Glad it was useful! The problem seems to be that the measure is whether we pass exams and not how well we can actually use what we learn. That's why so many cramming techniques continue to be celebrated.
You dont learn for an exam, you learn for your life. Probably one of the most impactful sentences i every heard in my life. And sadly even though i am studying psychology now - where i thought people would be more mindful about this - there are way too many people in my lectures that dont process the information deeply and just learn to pass the exams. And i always wonder how these people will ever be competent psychologists if they dont see the bigger picture of what they learn. Also i just want to say thank you and appreciate your channel because it gave me a lot of new perspectives on how to build associations and connections with the things i want to learn. ABC active really is a great way to create more cues in order to retrieve what you learn :) Thanks a lot!
I know, it's the same everywhere. It's really a shame. Especially now when we need more and more people who need to be able to solve complicated problems and adopt new technology. Great that you find my videos useful! That's why I make them. Comments like yours are very encouraging. 🙂
I love your work. In this case, I think you may have gotten wrong the point of spaced repetition. In an earlier video you had mentioned the value of understanding concepts deeply as a prerequisite for creativity. Well that's exactly what spaced repetition does for you. First you master the accepted and dare I say mundane aspects of your field, then from this you can become more creative using the techniques you now outline here. In short spaced repetition is just a tool similar to ABC active one that solves the problem of getting what has already been solved by others into you head.
Thanks, man. I appreciate. Your point about spaced repetition is very interesting. I hope my answer is not to rambling, but there's a lot to unpack. I might make a separate video about this at some point. Feel free to ask questions or to argue your point - as I said this is a really interesting topic. That we must "get what has already been solved by others into your head" is a common and dangerous misconception. We always think of learning as "filling our brains" with something (compare, for instance, the metaphor "to absorb knowledge like sponge"). This suggests that learning is something static. But learning is a highly dynamic and very creative activity. In communication theory we know that both sender and receiver perform vital actions when transmitting a message. And it's only in the interplay between the two that the message is constructed. Some form of learning consists of transmitting messages (that's the form usually practiced in "formal education"). The idea behind rote memorisation (of which spaced repetition is one form) is that there is such a thing as a message which is independent of sender and receiver (or at the very least independent of the receiver). But this is not the case. If I say 我特别饿了, this is a perfectly clear message for someone who speaks Chinese. But if you don't, there's only noise for you. In addition, you can understand a concept on different levels and as you learn more about the subject your understanding about the concepts will develop as well. If you understand a concept well, you can express it several ways and on different levels. But if you go for rote memorisation (and spaced repetition, as it is usually done, is just one form of rote memorisation), there is only one, definite way of expressing a concept or exactly one list of pros and cons and so on. You're given absolutely no space to think the concept through, because thinking it through would require that you doubt it (you can't, because it must be correct or else you would not memorise it), look at it from a different perspective (which would involve saying it in a different way, but you try to memorise the statement as is), add more meaning to it from other examples or experiments (which again would require rewording the statement ad doubting it, at least for some time). So you see, rote memorisation is not geared to deeply understanding, but towards parroting one specific answer. And when you want to be creative you must be able to see nuances, you must be able to change your perspective or realise that there are limitations to a certain statement and so on. But if your brain has come to except that there is one accepted way of looking at a given aspect and everything else is necessarily wrong, it's very, very hard to play with the concepts as needed. On top of that, even if you're able to do this, chances are that your inner censor will shoot down that shoot of an idea before it can grow strong enough for you to decide whether it's worth pursuing further. Of course, you could utilise spaced repetition in such a way that you say I want to actively think about a subject in certain intervals and if, for whatever reason, nothing seems to appear in your mind about the subject you think about it more often again. But that's not what spaced repetition was originally intended for. To see the difference to ABC-active (because you mentioned it) do the following small experiment. Take another person who also knows how to do ABC-active and select a text. Then both of you read the text and create your ABC-active. Afterwards, compare your ABCs. While some words might be identical and some more might be close, others will be completely different, because you both focused on different aspects. And by comparing and talking about it, you will both be able to take more from the text than you would have otherwise.
