
Packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out - Tomte
http://archive.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/everything-about-learning/
======
jbarrow
Gwern wrote a good overview of spaced repetition and how to apply it [1]. If
you're interested in going deeper, it serves as a good starting point as he
provides all kinds of references.

[1]
[http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)

~~~
jck
Spaced repetition(with mnemosyne) worked very very well for me when I was
preparing for GRE's verbal section. However, I have no idea how I could use it
for technical knowledge.

~~~
chipuni
I use spaced repetition every day for technical knowledge. It's very easy:

Every small piece of information that you want to memorize, create a new card.

Let me give some examples from my current technical deck:

Q: This is an open source data collection system for monitoring large
distributed systems. It's a distributed data collection and analysis system in
Hadoop. It runs collectors that store data in HDFS and it uses MapReduce to
produce reports.

A: Chukwa

Q: This is an Apache templating language and processing engine that can be
used to generate Java code, HTML, JSP's, Hibernate modules and most anything
else that can be generalized.

A: Velocity

Q: In Ruby, what command lets you determine whether you're running as a main
program?

A: if __FILE__ == $0

Q: This C++ function rearranges the elements in the range [first, last) into
the lexicographically next smaller permutation of elements.

A: prev_permutation

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a3voices
Why would you do that instead of just keeping everything in a notes.txt?

~~~
mahmoudimus
Agree with parent. chipuni's strategy seems like trying to pigeonhole a
reference when statistically, you're most likely always going to be on a
computer and have access to a reference that's searchable.

~~~
taeric
The advantage for many is the actual physical association.

I liken it to learning how to get around a building by actually walking around
the building, as opposed to just seeing a map. Ultimately, when there are no
other distractions going on, one is probably as good as the other.

Not that I don't think you can't get this in a notes.txt. Just, I understand
why some would want a physical card deck where they flip a question into an
answer. Involving your body seems logical as a benefit for some.

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spindritf
Another advantage of full stack development. Code a little, chase a bug in the
webserver, google site:serverfault.com in frustration, knock out a couple of
tickets from users, finally drive to the dc to change a failing drive.
Related, yet different, and get you to change the scenery.

Specialization is for insects.

Here's a paper with an evaluation of those techniques[1] and here's a pretty,
high-level summary[2].

[1]
[http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full](http://psi.sagepub.com/content/14/1/4.full)

[2] [http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-
for-...](http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-the-one-
thing-you-never-get-taught-in-school-how-to-learn)

~~~
notastartup
Amazing stuff, it confirms what I've recently been able to discover for
myself. Narrow focus on one specific problem is a fools game I am learning,
rather keep switching dishes, take a little bite each time. This incremental
practice got rid of burn out, improved quality and was able to get more work
done for less time and stress.

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troydj
A more up-to-date and complete treatment of these exact topics can be found in
the recently-published book, _Make it Stick: The Science of Successful
Learning_
([http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674729013/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674729013/)).
For those that have already immersed themselves in spaced repetition
techniques via Anki, SuperMemo, Mnemosyne, etc., some of the material in the
book will be review. But there is a wealth of useful information for both
students and lifelong learners. In addition to that, the intertwined, real-
life case studies and anecdotes drive home the points. And lest my comments
come off like a back-cover endorsement, I will say that I was a bit
disappointed that the authors seemed to have little awareness of SRS' momentum
on the Internet with the aforementioned programs. For example, even though the
book spends quite a bit of time discussing spaced repetition and flashcards,
it never once mentions Anki, SuperMemo, or other popular SRS software. Aside
from that, it's still an excellent book.

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jeffrey8chang
This is exactly how the curriculum is designed in a Waldorf school; each main
subject is taught for a few weeks intensively, then left aside for a month or
so before next re-visit.

Only things you can forget is truly learned!

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ryanpardieck
There was a famous writer once who said that one of his greatest assets was
his extreme forgetfulness. Appropriately, I am blanking on his name at the
moment, but I'll pop back in here if I recall it. It was a long time ago.

However, his point was something like focusing on rote memorization of detail
makes for trite, superficial, and boring fiction-writing, and that you're
better off experiencing something as intensely as possible and then forgetting
it almost immediately. The idea being that your brain will recall the crucial
bits more relevantly and more vividly once they have been yanked back from the
fog of utter forgetfulness. I'm not sure how closely related this is to the
ideas presented in the article, but for me personally, it became significantly
easier to write fiction with a real sense of "immediacy" once embracing this
principle.

However, fiction can require a strange sort of learning: it can involve
sensory knowledge of scattered quotidian detail. Back when I wrote a lot,
things like the discrete texture and smell of different wooden tables were
very interesting to me. Or exactly how it feels to be in a room lit by a
single large fluorescent light vs other kinds of light. I'm not sure that kind
of learning transfers to any other domain, really. But forgetfulness was very
useful for it, at any rate. I'm done now.

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Kiro
> you’d want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork —
> not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in
> Java.

So if I want to learn European capitals I interleave it with what? The
tennis/serve example is obvious, the rest is not.

~~~
scythe
>So if I want to learn European capitals I interleave it with what? The
tennis/serve example is obvious, the rest is not.

