to school or work. You can recognize them all, and yet you have never sat down and crammed that knowledge in. Were you ever tested whether you recognize a place and how you find your way in between locations? No? You have a hunter-gatherer mind but you have stopped both hunting and gathering.
Faces are important. And you can recognize about 5000! No hard work is required. Songs and chants are important. And you can hum plenty of tunes, maybe hundreds. And you will remember the lyrics of many of them! I guess you must have sat down and crammed for that for months!
And then there are stories. How many plots of fairytales, novels, plays, and movies can you retell? Have you got them all on revision cards? How else do you remember all this stuff?
Your ancestors before you have slayed the Forgetting Monster with a story performed in the night sky. And so have you. Thousands of times. Just not for the Periodic Table of Elements. Why not? The periodic table will not help you on the Savannah, in the desert, in the Jungle, or in the Arctic. For hundreds of thousands of years, our evolution has forged a potent shield to keep the forgetting monster at bay. If knowledge helps your survival the monster vanishes into thin air. But without that, you have entered its lair without a sword and armor.
And this is what we do at Lukasa. We fool the Forgetting Monster. We plant knowledge where the Monster can’t reach, next to the images, stories, and places we remember with ease. Numbers turn into words. Facts turn into images. Bullet points turn into locations. Words, images, and locations turn into stories. All that is left to do is water your knowledge plants from time to time so that it lives happily ever after.