@@bf-thinking I fully agree with you about each person's point in effect having their definition. I go a bit further. I think each term/concept means something different in different contexts. My tool of choice (Remnote) allows me to do this brilliantly. I think maybe it's because I have a poor memory than most people. I struggle to remember what I literally just read. Here is an example DRIVE-BY (ONE-TIME) VISITORS RETURNING VISITORS ENROLLED USERS VOTERS/FLAGGERS COMMENTERS CONTENT CREATORS MODERATORS GROUP CREATORS The list above represents a funnel for user-generated business. Now I can read it and its definitions, even remember parts of it, but it rapidly disappears once I move on and now need to remember say. Clarify Describe List problems List solutions Evaluate The list above represents steps towards disambiguating a product challenge. The second list I got from memory, the first I had to refer back to the book. So now what I do is embed the list in a mnemonic of sorts. This forces me to think about the words in creative ways. I am successful, and it sticks; I can now let my mind wander, say when waiting in line, about various possible connections. In this way, I try to give the list meaning. Think about it like a CaWa done in memory. I am just starting this out, but I think it holds some potential. What do you think?
@Jacob Chencha Yes, I completely agree with you that the same term can mean something completely different in different contexts (stress in engineering vs stress in psychology, for instance). Edit: I had written much more, but for some reason TH-cam didn't take this over. Sorry about that. You need to give me some time to type it out again.
@@JacobChencha Oh, just as a quick follow up. Most people would think that stage actors are the paragon of memorising folk. But they to don't usually use mnemonics to learn their line but work through the text to get a deep understanding. You might find this article interesting: www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-be-brilliant/201206/how-actors-remember-their-lines
@@bf-thinking thank you will be waiting. Looking at the actor article. I see the point. Actually I don't think I have any problems remembering emotionally evocative topics. Sometimes you just have to go through dry text and somehow make it stick before you get to higher levels of understanding. Tradionally I would just store this information in some kind of note taking tool and retrieve it as needed. Over time, I have come to realize speed of retrieval in this way is painfully slow and hard to carry out a natural conversation with say my boss.
As someone who is trying to learn Anki right now (college level IT, where passing tests indeed matters), I feel your criticism of spaced repetition. Despite giving it a serious effort for a couple of weeks, I'm not sure how useful Anki or spaced repetition truly is. The reason being is that it's incredibly dull and slow to go through the cards I've created in Anki. Also, you feel like to are rote memorizing individual words or, even worse, their visual positions due to the way cards are constructed in Anki. But I know that the scientific research on spaced repetition is solid and highlights it as one of the new learning approaches that really work, which is why I would like to hear your thoughts about Anki.
Sorry that it took me so long to reply to you. I hope you find my thoughts useful. From what I understand (and I haven't read as deeply or widely on this topic as I would like to, yet), there are several related concepts called "spaced repetition" that are often mixed up in many video eyplanation you see on TH-cam. 1) There is one "spaced repetition" that is contrasted with "massed repition". That means do you repeat something you want to memorise imediately several time or do you space it out (e.g. you say "mitochondria convert sugar to energy, mitochondria convert sugar to energy, mitochondria convert sugar to energy..." in quick succession vs you leave a gap of several hours or days between repetitions). The second has been shown to be more effective. That doesn't mean that you must use flash cards for that. 2) Another concept which is sometimes called "spaced repition" or "active recall" (though the terms used in the scientific literature seem to "test effect" and "retieval practice"). It says that if you have to produce something actively from memory (rather than just rereading something and deciding whether you remember reading it before). And again there's scientific support for that. While many studies seem to have used some variation of classical cramming techniques to test this (again, I haven't yet read many of those papers in detail and I might be wrong), this doesn't mean that these are the only ways in which you can actively retrieve something from memory. 3) Then there's "space drepetition" as it is used in the spaced repitition technique. That technique implements the insights from research from the first two meanings. While there has been a bit of research with this technique, the majority of research has not directly tested this specific implementation from what I can see at the moment. And there also hasn't been much research on alternatives. So, it's one way of utilising what research has found (without doubt the most vocal one), but not the only one and not necessarily the best one. There're many other ways in which you can actively retrieve what you read / heard in lectures. E.g. by telling your friends / partner / family what you recently read, by taking important concepts and grouping or ranking them acc. to various criteria, by trying to create new metaphors for these concepts, by expressing the concepts or processes in terms of a CaWa, by roleplaying situations in which you need to use the knowledge, by solving concrete problems and so on and so on. And you can easily space that out over the course of several days / weeks / months. That way you can harness the power of sense 1) and 2) of "spaced repition" without having to use sense 3).
