I want a better memory.

Think about using Mnemosyne to drill the things you notice yourself forgetting, like the authors of papers containing interesting things, solutions to problems you've solved and so forth. This might be tricky since there may be too many problems and papers to feed them all into the spaced repetition system, and you only want to recall them randomly. A weird approach here might be to insert a random fraction of the stuff into spaced repetition, so that the maintenance cost doesn't grow to be prohibitive, but you still get some bonus for extra stuff at the forefront of memory. The SuperMemo guy has gone all-out with the spaced repetition approach to doing memory stuff, and seems pretty happy with it.

Try learning some mnemonic systems for fun. The Dominic system involves learning a list of 100 memorable people and using them as a peg system for storing lists of stuff. Memory Palaces are the classic technique, from way back antiquity, which uses people's ability to visualize familiar environments to store items to memorize.

The mnemonic systems seem kinda useless since they're very much geared towards straight up memorization rather than understanding things, but they could still serve as a mental exercise and develop habits that make you remember useful stuff better.

The basic advice to students on mnemonics is to come up with ridiculous and unusual imagery linked to the surface form of whatever you're trying to memorize, which has always sounded like adding a bunch of noise and junk to your head to me. An Abstract Art of Memory is an article that tries to apply a mnemonic system to imagery that's actually conceptually relevant to the subject.

I used to discredit all rote memorization as annoying activity that just takes time from actually getting to understand things, but so far my record for actually understanding anything that requires sizable effortful study hasn't been too good, and I suffer from pretty much all of the problems you listed. I've started to think that a habit for memorizing stuff, even if some of it is objectively pretty useless trivia, might have a general beneficent effect on being able to learn and recall important things effectively.

I hypothesize that a lot of the problems here are less "forgetting" than "not remembering"-- you find yourself needing information that was never committed to long-term storage in the first place, perhaps because it was not tagged as important the first time you were exposed to it.

This is based on my own experience of being "bad with names": I fixed the problem simply by training myself to think that people's names are important to me, and to pay more attention when I hear a new one (mentally repeating it to myself, and then using it in conversation as soon as possible). I am now not particularly great with names, but good enough not to be embarrassing, and sometimes even to impress people.

So maybe you would get good results by working on your attention as well as your memory? For me, this is part of the purpose of the writing-things-down habit; I only occasionally refer to my notes because I remember things so much better once I've made the effort to write them down, or even just identified them as something I should write down.

It sounds like you may benefit from a nootropic stack. Start with Piracetam/Choline/Sulbutiamine. Of course, if you aren't getting enough aerobic exercise, then fixing that will have a larger marginal benefit in terms of memory than any stack I know of.

Memory Palaces could be something you want to look into. The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to have a fantastic description, but I think wikiHow has a decent set of instructions, and I'm sure there are many more good places online.

I find this is frequently a big problem. Out of all the shortcomings I have, "not remembering" is probably the most disastrous for me.

For most of my life, I had assumed that this was something inherent about me. This led me to develop lots of tricks not for remembering, but for being good at not having to remember. I have thousands of text files stored on my computer's hard drive that I can search. When I started doing this, I'd never be able to find what I was after because I couldn't even recall a single keyword that would identify the right file for me. But over time I've gotten better at choosing smart ways of phrasing my notes, such that they're easier to search. Similarly for programming -- I carefully document even fairly trivial programs and try to keep a very strict folder hierarchy so that I'll be able to find what I need when I need. Sometimes I find useful programs that I can't even remember writing.

I now think that I was at least partially wrong in assuming that my memory cannot be fixed. I am looking forward to reading advice on this topic.

Do you have other symptoms of ADD? Scattered memory goes hand in hand with it (along with scattered everything else).

My memory has gotten better since I started treatment.

Quick and dirty test: do stimulants calm you down? If so, you might be an ADDer.

One fun technique is silly mnemonics. It requires a bit of creativity, but, for example, take the defining expression for entropy : Entropy (S) = boltzmann's constant (k) times the sum of p*log(p), where each p is the probability of a microstate. If I wanted to memorize this using a mnemonic, I might make up a story about it. Boltzmann is a wizard building a wizard tower, and the wizard tower is made out of logs. He makes these logs out of a huge pile of peas he is standing beside, and also makes from these peas the pea-green paint that he will paint his tower with. The tower is called "the tower of entropy," and it will have a big S on the top. Boltzmann floats the peas past him, and some of them turn into logs and some of them turn into paint, and then he paints each log and adds it to the tower.

So now I'll remember the formula for entropy.

Great ideas in this topic.

However, mnemonics are suggested over and again. I'm not very fond of mnemonics nor creating relationships between fictive objects (method of loci) unrelated to what you are trying to remember in order to support what you are trying to remember in the first place.

Instead, I would be very interested in hearing some strategies of how to reinforce the relationships within the actual topic being learned. By perhaps when trying to devote something to memory, consciously performing a mental routine. For example taking a mental photograph of yourself in front of your car with the appropriate background in order to remember where you parked your car. Or visualizing yourself dialing a phone number you want to remember. Mindmapping a new term with similar words as well as antonyms. Even better, pseudocode for putting something to memory.

What methods work for you?

I would just like to chime in that you're not alone. My memory problems are horrendous, and I've had too much akrasia trouble to consistently do things like Mnemosyne or dual n-back.

As for memory techniques, I dislike mnemonics and my brain does not seem to be the type that can visualize things easily.

I also find my memory is nowhere near adequate to store all the information I need, but I've adopted the strategy of explicitly outsourcing that function to the machines; like you, I write down to-do and how-to notes etc (in text files), but things that are public knowledge like foreign language words I just rely on running a Google search whenever I need the information (or for more technical information that's described in a paper, I download the PDF, rename it to something more descriptive and put it in a documents folder). I don't bother trying to memorize things.

This is certainly slower than being able to recall stuff from on-board storage, but in practice I don't find it makes enough difference to be a major productivity bottleneck. I don't off the top of my head have a theory about why our experiences differ in that regard. I don't suppose you have any idea whether you have an unusually large working set?

I have these problems a lot, but it might not be relevant because it's a case of actual medical memory problems not just everyday forgetfulness.

If it will help anyone, I'd like to chip in with a memory/note-taking technique I am using at the moment. Mindmaps. I find it extremely powerful for very fast information retrieval, since it's inherently hierarchical. I do digital mindmaps, using Freeplane. I use it for storing key ideas from books, articles, workflows, step by step howTos, programming snippets, even for my own thoughts. You name it.

Only downside I can think of is that my memory no longer has any incentive to retain the information I come across so you could say my memory only gets worse, using this technique. Does anyone know of any studies on long term effects on memory when storing information externally, rather than forcing your brain to do it itself?