ScotthYoung.com Members Area

On the first day of this bootcamp, I told you that being unable to focus was the number one problem faced by readers here. Number two? Difficulty retaining information.

Today I’m going to offer a three-step process to remember anything permanently. This strategy can apply to a wide range of subjects–I used it in both the MIT Challenge and my language learning project. Second, the steps involved are backed by scientific research as being effective components to learning better.

—-

The three steps are quite simple, but they’re so important that I’m splitting this lesson into two parts. Those steps are:

1. Practice.
2. Connect.
3. Distribute.

Practice, you already know from yesterday. In order to remember information it needs to be learned actively, meaning you quiz yourself without looking at the answers.

Connect, which I’ll be covering today, is the special sauce. There are many techniques here–too many to cover in one email–but the goal is to transform the information so that it leverages the more powerful memory tools of the brain. I’ll briefly cover some of the main tools in this email, although there’s many more that we teach in Learning on Steroids.

Distribute refers to spacing out your exposure to an idea. This was, along with practice testing, listed as one of the two most effective methods for learningin this study. Tomorrow I’ll be talking about this in more detail, and how you can leverage it as a system to remember anything permanently.

—-

There are many techniques for connecting, but they all share one property. They are an attempt to link the information you want to learn, with a format which the brain can more easily process and remember.

Not all ideas are remembered equally. The brain has systems for storing certain types of information, such as stories, images and places, quite effectively. These systems were essential in our ancestral environment, where getting lost and remembering friend from foe were more important survival tasks than solving differential equations.

Much of the information we struggle to remember is precisely because it doesn’t fit into these excellent memory systems. Abstract ideas, isolated facts, definitions, terminology and trivia rarely use these systems, and so are quickly forgotten.

Connect, the second step of our three-part process, is an attempt to translate information into stories, pictures, analogies and examples that the brain can easily remember.

—-

There are many ways this can be achieved, and professional mnemonicists have developed hundreds of specialized tools for particular memory tasks. Here are some of the main ones:

Visualization – Here you try to translate the idea to a picture. Programming variables become colorful jars. Determinants become bounding volumes of parallelepipeds.

Examples – Take the general and make it specific. In economics, the substitution effect is when you rent a movie, instead of going to the opera, because the price of tickets rises. The income effect is when you go to the opera less because rent is so expensive.

Image Association – Link two images mentally to form a chain. Need to remember that chavirer means, to capsize, in French? Turn the sound into an image: chavirer becomes “shave ear”. Then blend it in a ridiculous way with an image of a boat capsizing. A giant bearded ear, rowing a boat, flips over while trying to shave itself. Next time you think of capsize, you remember the picture and the words.

Analogy – Link the deep structure of the two ideas. Voltage is to electromagnetism, like height is to gravity. Then imagine a circuit where the water flow is current, the wires are pipes and the height of the pipes is the voltage. Batteries pump water up to higher pipes, resistors bottleneck the water flowing back down.

Anthropomorphization – Turn inanimate objects into characters. The noble gases don’t like to interact with the commoner metals on the periodic table because they already have everything they need. Halogens are just shy of a full set, so are eager to steal electrons from anyone who passes by.

Diagramming – Draw the relationships of the idea out on paper. Assets, liabilities and equities form two sides of a scale, with everything resting on both halves linked to a twin on the other side.

This is just a short list. We cover each of these in a lot more detail in Learning on Steroids, including others such as mental highways, pegging, the link method, deep linking, memory palace and storytelling.

—-

Connection is a powerful tool, but it can also be misapplied. Particularly if it’s used as a direct replacement for practice.

In my own learning, I use connection in two ways, which helps me learn better.

First, I use it spontaneously whenever I’m learning. This is a habit cultivated with years of practice of automatically trying to take information and connect it to images, examples and things I already understand.

However, as a skill, this takes some time to develop spontaneously and it often fails when facing very hard material. The easier you find material conceptually, the easier this step will be, so it’s often not possible to spontaneously create links when you’re just barely following along.

Here it’s important to apply these methods deliberately, yet selectively. Don’t set aside hours of your day to apply it on every idea you encounter. You’ll run out of time and likely won’t remember the information as well as if you had just done practice testing alone.

Instead, using your practice testing as a guide for when to set aside time to use this technique. Here are some ways I’ve used this:

• While doing the MIT Challenge, whenever I found there was a topic that I had to rely entirely on mechanically using the formulas, and couldn’t process intuitively. I spent time doing a Feynman technique (more on that soon) and sought out a good analogy.
• While learning Chinese, whenever there was a character that I forgot more than once, I would recognize the radicals and try to form a mental picture either with those radicals and the character meaning, the pronunciation, or all three.
• While studying international business law in France, whenever I had to memorize the date and place a particular treaty was signed, I used the link and peg method to link it to the name of the treaty.
• While studying accounting, when I couldn’t remember a rule or procedure on a practice question, I’d make a mental image that encapsulated it.
• While learning biology, whenever I couldn’t remember an amino acid, I made a list of its properties, turned those properties into images (acidic = lemon) and linked that to the way the name sounds (leucine = Lucy from Peanuts).

When you’re trying to memorize a lot of information that isn’t well connected, like languages, laws, chemicals or characters, focus on quick and loose images that will help you translate the information, even if they don’t represent it well.

If you’re learning a dense conceptual fact, like those in math, economics, science or literature, it can pay to spend as much as thirty minutes looking for a good analogy or example. I spent nearly half an hour looking for the best analogy for voltage, discarding ideas like pressure and force, before realizing height was the most exact analogy.

—-

How can you use this idea in your studies to remember more?

Now that you’re following the first two ideas: setting limiting study hours with intelligent breaks and practice testing, we’re going to extend that with connecting ideas.

For right now…

Take something you’re trying to remember from whatever it is you’re learning. If it’s a simple fact, with no real deep structure, try using visualization, image association or mnemonic to seal it together. If it’s a conceptual problem, look for analogies or concrete examples.

Don’t worry if you’re not entirely successful on your first attempt. This requires a lot more skill than the other techniques I mentioned, which is why I devote so much of Learning on Steroids to training it. Just try your best!

For next time you’re learning…

Continue with setting the specific learning hours of your day plus the practice testing. However, next time you get stuck after a practice problem or failed flashcard, briefly use this method to seal the gap.

Using this method for ten to thirty percent of your studying time is usually ideal. In rare cases, where information is truly punishing to remember (such as arbitrary dates or passages verbatim), I might increase this to a higher percentage. However, in most subjects, practice should still be the foundation.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’m going to discuss the third part to remembering anything permanently, distributed practice.