In principle it should be another piece of knowledge which makes "European
capitals" useful, in the same way that having a good backhand gives you more
opportunities to serve. Examples would be "European systems of government",
"European political movements", "European international politics and
diplomacy", "European countries", etc. It's a little harder to think of,
perhaps, because "European capitals" _per se_ seems to many people to be an
almost useless piece of knowledge.

~~~
n8m
I agree. A simple strategy for the "European capitals" would be to learn the
size of them in conjunction. I guess the key is to search for something useful
that you can relate to easier? For Example: London, 8.3 Mil; Berlin 4.3 Mil
and so on...

~~~
sitkack
European capitals are the centers of political decision for a country, but one
could find the capitals for cheese, mathematics, water colors, etc.

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plg
For me the problem isn't packing things into my brain in a way that keeps them
from leaking out ... the problem for me is figuring out what are the right
things I want packed into my brain

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ojjzhna
Crude, but what I use: text file with each note a paragraph. Each paragraph
get's an integer weight. A filter repeats a given note (paragraph) as the
integer indicates. Every twenty minutes 3 random notes are echoed to one of my
GNU screen terminals. I go to that 'screen' window when I'm bored. This is
somewhat like UNIX 'fortune'. The weights are arbitary, quite a few '1's, and
some urgent ones as high as 1500 - some for learning, some for nagging.

~~~
spiffytech
Very neat! This is actually an implementation of "spaced repetition", a
learning technique that's been employed for many decades. The Pimsleur foreign
language courses, famous for their efficacy, use it.

For folks less interested in injecting this into their terminal, check out
Anki. It implements spaced repetition as flash cards, and automatically
computes how often to show a card based on how often you say you already know
the material.

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eik3_de
for spaced repetition learning, I can recommend ankisrs.net

~~~
tunesmith
Anki is great, but I'm currently having a bit of trouble in that after
reaching a few thousand cards that are all fairly mature, I can't seem to get
below 20 cards a day review. When it's that many, I'm experiencing a bit of
disincentive in creating new decks to drill myself on new knowledge. I thought
they'd continually get slower but the rate at which card appearances slow down
seems to slow down over time as well.

~~~
b_emery
I had a similar issue using Mnemosyne. Then I read "Moonwalking with Einstein"
and I'm pretty convinced that spaced repetition is a solution to an adjacent
problem. More important is the vividness of the memory, and the use of spatial
memory (memory palace technique), along with some other techniques, for
engaging many parts of the brain. These make the memory stick much more
clearly and for a longer time.

It's a great book but I understand there are others that are more focused
specifically on techniques, with much less story.

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Machow
I really like the broad coverage that articles like this give to the
psychology of learning, but I wonder how important some of these principles
are in a practical sense. Sure, the effect of studying and retrieving in the
same context is a classic effect, but how strong is it?

It's like reading an article on how to make money that doesn't even give you a
ballpark estimate of how much money each strategy could make you.

~~~
walterbell
> doesn't even give you a ballpark estimate of how much money each strategy
> could make you

Public strategies have short lives in efficient zero-sum markets. Here is a
site with resources and active discussion on mnemonics, memory palaces and
other practical memory improvement techniques:
[http://artofmemory.com/](http://artofmemory.com/)

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charlieflowers
The article makes interesting claims. Some of them ring true. But there is
very little backing for the claims in the article. Therefore I'm surprised to
see it still on page 1.

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teddyh
With the title being “… _and keep them from leaking out_ ”, I thought this
would be about mental compartmentalization and doublethink.

~~~
sitkack
Think of it as knowledge infiltration instead.

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foxhill
> "Because humans have unlimited storage capacity..."

this is patently untrue, unless human brains defy the known laws of physics.
this makes it hard to believe everything that he mentions.

~~~
tedks
It's _functionally_ infinite, because it's bounded by encoding time, not
storage capacity. If you spent your entire life learning you would not learn
enough to exhaust your long-term memory.

This is a very basic fact about human memory that you can find in any psych
101 textbook. You should consider picking one up and reading it.

~~~
thret
The underlying assumption being that you won't live much longer than anyone
else. Hopefully this will change, and soon. Do those psych textbooks make any
guesses to how long an average human would have to live before they exhausted
their brain's storage capacity?

I am reminded of the immortal character in Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's, who
has been alive too long and forgotten all of his early life (including who he
is). I believe he was supposed to be a Time Lord.

~~~
teddyh
This is close to the truth – that character was not supposed to be a Time Lord
in the book, but the storyline of the book is loosely based on two separate
scripts written by the same author for two separate Doctor Who serials. (For
unrelated reasons, the one script containing that character was only partially
filmed, and the serial was therefore not broadcast at the time.)

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notastartup
Similar to the method in this article, I had already applied it to
development.

I used to work on each tickets one by one, move on when it's fully done but
this got very tiring, sometimes I would have to come back to a bug because it
was related to another one.

I started to work on each ticket for 15~30min max, moving on regardless of
whether I had got anything done. When I started to feel the burn from a ticket
I would skip it and move on to the next ticket.

What I found was that I ended up getting far more done in less time. What
happened was kind of like skipping a question on a test and coming back to it
later. Your brain keeps working on it, or maybe you had to ask stackoverflow
and it took time for someone to answer it. Anyways, time automatically began
working for me, instead of me trying to bang my head against the keyboard
until one thing was completely finished.

Once you shake off the feeling of unproductivity and begin seeing just how
easy things are when you work on multiple tickets in short time intervals, its
far worth the effort.

I've yet to name this technique, I shall call it 'notastartups maximum ticket
resolve method'

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dang
We changed the title to a sentence from the article.

Edit: changed it again, because this piece is more interesting than "Interview
with Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab" made it
sound.

