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Bootcamp 2012 — Day 2: The trick to remember things years after they were taught

Today we’re going to talk about forgetting. Specifically, that frustrating feeling of spending countless hours learning a subject, only to forget everything just a few months later.

I’m going to share a method I’ve used to remember ideas clearly, even years after they were taught. This is especially relevant to non-students, where learning can feel especially wasteful if the ideas are quickly forgotten.

But First, The Hard Truth…

Forgetting is like aging, it’s going to happen and there’s no miracle cure to stop it. Unless you actively remind yourself, or practice the skill regularly, knowledge and skills fade. That’s the unfortunate part.

Fortunately, forgetting is also like aging in that some people don’t seem nearly as affected by time.

You will forget. But if you use the right methods, that information will stay with you far longer. Even better, the same methods that help you remember years later, will help you remember better right now, so they’re worth applying even if the exam is right around the corner.

Why You Forget Things

It turns out the seeds of remembering or forgetting are laid from the very first time you approach an idea. By using brain scans from fMRI machines, while people are in the process of learning a new fact, scientists can tell, just by using the scan, whether that fact will be recalled correctly later.

This suggests memory has a lot more to do with how you learn, and less about what takes place in the intervening time.

I believe that this effect is even more profound that we realize. Learning the right way, the first time, can mean dramatic differences in how much you can recall, even years later. More, I believe I’ve stumbled upon two of the control levers for this memory power.

The Two Things that Help You Remember

Control Lever One: Mental Compression

The first control lever for memory is simply how much there is to remember. Remembering one fact is much easier than remembering hundreds, especially if you need perfect recall to use an idea properly. This is pretty obvious.

What’s less obvious is that information can have very different levels of compression. Highly compressed ideas package hundreds of little facts together, so they can be easily recalled.

You may be familiar with the concept of compression from technology. Without it, movies would take up thousands of gigabytes of data, and streaming video or music would be impossible. Compression takes the complex patterns of bits and bytes and turns them into a format easier for a computer to remember.

Mental compression works similarly, except our brains aren’t digital devices, so we can’t expect the same algorithms to work. Instead, human brains work by connecting ideas, through analogies, pictures and stories.

If you can create a connected representation of a set of ideas, then you only need to recall part of it, in order to retrieve the complete picture.

Control Lever Two: Interestingness

The second control level is interestingness. Your brain was built to store things it feels are important to your success and survival. In protohomonid days, that meant worrying about the lion that might eat you, or the mushroom that might poison you.

Today, the types of facts that matter have changed, but our brains haven’t. Your math class may seem dull, even if it’s important for your success.

To make an idea more interesting, it needs to engage your senses and your emotions. Ideas that make you feel fear, excitement, wonder or disgust are remembered. Abstractions that make you feel bored are forgotten.

Long-time readers will recognize that these two elements, connections and interestingness, are hallmarks of the methods of holistic learning I’ve discussed many times before. The way to remember things years after they’re taught, is to use the same learn-via-connections approach I advocate for exams and classes.

How Do You Actually Learn This Way?

Holistic learning, the idea that you form connections to remember ideas easily, is an intriguing idea to many people, but a difficult one. When they actually get to their studies, they revert back to the repeat-and-memorize strategies they’ve known all their life.

Because this is a bootcamp, I’m not going to let you stop there. In the next section, I’m going to describe an incredibly specific technique you can use on one idea to learn it holistically. Then you’re going to practice it, with pen and paper, on one concept you’ve learned, but would like to remember better.

The 5-Year Old Method

Here’s how it works:

1. Take two pieces of paper, and write your idea at the top. This should be something you’ve learned already, perhaps from a recent class or book.
2. Start by writing a brief explanation of the idea, as if you were teach it to someone else. Those of you unfamiliar with this method, should see my tutorial on the Feynman technique.
3. After your brief introduction, you’re going to rewrite your explanation, as if you were teaching it to a 5-year old. The idea is that you have to simplify, or explain via analogy, all the details of the hard idea.

You won’t always be able to explain an idea to a 5-year old level. But you should be able to eliminate most of the complicated reasoning, and come up with more vivid analogies or stories to help explain it.

