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Never Forget Anything Ever Again with iFlash
By Grey | November 8, 2008
Every six months or so, one of my flatmates moves out and we need to find a replacement. At the end of the interview process we ask them to write their contact details on a pad of paper.
Every time, they don’t know their phone number.
“I just got a new phone,” they say. “I haven’t learned the number yet.”
But they lie. How do I know? I used that same excuse when I moved into the flat and was asked for my number. Truth was, I just plain didn’t remember, but felt stupid saying so.
The number of devices out there, leaping at a chance to hold important pieces of information is staggering. It’s so easy to let them be our outboard brain. Were it not for teachers and their tests, I’m sure the kids-these-days would find the idea of using their brain to remember things archaic.
I don’t think this lack of memory is necessarily a bad thing. It’s no worse than the deterioration of mental arithmetic since the invention of the abacus.
However, there are times that you may want to remember things.
If you want to keep your memory up-to-date, then Iflash is a great program to help you do so. It’s a flash card database, with one great advantage: it asks the flash cards you have the most difficultly with the most often. If I have five minutes to kill while waiting for a client I’ll fire up Iflash to do something useful with the time.
I use it to remember things like my wife’s phone number. While I have her number on speed dial, it’s easy to imagine an emergency where I don’t have my cell phone and need to contact her. It’s also handy for bank account numbers and passwords (I do, however, keep my database of flash cards encrypted, so that I can store sensitive information without worrying).
While you can make many different databases and categories, I prefer to leave the flash cards unsorted in one massive pile called ‘The Knowledge’ (after the arduous geography test that London cabbies must pass). This way, anything that I ever need to remember stays in there forever. It also makes the daily testing more interesting. Iflash asks ‘What’s the 92nd element?’, ‘Who assassinated William McKinley’, and ‘what does lexiphanes mean’ rather than just question after question on spanish verbs.
Even though a world where google is a verb makes looking up information so easy, just remembering something makes life a bit smoother. Eventually though, memory will be a kind of arcane art form — a calligraphy of the mind. But until that day, give Iflash a try.
[Click here to download iFlash]
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Header photograph by sanchom
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