[bowenjin]

In my experience short term and long term memory recall speed and accuracy are strongly correlated. It's unlikely someone will be able to swiftly traverse a large long term memory graph, in a manner that would allow you to derive deep insights not just recalling a single piece of information, but have a poor short term memory.

However I do believe long term memory is more robust so if you're in a mentally compromised state, such as having a headache, it will be less affected. So if you have to work through a hard problem on a deadline but have a headache, you can rely on heuristics stored in long term memory rather than deriving everything in short term memory.

[nwienert]

Correlated but at what level of the bell curve? I think they are correlated but vary a lot within similar bands, to the point where the broad correlation is actually not interesting and the within-band correlation is much more so.

Adding on, there's a definite weird trade off going on between memory and creativity that I think is very under-appreciated. I think memory acts as a bind on creativity, and it's really easy to make this intuitive with any number of examples whether it be youth or marijuana/psychedelics. When you reduce your ability to access memory you seem to gain an ability to explore new spaces. Likewise the more you learn and build structures in your brain around concepts, the harder it is to accept and process novelties. Feels like there's some similar trade offs going on as with this deep vs fast thinking.