The problem wasn't shyness but the same intolerance for inefficient expenditure of mental resources that led to the invention of SuperMemo in the first place. By the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.
Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change.
These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves through automated steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it incremental reading, and it has come to dominate his intellectual life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that he hasn't gotten to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the system, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropriate time.
The appropriate time, that is, for him. Having turned over his mental life to a computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and requests. Naturally, this can be annoying to people whose messages tend to sift to the bottom. "After four months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to some sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental reading process."
For Wozniak, these misfires were less a product of scrambling than of an inevitable clash of goals. A person who understands the exact relationship between learning and time is forced to measure out his hours with a certain care. SuperMemo was like a genie that granted Wozniak a wish: unprecedented power to remember. But the value of what he remembered depended crucially on what he studied, and what he studied depended on his goals, and the selection of his goals rested upon the efficient acquisition of knowledge, in a regressive function that propelled him relentlessly along the path he had chosen. The guarantee that he would not forget what he learned was both a gift and a demand, requiring him to sacrifice every extraneous thing.
From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can sometimes look selfish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has stunted the development of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himself," says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is perhaps a bit unfair. SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of which were coded by licensees: SuperMemo for Windows, for Palm devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet version. It's true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. Still, it can hardly be described as the world's most difficult program. After all, photographers can learn to produce the most arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't more people be able to master SuperMemo?
"It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may be getting closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the struggle to optimize intelligence, a conflict that transcends design and touches on some curious facts about human nature. We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.
