Update June 2024 (Mother had stroke and MidJourney is really useful)

Hello! Just to give you a quick update on the state of things:

Two notable things have happened in my life during the past six months.

1. My mother had a stroke. I am 1000% a mama's boy and love my mom VERY much, so when this happened, I was an emotional wreck. Since I live in South America it took me about 36 hours to fly back to the United States after I got the phone call that she was in the process of having a stroke. Lucky for our family, her stroke was minor, she was in extremely good health (minus the stroke, of course) and was determined to recover the use of her right side (Which was the side that was affected). I dropped everything and helped her with walking, taking her to her various physical therapy appointments, doing speech and physical therapy with her at home, running to get prescriptions, all of that fun stuff. After about 6 weeks, she was essentially at the state that she was at prior to the stroke, minus a little bit of her ability to say certain syllables clearly. We do speech therapy over the phone. Fun fact: you can use ChatGPT to create tongue twisters and have those tongue twisters follow a particular story that you outline. My mom quickly got bored with the bland word exercises so I started using ChatGPT to make an ongoing story involving an exaggerated depiction of the lives of various family members filled with various inside jokes; this has been WAY more fun to read with her. She can now drive on her own as well as be home by herself, which is a HUGE relief.

2. MidJourney has changed mnemonics (and images in SuperMemo) forever, for me at least. To remember things that aren't very memorable, I would typically use story mnemonics, or create stories in my head to "encode" the useful information into a memorable mental image that I would recall easier than the information itself. If you can create a SYSTEM of mnemonics for different kinds of information, those systems can be quite powerful. For example, the "Remembering the Kanji" book outlines a mnemonic system that I used to memorize Japanese characters. With MidJourney, rather than relying on your brain to imagine the scenario, you give the ingredients to the program (a prompt), and it spits out a fully baked cake (image)! In past iterations of this technology, the images didn't look so good, but now they are WAY BEYOND "good enough" to serve the purpose of a mnemonic. Up until now, I had a number of extensive mnemonic systems to memorize different kinds of information (numeral and linguistic), but they all relied on story based mnemonics (Stuff I imagined in my head). With MidJourney, the possibilities DRASTICALLY increased: instead of relying on story "vibes" like I had previously, I could rely on VISUAL distinction to differentiate and anchor things. One of the early tests I did was with memorizing number-based information. In my new "number alphabet", 77 relates to the video game "Cyberpunk 2077." Still haven't played it, but I'm familiar enough with the long term hype. I looked up some random things that happened in 1977, and one interesting fact I found was that "Chuck E Cheese was founded in 1977." So I asked MidJourney to create the Chuck E Cheese mouse in the style of Cyberpunk 2077, and it spit out a bunch of totally awesome images you can see on the right!

With images like these, it's hard NOT to remember that Chuck E Cheese has something to do with the number 77!

This experience made me reimagine my "mnemonic alphabet" game, but required many many hours of (1) coming up with a totally new mnemonic alphabet and (2) actually using MidJourney to make the flashcards and (3) memorize the flashcards. This task was completed a few months ago.

The OTHER thing I used MidJourney for extensively was for "concept mascots", which was something I had started doing more than 10 years ago. Basically, I decided that I wanted to use various characters of fiction to represent concepts that could aid in the remembering of information associated with that particular concept. For example: Heavy Weapons Guy from Team Fortress 2 could be used to represent the concept of “heavy”, or a character from the Soul Calibur fighting game could represent the concept of "weird" (Voldo). I did this for more than 1500 different words (and it took FOREVER!). Once I realized how powerful MidJourney was, I saw how much better my system could be improved if I used MidJourney to generate images representing various concepts (since the image could be EXACTLY what I wanted it to be).

Just yesterday evening I FINALLY finished my extensive rework of ALL of my "concept mascots" in SuperMemo. Also I used MidJourney to create images that correspond to all 2,000-ish kanji that I first learned when learning Japanese. Essentially I remade a system in a few months that took many many years prior to put together, and the results I've been seeing so far are VERY promising. Using images that EXTREMELY correspond to information you're trying to remember has made memorizing useful information WAY easier. And if I encounter an idea or concept that I have no image for, I simply ask MidJourney to create it and then add the image in SuperMemo.

So as of now I think that (1) mnemonic alphabet and (2) concept images have been explored to a satisfactory level that I can attest to their usefulness. The third major thing that I've started exploring (And final SUPER USEFUL application of AI image tools relative to spaced repetition that I can think of) has been using MidJourney to actually ENCODE information to memorize (boots on the ground-style). I've only been REALLY getting into this over the last few weeks, so I want to give it a little bit more time before I say definitively "this works" (Although I don't see why it won't, at this point). What I'm referring to is basically the Cyberpunk Chuck E Cheese 2077 example, but on a larger scale and for both numerical and linguistic information. Compared to coming up with mnemonics that you imagine in your head, this new method seems to be MUCH more effective and flexible at making durable memories. Certain "established principles" or habits that I got into when making story-based mnemonics seem to no longer apply, and I've started noticing ways that images can be "tweaked" to be optimized so multiple things can be memorized with just one image.

But this is stuff that ALWAYS happens when you REALLY start to get into a hobby, right? Assumptions are challenged, new connections are made, you learn nifty little tricks, etc. I’m currently at that level with “phase 3” of using AI image generators for remembering stuff.

But if it were not for AI image generators (Which MidJourney seems to be one of the best out there right now), the book that I was writing would probably be done and out. But learning about how powerful these tools can be, it has had a REALLY positive impact on my learning and retention of information, it would be a crime to NOT cover this in relation to Spaced Repetition. I also don’t want to say “this works” until I know for a certainty that it ACTUALLY does.

Feel free to ask any questions! (But this will be covered more extensively in the book, FYI)