[Betterexplained] how to effectively remember and learn

Your knowledge doesn't depend on how much you remember, but on whether they can be recalled at the right time.

Let me be a little more detailed: Learn new knowledge and store it in the brain,The ultimate goal is to be able to think about it at the right time.. Therefore, the effectiveness of learningObviously, this should be measured.: Related knowledge when you need to use the learned knowledgeWill it automatically pop up from your mind?At the very least-whether or not they can be extracted through conscious searches.

This is not as simple as it sounds, otherwise there will be no rhetoric like "Drop the book bag" or "read dead books.

To illustrate this in depth, the following are some famous experiments on Learning and Memory mechanisms:

Here is an example of finding the lost self:

Suppose a task: Give You A Word (such as brain) and ask you to find its rhyming words (such as train ). After a while, I asked you not to remember what words were given to you. You may not remember. Now, if you are not looking for a rhyming word, but thinking about its meaning or functions (such as the brain function ), in this case, you may recall what words were at that time.

A reliable explanation for this is:The latter memory encoding method (called fine encoding) provides more clues for extraction.. The so-called great roads allow Rome,Any trigger of a clue may trigger the entire process. Fish Memory.

A very similar experiment was conducted in this way (I only remembered the experiment and forgot the source). By the way, I would like to know about it :)Update: Thanks to Leeve for your advice. This is a classic experiment on deep-layer processing of memory developed by Craik & tulving in 1975. For more information, see the original article here ):

Give the same group of words, let a group of participants count the number of syllables of each word, let another group of subjects read the meaning of words (or imagine the scenarios in which words can be used), and then let the two groups recall the words on the list, which group can recall more?

This is a widely recognized memory mechanism, namely:When we remember it, We encoded many clues (such as the scene at the time, the background of the problem, and even the language environment and space location) into our memories, the ability to extract this part of memory afterwards depends heavily on the richness of the extracted clues and the ability to reproduce the clues of memory during the recall process.

In principle, in the two experiments mentioned above, both groups of subjects have come into contact with the same word and all have the same knowledge, but it depends on what clues will be taken in memory, the number of clues linked to the memory determines whether the memory is successful after the event.

In connection with our daily experience, it is not difficult to note that the rigid memory mode and the "Understanding memory" we often say correspond to different encoding methods. The nerd's memory is hard to remember. At the end of the day, if you ask him what a chapter in a book says, he will be able to roll back and ask him which example can be used to reverse the stream, however, it would be dumb to encounter specific problems or variants of the problem, because he did not have a deep understanding of the knowledge in his memory, and the problem-solving process in his eyes is actually no different from the phone number book, maybe the only clue he coded is the answer from which chapter, section, or question.

HoweverFor those who understand the memory, knowledge contains numerous memories and clues, including fine concepts, logic, general problem-solving principles, general problem-solving techniques, background knowledge, and similar problems.Instead of an isolated, arbitrary text sequence. (Of course, it is well known that another important feature of understanding memory is that after remembering the general principle, other details can be derived even if they are forgotten, so that they do not need to be memorized. There is a widely-spread story of mathematical cool people (glory belongs to ukim) that tells the story of Hilbert: A young man reported in a discussion class at Hilbert, here, we use a very beautiful theorem. Hilbert said, "This is really a wunderbaschon theorem. Who found it?" The young man stood blank for a long time and said to Hilbert, "it's you .......".)

Memories without clues are like memories of isolated islands in the ocean. Although they are there, they are hard to access. The memory that is full of clues is Rome, with great paths leading to Rome.

There is a famous memory method in ancient Greece (or ancient Rome) that uses spatial location clues to aid in memory. I have used similar techniques and seem to be quite useful in small-scale temporary memory tasks, specifically, I have a habit of going to the real bookstore to see if there are any new books. I think it is good to purchase it from an online store. Sometimes I can see several books without paper or pen at hand. How can I effectively remember the titles of several books? I found it difficult to remember more than four books (the number may vary from person to person). At least I have to think about it for a long time. However, I found that by recalling the position, face direction, and other information when I used this book, I could effectively help to pull out my memories ".

In fact, it is not just the location, but some research shows thatEven the environment, taste, and sound at that time were used as clues for extraction and memory encoding.. For example, the inconsistency between the test environment and the learning environment may affect the performance (memory extraction ).

