How to Remember
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It's basically a blue highlighter and a red transparent plastic sheet. You first highlight the stuff you want to test yourself on, and when you are ready you can cover the material with the red sheet. Now the highlighted words just became redacted like in a released CIA doc.
There is a review on Youtube that let you see how it actually looks [1].
[0]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01C02NOMQ/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_...
Spaced repetition, repeated testing yourself on the material, questioning yourself to prompt you to work your memory recall, are shown to be the most effective.
Sources discussed and referenced in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE
I got frustrated with writing notes in one app, then making SRS cards out of them in another app, so I made one that combines the two[0]. I'm still trying to nail down the best workflow, but something like:
1) Read/watch material.
2) Summarize material in note(s)
3) Create cards from note(s) and study with SRS.
Works pretty well I think.
[0]: https://mochi.cards
Just imagine a route you regularly take. Ideally a walk where you have time to consider your surroundings, but any route where you can remember landmarks will do. Now assign each thing you need to remember to a specific landmark. That's it. I've found that if I go through this process and then review it just once in my mind I can remember everything with 100% accuracy.
I used this trick recently to remember a gate code by assigning numbers to nearby architecture. I'd have a terrible time trying to remember it any other way.
You're not going to remember 15,000 landmarks along some route that you usually take.
Perhaps counter-intuitively most classical musicians are "visual thinkers" and are very good at sight-reading and less good at playing by ear.
However, strictly speaking, the technique should work well for everyone but especially well for some people.
The human brain can store and recall some types of information more readily than other types. Humans have an uncanny ability to recognize voices, recognize whether we have seen a face before, and we automatically absorb all sorts of information about places we travel to.
We struggle to deal with other types of information, like random series of digits, dates, etc.
All memory techniques work under the same principle: take something that you want to remember, and convert it into a different format which you can remember more easily.
Memory palace technique converts input into a spatial representation. That doesn't mean you have to have a good spatial memory! Unless you have a specific kind of brain damage or cognitive impairment then you have an excellent spatial memory just for being human.
If this technique doesn't work well for you, then the point of failure is your association between the hard to rememeber input and the easy to rememeber format. That's great news because it means there is a memory technique that will work great for you if you give it another try until you can figure out how to make effective associations.
It took me around a year of regular practice to get to the point where it does not take me time and effort for each picture. The key for me was to want to memorise something that was so large that, even if using mnemotechnic was hard it was still way easier than to try and root learn it.
Here I thought memory techniques were essentially data structures for the mind. Memory palace always felt to me a bit like a hash table; some of the techniques I read about for remembering sequences of items or numbers were quite literally building linked lists in the head.
really weird.
additionally, and somewhat unrelated... The best racers know the course. They can sit back, close their eyes, drive the course in their mind, and open their eyes. If they are missing parts of the course in their memory, they have more to learn. If they time this exercise the closer they are to a lap time, the better they know the course (and the better chance they have of driving it well)
https://m.wikihow.com/Remember-Lists-of-Words-With-the-Roman...
First, I created a list of letters associated with the numbers 1-13 and suits. There are two commonly used methods for this. I had already used the Major System[1] when I first read about it many years before (1963) in an old 1957 Scientific American. The Major Method worked well and I could recall around 50 random items in order or reverse order or call out the 37 item and so forth.
I decided to try a newer system, the Dominic System[2] for memorizing cards. The Dominic System associates a person with each number, in this case a person was associated with each card. This is done by using the following mapping:
0 - O (letter O) Ten in a deck of cards
1 - A (the ace)
2 - B
3 - C
4 - D
5 - E
6 - S
7 - G
8 - H
9 - N
With a few hours of practice, I could easily visualize Captain Hook whenever I turned over a 3 of Hearts; likewise, every card had an associated person.
Then I memorized 52 locations that I would remember easily. I used my home. Starting at the mailbox at the street I had a list of 10 spots: Mail box, Driveway, Guest parking spot, Parking outside of garage, Parking in garage, at the back door, inside the back door, laundry room, back stairs, kitchen door. Likewise, I had four other sequences of locations in my house and yard each 10 long and a couple more to make 52 locations.
I could then go through a shuffled deck of cards and if the three of hearts came up as the fifth card in the deck I would simply think of Captain Hook inside the garage (doing something dramatic, like putting his hook through the hood of my car). As each card was turned up, I pictured the character in the location doing something memorable. Then, a friend of mine might say "What was the location of the eight of spades? This card has initials HS == Homer Simpson so I would think of where I pictured Homer Simpson and realize that he was in my bed upstairs which was location 36 in my list of memorized locations so the eight of spades was in location 36.
It's a pretty impressive trick and it can be combined with card magic tricks without too much difficulty. For example, cutting a deck doesn't change the relative order of the cards to each other.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yevxvTbUa4s
This serves three purposes:
1) The act of teaching is one of the best ways to solidify a concept in your mind. It forces you to have a good understanding of it, and forces your mind to produce a good internal organization around concept.
2) It usually takes a while to write + diagram a good summary, and takes a number of tries to get a smooth recording of you speaking the summary (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHc-bog1hhE). All of this "repetition" / time spent with the concept makes it easier to remember.
3) Sooner or later we realize that remembering everything is impossible. Given enough time, concepts will decay in your mind. In the long term, one of the most important things for you to optimize is the speed at which you can re-create your mental model of a concept. Having these 30 second summaries, complete with links to prerequisite concepts, allows you to re-build your mental model of a subject area extremely quickly in the future in a just-in-time fashion. Just like a smartphone is an "extension" of your brain, a note system like I've described here is like an extension of your memory.
The same is true for flashcards where it is the process of creating them that helps remember the information. I have noticed when I don't create the flashcards I use, the information is not remembered as well.
Create happy memories to crowd out the sad ones.
Invent the MIB device
Whenever I have to learn a new OS, system, tool, programming language, etc: if I have trouble with it, I just write up a training manual as if I were also tasked with teaching others. What I end up with is a customized courseware for just me that I can refer back to at any time. Time consuming, but very effective for me.
This makes me wonder about the damage FAQs do to a community; where once there was a continual flow of new people needing newbie explanations - and a continual flow of not-quite-newbies benefiting from writing those explanations over and over, but different people each time, and implicitly being welcoming through that interaction - there is instead an implicitly unwelcoming response with a link to a FAQ. A FAQ which is dauntingly large due to its attempt to be comprehensive, but never deleted and refreshed, so getting ever more outdated and cruftier.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flashcards.wor...
It has sets for all Japanese school grades, split into daily chunks so that you can keep going forward with the app for years.
The only thing missing is kanji stroke orders, but the dev has hinted that those would be coming soon.
Efficient learning is not only about performing during a test, but understanding the subject matter.
Spaced repetition is useful when the number of items to remember is very large; it's a way of optimizing the quizzing.
For all intents and purposes, the normal SR that everyone uses in the form of software and that everyone refers to when they use the term SR is not orthogonal to quizzing; it's quiz-driven.
I don't think that a passive strategy could be anywhere near effective as the actual SR algorithms in use, which incorporate feedback from quizzing in order to adjust the interval for each item, so that difficult items remain on short intervals while easy items recede farther into the future.