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March 25 - April 18, 2019
desirable difficulty,
“having such memories become inaccessible but remain in storage has important advantages. Because those memories are inaccessible, they don’t interfere with current information and procedures. But because they remain in memory they can—at least under certain circumstances—be relearned.”
Thus, forgetting is critical to the learning of new skills and to the preservation and reacquisition of old ones.
Using memory changes memory—and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.
Moods, preoccupations, and perceptions matter, too: how we feel while studying, where we are, what we see and hear.
reinstatement,
absence
The first is that our assumptions about learning are suspect, if not wrong. Having something going on in the study environment, like music, is better than nothing (so much for sanctity of the quiet study room).
The second point is that the experience of studying has more dimensions than we notice, some of which can have an impact on retention.
contextual cues, when they’re conscious and visible.
state-dependent memory:
“internal mental states.”
distributed learning
spacing effect.
Distributed learning, in certain situations, can double the amount we remember later on.
fluency, the belief that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they’ll remain that way tomorrow or the next day.
“We know that if you study something twice, in spaced sessions, it’s harder to process the material the second time, and so people think it’s counterproductive,” as Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, told me. “But the opposite is true: You learn more, even though it feels harder. Fluency is playing a trick on judgment.”
The easier it is to call a fact to mind, the smaller the increase in learning. Repeating facts right after you’ve studied them gives you nothing, no added memory benefit.
The technique is testing itself.
A test is not only a measurement tool, it alters what we remember and changes how we subsequently organize that knowledge in our minds. And it does so in ways that greatly improve later performance.
spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory.
Testing is studying, of a different and powerful kind.
“Immediate recall in the form of a test is an effective method of aiding the retention of learning and should, therefore, be employed more frequently,” he concluded. “Achievement tests or examinations are learning devices and should not be considered only as tools for measuring achievement of pupils.”
the testing effect,
“retrieval practice.”
When we successfully retrieve a fact, he argues, we then re-store it in memory in a different way than we did before. Not only has storage level spiked; the memory itself has new and different connections. It’s now linked to other related facts that we’ve also retrieved. The network of cells holding the memory has itself been altered. Using our memory changes our memory in ways we don’t anticipate.
pretesting,
“unsuccessful retrieval attempts potentiated learning, increasing successful retrieval attempts on subsequent tests.”
Taking a practice test provides us something else as well—a glimpse of the teacher’s hand.
Testing—recitation, self-examination, pretesting, call it what you like—is an enormously powerful technique capable of much more than simply measuring knowledge. It vanquishes the fluency trap that causes so many of us to think that we’re poor test takers. It amplifies the value of our study time. And it gives us—in the case of pretesting—a detailed, specific preview of how we should begin to think about approaching a topic.
insight problem,
“stages of control.”
The first is preparation:
it means working to a point where you’ve exhausted all your ideas.
The second stage is incubation,
the mind works on the problem off-line, moving around the pieces it has in hand and adding one or two it has in reserve but didn’t think to use at first.
The third stage of control is called illumination.
The fourth and final stage in the paradigm is verification,
He conceived of incubation as a less intense, subconscious continuation of the work.
incubation is often—perhaps entirely—subconscious.
Gestalt—“shape,” or “form” in German—theory held that people perceive objects, ideas, and patterns whole, before summing their component parts.
Many riddles exploit just this kind of automatic bias.*1
“functionally fixed.”
two mental operations that aid incubation, picking up clues from the environment, and breaking fixed assumptions,
“selective forgetting.”
meta-analysis,
people don’t benefit from an incubation break unless they have reached an impasse.
The science of insight says not only that our guilt is misplaced. It says that many of those breaks help when we’re stuck.
The fear that digital products are undermining our ability to think is misplaced.
Mentally, our creative experiences are more similar than they are different.*
