7 ms·

Simple Ways to Be Better at Remembering

280 points by aaossa 9y ago

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>Forget cramming. It didn’t work in college, it doesn’t work now. Spaced repetition might be the best way. // Cramming worked for me, it's just short-term, which can be a problem depending on your goals.
- axiom92 9y ago
  IMO it vastly depends on the college.
- mrspeaker 9y ago
  Ha, I was thinking the same... reading "forget cramming, it didn't work in college" just brought back very vivid and terrifying memories of my first year statistics course, where I "learned" the entire course contents in a night. Personally I've tried spaced repetition so many times and things don't stick for me... it just feels like repeated cramming: I'm great while I'm doing the Anki, but next session it's back to square one.
  - fossuser 9y ago
    Have you ever learned how to play an instrument? That’s a space where the effectiveness of spaced repition is obvious. It’s like there’s a maximum amount you can improve between sleep cycles.
    - trendia 9y ago
      One of the amazing results of Ericsson's study of performance musicians was that those who napped during the day had a huge imprvement over those who didn't.
    - hollander 9y ago
      This is like learning to juggle. You only learn by not doing it too much. Just five to ten minutes a day, no more, and then do that every day.
keiferski 9y ago
No mention of Anki? I use it every day for basically everything (foreign languages, life memories, trivia, world capitals, etc.) and it's unquestionably changed my life.
- kayoone 9y ago
  me too, it's amazing how such a simple tool can make you really take advantage of your minds potential. Spaced repetition is an invaluable learning tool.
- skybrian 9y ago
  They did talk about spaced repetition, which Anki implements.
- samstave 9y ago
  Eli5 anki Accumulate knowledge in intervals?
  - detaro 9y ago
    An awesome app for flash cards/spaced repetition. https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    A more complete answer. It's a useful app for spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a way of scheduling your practice/study sessions that aims for optimal recall. We all have a forgetting curve. You read 100 facts today and tomorrow you will only remember 80. In a week you may still remember 50. At the end of the year you'll be doing good to remember 20. (this assumes no further reviews) SRS (with Anki or not) schedules reviews to try to help you remember. You study 100 facts today. Tomorrow you review them all (this is actually a bit much for someone just starting, but go with it). You get 50 correct, you'll see them again in 2 days. You get 50 wrong, you'll see them again the next day. Eventually, everything you've studied for a long time will either be scheduled for reviews way far out in the future, or you'll be reviewing it frequently (which often means the card is too hard or you otherwise just aren't getting it). You edit the card to break it down ("Columbus sailed on the Pinta, Santa Maria, and Niña in 1492 from Spain.", that's at least 6 facts: name, ships, year, origin). This is better than the alternative, and the way many of us (or at least my classmates and I) did it in school. We made flashcards and just reviewed all of them over and over again. It was a long slog to get through, and often we'd just skip it rather than deal with it. Or the ones at the bottom of the stack would never get reviewed properly. SRS works in much the same way, but you don't review the full deck each day or even each week. If you learn a fact really well, you won't see it again for months. If you still know it then, you won't see it again until the next year. So the only things you study regularly are new things, or things that aren't (for some reason) sticking. Anki is a useful (and free) application that will sync across your computers and devices (I make cards on my laptop, but review them on my phone) that implements SRS. You can, through plugins, do a lot of neat things like autogenerate math problems so you aren't practicing the same ones over and over (and risk just memorizing them rather than learning the techniques), or have it render LaTeX to the card. It'll show images, play audio, and more.
primordialsoup 9y ago
I would love to increase my focus. Even if I force myself to sit tight, often times I catch myself reading paragraphs after paragraphs all the while thinking about something else. Meditation can help? What else?
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  Reportedly, dual n-back. I cannot confirm this, however. My focus improved by taking up distance running, but that's not an activity for everyone. To me, it's meditative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back
  - andai 9y ago
    There was a study that found that after intense physical exercise, concentration was better in ADHDers and worse in non-ADHDers. Regardless, regular exercise is the single best thing you can do for both your mental health and your mood. I have heard a lot of ADHD people anecdotally benefiting from Dual N-Back and have started using it recently myself. It really feels like a workout!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- KVFinn 9y ago
  I focus better in the hours after exercise, and better generally while maintaining a regular exercise routine. Any kind of exercise helps some but I find cardio is most impactful in this particular area. It doesn't have to be intense but I do need to work up a good sweat. Long low-intensity works too but it's not too often I can take a very long walk/hike.
- visarga 9y ago
  > I catch myself reading paragraphs after paragraphs all the while thinking about something else. Take notes as you read? Taking notes is great because you're doing both information input and output, which helps a lot in memorization and assimilation (information fits with previous information).
dorfsmay 9y ago
Read blogs from Piotr Wozniak, he did a lot of research on the subject and created supermemo. https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm
1wd 9y ago
