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One of the most successful methods I've found for me is to rewrite the material. I haven't seen anyone suggest this yet.

By rewriting the material, you are recoding it. You are forcing yourself to think about the information differently: what you are doing is explaining it to yourself. This to me is far more effective than something like highlighting, because in rewriting that material, you are also clarifying your understanding.

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Very much this for me. It's the reason I wrote notes instead of typed them in college. The intention was never to use the note for reference, but the act of writing them enforces your memory.

I'd think that for code, typing them is more effective than writing?

I've never written down code for school notes. At least nothing more than a few lines. There is no point.

Yes, this is my approach too - I'll take extensive notes and/or rewrite the material. The way I do thinking and learning is essentially to write things down on paper - it doesn't work for everyone, but it does for me.

I also happen to use fountain pens for it, but I think that part is optional. :)

Posting an old comment of mine here (which relates to rewriting material as a retention aid): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302365

I do this all the time. I write things down and never come back to read them because I seem to remember the important parts.

This is what I do for most of my university courses. It's super not efficient time-wise, but my grades have been generally good thanks to it.

Plus if I have to write an essay about anything related I can just ctrl+f the material I've written so far and get my facts straight very quickly.

This is a great suggestion. It worked quite effectively during my high school while preparing for college entrance. I used to rewrite a lot. Rewriting in combination of revisiting material with some frequency helped.

I can vouch for this. I just gave an SDE a bad performance review because he could never recall any code he worked on or how it worked…

I wasn't sure so had to ask. Where you making a joke? Did the sde have actual measurable perf problems?

The lack of recall led to severe perf problems. He had a hard time fixing bugs quickly on code he had written. A significant change from the past, I presume he has started smoking a lot of weed.

Yeah that is sad. Software engineering for the most part has become "standardized" and it is unfortunate this individual either missed the boat on the upskilling or just ran out of steam/luck from what may have been (possibly successful) cowboy coding days!

This sounds more like they’re burned out. Subordinates going from great to terrible usually means the business is failing them, not they suddenly “started smoking a lot of weed”. I would take a hard look at your job as a manager.

No, he smells like pot.

Perhaps you should consider your part in that. Or if you could have had a more positive impact on his life apart from kicking him when he was down.

Unfortunately we do stack ranking so it wouldn’t be fair to anyone else on the team. He also refuses to say anything in 1:1s with regular nudging.

He might have had COVID as well.

This can also be caused by persistent sleep problems, which a lot of people have had during the pandemic.

Is there scientific evidence linking marijuana to memory loss ?

Yes, although as always with drugs I am sure plenty of people will say that all those studies are flawed or biased.

You can see it change rat brains:

> As people age, they lose neurons in the hippocampus, which decreases their ability to learn new information. Chronic THC exposure may hasten age-related loss of hippocampal neurons. In one study, rats exposed to THC every day for 8 months (approximately 30% of their lifespan) showed a level of nerve cell loss at 11 to 12 months of age that equaled that of unexposed animals twice their age.

It has measurable effects on human performance:

> Among nearly 4,000 young adults in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study tracked over a 25-year period until mid-adulthood, cumulative lifetime exposure to marijuana was associated with lower scores on a test of verbal memory but did not affect other cognitive abilities such as processing speed or executive function. The effect was sizable and significant even after eliminating those involved with current use and after adjusting for confounding factors such as demographic factors, other drug and alcohol use, and other psychiatric conditions such as depression.42

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...

Oh gosh, I am pretty bad at this. The only thing that seems to help is being on keto, in which case my recall is amazing.

Never got a poor performance review for it, but that's a real issue I have.

Ben Franklin did something similar, he copied books by hand I think

I think he rather took short notes, then attempted to rewrite the material based on the notes, comparing to the original afterwards. This would seem to me to be much more effective than copying directly out of the book when it comes to recall.

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