Why can’t I remember? Model may show how recall can fail

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Physicists can create serious mathematical models of stuff that is very far from physics-stuff like biology or the human brain. These models are hilarious, but I'm still a sucker for them because of the hope they provide: maybe a simple mathematical model can explain the sexual choices of the disinterested panda? (And, yes, I know there is an XKCD about this very topic). So a bunch of physicists who claimed to have found a fundamental law of memory recall was catnip to me.

To get an idea of how interesting their work is, it helps to understand the unwritten rules of "simple models for biology." First, the model should be general enough that the predictions are vague and unsatisfying. Second, if you must compare with experimental data, do it on a logarithmic scale so that huge differences between theory and experiment at least look tiny. Third, if possible, make the mathematical model so abstract that it loses all connection to the actual biology.

By breaking all of these rules, a group of physicists has come up with a model for recall that seems to work. The model is based on a concrete idea of how recall works, and, with pretty much no fine-tuning whatsoever, it provides a pretty good prediction for how well people will recall items from a list.

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