There was a science squirrel article titled smell and memory-unusual intimacy:

Many of our memories are associated with smells. When you smell a certain kind of taste, you will suddenly think of some of the previous things, such as a cup of hot chocolate drink, think of the original taste of chocolate, put a brown sugar into your mouth, thick slide, with some sweetness and warmth; for example, before the arrival of the rainstorm in summer, rich dirt and grass taste, will it remind you of the feeling that you didn't get an umbrella full of rain when you were a child, or even the memories of getting home beaten, and there was a bit of hot pain in your ass. When we think of the new year, will there be a thick smell of firecrackers in the nasal cavity, as if we were immediately in the hot atmosphere. Especially in social activities, we often think of a person we are familiar with, or even old friends we haven't seen for decades.

Indeed, sometimes I put a piece of background music when reading a novel, and then I thought of the plot I saw every time I heard the music.

WeIt even uses the language background as a clue for memory encoding.. An interesting study used Bilingual inquiry to ask questions with multiple answers, for example:

"Name a statue of someone standing with a raised arm while looking into the distance "), or "in a famous tragic love story, because the two sides do not agree with the family, the two sides finally fall in love. What is the main character of the story ..?" ("In a famous love story, what were the names of two lovers who died because of family disapproval ?"), All the people asked are skilled bilingual users.

The results show that the language used for the question can affect the answer. For example, the first answer may be the Maozedong statue or the Statue of Liberty ", the second answer may be "Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai" or "Romeo and Julia ". Asking in English can lead to more likely answers in the English environment. The same is true for Chinese.-Of course, this is relative to the baseline, not absolute. For details, refer to this article (PDF paper)

On the other hand, if some key clues are not displayed in the original memory, it may lead to the so-called cue-dependent forgetting.Evidence-dependent forgettingYour brain does not store the target memory, but the clues are wrong and cannot be extracted.

There areA vivid analogyYes: You want to go to the library to find a book. If you do not know the index number, author name, and title, you cannot find the book you want, even though books are standing on a row of bookshelves in the library, when you see this book, you will naturally notice what you want, but unfortunately, it seems that our memory system does not have such a convenient linear traversal mechanism-if I ask you, "What do you remember about mathematics?" Can you tell me in sequence ?).

I have the habit of taking notes. My notebook contains a large number of text clips. I organize them by topic for easy retrieval. However, sometimes, I remember a piece of material, its topic and general description, but without a certain keyword, the result is that it cannot be searched, and it can only be searched everywhere, remind yourself to add moreFamiliarKeyword, suchUse your own wordsTo summarize the theme,BecauseYour habitual words are often different from those of the author. When you read the author's words, you may use your habitual words to re-express this text, stored in memory. As a result, when you are looking for something, the brain only remembers what you say, but does not remember the original words of the author, however, to retrieve the original text, you must know the words used by the author. To make up for this problem, you can add your own summary when storing the text. This seems to be a good solution-we often hear similar advocates when learning and memorizing: repeat it in your own words and then understand it more deeply (in fact, it is easier to remember and extract it-knowledge or that knowledge; in addition, retelling with your own words often triggers the connection with other knowledge in your knowledge system, and then code it into more memory to extract clues, this is another benefit (writing is for better thinking).

Another classic experimentIt is about the role of abstraction in learning and extracting knowledge:

(In fact, I have used this experiment twice in my blog.) First, let the trainees (both college students) read a piece of military material, this document describes how a small army uses several small-scale attacks in different directions to defeat a strong defensive military bastion. In fact, the essence of this example is that at the same time a weak attack on a point can combine into a powerful force. The patients were asked to solve the problem: a doctor wants to use X-rays to kill a malignant tumor that can only be killed by High-Intensity X-rays, however, this will hurt the surrounding good organizations. What Should doctors do? Only 10% thought of the answer in the test that did not give the previous military example, which is the control baseline. Then, in the trial of the military example, this proportion only increased to 30%, that is to say, only an additional 20% of people will automatically transfer their knowledge (they will be able to bypass the class ). The last group was done under the reminder, reaching 75%, that is, 45% more than the "Automatic" Transfer Group (reminders required ).

This experiment shows that the details of the appearance of knowledge will confuse our eyes and hinder our transfer and use of knowledge (promotion). In this example, the two fields of problems are not similar on the surface, but it is essentially the same. On the surface, however, this is because it is not similar, and our memory extraction relies heavily on clues on some appearances, as a result, these superficial non-similarities impede the analogy between problems and apply what we grasp in one situation to another.

