Conversation

Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
I like this question, and I’ll try to answer it! I have always been pretty driven to reread my favorite passages from books, so I think the initial idea was that it would be nice to be able to revisit them in my head whenever I wanted.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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Replying to @diviacaroline and @BenGoldhaber
Thank you for sharing! I hope you don’t mind my asking—what drives you to memorize prose like that?? I often wonder this when talking to people who use SRS memorize prose, and it looks like you don’t quite say here (other than that you wanted to try SRS).
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
I would also say that memorizing them was really aesthetically pleasing, and that’s worth quite a bit to me too. Also, the exercise made it increasingly clear to me that the passages I was most drawn to were ones that evoked something I couldn’t quite understand.
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
And this is a little hand-wavey, but memorizing them seemed to help help to free up working memory (bc I was using longterm memory instead I assume?), so I had more of my brain available to process them when I read them or just thought about them.
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
That, and I think memorizing anything encourages my brain to wring meaning out of it. So I think I ended up understanding my mind better and integrating some stuff that would have been just beyond my reach otherwise by memorizing the quotations.
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