Interesting, perhaps our views differ mostly in how much benefit we believe we could get from a good memory. Some of my reflections:

• When I have managed to join previously disconnected concepts during my research, it's been productive. This suggests to me that a better memory could help me connect many more ideas and hence improve my productivity. The N^2 search over all pairwise concepts is really difficult to execute with off-board memory.

• When I write papers or blog posts, I spend most of the time chasing down studies/essays/articles that I remember the gist of, but not the title, author, or journal. This suggests a better memory could significantly.speed up my writing.

• Losing memories of how successful some productivity strategy was seems particularly harmful, as I could otherwise have updated from these valuable data points.