Great that you think they're interesting. My PhD is in psychology, in neuroscience. I'm looking at how the brain change after hand nerves get cut (this happens, unfortunately comparatively frequently)
The thing is that our brain is not good at learning isolated facts. It's good at finding structures and connections. In fact, mental structures and models help us to remember facts. There's some fascinating research with chess players who were asked to remember positions on a chess board. Better players could memeorise the positions better and faster, because they are storing this type of information in a more structured way. The actual position of the figures on the board are like the facts you are trying to learn. Good teachers provide you with the necessary models, but most teachers prefer to teach isolated facts, because that is easier for them (but worse for the students). So, it pays off to invest a bit of time in the beginning in building up these models (which will later be refined and extended the more you learn). This might feel as if it slows you down initially, but only for a little while. Later it allows you to speed up and you'll save time in the long run and learning will be easier and more enjoyable.
I haven't studied medicine, so I can't give you too many concrete examples. But I can say something about learning anatomy and other biological topics. Anatomical knowledge is like geographical knowledge, it's all about the spatial arrangment of components (bones, blood vessels, cell organelles or what have you). It's just all in 3D. So, you can build your own physical models. You can get really artistic, if you like, or just use wires and thread for a very abstract representation. Or you could draw the arrangement in 2D, where applicable, create models in Blender or whatever or just mentally imagine the layout of the components (the last one can be very hard and you're more easily distracted). At the begining, you'll only be able to place the principle compknents down. But that's ok. Once you "got" those, you'll find that it'll be much easier to learn more nuances in relations to the principle components (in fact there's a good chunk of organs that are named by their position relative to other organs - just in Latin). If you do that, you need to actively and repeatedly engage with the components and their relations and by doing that you encode them much better (not to mention that you need to use active recall). So, you'll learn a lot without being fully aware of it. A lot of the knowledge that you need to learn has to do with classification. That means we have a mass of (organs, cells, illnesses...), how can we tell them apart? And again, the world is not a mess, but there is an underlying structure. So, repeated categorisation can be a great aid in helping to remember the "facts". In a way, it's all about arrangement again, just in this case it's logical, rather than physical arrangements. Certain illnesses have common symptoms that other illnesses do not show (some symptoms, such as fatigue, are very unspecific, while others are highly specific). If you do that, you'll find that the first couple of items are always easy to categorise. But as you add more and more items things start to get hairy and you need to reconsider your choices. You again heavily improve encoding, because you need to actively engage with each item, and you use active recall. Then there are also processes (the progression of an illness, cell respiration, immune responses...). You again have an arrangement of components or items. But in this case it's a temporal arrangment (first A, then B...). Graphs and diagrams are really good to visualise those (e.g. flow charts, causal-loop-diagrams, scatter plots...). This can be as simple as taking a text that describes a process, noting the names of the individual steps and writing them on a separate piece of paper with arrows between them (the tail pointing to the previous, the tip to the next step of the sequence). For more complicated processes, you'll need more complicate representations. So, you again use active thinking to improve encoding and quite naturally also encorporate active recall. The idea is always the same, though. The "facts" that are usually taught isolated are really part of a (spatial, temporal, logical) structure. Learning isolated facts is hard, learning facts while thinking through a mental model or structure is easy. Unless you try to learn the strucutres as isolated facts - then it's just as hard as learning the isolated facts themselves.
What are you learning at the moment?
I read Polanyi's “the tacit dimension”
Python
Never thought spaced repetition results in mindlessness. What you said really resonated with me, thanks for the video!
Glad it was useful! The problem seems to be that the measure is whether we pass exams and not how well we can actually use what we learn. That's why so many cramming techniques continue to be celebrated.