I recently read [1]: "There are three ways in which information may be learned or committed to memory: by rote, assimilation, or use of a mnemonic device. By Rote. Material to be learned is repeated [...] It seems to be the least efficient way of remembering. By Assimilation. Information is learned by assimilation when the structure or substance of the information fits into some memory schema already possessed by the learner. The new information is assimilated to or linked to the existing schema and can be retrieved readily by first accessing the existing schema and then reconstructing the new information. Assimilation involves learning by comprehension and is, therefore, a desirable method, but it can only be used to learn information that is somehow related to our previous experience. By Using A Mnemonic Device. A mnemonic device is any means of organizing or encoding information for the purpose of making it easier to remember. [...] Any form of processing information in this manner is a more effective aid to retention than rote repetition. " Is this information (from 1980) outdated? Is "spaced repetition" a newer idea? Is it more effective than assimilation or mnemonic device? [1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art6.html https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  SRS is not really an alternate, SRS is a scheduling of study. You still use your mnemonic devices and attempt assimilation, or even memorize by rote. But SRS spaces out the practice of these things to try to attain optimal recall. If you are using rote, like studying a language's vocabulary, you may have 1000 vocabulary cards that you study over a few weeks or months. SRS will have you practice reviews based on your ability to answer the cards. If I see "cabeza" and think "cabbage", clearly I don't know the word and I mark it as bad. I'll review it the next day. If I get it correct ("head") then the next review will be, approximately, double the time between the previous two reviews (rough progression then of 1 day, 2 days, 4 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, ...). If I'm trying to study by assimilation (true comprehension), the cards may be more complex or harder. Translate a full sentence (from or to Spanish). Practice a math problem (some tools in Anki let these be generated automatically so you practice the techniques and don't just memorize some answers). It may even be a prompt rather than an explicit Q&A card. If I'm using a mnemonic device ("The Cab in New Mexico Is Land Cruiser" for the tarsal bones), I may have a card that has "tarsal bones" and on the back has the mnemonic. I may have the mnemonic and the question "T?". I may have the full list of the mnemonic and the bones on the card with parts covered over. It's still using a mnemonic, but, back to SRS, SRS just schedules my practice of it based on my ability to recall in the review session.
dub 9y ago
I highly recommend "Moonwalking with Einstein" to anyone curious about what our memories can do and how we can make better use of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein The author won the US Memory Championship after just a single year of learning and practicing mnemonic techniques.
- rgrau 9y ago
  I read that book recently and it triggered my interest in "the art of remembering". Then I moved to "how to develop a perfect memory"[1]. It gives practical tips for remembering lists, numbers, appointments, faces.... It works surprisingly well. The thing is that nowadays, we usually use technology to remember those kind of things. I think there's a huge difference in the types of contents that are "hackable" and the ones that have to be learnt by assimilation. I can remember 50 digits without any problem, but remembering subtle content from a book, how to use a new API,... it's much more difficult to find mnemonics for that in my experience. Anyway, I think it's great fun to "hack" yourself to be more efficient, and this, along with speed reading and lucid dreaming could have exponential effects. I'm on it. on both. We'll see. 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2691332-how-to-develop-a-perfect-memory https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2691332-how-to-develop-a...
j_s 9y ago
There were a couple parallel sub-discussions earlier this week, but no mention of spaced repetition: Training exercise boosts brain power, Johns Hopkins researchers say | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508714 (Oct 2017, 138 comments) >pdog: Do you know the best exercise for your brain? Actual exercise >JamesBarney: I hit dual n back pretty hard trying to improve my IQ https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis
aeto 9y ago
+1 for spaced repetition. I automated a schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days) based on the SuperMemo algorithm for stuff that I read that I want to remember. Currently exists as a browser extension: (Chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-mind/dejecgndbecimagkaefkfdaedaimamji https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-... (Firefox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/harvest-grow-your-mind https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/harvest-gr...
TheLilHipster 9y ago
There is actually some really good ted talks on this: * https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone... * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebJlcZMx3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebJlcZMx3c Make more connections to the things you need to remember. Make a tune out of the specifics or make a quick phonetic story out of it. Good stuff. I haven't been able to forget my ex's anniversary date because I remember it as "she's a 10/10" (oct 10).
susi22 9y ago
I'm a big fan of spaced repetition. From a mathematical standpoint it's also a very interesting question: You have your forgetting curve and which gives you the probability that you still remember the association. I think there is still some rooms for improvements around there. For instance, I'm not sure if the big plays in the area adjust the forgetting curve for each individual user after they have enough data points. Shameless plug: I actually just developed a new spaced repetition platform the last few years. I'm not official launched but it's online and works. If anybody is interested in taking part of the beta testing, email is in my profile.

