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One of the best uses for Spaced Repitition I've found is to manufacture those "Aha!" lightbulb moments. The process works like this:

1. I create diagrams/other visuals from what seem to be important concepts from the book before reading it and without knowing what they are about.

2. I will use Anki to try and draw those visuals from memory. At this point, I learn the intimate details of the visual but have the constant question in my mind,"what is this thing?". I try to time starting this process 3-5 days before reading the book.

3. I read the book as I normally would, and when I hit a discussion about whatever visual I memorized my brain immediately goes "Oh! That's what that thing was!". Those euroka moments are actually great tools for remembering concepts and with the SR system I also have a visual to tie the concept too.

Other things I've used SRS for:

- Internalizing life principles. Anytime I feel "Oh thats important principle, I don't want to forget it". Sometimes its been from a book, othertimes its useful feedback from coworkers, or just anything thats a principle I want to hvae top of mind.

- Associating faces with names. When joining a new company and meeting dozens of new people, using Anki to remember peoples names works well.




This is interesting. Don't you risk the 'Eureka moment' being something that's not important? I wonder if one could, as a teacher, manufacture this with seemingly nonsensical one-liners that eventually become clear.

I sort of do this with my kids, dropping titbits to try and entice interest: "of course we are time travellers, moving at a second-per-second most of the time" but that could be more explicitly tailored to "... except under time-dilation". Perhaps the latter gives a hook "time dilation" to hang the concept on later when it's learned -- maybe like reserving disk space when downloading a large file. Or perhaps it's the 'transfer' of the concept to the hook, at some point, that makes for a 'repitition'.




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