You dont learn for an exam, you learn for your life.
Probably one of the most impactful sentences i every heard in my life.
And sadly even though i am studying psychology now - where i thought people would be more mindful about this - there are way too many people in my lectures that dont process the information deeply and just learn to pass the exams. And i always wonder how these people will ever be competent psychologists if they dont see the bigger picture of what they learn.
Also i just want to say thank you and appreciate your channel because it gave me a lot of new perspectives on how to build associations and connections with the things i want to learn. ABC active really is a great way to create more cues in order to retrieve what you learn :) Thanks a lot!
I know, it's the same everywhere. It's really a shame. Especially now when we need more and more people who need to be able to solve complicated problems and adopt new technology.
Great that you find my videos useful! That's why I make them. Comments like yours are very encouraging. 🙂
Your channel is great
I love your work. In this case, I think you may have gotten wrong the point of spaced repetition. In an earlier video you had mentioned the value of understanding concepts deeply as a prerequisite for creativity. Well that's exactly what spaced repetition does for you. First you master the accepted and dare I say mundane aspects of your field, then from this you can become more creative using the techniques you now outline here. In short spaced repetition is just a tool similar to ABC active one that solves the problem of getting what has already been solved by others into you head.
Thanks, man. I appreciate.
Your point about spaced repetition is very interesting. I hope my answer is not to rambling, but there's a lot to unpack. I might make a separate video about this at some point.
Feel free to ask questions or to argue your point - as I said this is a really interesting topic.
That we must "get what has already been solved by others into your head" is a common and dangerous misconception. We always think of learning as "filling our brains" with something (compare, for instance, the metaphor "to absorb knowledge like sponge"). This suggests that learning is something static. But learning is a highly dynamic and very creative activity.
In communication theory we know that both sender and receiver perform vital actions when transmitting a message. And it's only in the interplay between the two that the message is constructed. Some form of learning consists of transmitting messages (that's the form usually practiced in "formal education"). The idea behind rote memorisation (of which spaced repetition is one form) is that there is such a thing as a message which is independent of sender and receiver (or at the very least independent of the receiver). But this is not the case.
If I say 我特别饿了, this is a perfectly clear message for someone who speaks Chinese. But if you don't, there's only noise for you.
In addition, you can understand a concept on different levels and as you learn more about the subject your understanding about the concepts will develop as well. If you understand a concept well, you can express it several ways and on different levels. But if you go for rote memorisation (and spaced repetition, as it is usually done, is just one form of rote memorisation), there is only one, definite way of expressing a concept or exactly one list of pros and cons and so on. You're given absolutely no space to think the concept through, because thinking it through would require that you doubt it (you can't, because it must be correct or else you would not memorise it), look at it from a different perspective (which would involve saying it in a different way, but you try to memorise the statement as is), add more meaning to it from other examples or experiments (which again would require rewording the statement ad doubting it, at least for some time). So you see, rote memorisation is not geared to deeply understanding, but towards parroting one specific answer.
And when you want to be creative you must be able to see nuances, you must be able to change your perspective or realise that there are limitations to a certain statement and so on. But if your brain has come to except that there is one accepted way of looking at a given aspect and everything else is necessarily wrong, it's very, very hard to play with the concepts as needed. On top of that, even if you're able to do this, chances are that your inner censor will shoot down that shoot of an idea before it can grow strong enough for you to decide whether it's worth pursuing further.
Of course, you could utilise spaced repetition in such a way that you say I want to actively think about a subject in certain intervals and if, for whatever reason, nothing seems to appear in your mind about the subject you think about it more often again. But that's not what spaced repetition was originally intended for.
To see the difference to ABC-active (because you mentioned it) do the following small experiment. Take another person who also knows how to do ABC-active and select a text. Then both of you read the text and create your ABC-active. Afterwards, compare your ABCs. While some words might be identical and some more might be close, others will be completely different, because you both focused on different aspects. And by comparing and talking about it, you will both be able to take more from the text than you would have otherwise.
@@bf-thinking I fully agree with you about each person's point in effect having their definition. I go a bit further. I think each term/concept means something different in different contexts. My tool of choice (Remnote) allows me to do this brilliantly.