This means that weWhen summarizing knowledge from experience, appropriate abstraction should be used to obtain a wider range of knowledge.(Not just a radish); on the other hand,When encountering a new problem, we should also abstract the problem, touch its nature, remove irrelevant factors and avoid interference, so as to effectively extract the previously abstracted knowledge..

In layman's terms, this is the opposite.

What I mentioned above is the mechanism of memory, why the quality of memory is high and what kind of memory and learning is more effective. The following describes some specific practices.How to effectively sum up knowledge from daily experience and how to truly learn and use it-so that knowledge can automatically jump out of the brain when you need them, instead of having no clue for half a day.

1) develop habits,Frequent active reviewsWhat I learned over a period of time (I 've been talking about it): This not only helps to consolidate long-term memory, in addition, after a period of time, you may have learned new knowledge to have a further view of the original understanding. Through review, you can integrate new and old knowledge to get new inspiration.

2) Opportunities for creating memories : I know the first one is not useful. , No one (well, few) can really stick to the execution. Therefore, there is a second opportunity to create memories with both knowledge and knowledge. Specifically:
2.1) Often discuss with others or tell others . I often discuss with my friends and talk about things summarized over a period of time so that others will learn new things and you will also learn new things from others, in addition, in the process of expressing each other, they have strengthened their memory and understanding to achieve a win-win situation. In addition to face-to-face communication, a good mailing list and BBS are also a good way. (For details, refer to Section 3 "Why should you write a blog from now on": "teaching is the best course")
2.2) Sort notes : Sort your notes frequently-if you haven't made any notes, start now-sort out the previous notes to consolidate the memories that have been deplayed, and give you the opportunity to review your knowledge. I often find that the first memory of knowledge is biased, Or I only see one aspect, Or I only pay attention to one point, looking back after a period of time, we can often combine some new thoughts and knowledge over this period of time to get more things. Note that you will find that memory is actually very fragile, and our first understanding of things is almost certainly not deep. Tip: I know that you are too lazy (I am also), so in order to better create a chance to organize your notes, you can use an electronic note software that is hard to retrieve without sorting it out, although it seems a little troublesome at first glance, it forces you to repeat your knowledge over time and classify it-the same is true for your memory: information with good classification is easier to extract.
2.3) Writing : The knowledge learned over a period of time is systematically "stringed" according to a topic, greatly enriching the association between knowledge, Add numerous clues . I often do this. Article Almost all of these articles, for example, I have always followed a topic: Learning the science related to thinking (cognitive science, psychology, behavioral economics, etc.) helps us make better judgments, decisions, learning, memories, and life. I divided this big topic into small themes. For example, "escape from your Xiao shenke" mainly summarizes blind spots in thinking and how to avoid these blind spots and become better independent thinkers, make better judgments and decisions. The "betterexplained" series summarizes some thinking-related knowledge based on a small topic. The goal is to become a better independent thinker and make more rational judgments on things; these theme all come down to the big theme of "thinking changes life. (For details about the advantages of writing, refer to "writing is better thinking".)

3)Place yourself in a "virtual experience": Our self-transmission memory seems to have a separate storage mechanism. one piece of evidence is that the so-called "Genius syndrome" caused by other genetic defects has a strong self-transmission memory (note, it is not a strong general memory, but a self-transmission memory ). In addition, in our daily experience, we also know in our memory what are our own personalities or ways of doing things, and what are the personalities or ways of doing things of our friends we know, we have a clear picture. In different scenarios, we can quickly speculate on "What does XX think in this situation" (this is called theory of mind ), but it will not be confused with "what do I think", proving that in our memory, we have a clear distinction between our own knowledge and other people's knowledge.

It is not enough to watch others do or listen to others to learn experience and knowledge,I often cannot think of myself.The result is youAlthough I learned the knowledge, it won't pop out of your brain at the right timeIs a "dead" knowledge. There are many possible reasons for this. One of the key reasons may be that "others' affairs" and "your own affairs" are processed differently in the brain, when someone hits the wall, you may not only suffer but also be gloated. if you wipe your skin, you will get a grin. Other people's bad things will never happen to you. Therefore, it is difficult for us to learn from others' experiences. One remedy is thatTry to imagine yourself in another situation, Experience what others have experienced, feel them,Link them to your emotional memory(The emotions that evolution gives us are the excellent clues to extract and the best catalyst to strengthen our memories.) although not as experienced, but it seems to be the best way we can do. Because we really imagine that we are in these scenarios,In the scenario we imagine, we are the first person perspective.Therefore, when you encounter similar scenarios in the future, it is easier to recall the feelings at that time.

