# How does the Mind store Information?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06718 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06718/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Psychology of Falsehood: A Human-Centric Survey of Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15896/) (2025)
- [Provable Hierarchical Lifelong Learning with a Sketch-based Modular Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10919/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How we store information in our mind has been a major intriguing open question. We approach this question not from a physiological standpoint as to how information is physically stored in the brain, but from a conceptual and algorithm standpoint as to the right data structures to be used to organize and index information. Here we propose a memory architecture directly based on the recursive sketching ideas from the paper "Recursive Sketches for Modular Deep Networks", ICML 2019 (arXiv:1905.12730), to store information in memory as concise sketches. We also give a high level, informal exposition of the recursive sketching idea from the paper that makes use of subspace embeddings to capture deep network computations into a concise sketch. These sketches form an implicit knowledge graph that can be used to find related information via sketches from the past while processing an event.