I feel this is something best learned by example, so I’ll do a few deliberately shortened examples here (yours may be longer if you’re not editing, don’t worry).

The Fourier Transform

First draft: This is an equation in the time-domain, and breaks it apart into its spectral frequencies.

5-year old draft: Think of each function like a recipe, for making a cookie, for example. The time-domain version is like if we chopped the cookie into tiny slices and asked how much cookie is in each slice. The frequency-domain is like if we instead broke the cookie into the amount of flour, milk and chocolate chips, in the entire cookie. (Kalid Azad deserves credit for this analogy)

DNA Replication

First draft: DNA replication works by separating the two halves of the double helix molecule, and then rebuilding the matching halves. On one side this can be done automatically, but on the other half, it must be done in chunks with starting strips.

5-year old draft: Think of DNA like a zipper. You use the zipper hook to split it apart. Afterwards, you can get a new zipper of the same kind and zip onto it. However, the zipper only zips together in one direction, so you need to create starting connections to zip on one of the sides.

Cournot Model (from Economics)

First draft: Price is determined by supply and demand, with multiple suppliers, they could coordinate to limit quantity and thus increase profits (a cartel). However, this gives each of them an incentive to defect from the cartel, flood the market and gain extra profit. The Cournot quantity is the amount each will output, knowing the others will act the same way to try to maximize profit.

5-year old draft: It’s like a bunch of kids who have balloons. They each want as many balloons as possible, so they try to steal from each other. But when they fight, they end up popping some of the balloons. The best way would be to divide them up evenly. But then if one kid decided to start stealing balloons, he’d have way more by cheating. The Cournot price is when kids steal just a few balloons each, but not so much that too many get popped.

Quick Tips on Using This Method

Sometimes these can be hard to make. With practice you can usually make them in just a couple minutes for ideas you already understand, but in the beginning it can take as much as thirty minutes.

No, you don’t need to use these on every idea you want to learn. Focus on the 10% of ideas that if you understood them really well would have the biggest impact. I’ve taken classes which were all centered around the Fourier transform. There were many different ideas, but understanding that one equation would have made a huge difference. Most classes are like this.

Usually it takes a few attempts. I made up the last analogy on the spot, and my first instinct was to think of a see-saw. But see-saws are always zero-sum, so there’s no benefit to cooperating, which made me want to look for something else.

Finally, the analogy doesn’t need to be perfect, as long as you understand its imperfections. Kalid’s transform-as-recipe analogy is obviously flawed. It omits many of the details that makes the Fourier transform work. But it captures an important intuition about the technique in a way you could never do with raw symbols.

ACTION STEP: Day Two

I got over a thousand responses to yesterday’s assignment, and there’s still more pouring in. But now I’m going to ask you to do something that will take a little more effort and about 20 minutes of your time.

This exercise, if you complete it, is the first step to learning holistically. That’s the philosophy that let me ace exams without studying and finish hard courses in several days. So I don’t believe I’m exaggerating when I say this may be the most important learning technique you ever adopt.

This holds true for non-students as well. Just because you’re not in class doesn’t mean this technique can’t help you learn things better, for your life, work or even your kids.

Here’s the steps:

1. Get TWO blank pieces of paper. Write the idea you want to remember better at the top of each. It should be something you feel you understand mostly. It could be from a class, book, or even Wikipedia if you can’t think of anything.
2. With your first attempt, write a half-page explanation of the idea. If the idea is big, just pick one part. If you’re not sure how to do this, watch this video.
3. Now rewrite the same explanation, but come up with an analogy, example, picture, story or anything that would help you explain it to a 5-year old. Try the first analogy you can think of, and don’t be afraid to restart if you find something better, it can take more than one attempt.

This isn’t an easy task, I know that. This style of learning is often hard for people who aren’t used to it, and it can take practice.

But while it isn’t easy, it doesn’t take too much time. Following through with this exercise should take no more than twenty minutes, unless you’re trying to explain too much or trying to be perfect with your simplification.

Good luck with this technique, and I’ll be back tomorrow with the next idea!

Best,
-Scott