Holla Forums Reseach methods, memory retention, and note-taking

Some stuff from my Uni days that different teacher told me (I finished engineering years ago).
To help memorize in class, what is needed is a mix of:
- Sound, hearing the explanation (from the teacher)
- Visual, drawings, formulas, etc (from the teacher)
- Writing down things (for the students)
- Questions if needed (from the student)

Similar studies also led to flashcards like program (anki for example) which give you visual words, sound of how the word is pronounced, and various randomized repetition, to help you learn a new language (or other things).

So if you intend to take notes on a laptop. Don't.
I could also write stuff on my laptop back then, but I always went in class with just pen and paper, the laptop would stay in my bag.

anyone have any tips on getting 'nicer' cursive writing? i'm in uni and would like to take notes as fast as possible, but I always shyed away from cursive as a kid. just liked printing more for some reason.

sometimes if i go back i can't read my cursive writing which does me no good.

I use everything in pic related, which sums up recent learning and memory research.

Most of it consists of using flashcard software (I use anki, which is free, there are others you can use). This takes advantage of various psychological mechanisms that help with memory retrieval (so I don't have to look at notes):

Testing effect: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect

Spacing effect: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

Interleaving effect: scientificamerican.com/article/the-interleaving-effect-mixing-it-up-boosts-learning/

Flashcard software tends to take advantage of all three, it forces you to retrieve things from memory (testing effect), they usually have an algorithm that spaces out cards depending on how well you know them (spacing effect), and if you keep them all in one deck it takes advantage of the interleaving effect by mixing up questions (making it harder for your memory to retrieve, which strengthens the memory if you can do it).

As to anki. I put in various questions (the input fields for decks are the question and the answer). My university degree was in philosophy and mathematics, so most of my deck is like this (along with some areas outside this).

Broadly, I would say I divide the questions in the flashcard decks up into definitional/conceptual/propositional questions and exercises/procedural.

Definitions are, "what is x?" Or asking a question where you are drawing/tagging a diagram. Or asking for arguments/counter-arguments for some concept. Or asking for equivalence of mathematical identities. Or finishing some conditional in some definition/theorem, e.g. if P, then … (then write whatever Q is in the answer. I'll also write questions for the contrapositive as well). Or asking a historical question (to gain intuition/historical knowledge about things), e.g. what was the problem that this conceptual tool was originally invented/created for?

Exercises/procedural questions are basically cut and pasting exercises and proofs into the questions, as well as programming stuff. For philosophy and math these include basic stuff like algebraic manipulation (solve for x), to graphing, to doing truth tables or semantic tableux. Or a question might be, "prove the following." Or it might be a programming question, e.g. solve this integral in MATLAB.

This is pretty much the only thing I do with respect to study and research. The only other thing I do is keep a read/to-read list where I place books/papers from a variety of areas.

I sometimes do transcriptions of books/papers/etc, then map the data as side flowcharts for easy navigation and use (combining, modules, learning inside, comparison, etc).

Most "productivity" or "self help" books are just a waste of paper but I would highly recommend reading "Getting Things Done" by David Allen and implementing as much of it as you can into your life. As much as I like this book however, it's extremely lacking and outdated when it comes to ways to implement the methodologies digitally. I only use physical paper once every few months at most.

I use emacs, being a programmer, which is a huge boon since it allows you to do EVERYTHING text-related in a single environment. I also have my filesystem set up so that all my projects are their own directory (backed up with git) in my home folder. I use org-mode for all TODO items which are in one huge file. Org mode is the gold standard for all note taking apps, and there really isn't anything better. It lets you do time tracking, pomodoro timers, lists, and a ton more.

Check out Mind Mapping. Tony Buzan is the most prominent name associated with it.

You basically do your notes as a big hub and spoke diagram. You are forced to logically parse and organize the material, as well as summarize instead of transcribing.

There is lots of software for it, but pen and paper works just fine.

This too, my writing is worse than a doctor's.

Well yeah fam. I've noticed this too in college.

When you're hand writing notes you're drawing every character by hand, whereas when you type you're just pressing buttons.

The notes are personalized since they are written in your hand. It contains part of your identity. Also it takes more focus to write than type so therefore you remember shit better.

I found that trying to teach someone something ends up teaching my self as well. It causes you to refine your knowledge from another angle.

Bump

Handwritten is the best.
If you need to memorize something - study the night before the night before a test.
Transcribe your notes when/while studying.
1200 on my SATs and 3.28 with close to 200 college credits.