280 points by aaossa 9y ago

>Forget cramming. It didn’t work in college, it doesn’t work now. Spaced repetition might be the best way. // Cramming worked for me, it's just short-term, which can be a problem depending on your goals.

axiom92 9y ago
IMO it vastly depends on the college.
mrspeaker 9y ago
Ha, I was thinking the same... reading "forget cramming, it didn't work in college" just brought back very vivid and terrifying memories of my first year statistics course, where I "learned" the entire course contents in a night. Personally I've tried spaced repetition so many times and things don't stick for me... it just feels like repeated cramming: I'm great while I'm doing the Anki, but next session it's back to square one.
- fossuser 9y ago
  Have you ever learned how to play an instrument? That’s a space where the effectiveness of spaced repition is obvious. It’s like there’s a maximum amount you can improve between sleep cycles.
  - trendia 9y ago
    One of the amazing results of Ericsson's study of performance musicians was that those who napped during the day had a huge imprvement over those who didn't.
  - hollander 9y ago
    This is like learning to juggle. You only learn by not doing it too much. Just five to ten minutes a day, no more, and then do that every day.

keiferski 9y ago

No mention of Anki? I use it every day for basically everything (foreign languages, life memories, trivia, world capitals, etc.) and it's unquestionably changed my life.

kayoone 9y ago
me too, it's amazing how such a simple tool can make you really take advantage of your minds potential. Spaced repetition is an invaluable learning tool.
skybrian 9y ago
They did talk about spaced repetition, which Anki implements.
samstave 9y ago
Eli5 anki Accumulate knowledge in intervals?
- detaro 9y ago
  An awesome app for flash cards/spaced repetition. https://apps.ankiweb.net/ https://apps.ankiweb.net/
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  A more complete answer. It's a useful app for spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a way of scheduling your practice/study sessions that aims for optimal recall. We all have a forgetting curve. You read 100 facts today and tomorrow you will only remember 80. In a week you may still remember 50. At the end of the year you'll be doing good to remember 20. (this assumes no further reviews) SRS (with Anki or not) schedules reviews to try to help you remember. You study 100 facts today. Tomorrow you review them all (this is actually a bit much for someone just starting, but go with it). You get 50 correct, you'll see them again in 2 days. You get 50 wrong, you'll see them again the next day. Eventually, everything you've studied for a long time will either be scheduled for reviews way far out in the future, or you'll be reviewing it frequently (which often means the card is too hard or you otherwise just aren't getting it). You edit the card to break it down ("Columbus sailed on the Pinta, Santa Maria, and Niña in 1492 from Spain.", that's at least 6 facts: name, ships, year, origin). This is better than the alternative, and the way many of us (or at least my classmates and I) did it in school. We made flashcards and just reviewed all of them over and over again. It was a long slog to get through, and often we'd just skip it rather than deal with it. Or the ones at the bottom of the stack would never get reviewed properly. SRS works in much the same way, but you don't review the full deck each day or even each week. If you learn a fact really well, you won't see it again for months. If you still know it then, you won't see it again until the next year. So the only things you study regularly are new things, or things that aren't (for some reason) sticking. Anki is a useful (and free) application that will sync across your computers and devices (I make cards on my laptop, but review them on my phone) that implements SRS. You can, through plugins, do a lot of neat things like autogenerate math problems so you aren't practicing the same ones over and over (and risk just memorizing them rather than learning the techniques), or have it render LaTeX to the card. It'll show images, play audio, and more.

primordialsoup 9y ago

I would love to increase my focus. Even if I force myself to sit tight, often times I catch myself reading paragraphs after paragraphs all the while thinking about something else. Meditation can help? What else?

Jtsummers 9y ago
Reportedly, dual n-back. I cannot confirm this, however. My focus improved by taking up distance running, but that's not an activity for everyone. To me, it's meditative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back
- andai 9y ago
  There was a study that found that after intense physical exercise, concentration was better in ADHDers and worse in non-ADHDers. Regardless, regular exercise is the single best thing you can do for both your mental health and your mood. I have heard a lot of ADHD people anecdotally benefiting from Dual N-Back and have started using it recently myself. It really feels like a workout!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
KVFinn 9y ago
I focus better in the hours after exercise, and better generally while maintaining a regular exercise routine. Any kind of exercise helps some but I find cardio is most impactful in this particular area. It doesn't have to be intense but I do need to work up a good sweat. Long low-intensity works too but it's not too often I can take a very long walk/hike.
visarga 9y ago
> I catch myself reading paragraphs after paragraphs all the while thinking about something else. Take notes as you read? Taking notes is great because you're doing both information input and output, which helps a lot in memorization and assimilation (information fits with previous information).

dorfsmay 9y ago

Read blogs from Piotr Wozniak, he did a lot of research on the subject and created supermemo. https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm https://www.supermemo.com/english/company/wozniak.htm

