Modern notetaking tools give us the ability to remember anything, for essentially free. We’re never far away from a computer or phone, and taking notes digitally makes them searchable later. Of course we still forget to look at our notes, and or what keywords we filed them under. To keep important information top of mind, we can review notes with spaced repetition – reviewing flash cards at regular intervals – which improves memory by 82%. Pair this with active recall – testing if you can answer from scratch – which grants 45% better understanding. There’s also ‘memory palaces’ – imagining a familiar building and storing information in each room – a technique used by 9/10 contestants in the World Memory Championships.
Now we can remember anything, should we? Deciding to deliberately remember something is Kahneman’s System 2 (conscious brain) dictating to System 1 (unconscious brain) what’s important. Our conscious brain is what we think of as “us”, but 98% of our thinking happens unconsciously. System 2 is deliberate, analytical and unemotional. That doesn’t mean rational. What economists call ‘irrational’ behaviors or ‘biases’ are memes that helped us survive for 10,000 years. As per the Lindy Effect they’re likely to prevail 10,000 more. Not all goals are equally valid or useful. If you memorize 17,500 species of butterfly, it won’t do much for you. Memory champions are rarely millionaires. If your brain keeps forgetting something, or you’re procrastinating learning it, maybe that’s telling you something.
Name | Link | Type |
---|---|---|
Distributing learning over time: the spacing effect in children's acquisition and generalization of science concepts | Paper | |
Do We Need To Rescue Rationality? | Blog | |
Effects of Note-Taking Training on Reading Comprehension and Recall | Paper | |
Gary Klein's Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions | Blog | |
How Much Energy Does the Brain Use? | Reference | |
Improving Students’ Learning With
Effective Learning Techniques: Promising
Directions From Cognitive and
Educational Psychology | Paper | |
Kahneman Fast And Slow Thinking Explained | Blog | |
Lindy effect | Reference | |
Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval | Paper | |
Scientific methods to learn faster | Social | |
Taika Waititi's interesting writing "trick” | Social | |
The Label “Rational” Is Being Used Illogically | Blog | |
The method of loci as a mnemonic device to facilitate learning in endocrinology leads to improvement in student performance as measured by assessments | Paper | |
Using elaborative interrogation to facilitate acquisition of factual information in cooperative learning settings: One good strategy deserves another | Paper |