If anyone is still reading I have a killer trick for resumes. I have been creating a shitload of them lately for extremely job specific occupations at the Federal level.
Write one for the job you want, then write another for the manager of that job, then an additional one for the supervisor of the original job you are applying for.

I actually had a physical interview for the worker job AND the manager job. Got beat out by education and happened to be competing against extremely similar applicants to me, based on an archaic Federal point system.

Both of those jobs were respectively 20 and 35K more than what I make now, so I am excited for the near future and am oozing confidence.

Why does this work?

Meta-memory retention time: pic related.

Link gives a summary + review, Holla Forums should be nodding gravely at sections 9 and 10, where the theses advanced are
- Our minds are becoming adept at forgetting things before they are lodged in long term memory, and reward themselves through Ctrl+F5 instead of reflecting on a smaller amount of information and improving their mental model of the world.
- Our theory of mind, when using electronic devices, is creating a electronic gestalt personality that each of us relates to, at the expense of real human relationships (the NPC problem).

vialogue.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/the-shallows-notes-review/

As far as note-taking goes, paper over computer any time for a live situation.

Doodling encourages the rightbrain to anchor the information to the situation.

Mindmapping forces you to reorganise your information and decide which pieces are subordinate to which. Also works for précis of a book because it breaks up the list structure of the printed word.

Rehearsing notes taken I used the 2-2-2 method - look over the notes 2 hours later, then 2 days later, then 2 weeks later.

I only ever remember what I actually code. Even inspect, copy, paste, run doesn't do the trick.

journal fag here.
been keeping a daily journal for more than a year now and im actually proud of myself.
short answer of what I did is installed a joomla blog onto my personal linux server (old gaming rig really).
One post a day, just of what I did and what I want to do tomorrow. It does help track what goals I make and see through.

Get started today, because in a while you will kick your self for not starting sooner.

That might very well be the case, all I can say is it is extensively taught amongst the UK's elite soldiers and special forces. So there is definitely something to it

i think we just have to practice man.

a couple weeks ago prior to this thread i tried note taking in cursive just because the memes about black people not being able to read cursive. i pretty much quit after 10 minutes.

today i took all my notes in cursive and i could tell it was easier by the end of class and better quality, although i wasn't able to write and listen since i was thinking about my cursive too much, but in time i think this will fade.

holy shit this helpfull self improvement thread was not sunk by the mods.

Does anyone know of any good prewar "self help books"?

you are looking for motivationals?

I used to find art threads very motivational.

Interesting. Got a few notebooks, will make it a priority to write something before I fall asleep.

When studying 漢字, I came across certain mnemonics. Basically, associate something with story-like imagery (using words and language you already know well so that it becomes easier to recall) and you'll have much better memory retention for things you don't encounter on a daily basis.

i believe mnemonics is the word

So if I can expand this into a "Practical Advice" thread, I would like to ask a question.

What's the least Jewed bank I can open an account with? My last one was bought out by Wachovia, which was then bought out by Wells Fargo, and the nose evident in my account dealings got longer and longer each time. I eventually just closed it, but I'm now sitting on a small pile of physical cash.

Who do I turn to to store the abstraction of my effort's value?

Your future self. Most every bank is under the big four now. It's is more secure in a place only you know. It is better served in action than in an account. It is a better investment in long term prepping than in interest rates.

I acknowledge and agree with your advice.

But being able to buy stuff online would help with all of that. Ebay/Amazon/NewEgg doesn't accept "throw bills at LCD" as a payment option. Do you have an alternative method besides normal banking?

Oh

THE EVIL COUNCIL!?!?!

BUMP SINCE THE CAPTCHA IS BROKEN AND WE CAN'T MAKE NEW THREADS

This is basically what I did until I started adding cards to anki decks instead. Both worked, at least for that class/test, but long-term retention was a problem with the copy method.

Started using anki a few years back and found it works much better than any other method I've tried, particularly for facts, formulas, and language learning. The only thing I'd like to add to your post is that anki is great because you'll ultimately spend less time and effort putting anything into long-term memory.

My method is to tie everything I think and learn together into one continuous string knotted back on itself over and over again. If everything is connected to everything else, then each thing I remember in the chain pulls out more memories. As long as I can get a single strand, I can pull out more and more memory until I get what I want.

Put another way, take things you want to memorise and involve them in your thoughts, whatever you're thinking about. Use the information as much as possible in as much of your life as possible. Write a story inspired by it, discuss something related to it, get into an argument about it, pick food related to it.

