#forgetting sense

[mentalisttraceur]

The forgetting sense seems to actually depend in large part on stumbling upon the idea of remembering.

It's not so much that a spontaneous "hey this is the last chance to remember this", as much as it is that as I roam through my mind I think or remember the idea of remembering the thing.

From there it is as described in the earlier post: I can sorta feel the difference in strength or availability of the memory, and I have learned from extensive forgetting and introspection experience roughly how weak it has to be for my failure to rehearse it immediately or imminently to cause it to be lost.

But the nuance here, the discovery, is that practical "always on" use of the forgetting sense as advertised in that last post is an active skill, not a passive one:

the recognition that if I don't review it I will forget is passive - this is the essence of the "sense" part - but

the awareness that any given memory is about to expire, the opportunity to trigger the "sense" part, requires active cognition to "touch" the idea of having this memory, and to "reach" towards the memory just enough to get a feel for how readily it comes to mind.

This active part can of course be so deeply habitualized that it feels passive and automatic. You notice the awareness coming up but not the cognition that preceded it. This is why it took me so long to detect that there is an active component at all.

This also explains more thoroughly why memorization practice develops the forgetting sense - an explanation I previously found subtly lacking. It's not just that it gives you more experiences being on the cusp of forgetting and either rehearsing the memory or losing it! It's that it also habitualizes the creation of cognition snags for remembering!

I have countless little cognition snags all over my mind that cause me to think about things I am trying to memorize and whether or not I remember them. I invested so much thought, effort, time, and attachment into memorization, that over the years thoughts like that have habitualized. Now they are a regular feature of the language-free wakes/ripples of associations at the outskirts my conscious cognition.

[mentalisttraceur-software]

I recently made two simple shell one-liners to practice memorizing and checking my passphrases - without ever storing them. Commented versions (note that this is using GnuPG 1 - you have to adjust the commands for GnuPG 2):

pwhash()

{

‍ ‍ ‍ # Password Hash

‍ ‍ ‍ #

‍ ‍ ‍ # Uses GnuPG to encrypt an empty file

‍ ‍ ‍ # with the password, thus storing a

‍ ‍ ‍ # secure salted hash of the password.

‍ ‍ ‍ : | gpg -‍-symmetric -‍-cipher-algo AES256 >"$1"

‍ ‍ ‍ # `:` is the no-op shell command,

‍ ‍ ‍ # and thus the pipe reads empty.

}

pwcheck()

{

‍ ‍ ‍ # Password Check

‍ ‍ ‍ #

‍ ‍ ‍ # Tries to use GnuPG to decrypt a given

‍ ‍ ‍ # file with the password, which fails

‍ ‍ ‍ # unless the password is correct.

‍ ‍ ‍ gpg -‍-decrypt -‍-quiet <"$1"

}

So as an example of usage, I might do

pwhash ~/memory/tumblr.com

then type my Tumblr password twice, as you'd expect from any proper password input where the correctness upon initial storage matters, and then when I want to practice or check it, I would do

pwcheck ~/memory/tumblr.com

You can of course use this for memorization of any sensitive information, not just passphrases. Pairs well with any automatic file synchronization or cloud storage solution. I'd like to connect this to a spaced repetition system somehow, but my forgetting sense is good enough now that I can do without.

[mentalisttraceur]

I forgot to make this explicit in my previous post about the forgetting sense, but the cognition snags in question do not have to be about remembering that specific thing. A generic cognition snag like

oh yeah, I was recently starting to memorize a new thing

is sufficient, so long as you react to that cognition snag by taking a moment to remember what the thing was, and reach for it enough to actually activate the forgetting sense itself, to get that feel for whether or not you are about to lose it.

And for me, the cognition snag for checking if I am currently trying to memorize anything at all is habitualized to fire on almost any association with memory, remembering, knowledge, and so on.

So there are definitely times when the forgetting sense fires spontaneously, when the extinction burst of a memory that is about to be lost happens to break into conscious awareness. But a lot of the progress towards the forgetting sense becoming a more reliable tool for me has come from that generic cognition snag and me taking the time to follow up on it when I snag it.

[mentalisttraceur]

Forgetting Sense

Anyone else just instinctively know when you need to review something in order to not forget it?

It’s this vivid awareness that pops into my head that I should consciously and deliberately pull up and review the piece of information, and that if I don’t, I will forget it.

During that moment, it’s also usually very readily available to me, the piece of information I need to review. It’s like my brain is in the middle of going through old junk, and it’s lifting up this piece of information to my conscious mind and asking “hey, do we still need this?”

And in “brain language”, the way to communicate that answer is to either think about it and review it or not - fully process it in the way that is appropriate for that type of information that reinforces its value, or focus on something else instead.

It’s like having a spaced-repetition system built-in: if I listen to and act on this “forgetting sense”, it follows the same decreasing frequency rhythm as I memorize new things, and really helps me remember things.

I didn’t always have this. But I think, once you know that it’s possible and what to listen for in your mind, it’s just a matter of practicing introspection and memorization enough.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

I hate forgetting passwords. I really value successfully memorizing a large variety of passwords. Actually memory in general. So when I forget something like a password, it is a failure of living up to a standard I set for myself that I really value, and this is pretty emotionally unpleasant.

So for year now, I've wished to have something like "barely forgotten password recovery" - that is, to recover a password when I remember almost all of it. When I remember almost enough about the what password was, but have forgotten just enough to not be able to get it back from memory or trying to go through all possibilities.

Anyway, I finally have something approaching a system which has for the first time in forever let me do this:

I use pwqgen to generate my passwords

I have the entire list of words and characters pwqgen uses to generate passwords saved in a text file, and

I have the programming skills needed to write little one-off programs to generate just the permutations I need.

Bruteforcing a pwqgen password with reasonable settings is infeasible. But bruteforcing just the tiny subset of the password space which matches what I do remember is much more tractable. Furthermore, if I catch it early enough, I just need to search my recognition memory by looking at the possibilities.

When I have just recently forgotten a password, I will usually remember almost all of it for a day or more, and all I have lost is just one symbol or word. Even when it is one of the words that I have forgotten, I usually still have memory of several narrowing details. Like "capitalized; four letters; first three keystrokes were left hand; last keystroke was right hand". This can easily narrow the possibilities down to about a hundred or less passwords.

Then I can spend my human time way more efficiently looking through just that list, looking for just that candidates that feel really likely. Anyway, today I had to make a new password for something and then I ended up missing the second or third forgetting sense cue for it because I was too focused, and so I lost a word.

Normally in my life when this happens the password is lost. I don't use password managers, let alone anything inherently insecure like "writing it down", so it's not saved anywhere, and I'm never going to remember the lost part again. Frustrating. But then after a little bit of effort to do the above, I got it back. Yay.

P.S. In combination with something like my minimal secure password practice solution, I could even feasibly extend my "reach" for recovering barely forgotten passwords even further, because all I need to do is reduce the possibilities to a reasonably small amount, and then I can bruteforce my own passwords purely locally without having to deal with any limitations or security measures of the actual thing being logged into.

P.P.S. There is actually an important security consideration here! Anything you write to generate just this subset of passwords that might be your password. It encodes some bits of your password, possibly a lot of them, so be extremely mindful about where that code is potentially saved or ends up. This post is not here to teach you how to properly assess and weigh all relevant risks. That's a huge separate topic.