If you had invented a revolutionary technique for improving human memory, and wanted to spread the news as widely as possible, you couldn't do much worse than Piotr Wozniak, creator of the SuperMemo system. Wozniak lives somewhere in Poland – he keeps his exact location secret – and owns no phone. He never attends psychology conferences. "I travel rarely and only to vacation destinations. Otherwise I am entirely stationary," he explains on his website, where he also apologises for not replying promptly to emails. (He didn't reply to mine.) In 2008, he gave an interview of sorts to Wired magazine, but spent much of it persuading the interviewer to join him swimming in the near-freezing Baltic Sea. He's not a misanthrope, however. He apparently considers his isolation essential for a long-term personal experiment he's conducting, aimed at becoming as efficient at acquiring knowledge as it's possible for a human to be.

For most of us, wanting a better memory has more to do with not forgetting appointments, or wishing we hadn't let our childhood French slip away, or why we keep finding ourselves in the living room with no recollection of what we came to fetch. But SuperMemo isn't only for reclusive eccentrics. It's a widely applicable learning method, based on the concept of "spaced repetition", which exploits a curious finding in the psychology of memory: the best time to get something deeply lodged in your brain is when you're on the verge of forgetting it. Like an older technique, the Leitner System, SuperMemo schedules your study sessions so that you're reconfronted with material at the optimal moment for retaining it. For language learning, say, the usefulness is obvious. But memorisation is an unacknowledged component of much of the work we do, so SuperMemo may have implications for when best to focus on other kinds of "brain work", too.

The crucial notion here is that remembering involves two aspects: retrieval strength and storage strength. Just because you can recall something easily doesn't mean it's deeply entrenched in your brain yet. SuperMemo works on the principle that the best time to improve storage strength is when retrieval strength has faded almost to nothing. But the storage/retrieval distinction also means, consolingly, that you probably haven't really forgotten your childhood French, in terms of storage strength. It's there somewhere. You just need practice at retrieving it.

Not that learning French using SuperMemo, or any other memory exercise, will necessarily keep your brain more generally limber, so you never again forget why you came into the living room. The idea of the brain as a muscle – "use it or lose it" – is far from established; the evidence for the benefits of "brain training" software, or doing the crossword daily, remains patchy. But the brain-as-muscle metaphor may be one of those cases that demonstrates the limits of demanding scientific backup when it comes to self-help. Since it feels so true, "brain exercise" makes people feel happier, which is half the point. In fact, the best ways to care for your brain are probably physical exercise, good diet and sleep; but happier people are surely more likely to make those choices. One study, meanwhile, suggests memorisation skills can be improved merely by socialising more. I wonder what the reclusive Wozniak makes of that, though on the evidence so far, I'm going to have to keep wondering.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
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