Learning is a continuous exercise of memorization and imagination; a failure in these two aspects can hinder your learning. And it seems very easy to forget things—there is that saying: “You must forget to learn.” This is actually true since memory is like infinite graphs interconnected. Strengthening one point strengthens the entire set of learning and experience.
A pointer is a programming technique where instead of pointing to a variable itself, you point to a memory space where that variable is located.
In simplified terms, we can abstract this programming technique to the human mind. Instead of having the content of the memory itself, we can just know the reference to where it is, and with this, you can use computer programs to create notes and quickly access such content.
In a way, we already do this in our daily lives; technology has made it much easier for this to be possible. I remembered this small insight after recently managing to retrieve information from three years ago in just a few seconds. I could only remember a vague context, and thanks to a search, I was able to recover the information I keep on a private Discord server.
You can use any tool: Obsidian, Notion, notepad, Discord server. And there are various note-taking techniques, such as Zettelkasten.
I have tried several tools, but what works best for me is creating channels on a private Discord server and noting down what I need, pinning the most important content, and tagging some notes so that I can quickly search and get a result.
For example:
The example from three years ago that I searched for was college content about data structures. I wanted to find a C implementation of a tree. The search was extremely simple: PUC.
PUC? Yes, it was the name of the university I attended, and the implementation I needed was in a booklet that contained the university’s name. How simple is that?
An important caveat: It is not very good to trust everything to “pointers”, as there is information you need to have in your memory. Memorize everything that is important and leave the rest to the machines.