Cognition
How human memory retrieval works, from forty years of ACT-R and Soar, and what it takes to build it as infrastructure.
Activation
Your brain has a retrieval algorithm. Psychologists spent forty years reverse-engineering it. Your search bar has about a third of it, and nobody seems to have noticed.
Forgetting Is a Forecast
Every time your memory lets something go, it is placing a bet about tomorrow - using odds it has been quietly collecting your entire life.
What Brings a Memory Back
History decides how deep a memory has sunk. Whatever is already in your head right now decides what gets pulled back up, and it has an odd side effect: the more you know about something, the harder each fact about it is to reach.
The Rival Theory
There is a second serious theory of how thinking works, and it disagrees with the first one almost everywhere. The places they independently agreed amount to a set of guardrails for machine memory.
Activation in Practice
Every dial in the machine, what it actually does, and what measuring it changed.