There are a lot of different theories on how to learn and retain information out there, and often those ideas are articulated in ways specific to individual experiences with studying, or academic pursuits.
But there are 3 things that are backed by more than 100 years of research that anyone can do to improve their ability to learn and recall information:
Like what?
What Ebbinghaus found is that we forget what we learn at a predictable rate. Along with that forgetting curve, there is an optimal time for review, which helps strengthen your retention of the material. That sweet spot is the key to what is known as 'desirable difficulty' — the moment in time when it is difficult, but not impossible to recall the information. (Much more on the science here in this interactive tutorial.)
This requires an understanding of how your mind works, and what areas or subjects might be weaker or stronger. This can also be affected by prior knowledge or related knowledge for a given subject.
While the first and second step of this process is fairly self-explanatory, Step 3 is just as critical to building long-term knowledge, but very difficult for an individual to execute, especially across multiple subjects or disciplines. It's almost impossible to know, for example, how your ability to learn and retain Spanish compares to your ability to learn and retain, say, astrophysics. Still, the creation of long-term memories, and ultimately foundational knowledge, of these subjects is partly contingent on how well you can time your reviews.
That's where artificial intelligence and machine learning can play an important role in helping humans learn faster and remember better, by automatically determining the timing of reviews to the exact moment when it is most likely to build retention, on a per-person, per-subject basis.
Even without machine learning, knowing your aptitude for certain subjects can help you determine where you might need more reviews or more frequent reviews — this is a process called metacognition, or understanding your own thought processes. Even without the assistance of machine learning, metacognition can be a valuable tool in determining how and when to review material you are trying to turn into long-term knowledge.
When studying new material only once, the stats say you are likely to forget 70% of that new information in 24 hours. Use the techniques above to strengthen those memories and build foundational knowledge, which is the key to unlocking your analytical and creative mind.
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