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August 25 - September 12, 2024
Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content.
Subsequent studies by many researchers have pressed further into questions of whether repeated exposure or longer periods of holding an idea in mind contribute to later recall, and these studies have confirmed and elaborated on the findings that repetition by itself does not lead to good long-term memory.
Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.
Retrieval ties the knot for memory. Repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast.
In motor learning, trial and error with delayed feedback is a more awkward but effective way of acquiring a skill than trial and correction through immediate feedback; immediate feedback is like the training wheels on a bicycle: the learner quickly comes to depend on the continued presence of the correction.
research indicates that testing, compared to rereading, can facilitate better transfer of knowledge to new contexts and problems, and that it improves one’s ability to retain and retrieve material that is related but not tested.
Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention. This is true for anything the brain is asked to remember and call up again in the future—facts, complex concepts, problem-solving techniques, motor skills.
Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better.
After an initial test, delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent for reinforcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed retrieval requires more effort.
Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.
Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort.
You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don’t get the rapid improvements and affirmations you’re accustomed to seeing from massed practice.
Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).
Mental models are forms of deeply entrenched and highly efficient skills (seeing and unloading on a curveball) or knowledge structures (a memorized sequence of chess moves) that, like habits, can be adapted and applied in varied circumstances.
When you’re asked to struggle with solving a problem before being shown how to solve it, the subsequent solution is better learned and more durably remembered.
we’ve come to understand that retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material.
Thomas Edison called failure the source of inspiration, and is said to have remarked, “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” He argued that perseverance in the face of failure is the key to success.
Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it.
Long-term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge.
Do ADHDers have great long term memory despite having executive memory function problems?
Reconsolidation helps update your memories with new information and connect them to more recent learning.
One problem with poor judgment is that we usually don’t know when we’ve got it. Another problem is the sheer scope of the ways our judgment can be led astray.
We like to think we’re smarter than the average doodle, and even if we’re not, we feel affirmed in this delusion each year when the newest crop of Darwin Awards circulates by email, that short list of self-inflicted fatalities caused by spectacularly poor judgment, as in the case of the attorney in Toronto who was demonstrating the strength of the windows in his twenty-two-story office tower by throwing his shoulder against the glass when he broke it and fell through. The truth is that we’re all hardwired to make errors in judgment.
Imagination inflation refers to the tendency of people who, when asked to imagine an event vividly, will sometimes begin to believe, when asked about it later, that the event actually occurred.
The curse-of-knowledge effect is close kin to hindsight bias, or what is often called the knew-it-all-along effect, in which we view events after the fact as having been more predictable than they were before they occurred.
In the world of propaganda, this is called “the big lie” technique—even a big lie told repeatedly can come to be accepted as truth.
If you are in a group reminiscing about past experiences and someone adds a wrong detail about the story, you will tend to incorporate this detail into your own memory and later remember the experience with the erroneous detail. This process is called “memory conformity” or the “social contagion of memory”: one person’s error can “infect” another person’s memory.
Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence. This phenomenon, of particular interest for metacognition, has been named the Dunning-Kruger effect
incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve.
The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience.
One countervailing idea, put forward by the psychologist Howard Gardner to account for the broad variety in people’s abilities, is the hypothesis that humans have as many as eight different kinds of intelligence: Logical-mathematical intelligence: ability to think critically, work with numbers and abstractions, and the like; Spatial intelligence: three-dimensional judgment and the ability to visualize with the mind’s eye; Linguistic intelligence: ability to work with words and languages; Kinesthetic intelligence: physical dexterity and control of one’s body; Musical intelligence: sensitivity
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the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again. Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes three: analytical, creative, and practical.
Analytical intelligence is our ability to complete problem-solving tasks such as those typically contained in tests; creative intelligence is our ability to synthesize and apply existing knowledge and skills to deal with new and unusual situations; practical intelligence is our ability to adapt to everyday life—to understand what needs to be done in a specific setting and then do it; what we call street smarts.
We are born with the gift of our genes, but to a surprising degree our success is also determined by focus and self-discipline, which are the offspring of motivation and one’s sense of personal empowerment.1
“Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
Paul Tough, in his recent book How Children Succeed, draws on Dweck’s work and others’ to make the case that our success is less dependent on IQ than on grit, curiosity, and persistence.
The takeaway from Dweck, Tough, and their colleagues working in this field is that more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success.
