You Can’t Remember It All

There’s a concept I use called the exomemory.

It’s not an original thought. I read about it in The Quantum Thief by Rannu Hajaniemi, and adapted it for my own use.

My exomemory is the sum of the things I know that aren’t immediately in my head, and for which I have to look elsewhere, mostly online. I put a lot of data in my private online notes, task lists, and databases. Phone numbers, birthdays, my GitHub and Google Mail passwords – all live in my private exomemory.

However, there are lots of things not stored in my exomemory I know I can find online in the broader universal exomemory:

• Programming language syntax? I know where to find it.
• Recipes for food I’ve cooked or want to cook? Easily discovered.
• A quote from an article I read last week? Might take some time, but I can find it.

I keep things in my personal exomemory because I don’t have an eidetic memory. My human brain remembers things in a flawed, imperfect way. I clearly remember specific time spending time in my grandmother’s kitchen, the smell of her cooking, and how I felt being there. However, I have no recollection of what she was baking, how to recreate it, or who else was there.

I also keep a personal exomemory because the sheer amount of information a person needs to function in modern society is overwhelming. Rather than keep it all in meatspace, I store the information on my devices, and remember how to find the information rather than what the information is. My devices form a literal physical memory palace, and I know how to get around it to find the info I need when I need it.

A family member once told me my devices were a crutch. I’m using them to compensate for having a poor memory, and for not working to strengthen my memory.

My counter is this: I can keep and recall more information on the devices than I can without them. And I fail to see how using an electronic device is cheating when everyone uses the same techniques all the time anyway.

Here’s an example: quickly, without looking, rattle off the sixteen digits of your ATM card number now. (If you’re in a crowded place, don’t do this out loud).

It’s OK if you can’t do it, because you don’t need to know the actual numbers by heart. You just need to know where the card is located and how to get the actual numbers. The numbers are written on the card (or “stored outside your memory in an exomemory”), and you know how to find it in your wallet (or “how to query the exomemory for info”).

The medium of a physical card against an electronic device is trivial, although I will argue my device can hold a lot more than just a credit card number.

A further example: A friend of mine always kept a small notebook and pen on him to write things down. He would process the notes at the end of each day, handling them as necessary.

I’ve tried that system, and sometime do carry a small notebook and pen with me. Unfortunately, I haven’t successfully developed the habit of regularly transferring things to online storage, so the notes mostly go unused and are useless by the time I get to them. The waste of paper galls me, although I still use notebooks for drawing and sketching.

So what brought this discussion up? And what does it have to do with learning to code?

On a forum I read regularly, a beginning programmer asked if searching for programming syntax or API documentation online made them a bad programmer.

Of course, the answer is no – we all do that. Learning new commands, or new ways to do things, requires research, and research is the quick way of saying “look this up somewhere”. Even remembering how to do something we’ve done before may require a quick search for some mental assistance.

The exomemory is where you find new things or recall old things. It doesn’t matter if the medium is a search engine, an encyclopedia, a pocket full of hand-written notes, or an online notebook, it’s what we all rely on so we can use our brains for the important stuff.

Don’t ever think you aren’t a programmer, or a good programmer, because you have to look things up. You’re just using your exomemory to remember how to do it.