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Science of Remembering

  • Apr. 29th, 2008 at 9:42 PM

The harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. Sense of achievement is exactly what we should most distrust. The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it.

How to become a genius: Clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.

Comments

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[info]echoeversky wrote:
Apr. 30th, 2008 05:48 am (UTC)
Yup.
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[info]princessgeek wrote:
Apr. 30th, 2008 02:54 pm (UTC)
I heard that there were programs to "remind" you of when to revisit something. I think that would be a killer experiment for my math classes. Put my lesson titles in there and then every day I would repeat what it said to.
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[info]the_elle_rag wrote:
Apr. 30th, 2008 03:55 pm (UTC)
distrust any sense of achievement and minimize stress? no problem there, beepboop.
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[info]valdelane wrote:
May. 2nd, 2008 04:36 am (UTC)
I recently bought SuperMemo. As much as I can tell after playing with it for a week--adding and remembering 65 facts and faces--I must say it seems promising. It's dirt simple to paste in the next thing you want to remember, and it automatically re-tests/re-minds you at a good point in the future based on how well you score each time. The rest of the interface is insanely complicated, but it doesn't seem necessary to deal with it at that level if you don't want to.
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[info]mcfnord wrote:
May. 2nd, 2008 04:58 am (UTC)
thanks for the testimonial! i'm considering it. i would like a windows mobile version ha. i feel good enough about the theory to consider implementing my own. i did something similar in high school, though the critical factor of optimal delay wasn't there, just rehersal based on performance. i hadn't considered pictures of people. i also want to memorize song lyrics. the model seems suited for memorizing a lot.
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