
How to Remember - prostoalex
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-remember-anything-you-really-want-to-remember-backed-by-science.html
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bgee
If you need to remember printed material (for an exam etc.), I highly
recommend this product [0].

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_...](https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01C02NOMQ/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_ohdbDbTZCREJG)

[1]: [https://youtu.be/et14d3cafcQ?t=58](https://youtu.be/et14d3cafcQ?t=58)

~~~
jodrellblank
Highlighting notes, and re-reading notes are the two study techniques that
students think are most effective, but studies show are less effective.

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE)

~~~
knubie
While highlighting and re-reading notes might not be as effective as SRS
quizzing, I still think there's a lot of value in writing the notes
themselves. It sort of acts as the "summarize and share" part of this article
(you're sharing with your later self).

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](https://mochi.cards)

~~~
reeves23423
For people wondering SRS means spaced repetition software

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underbluewaters
I've got a trick for remembering things that, to me at least, feels like
magic. It was particularly useful in Biology courses where I would have to
remember a large set of terminology like family names of fishes.

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.

~~~
m463
When I'm driving my car and listening to an audiobook or podcast, I find that
if I rewind it a couple minutes, my brain will flash back to where I was
driving when I heard it the first time.

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)

~~~
abakker
The audiobook thing! Yes! I hike or mountain bike with books, too, and when I
bike those routes now, sometimes I get almost total word recall of a moment in
a book I heard years ago. It’s a great sensation.

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danielbigham
Something that I started doing recently is to create a "30 second summary" of
each important concept, consisting of text and diagrams. I then record a 30
second video where I narrate, using good intonation, the 30 second summary. I
also create a hyperlink from the summary to my notes of each prerequisite
concept.

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](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.

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jneplokh
> "What that [making yourself a quiz] forces you to do," Adam says, "is
> practice retrieving the information, which makes it stickier and easier to
> find yourself."

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.

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MiddleEndian
Now how about something to forget what I want?

~~~
zaphirplane
2 options

Create happy memories to crowd out the sad ones.

Invent the MIB device

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I like the first option. What I do is don't worry about forgetting. I let
myself be as angry, frustrated, sad, whatevs. The biggest help is decoupling
feeling from action. Just because I am angry, that doesn't mean it'd be a good
idea to aim my anger at someone else. Then I just move on. Getting the
emotional stuff out of the early frees me up to remember something without
getting all emotional about it. Eventually I just have too many other
experiences to process before I get to the thing I'd prefer to forget.

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mdorazio
Good article on different techniques that don't require any special
software/setup. Personally, quizzing doesn't really work for me, but
discussing or (even better) trying to teach it to someone else is extremely
effective. The third suggestion, association, has mixed results for me - I use
it for names and dates, but trying anything more complicated isn't very
effective. Anyone else have better results with these methods?

~~~
sweetbacon
> discussing or (even better) trying to teach it to someone else is extremely
> effective.

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.

~~~
jodrellblank
I wonder if the main benefit of blogs and tutorials is for the writer, not the
reader.

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.

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ddffre
I highly recommend using flashcards apps, especially this one that I have
found. As mentioned in the article about quizzes, this app has just that.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flashcards.wor...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flashcards.words.words)

~~~
bemmu
For those studying Japanese, this one is amazing: [https://nihongo-
app.com/](https://nihongo-app.com/)

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.

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vipref
The linked article reads: "Because students believe that learning and testing
are separate things, they often study inefficiently"

Efficient learning is not only about performing during a test, but
understanding the subject matter.

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HNLurker2
Adam Grant is a charlatan. Never read his book. It is worthless self help.

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sys_64738
Must remember to read this!

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dqpb
Finally, a memory article that doesn't mention spaced repetition!

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kazinator
It doesn't specifically mention spaced repetition, but spaced repetition is a
way of quizzing yourself.

Spaced repetition is useful when the number of items to remember is very
large; it's a way of optimizing the quizzing.

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dqpb
Spaced repitition is orthogonal to quizzing yourself.

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kazinator
I'm not aware of a passive spaced repetition, which just presents items in
increasing intervals without interrogating the subject's recall.

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.

~~~
dqpb
But I'm sure you could imagine quizzing without spaced repetition