1wd 9y ago

I recently read [1]: "There are three ways in which information may be learned or committed to memory: by rote, assimilation, or use of a mnemonic device. By Rote. Material to be learned is repeated [...] It seems to be the least efficient way of remembering. By Assimilation. Information is learned by assimilation when the structure or substance of the information fits into some memory schema already possessed by the learner. The new information is assimilated to or linked to the existing schema and can be retrieved readily by first accessing the existing schema and then reconstructing the new information. Assimilation involves learning by comprehension and is, therefore, a desirable method, but it can only be used to learn information that is somehow related to our previous experience. By Using A Mnemonic Device. A mnemonic device is any means of organizing or encoding information for the purpose of making it easier to remember. [...] Any form of processing information in this manner is a more effective aid to retention than rote repetition. " Is this information (from 1980) outdated? Is "spaced repetition" a newer idea? Is it more effective than assimilation or mnemonic device? [1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art6.html https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Jtsummers 9y ago
SRS is not really an alternate, SRS is a scheduling of study. You still use your mnemonic devices and attempt assimilation, or even memorize by rote. But SRS spaces out the practice of these things to try to attain optimal recall. If you are using rote, like studying a language's vocabulary, you may have 1000 vocabulary cards that you study over a few weeks or months. SRS will have you practice reviews based on your ability to answer the cards. If I see "cabeza" and think "cabbage", clearly I don't know the word and I mark it as bad. I'll review it the next day. If I get it correct ("head") then the next review will be, approximately, double the time between the previous two reviews (rough progression then of 1 day, 2 days, 4 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, ...). If I'm trying to study by assimilation (true comprehension), the cards may be more complex or harder. Translate a full sentence (from or to Spanish). Practice a math problem (some tools in Anki let these be generated automatically so you practice the techniques and don't just memorize some answers). It may even be a prompt rather than an explicit Q&A card. If I'm using a mnemonic device ("The Cab in New Mexico Is Land Cruiser" for the tarsal bones), I may have a card that has "tarsal bones" and on the back has the mnemonic. I may have the mnemonic and the question "T?". I may have the full list of the mnemonic and the bones on the card with parts covered over. It's still using a mnemonic, but, back to SRS, SRS just schedules my practice of it based on my ability to recall in the review session.

dub 9y ago

I highly recommend "Moonwalking with Einstein" to anyone curious about what our memories can do and how we can make better use of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein The author won the US Memory Championship after just a single year of learning and practicing mnemonic techniques.

rgrau 9y ago
I read that book recently and it triggered my interest in "the art of remembering". Then I moved to "how to develop a perfect memory"[1]. It gives practical tips for remembering lists, numbers, appointments, faces.... It works surprisingly well. The thing is that nowadays, we usually use technology to remember those kind of things. I think there's a huge difference in the types of contents that are "hackable" and the ones that have to be learnt by assimilation. I can remember 50 digits without any problem, but remembering subtle content from a book, how to use a new API,... it's much more difficult to find mnemonics for that in my experience. Anyway, I think it's great fun to "hack" yourself to be more efficient, and this, along with speed reading and lucid dreaming could have exponential effects. I'm on it. on both. We'll see. 1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2691332-how-to-develop-a-perfect-memory https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2691332-how-to-develop-a...

j_s 9y ago

There were a couple parallel sub-discussions earlier this week, but no mention of spaced repetition: Training exercise boosts brain power, Johns Hopkins researchers say | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508714 (Oct 2017, 138 comments) >pdog: Do you know the best exercise for your brain? Actual exercise >JamesBarney: I hit dual n back pretty hard trying to improve my IQ https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis

aeto 9y ago

+1 for spaced repetition. I automated a schedule (1, 7, 17, 35 days) based on the SuperMemo algorithm for stuff that I read that I want to remember. Currently exists as a browser extension: (Chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-mind/dejecgndbecimagkaefkfdaedaimamji https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-grow-your-... (Firefox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/harvest-grow-your-mind https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/harvest-gr...

TheLilHipster 9y ago

There is actually some really good ted talks on this: * https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone... * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebJlcZMx3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebJlcZMx3c Make more connections to the things you need to remember. Make a tune out of the specifics or make a quick phonetic story out of it. Good stuff. I haven't been able to forget my ex's anniversary date because I remember it as "she's a 10/10" (oct 10).

susi22 9y ago

I'm a big fan of spaced repetition. From a mathematical standpoint it's also a very interesting question: You have your forgetting curve and which gives you the probability that you still remember the association. I think there is still some rooms for improvements around there. For instance, I'm not sure if the big plays in the area adjust the forgetting curve for each individual user after they have enough data points. Shameless plug: I actually just developed a new spaced repetition platform the last few years. I'm not official launched but it's online and works. If anybody is interested in taking part of the beta testing, email is in my profile.