You NEVER forget things, you just lose track of the memories. As long as they're solidly connected to something you can pull them back. Think of a number and then rearrange your desk in a pattern related to it, play word-association games with it until you get into common words.

This method isn't perfect, if you asked me what I know I honestly couldn't tell you, but I can instantly pull out massive amounts of information given the slightest hook. One frame from an movie, one second from a song, one sentence from a book, an emotion, a type of food, even the air temperature can remind me.

The absolute best way to improve your memory is to USE IT ALL THE TIME! Constantly remember things and think about them and you'll never forget. Just like building muscle, your memory is based on constant exercise.

If you really want to go nuts, learn to draw, sketch things connected to your thoughts and keep the drawings in a book. Whenever you think you need to remember something, look through the book and the drawings will tell you.

Do you have conversations with grain fields?

Take Lecithin and DHA

Lecithin contains acetylcholine

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcholine

DHA contains…DHA

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docosahexaenoic_acid

Both will help to speed up your brain's processing power and perception (ability to notice things quicker)

Some people get the runs from Lecithin, so I recommend taking DHA instead. 3000mg per day, either type.

There are tablets you can get that let you write your notes by hand directly into a digital document. This lets you have the best of both worlds, I think.

One could also try racetams for similar effects.

This isn't a terrible memory technique, but consider the things that many Holla Forumsacks like: Nazi propaganda, ancient Egyptian gods, and anime waifus. Now, can you really expect them to tie that shit to other things and then talk about it openly with regular people IRL? That doesn't sound like the best idea.

Thanks, user. I'll give that a read.

Pomodoro? Never heard of it. Google tells me that it's essentially the same thing as the good old fashioned 25 minutes on, 10 minutes off study technique that got me through college. If that's right then I also recommend that. Helps to cut back on fatigue, and one also remembers the beginning and end of things better than the middle, so you're creating a lot of beginnings and ends by stopping and starting a lot.

give me prices

Just check Amazon, man. We're not here to hold your hand.

btw racetams are legal/illegal in some countries since one needs prescription for it.

I am not sure user. I like to think that I have some influence on this planet. If I keep notes to only myself I will lose even that small hope that somekind of giant AI is out there, and being a bro to me. Or maybe somekind of jew who thinks that I am important enough to be a thread (I am pretty narcissistic)

if only a jew could come forward and say to me "yes user, you are important, dont ever leave me" :(

I wonder how many of these things could pass

examine.com stringent evidence based proofs for their efficiency. Though I am having trouble finding them there.

Seriously, where is the evidence that they work?

I wonder though

has anyone ever read this and how certain psychotherapy may cause you to trigger different kinds of behaviors?

archive.is/gP9yr

Here a faggot was "cured" into liking women.

But I wonder if the same technique could be used for different things. Could you use it to behaviorally change yourself into reacting completely as you want to to certain things?

but I want us to hold hands.

That is an utterly terrible idea and completely goes against how we learn and how we remember things.

generally speaking you can use a flashcard program and it'll work alright, just be sure to write it out then type it in. Then use the program (with pictures).

* Mnemonic techniques are great, but they're just a tool in your learning arsenal. You can use mnemonic techniques to memorize thousands of words, but that will not make you fluent in that language, or even proficient, if you haven't contextualized them and solified your understanding with practice. Practice is essential. This applies to anything you want to study.
* Again, applying whatever you learned is key. Practice.
* Understanding something doesn't mean you have learned it. You have to test yourself for retention, conceptual understanding and fluency with the material, until it becomes part of you. If you hesitate even one second before retrieving a certain piece of information then you don't "know" it, yet. You need to work on it.
* Rote learning is useless in the long term. It might help you pass a test, but it will not make you competent. Competency/fluency comes with repetition and redundancy. You need to encounter the information in many contexts before understanding it deeply.
* Use a spaced repetition program, like Anki or Supermemo.
* Multitasking does have its place, but it's bullshit for the most part. You need to concentrate and push yourself to stretch your understanding and grow.
* Frustration is normal, you're not stupid if you don't understand something immediately. It's normal. Even so-called geniuses have to study hard like everybody else. Newton was a poor student. Tesla got several degrees, Einstein too. Accomplished pianists, linguists, artists, athletes need to work diligently for years before coming into their own, and they have to deal withplenty of frustration and failures in the process. This applies to everything, but especially to the more abstract fields where almost nothing is intuitive, like math.

