Augmenting Long-term Memory by Michael Nielsen
Investigation of a personal memory system, Anki, improve the long-term memory.
- Anki works like a flashcard app but also has the ability to manage the review schedule.
- If you answer a question correctly, the review time expands.
- The better you master the material, the less frequent it appears.
- Memories are maximally strengthened if tested when we’re on the verge of forgetting them.
- Anki is used to learn anything: papers, books, talks, conversations, facts, plans,… A common way to use Anki is to use its desktop client for entering new card, mobile client for reviewing.
- Author’s workflow for reading a research paper in an unfamiliar field (AlphaGo paper).
- Read quickly first, come up with questions that:
- Identify the most important ideas.
- Look for basics fact that I could understand easily.
- Make several passes this way, each time try to get deeper, continue to ask questions.
- Read quickly first, come up with questions that:
- Make better use of Anki:
- Make the question more atomic so I could focus on the hard-to-memory details → asking good questions is very important.
- Construct your own decks instead of using shared ones → constructing a card forces you to think through the questions and its answer.
- Avoid yes/no questions.
- Procedural vs declarative memory.
- Procedural (implicit, unconscious, automatic): habits such as walking, talking,…
- Declarative (explicit): know your phone number, a fact,…
- Basically, there is a difference between remembering a fact and master a process.
- Just because you remember a Unix command doesn’t mean you can recognize or apply it in a real-world situation.
- Remembering is not enough. Need to carry out the process. Solve problem with it.
- If Anki is so great, why isn’t it widely used?
- People prefer last-minute cramming and believe it produces better results, though many studies show it does not.
- The act if recalling something while we’re on the verge of forgetting is hard, unless one is strongly motivated.
- Anki is challenging to use well, easy to use poorly.
- The importance of long-term memory.
- A study shows that chess grandmaster has higher memory capacity.
- Beginner see a series of individual pieces.
- Master see see a “chunk”-combinations of pieces recognized as a unit → able to reason much easier at a higher level of abstraction (25k-100k).
- A study shows that the better working memory one has, the higher their IQ and vice versa.
- Having more chunks memorized in some domain is somewhat like an effective boost to a person’s IQ in that domain.
- A study shows that chess grandmaster has higher memory capacity.
- Distribute practice - why Anki works?
- Memory decays through time - we will forget things eventually.
- Retest/recall will slow the decay - meaning it takes longer after subsequent recalls.
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