UCLA has a Learning and Forgetting Lab and the guy who its named after gave Wired a few hints on how to learn and not forget:
- Interleave: don’t just keep trying to learn one thing until you master it, but rather move on to something else for a while. The something else should be related though, so maybe break up a subject like the Cold War into decades.
- Change venues periodically: if you study in only one location, you’ll only remember the stuff in that location.
- Learn, wait a while, then recall: if you just learn a thing once, it’ll get more and more buried the longer you don’t recall it. But if you wait some time, until you can just barely remember it, then study it again, it will help you recall it easier the next time. In a sense, it’s like practicing retrieving that particular memory, because we have so many facts in our heads that we need that practice.
So come back and read this in three days from a different location.
From Wired