5.6 KiB
[BST] Perfect Recall*
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3g79qf/bst_perfect_recall/
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Score: 2
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Created: 2015-08-08T02:17:08
Post:
With a catch: you can remember perfectly every detail of one ten minute stretch of time that you've experienced. Everything outside of that is subject to regular memory mechanics. You can at no point change what memory you can perfectly recall. There are no clues present in the ten minutes prior to you obtaining this ability that would allow you to regain it through replicating the lead-up to the event. I have two scenarios in mind:
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You are informed that you've gained this ability and must pick what stretch you'll remember immediately.
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You are informed that you've gained this ability and are allowed to save it such that you can apply it to a stretch of time in the future after you've experienced it.
How do you use this power?
Comments:
u/Gurkenglas [+10] (13 hours later)
We can pick up the Randi Prize with this, for one. ~24 fps * 600 s is ~15000 frames. I estimate 10 - 100 pages of text that a monitor setup can present per frame, making for ~1500 books of 100-1000 pages. Our marginal advantage is in accessing this information without the delay and bandwidth introduced by just accessing the smartphone we could instead.
u/DCarrier [+8] (an hour later)
For all intents and purposes, you gave me a video camera with ten seconds of film. It's not particularly useful.
Edit: Although I guess the fact that nobody else can see it can be useful. I use it to look at my private and public keys. Although I'd still need to type the private key somewhere to use it. I can't do math on that scale in my head.
u/Geminii27 [+6] (8 hours later)
...yes. It's kind of the equivalent of the 'superpower' of being handed a smartphone with an almost-dead battery. Which can't play games or run apps and is out of range of any signal.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+5] Concent of Saunt Edhar (9 hours later)
Technically it is video plus "smell-o-vision," taste, touch, etc...
Which raises the point that a hedonist would probably go on an experience binge with the risk of becoming an addict reliving the same memory over and over, for whatever extremely pleasurable indulgence you have in mind.
All said, I think that sadly, an "emotionalist" would find a better use for this ability than a rationalist, since perfect information recall doesn't amount to much in the free internet era.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+3] Mouse Army (11 hours later)
So get Heroin, nearly overdose, get Heroin-memory addicted without some of the bad sideeffects?
Though its debatable wether drug experiences fall under perfect memory.
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
Ten minutes! though I suppose if you really want to boil it down you could think of it as a portable video camera.
u/Geminii27 [+3] (8 hours later)
I'd note for the thread that being able to remember things is not the same as being able to understand them. Speedreading every scientific thesis paper for a particular area of science will not make you a scientist.
u/Lugnut1206 [+3] (a day later)
No, but you can mentally reread them at your leisure.
u/what_deleted_said [+1] (12 days later)
Which you can also do through google scholar.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
Congratulations, you've discovered the 1026^th least useful superpower.
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
[deleted]
u/notmy2ndopinion [+5] Concent of Saunt Edhar (9 hours later)
So basically you'd try to do the Lilu fifth element info binge using visual media only. Why not add in the matching text-to-speech audio component on ultra-fast-forward too? While we're at it, you get ten minutes of Braille info that provides an indexing function to help you figure out which part of your memory to "zip to" when you need it.
It's good to pick physics and mathematics since other types of knowledge are at higher risk for becoming out of date or just plain obsolete.
You should also eat your favorite foods, assuming that you can sneak them into the library.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
[deleted]
u/sparr [+1] (a day later)
Time to study the material. How long would it take you to memorize every equation and chart that you could look at in 10 minutes? Months? Years? Decades?
u/None [+3] (an hour later)
Is there a better way to do this that would save more time? Seems like if you're limited to library books you're not saving more than at most a couple years of time studying relatively general knowledge. Maybe get a bunch of thesis PDFs and scroll really fast?
u/Prezombie [+3] (9 hours later)
Well, it depends on how you define perfect recall. The human eye is actually pretty lousy, outside of a handful of degrees of arc at the very center of your vision, detail drops quickly, that's why you have to move your eyes across a page when reading.
If you got a few 144hz monitors, and made a simple program to flash a different image 144 times a second, you could theoretically compress a textbook into "human readable" format into a second, but that won't be much good if you can only remember a fraction of each page.
Using a more reliable sensory input seems like it could be the way to go, setting up a system to compress data into tones or taps which actually get the entire signal to the brain, followed by learning the way to translate it all from noise to readable information.