I think maybe it's because I have a poor memory than most people. I struggle to remember what I literally just read.
Here is an example
DRIVE-BY (ONE-TIME) VISITORS
RETURNING VISITORS
ENROLLED USERS
VOTERS/FLAGGERS
COMMENTERS
CONTENT CREATORS
MODERATORS
GROUP CREATORS
The list above represents a funnel for user-generated business. Now I can read it and its definitions, even remember parts of it, but it rapidly disappears once I move on and now need to remember say.
Clarify
Describe
List problems
List solutions
Evaluate
The list above represents steps towards disambiguating a product challenge.
The second list I got from memory, the first I had to refer back to the book.
So now what I do is embed the list in a mnemonic of sorts. This forces me to think about the words in creative ways. I am successful, and it sticks; I can now let my mind wander, say when waiting in line, about various possible connections. In this way, I try to give the list meaning.
Think about it like a CaWa done in memory.
I am just starting this out, but I think it holds some potential. What do you think?
@Jacob Chencha Yes, I completely agree with you that the same term can mean something completely different in different contexts (stress in engineering vs stress in psychology, for instance).
Edit: I had written much more, but for some reason TH-cam didn't take this over. Sorry about that. You need to give me some time to type it out again.
@@JacobChencha Oh, just as a quick follow up. Most people would think that stage actors are the paragon of memorising folk. But they to don't usually use mnemonics to learn their line but work through the text to get a deep understanding. You might find this article interesting: www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-be-brilliant/201206/how-actors-remember-their-lines
@@bf-thinking thank you will be waiting. Looking at the actor article. I see the point. Actually I don't think I have any problems remembering emotionally evocative topics. Sometimes you just have to go through dry text and somehow make it stick before you get to higher levels of understanding. Tradionally I would just store this information in some kind of note taking tool and retrieve it as needed. Over time, I have come to realize speed of retrieval in this way is painfully slow and hard to carry out a natural conversation with say my boss.
Thank you !!!
Glad it was helpful!
As someone who is trying to learn Anki right now (college level IT, where passing tests indeed matters), I feel your criticism of spaced repetition. Despite giving it a serious effort for a couple of weeks, I'm not sure how useful Anki or spaced repetition truly is. The reason being is that it's incredibly dull and slow to go through the cards I've created in Anki. Also, you feel like to are rote memorizing individual words or, even worse, their visual positions due to the way cards are constructed in Anki.
But I know that the scientific research on spaced repetition is solid and highlights it as one of the new learning approaches that really work, which is why I would like to hear your thoughts about Anki.
Sorry that it took me so long to reply to you. I hope you find my thoughts useful.
From what I understand (and I haven't read as deeply or widely on this topic as I would like to, yet), there are several related concepts called "spaced repetition" that are often mixed up in many video eyplanation you see on TH-cam.
1) There is one "spaced repetition" that is contrasted with "massed repition". That means do you repeat something you want to memorise imediately several time or do you space it out (e.g. you say "mitochondria convert sugar to energy, mitochondria convert sugar to energy, mitochondria convert sugar to energy..." in quick succession vs you leave a gap of several hours or days between repetitions). The second has been shown to be more effective. That doesn't mean that you must use flash cards for that.
2) Another concept which is sometimes called "spaced repition" or "active recall" (though the terms used in the scientific literature seem to "test effect" and "retieval practice"). It says that if you have to produce something actively from memory (rather than just rereading something and deciding whether you remember reading it before). And again there's scientific support for that. While many studies seem to have used some variation of classical cramming techniques to test this (again, I haven't yet read many of those papers in detail and I might be wrong), this doesn't mean that these are the only ways in which you can actively retrieve something from memory.
3) Then there's "space drepetition" as it is used in the spaced repitition technique. That technique implements the insights from research from the first two meanings. While there has been a bit of research with this technique, the majority of research has not directly tested this specific implementation from what I can see at the moment. And there also hasn't been much research on alternatives. So, it's one way of utilising what research has found (without doubt the most vocal one), but not the only one and not necessarily the best one.
