dancing

I just finished reading a fascinating article about memory at Wired magazine by Gary Wolf.

Are you interested in memory? Whenever I see ads for memory systems, I’m never interested. It looks incredibly boring and the processes themselves usually involve detailed information that I would need to learn and remember.

On the other hand, I have journaled for many years and let me tell you: I have learned the same things many times. It would have been simpler if I could have remembered some of what I learned the first time. Plus, looking back at my school days, it is kind of sad to realize that so much of that truly enriching knowledge that I learned with some effort does not belong to me anymore.

Apparently, there is a better way. Piotr Wozniak created software called SuperMemo that reminds you of what you have learned at just the right time. From Wired magazine:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking.

It kind of freaked me out when Piotr Wozniak, the inventor of SuperMemo, said that we will only be able to learn and remember a couple million new pieces of information in our lifetime. Panic! Must hurry and learn! Then he said, choose what is important to you to learn and I calmed down. Here is what is most important to me to learn and remember:

1. How to be happy
2. How to communicate and interact well and beautifully and kindly and lovingly and joyfully with other humans.
3. How to cook
4. How to make and participate in music
5. How to be healthy
6. How to dance
7. How to learn

I’m already fairly good at learning, and I’m good at finding information. I naturally use the reading method Piotr Wozniak suggests. (I read many books at the same time, coming back to each over and over. I agree that reading that way enhances creativity.) But even though I’m a naturally good learner, I forget a lot. This only really becomes obvious to me this when I look back and see what I used to know.

I downloaded some Supermemo like software, but it wasn’t a breeze to use. I’d like a way to email myself reminders about what I want to remember. I’ll let you know if I find something that works elegantly.

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