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Browse three article series with searchable topics, sources, and full reading pages.

Research-backed articles on memory and learning

• Why a Familiar Route Can Outlast a New Number — Memory science · 8 min read. A familiar route may come back more readily than a new string of digits. The contrast raises a useful question: which cues help you find an idea again?
• A Memory Is Not a Recording. It Is a Build. — Memory science · 9 min read. Encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and sometimes reconsolidation. Mouse experiments, H.M.'s case, and sleep studies show how memory can change, and where the evidence stops.
• Recognition Is Not Recall: Test What You Can Retrieve — Practice & method · 9 min read. A familiar page can make knowledge feel close at hand. Learn what recognition and recall each reveal, then use retrieval practice and spaced reviews to check what survives when the answer is hidden.
• Your Mind Is a Map: The Positioning System Inside Your Head — Spatial learning · 8 min read. Recordings in rats revealed cells sensitive to place, direction, and distance. These findings help explain spatial navigation and offer clues about memory, with limits that matter.
• Maps Beyond Places: How Relationships Can Cue Recall — Spatial learning · 8 min read. Studies find map-like signals while people navigate learned relationships, including bird features and odour mixtures. Those findings suggest a useful analogy for recall, with limits that matter.
• Engineering Memory Scenes: The Method, the Evidence, and the Limits — Practice & method · 11 min read. What controlled memory training actually improved, ten practical prompts for a route, and a six-week practice plan to test for yourself.
• Your First Palace Is a Route, Not a Room — Spatial learning · 7 min read. Choose a place, fix a short path through distinct landmarks, and practise finding each stop before you attach facts. The route gives your images an order you can revisit.
• The Encoding Grammar: Why Most Memory Images Die in Four Days — Practice & method · 6 min read. The advice everyone gets is to make the image vivid, bizarre and exaggerated. Two of those three are close to worthless, and the property that actually does the work is almost never mentioned.
• The Walks: Scheduling Retrieval So the Palace Does Not Quietly Rot — Practice & method · 7 min read. A palace you built and never walked again is a palace you will lose, and you will lose it without noticing, because the images stay visible long after the route stops working. Here is the schedule, why each interval is there, and the six ways it fails.
• Route Knowledge, Survey Knowledge, and Why a Satnav Teaches You Nothing — Spatial learning · 7 min read. You can drive a city for a year with a phone on the dashboard and still not know it. The reason is not laziness — it is that following a route and building a map are different operations, and only one of them leaves anything behind. The same split runs through everything you study.
• Palaces for Things With No Picture: Code, Proofs and Systems — Practice & method · 7 min read. Everyone can picture an elephant. Nobody can picture amortised complexity. The method still works on material like this, but only if you stop trying to illustrate the idea and start doing something much more mechanical to it.
• 1943: The Year a Neuron Became Arithmetic — AI history · 7 min read. Two men, one a neurophysiologist and one a homeless teenage logician, wrote a paper claiming that a nerve cell could be described completely by a sum and a threshold. They were wrong about the biology and right about something much larger.
• The Perceptron: A Machine That Learned, and the Line It Could Not Draw — AI history · 7 min read. In 1958 a psychologist built a machine that adjusted its own wiring, and a newspaper reported it would soon be conscious. Eleven years later a book proved a real limitation. The story everyone tells about what happened next is mostly wrong.
• Two Winters: How a Field Talks Itself Into a Funding Collapse — AI history · 7 min read. Twice, artificial intelligence research lost most of its money in a short space of time. Neither collapse was caused by the technology failing. Both were caused by the gap between what was promised and what arrived, and the pattern is legible enough to be worth knowing.
• Who Is to Blame? Backpropagation and the Fifteen-Year Gap — Neural networks · 7 min read. The problem that stalled neural networks had an answer published in 1970, in a Finnish master's thesis, about rounding errors. It was rediscovered at least three times before anyone noticed what it was for.
• Why 2012 and Not 1992: The Breakthrough That Was Not an Idea — Neural networks · 6 min read. In one year an error rate that had been creeping down by a point at a time fell by ten. Nothing conceptual had been invented. The architecture was from 1980, the training method from 1986 — what arrived was a database and a games console component.
• Attention Is a Memory Machine, and That Is Why This Series Meets the Other One — Neural networks · 7 min read. Two fields spent decades on what they thought were different problems. Both arrived at the same answer: storage was never the hard part. Everything interesting is in how you get back to what you already have.