Lesson #3: How to remember things permanently

Please note, this is only a temporary archive of the lessons leading up to the opening of Rapid Learner on September 12th, 2016. As such, it will be removed from here after September 17th. If you want to retain a copy of this, I highly recommend saving a copy on your computer.

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It would be nice if you could see something once, say a passage in a book, a lecture or piece of trivia, and effortlessly remember it for all time.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be how we are wired up. Instead, we tend to only remember things with a certain likelihood. Studying another language, you may need to see the translation of a word five times or more before it finally sticks.

Even when we do manage to remember something, it often slips out of our heads in the months following. A medical student once wrote, “Don’t worry about forgetting everything from your early classes and relearning it later, we all do that.”

To think that the hours we spend reading, studying and practicing might all slip away, feels like a great tragedy. What’s the point in learning if it’s all going to be forgotten eventually?

While I can’t change how your brain works, there is, in fact, a way we know that you can extend the longevity of your memories. In this lesson, I’d like to teach it to you.

There are a lot of different tools you can use to improve your ability to remember, and I cover many different ones in Rapid Learner. Today, however, I’d like to focus on just one: overlearning.

What is Overlearning?

Say you have a new type of problem you’re learning, such as a math question. When you’re learning it, at first, you might not get the question correct all the time. There’s a lot to think about and you may forget to apply a step or your memory as a whole may not be that strong yet.

If we sampled you on a test with different questions, we could measure how much better you get at doing the test over time. You may start out with quite a low score in the beginning, but it would steadily get better as you got more practice.

Eventually, however, you’d reach a plateau. After this point, you mostly stop getting better at the test. This could be because you’re scoring 100% every time, or because the test is difficult enough that its impossible not to make a couple silly mistakes, leaving you with 95% or something similar.

Here’s the question: When you reach this point, is there any benefit in continuing to practice?

The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

Continuing to practice after this point has a different effect. This effect, what psychologists call overlearning, doesn’t affect your test scores (that’s already at a maximum). Instead, where it helps is with the *longevity* of the memory.

Put simply, in the beginning, practice improves performance. Later, when performance is maximized, it continues to improve longevity of the memory.

Overlearning something, therefore, is the strategy for remembering it permanently.

By now, I know what you’re thinking, “Overlearning something past perfect scores?? That sounds like way too much work!”

Is Overlearning Worth It?

I definitely don’t recommend continuing to practice the same test with perfect scores in the hopes you’ll stretch out your memories. Those are simply examples from how the effect was demonstrated scientifically.

In reality, however, there’s some easy techniques that can help you apply overlearning.

Strategy #1: Learning +1

The first approach comes from a study in which people were given an algebra test after a class, and then tested again at varying intervals later, to see how much they’d remembered.

Interestingly enough, the people who did best on the first test didn’t have more durable memories than those who did poorly. Of course, if you remembered more for the first test, you’d remember more for the second. But the *rate of forgetting* in both cases was the same.

But there was a group of students who didn’t see their memories decay:

Students who went on to study calculus.

Learning a subject above your current level forces you to overlearn the basic tools of the previous subject. If you want to make your memories last longer, see how they can be applied in a more advanced topic and learn that.

Strategy #2: Immersive Overlearning

One of the reasons I’m so in favor of immersion for learning languages is that it makes great use of overlearning.

Say you learn vocabulary in your Spanish class. You learn some words, and write a test, but once the test is done, you move onto a different set of words. Learning via immersion is different because the core vocabulary of the language is repeated far, far more times than is necessary to learn it. That also means it’s much harder to forget.

This also applies to many other skills you could learn: playing guitar in shows, working on your own programming projects, integrating a skill into your daily life. By applying immersion, you don’t expose yourself to everything evenly—the things you need more often get repeated far more often and thus create a bulwark of overlearning to prevent memory degradation later.

Strategy #3: Practice Makes Perfect

I dismissed the idea of practicing a test repeatedly, even after you’re already scoring 100%. However, for certain skills you want to make absolutely permanent, this isn’t such a crazy idea. The key is that you need to be selective about where you apply it—overlearning every possible fact will limit what new things you can learn.

However, if you know that a certain set of knowledge is going to be essential to have at your fingertips: overlearn it! Practice it until you get it perfect and then keep practicing it some more.

If you choose to overlearn the right things this could be very useful indeed.