There're many other ways in which you can actively retrieve what you read / heard in lectures. E.g. by telling your friends / partner / family what you recently read, by taking important concepts and grouping or ranking them acc. to various criteria, by trying to create new metaphors for these concepts, by expressing the concepts or processes in terms of a CaWa, by roleplaying situations in which you need to use the knowledge, by solving concrete problems and so on and so on. And you can easily space that out over the course of several days / weeks / months. That way you can harness the power of sense 1) and 2) of "spaced repition" without having to use sense 3).
What are you doing your PhD in? This is very interesting, thank you for making these videos.
Great that you think they're interesting. My PhD is in psychology, in neuroscience. I'm looking at how the brain change after hand nerves get cut (this happens, unfortunately comparatively frequently)
Could you suggest methods to learn highly fact oriented subjects like medicine, where you are bombarded with lots of isolated facts
The thing is that our brain is not good at learning isolated facts. It's good at finding structures and connections. In fact, mental structures and models help us to remember facts. There's some fascinating research with chess players who were asked to remember positions on a chess board. Better players could memeorise the positions better and faster, because they are storing this type of information in a more structured way. The actual position of the figures on the board are like the facts you are trying to learn. Good teachers provide you with the necessary models, but most teachers prefer to teach isolated facts, because that is easier for them (but worse for the students).
So, it pays off to invest a bit of time in the beginning in building up these models (which will later be refined and extended the more you learn). This might feel as if it slows you down initially, but only for a little while. Later it allows you to speed up and you'll save time in the long run and learning will be easier and more enjoyable.
I haven't studied medicine, so I can't give you too many concrete examples. But I can say something about learning anatomy and other biological topics.
Anatomical knowledge is like geographical knowledge, it's all about the spatial arrangment of components (bones, blood vessels, cell organelles or what have you). It's just all in 3D. So, you can build your own physical models. You can get really artistic, if you like, or just use wires and thread for a very abstract representation. Or you could draw the arrangement in 2D, where applicable, create models in Blender or whatever or just mentally imagine the layout of the components (the last one can be very hard and you're more easily distracted).
At the begining, you'll only be able to place the principle compknents down. But that's ok. Once you "got" those, you'll find that it'll be much easier to learn more nuances in relations to the principle components (in fact there's a good chunk of organs that are named by their position relative to other organs - just in Latin). If you do that, you need to actively and repeatedly engage with the components and their relations and by doing that you encode them much better (not to mention that you need to use active recall). So, you'll learn a lot without being fully aware of it.
A lot of the knowledge that you need to learn has to do with classification. That means we have a mass of (organs, cells, illnesses...), how can we tell them apart? And again, the world is not a mess, but there is an underlying structure. So, repeated categorisation can be a great aid in helping to remember the "facts". In a way, it's all about arrangement again, just in this case it's logical, rather than physical arrangements. Certain illnesses have common symptoms that other illnesses do not show (some symptoms, such as fatigue, are very unspecific, while others are highly specific). If you do that, you'll find that the first couple of items are always easy to categorise. But as you add more and more items things start to get hairy and you need to reconsider your choices. You again heavily improve encoding, because you need to actively engage with each item, and you use active recall.
Then there are also processes (the progression of an illness, cell respiration, immune responses...). You again have an arrangement of components or items. But in this case it's a temporal arrangment (first A, then B...). Graphs and diagrams are really good to visualise those (e.g. flow charts, causal-loop-diagrams, scatter plots...). This can be as simple as taking a text that describes a process, noting the names of the individual steps and writing them on a separate piece of paper with arrows between them (the tail pointing to the previous, the tip to the next step of the sequence). For more complicated processes, you'll need more complicate representations. So, you again use active thinking to improve encoding and quite naturally also encorporate active recall.
The idea is always the same, though. The "facts" that are usually taught isolated are really part of a (spatial, temporal, logical) structure. Learning isolated facts is hard, learning facts while thinking through a mental model or structure is easy. Unless you try to learn the strucutres as isolated facts - then it's just as hard as learning the isolated facts themselves.
Very hard to make it audible.
Sorry, at that time I didn't have a lavalier mic yet. If you look at more recent videos, I think you'll find the volume level is better.