Memory on Ivan: Thinking

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 23:37:51 -0700

What Are All Your Photos For? For many, it’s for posting on social media. For others it’s to look back and be reminded of and remember old memories (especially as we get older). They are also, for some, keepsakes to share with children.

/little-memory #reflection #parenting #memory

Day One wants you to chat with AI

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:17:56 -0700

Aleem Shaun (via) has been a longtime Day One journaler.

I’ve used Day One for more than a decade. It was an excellent journalling app. Private, minimal, easy to use, with excellent features such as geolocation, weather, ‘On this Day’, and book printing. Features that got out of the way and either worked quietly in the background or appeared only when you summoned them. That’s changed.

He’s been getting frustrated with Day One forcing the AI chat feature down his throat without a way to remove it. As he looks for alternatives:

The features I will most miss are On This Day and book printing. I can replicate On This Day with shortcuts and widgets. I’ve also been using Flohgro’s excellent On This Day Rewind App. Book printing, which I use to curate personal memories for my kids, will be a bigger pain point and harder to replace. My research hasn’t turned up much. I’ve looked at Blurb, Momento and others. None fully replicate what Day One does natively.

Interesting to hear the thing Aleem would miss from Day One, a big app with tons of features, is the “on this day” feature, which is the whole reason I built my app Little Memory, a simpler Day One alternative. My app doesn’t have book printing, though.

/little-memory #reflection #nerdtower #ai #design #memory

Book of Good Times

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:14:19 -0700

The Book of Good Times is a journal you write in to help teach the book how to become a human being. What a clever way to help you think/create and view the world!

/little-memory #reflection #memory

Photo memories for self-growth and reflection

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 21:55:51 -0700

Writing one sentence every day is a simple and easy way to journal and help you remember the little things in your life. What can be even more powerful is when you also save a photo memory.

As cliché as it sounds: a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Save a photo memory of yourself every day

To be able to have photo memories, you need to first create them and save them. One of the simplest things you can do is take a photo of yourself every day. This technique was made most famous by Noah Kalina’s project: Everyday.

It takes so little time to capture photo memories with your phone, and it’s simple to save them right from Little Memory.

Look back and reflect on old photo memories

When looking back, you get the chance to reflect on what’s changed or hasn’t changed since you saved the photo memory. Your photo now has new meaning, and that meaning may even change a year later when you revisit it again. What’s amazing about this is that even though the photo memory never changed, you’ve changed–and your perspective has changed based on experiences in your life since then.

You’re different: you’ve grown.

Nostalgia: the carousel circles back

When looking back at old memories, the nostalgia that you experience is a mixed bag. On the one hand, you feel a sense of excitement as you rediscover a part of your past: a moment that was a part of your life where you feel connected between the you of today and the you of a past life. On the other hand, you feel the pang of longing for a past where you feel you were more young and innocent.

In my opinion, this is a meaningful experience. When I think of someone important that I’ve lost, the pain I feel is necessary because otherwise the relationship I had would have meant nothing: it hurts because it means something to me, and that’s worthwhile. Similarly, when you reflect on old photo memories, you may feel the pain of nostalgia come upon you. This bittersweet experience adds color to these memories, and it means that you’re given the opportunity to reflect on your growth since that time.

Someday, today will be another memory for you to reflect back on.

/little-memory #nerdtower #reflection #memory

Thanks: Uncommon in Common

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 12:07:38 -0700

Thanks to little memory user Angelica for some love in the latest Uncommon in Common dispatch where they asked the community, “Do you have a favorite way to peruse the past?”:

One of my favorite ways to peruse the past is through an app called the little memory. The little memory is a place for recording short daily memories. The app prompts you to “tell your future self” about a little joke or time spent with friends in less than 300 characters, and when you finish, a notification slides down: “one more memory, one more future anniversary.” As you compile memories, you’ll begin to see past memories appear “exactly one month ago” or “exactly 6 months ago.” What was mundane at the time is now a milestone, a special glimpse into the past. I often can’t believe the passage of time, thinking, “was that only 3 months ago?” or “wow, it’s already been a year?” In any case, I always feel a little thrill to see what I wrote in the past contained in a mini, daily time capsule.

/little-memory #nerdtower #reflection #memory

The safest memories are the memories which are in the brains of people who cannot remember

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:54:00 -0700

What is a memory? Is it a physical thing, maybe an object, or a collection of brain cells floating in that space between your ears? Or is it maybe something tied to the thing you call your consciousness?

Estella Tse pointed me to the RadioLab podcast Memory and Forgetting. In the first segment of the hour-long podcast, they interview several scientists who’ve spent quite a bit of time wrapping their heads around what happens in your head when you remember (and forget) things.

Source: flickr

In the 60’s, scientists discovered a drug that could prevent goldfish from forming new memories. That is, when the goldfish were in a tank with a few squirts of this drug, they wouldn’t remember what happened while in the tank.

