Memory Experiment
October 16th, 2007I was thinking about it, and I realize that I made a really big claim in my discussion of memory. Although I did search for some scientific or expert knowledge on the veracity of my claims before I published the post, I found nothing very solid.
Nevertheless, my claim is specific enough to be verifiable. I should be able to test it.
My claim: suppose that I have something I want to remember called X, I hypothesize that writing down X discourages my mind from remembering X. Furthermore, not writing down X encourages me to remember X, while simultaneously training my mind to remember other things similar to X.
If I cannot find any literature on this, I should be able to design an experiment and verify that what I’m saying is true. It might not be. It might be spectacularly false. Maybe I just had a good memory after all and I just never tried to use it before. I prefer to think that everyone’s memory is on about an equal level, but I moreso prefer to know the truth.
I will think about a way to design a controlled experiment that tries to eliminate all confounding variables, test it, then publish results here.
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