Of course, another method that is often called upon is practice. The actual practice is naturally much more impressive than the "virtual practice" mentioned just now. However, not all practical practices are required or possible. For example, you don't need to make a profit once to understand what is the right risk control in the financial market-you even have to calculate it on paper. There is evidence that a fish in Africa can even use simple reasoning to replace actual experiences. For example, if it conflicts with fish B and fails, if it detects a conflict between fish B and fish C, and fish B fails, it can directly realize that it is not the opponent of fish C, so as to avoid the catastrophic consequences that can be caused by "directly going through it" (here the value of evolution is obvious ).

In addition, in many cases, you cannot really traverse every path of life to see what will happen. You do not have such time resources. Instead, you can only use others' "alternative experiences ", your Own "virtual experience" to obtain as much information as possible.

4)Abstraction and promotion: If one thing is one thing, we will never be able to learn the "future" knowledge. The result is that every wall has to hit it and try the hardness. One of the most outstanding capabilities of the human brain is the powerful Inductive Reasoning (Inductive Reasoning), or what we often say: generalization, promotion, inferences, abstraction. They all mean the same. They all promote the rules obtained in the special case to the general situation. The previous experiment on Laser killing tumors fully demonstrated the value of abstraction. Without abstraction, knowledge will always be linked to irrelevant details, restricted in a specific narrow scenario, it cannot be propagated. abstraction makes it in the Knowledge Tree (for non-geeks: Imagine a long tree, rooted in) up to one or more layers can be applied to more branches. Similarly, when you encounter a specific problem, do not forget to abstract the problem, remove irrelevant details, and abstract the problem from a specific branch, thus encountering the generalized conclusion.

The above section is a bit abstract.For example: We get a broad law from a large number of economic decisions-economic decisions can be abstracted into considerations for the proportion of input/return. This is the abstraction of the knowledge acquisition stage. In the problem solving stage, we can consider the input/return dimensions when we encounter a decision-making problem, rather than looking at the fly, I thought that option was correct. If you do not understand the nature of the problem (such as economic decision-making), it is difficult to use the conclusions (such as input/return, risk estimation, and so on) that have been promoted previously ), instead, it will be controlled by some predictable irrational aspects of our original brain (such as herd, authority, and even the most terrible behavior trap-"deferred decision-making") and become a normal fool.

5)Contact/compare your own experiences: Comparing others' experiences or those obtained through reading and observation with their own experiences can often draw very valuable conclusions. "Observation" and "comparison" are an important way to acquire knowledge. For example, I did something before, but I don't know why it failed; one day I saw or read someone doing something similar or the same, and he succeeded. By comparing the differences between the two, I can infer with confidence what caused the difference in the probability of success.

It is worth noting that: 1) the sample size is critical: the fewer individual samples, the more likely it is to produce incorrect attribution. It is best to observe more and compare and summarize more. 2) be alert to "evidence of silence", post-event prejudice, and self-interest attribution: when reading another person's biography, whether the biography was written by myself or by a biographer through interviews, we will intentionally or unintentionally commit post-event bias. For example, the most common practice is to ignore the opportunity factor because of personal ability. Consider accidents as inevitable.

One day I saw Buffett's recently popular autobiography "snowball" in the bookstore. At the beginning, I mentioned the first snowball rolling scene when Buffett was a child. "In the winter of 1939, buffett, 9 years old, is playing with snow in the yard. He shovel a small amount of snow into one, knead it into a snowball, and then put it on the ground slowly rolling, the snowball rolled bigger and bigger .. since then, Buffett has never stopped, and his eyes are on the white-covered world .. "(although you can say that this is only a rhetoric or foil, it is undeniable that it hides an irresistible attribution tendency, it seems that there is a strong and definite line of cause and effect in the dark, crossing the 60-year time, putting all the things of a person's life together. Awesome. However, this is not a fact. From the perspective of a single individual, there are too many uncertainties and there are too many coincidence. However, either the author himself or the "objective" writer is hard to resist the temptation of this deduction method. However, this is already an experience for us to understand others, the only way to have multiple "virtual" experiences.

Observe and read, and do not forget to take your rationality into consideration (including this article). Find out that entertainment is entertainment and knowledge is knowledge,If you really want to get some knowledge, you 'd better filter your information. Otherwise, you will be proud of others..