They learn stuff except when they have this drug in their system, in which case they’ll learn stuff and forget it immediately. And the implications of this were huge! According to science writer Jonah Lehrer. Now for the first time, scientists could say that a memory… well, it’s a thing.

And not only do we know that a memory has a physical manifestation, but we also know that the traces that memory leaves in your brain is made largely of proteins. “Proteins are the building blocks of memory,” said Lehrer. And what the drug was doing was preventing new proteins from being formed.

Ok, so they go on with Joe LeDoux, who’s doing more memory tests on rats:

play a beep sound
send an electric shock to the rat
play the beep sound again
the rat tenses up because it remembers the shock

But then they play around with the drug:

inject amnesia drug into rat
play a beep sound
send an electric shock to the rat
wait for drug to wear off
play a beep sound
the rat doesn’t tense up because it has no memory of the shock

Great. That confirms what we already know, and the drug is preventing the formation of new memories.

But then, in 2000, Karim Nader from LeDoux’s lab decided to try messing around with memory during the retrieval of the memory:

play a beep sound
send an electric shock to the rat
wait 60 days
play the beep sound again
the rat tenses up because it remembers the shock, BUT while that’s happening, inject the drug into the rat
wait for the next day
play a beep sound
the rat doesn’t tense up anymore; it’s forgotten the shock and broken the association between the beep and the shock!

That’s…that’s crazy, right? This was some Eternal Sunshine kinda stuff. Nader was able to actually remove a memory from the rat’s mind.

Source: flickr

Well, but what else does that mean then?

The act of remembering, on a literal level, it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it.

This is why the drug works for making the rat forget. Every time you dig into your past to retrieve a memory, you’re not actually going into some hard-drive full of memories and grabbing it from a folder. It’s a lot more complicated than that. What’s actually happening is that you’re retracing neural pathways and rebuilding a memory.

You think you’re remembering something that took place 30 years ago. Actually what you’re remembering is that memory reinterpreted in light of today, in light of now.

This makes a lot of sense, especially now that we know how tied together memory and creativity are. Memory, creativity, imagination: they’re all tied together in the mind, and they all share similar functions in our brains.

I think it also makes sense to write things down each day. When I write something down in a memory journal, I’m capturing that memory with how I’m creating it in my mind at that moment. In the future, I may look back at what I wrote to see that memory with fresh eyes.

And because each time you remember something, you’re creating a new memory, and that new memory that you create is actually an imperfect version of the original memory.

And, thus:

The safest memories are the memories which are in the brains of people who cannot remember.

/little-memory #nerdtower #memory

Mind the Memory Gap: How Appreciation Helps You Remember

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 15:33:28 +0700

I recently finished reading the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. A longtime Little Memory user and the force behind Tangents & Distractions, Dan Walsh, was so incredibly gracious to send me a copy. Thanks, Dan.

Memory and Creativity

We don’t usually associate memory and creativity together; they are likely even considered to be opposites to most people. What kind of creative endeavor is it to memorize the multiplication table? Or that long list of Kaplan SAT words? <shudder!>

“In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” say Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas.”

The way I think about it is that memory and creativity are both incarnations of the brain’s association machine. Essentially, both are just making connections in your mind.

Creative Computers

This got me to thinking: computers are really good at remembering things. Computers have yet, however, been able to make much headway into the realm of creativity. Sure, we have fancy Avatar computer graphics and huge datacenters filled with pirated movies, but where are the computers that make art?

What if computers could be creative too? What if computers could tell us jokes? What if we could offload creative tasks to computers like IBM’s Watson?

If creativity stems from the same root of the mind’s association machine, it may not be so far-fetched to imagine a computer building associations with its vastly superior memorization prowess. Amazon and Netflix currently have recommendation engines, and Google already has quite the association builder. What would it look like if we redirected that technology to create new art?

Memory and Mindfulness

This has to be my favorite quote from the entire book:

What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me.

This is what Little Memory has been about since day one: giving you an easy way to remember to think about your day. I understood why Dan suggested this book to me.

When people can’t remember others’ names, really, it’s just a matter of not caring about who the person is who you just met was. Do you really think if the guy or gal of your dreams were to tell you their name that you’d actually forget it?

The same can be said for all the other little things that you have to end up doing every day of your life. Doesn’t it seem like some days, you suddenly realize that time has gone by and you can’t remember what the heck you did with all the time? Maybe you just weren’t paying attention. Maybe you were just living your fishbowl life, not minding the water, and just floated through your time instead of participating in it. What a waste!

One can even think that only the remembered life is meaningful because you wouldn’t have remembered it if it weren’t meaningful. Or, as Foer put it:

In trying to capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating.

Let’s remember to notice and appreciate all the little things in our lives. I don’t think computers will ever be able to do that for us.

Ivan

/little-memory #nerdtower #reflection #memory