The way Einstein's brain worked is how AI should retrieve information

The way Einstein’s brain worked is exactly how AI should retrieve information. It doesn’t. Yet.

Einstein probably couldn’t tell you what he had for breakfast. And that’s exactly why he changed the world. Genius was never about storing more. It was about retrieving better.

Einstein didn’t carry the entirety of physics in his working memory. He (or his brain) knew which synapse to fire, which pathway to follow, which sub-index to consult to get to the right neighbourhood of thought - fast.

The retrieval was short by design. It was a relay race between anchor points, not a full scan of everything he’d ever learned.
Fire. Follow. Verify. Done.

But here’s what made Einstein “Einstein” specifically - it’s not just efficient retrieval, but dense pathways. More passes through the same anchor points. Richer associations built over a lifetime of obsessive thinking. The index didn’t grow. The connections between points did.

He didn’t need to remember more. He needed to have been through the same territory enough times that navigation became instinct.

Now look at how AI retrieves information without a memory structure.
It scours. Everything. A swarm devouring the entire codebase, the entire context - searching for what you need by searching for everything first.

It’s like asking Einstein a question and watching him re-read every physics textbook before answering.

SR-SI changes this.

• Check the index
• Find the likely pathway
• Follow it
• Verify
• If wrong, back to the index, repeat

And every pass through that index makes the next retrieval richer. The index stays small, but the connections deepen.

That’s not a limitation of the methodology, that’s the methodology maturing.

Genius was never what you stored, it was always knowing where to look, and having been there enough times to find it without thinking.

If you want the deeper mechanics of context continuity and self-orienting workflows, I’ve written a full paper on the broader “AI Memory Prosthesis” idea and how to prevent coherence drift across long-running projects.