The inventor of Supermemo, Piotr Wozniak, has written extensively on the topic.

supermemo.com/articles/myths.htm
supermemo.com/articles/devour.htm
super-memory.com/articles/genius.htm

I'd like to point out that in the Mueller and Oppenheimer study that even when students were instructed to take original notes on the laptop (they believed that copying the speeches verbatim was harming the computer-users' performance), they still performed much lower than those instructed to write down their notes.

For information that you plan to retrieve in a purely linguistic format and dump, flashcard programs work best. For more complex or conceptual information, creating electronic question prompts with the answers hidden in a separate section in whitetext/spoilers (try not to copy the written answer verbatim when you mentally answer the question), or trying to write original articles, guides, etc. about the material or about how the material can be applied to different aspects of everyday life works best because these methods will help you engage with the meaning of the concepts as opposed to how their explanations look or sound in your mind. Still, I tend to take all my notes in written form first and then use the other techniques as a supplement.

As for how often you should review, it's generally agreed that spacing out your study sessions is better than studying one night or two nights before an exam. It helps to review using multiple devices, environments, etc.

This. You won't get better at anything unless you practice that thing specifically and use it regularly.

I like your thread m8.

I remember a study where students did better at geometry tests if they were instructed to trace the diagrams with their fingers.

OH the old computer-does-not-work-meme.

Yes it does. But you have to use it as what it is. You can save whole pages as mhtml if you activate it and search with desktop search tools. There are other tools to organize bookmarks with comments, so e.g. to blatantly stalk public persons and their remarks and attach screencaps as well as the whole site with their remarks/archived links. A PC is a dumb collection of facts. Memory management is different beast.

Generally, it is way more important to have a clean mind. This means enough sleep. I learned a lot while being in lecture and a lot more when I moved the notes into computer based notes. What brought the highest grades was to type them, print them out and paste them into a booklet. Stupid, because you think that is kindergarten, but it works very well with introductory stuff. If you are in STEM, just do the fucking exercises and do more. Do additional examples. Solve previous tests. Do more exercises. Do more. A lot more. You got the picture. Why are you reading this? Solve more problems. Now.

Other areas of research profit by reading stuff. You'd be surprised of the reaction of professors if you ask them what book they recommend if someone really had the time to read it, the "one of the field" (to make it clear you don't want to read their 3rd class book). They mention two or three, pick one, read it in two weekends. This will catapult you ahead. For social sciences read the actual stats the government provides. Most don't and just believe what everyone told them. Follow the trends. Your time of study will uncover stuff that you specifically see but the normie sheeple in class wont.

This totally depends on how you use a computer. If you see a thread here and then delve into comparing it to your own nation, e.g. researching numbers between the US, Canada and Austria and make assumptions on why they are the way they are, I am sure you can't just forget this whole episode. Or you watch a little 15 minute film about a topic you tangentially know already. There will be stuff you take with you out of it.

Mnemonics is just a technique. I works. But it does not solve the mystery as why today (Internet or not) we can't remember stuff we should keep for live. This is a habitual thing. "Why can't I run more than 5 Miles?" has not the answer "You have to get better shoes." This is just what I know. I am learning language(s) and I bite my ass because I did not learn in my mid-20ies, because I thought well those Anglo-Saxon will fuck everything up, no purpose there. But I saw the light and determination, I want to learn "one for each five years of my live". Should work. I am back in, took me about five years.

That dude knew it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi

So a stupid markup generator would be more than enough to learn? Never thought of that.

But a few weeks ago I learned that others can't "feel" if they truly know something. I feel when I know something rock solid. That could be a work, a phone number or some technical tweak I have to type in. I feel the level of trust I should put into the information I can retrieve. I encountered somebody who can't do that. She (probably not important but she was one of those types who learns each hour of her life something for school or job, you know them) was perplexed when I said "well, when you test yourself while controlling word retention, don't you know instantly if you know a word by heart? Like this feel of it was forever in your head, no problem?" "No, I know the word or don't there is no scale of retention."

Someone corrected me "this gift of metacognition if a gift from god, treasure it!". I think we all should learn to feel this thought, this reaffirmation of knowledge. If you know what I mean, you should not have any troubles learning anything. You just know when the learning process is over.

It's rooted in a basic learning technique where you create flashcards and test yourself every day. You shuffle the cards into separate piles (A, B, C, etc.) and each pile is marked for how long until you use cards from that pile, at first they're all in the A (everyday) or B(every few days) piles but as you get better at remembering the answer the other piles (C every week, D every 2 weeks, E every 3 weeks, etc.) start to pile up and even out. You have to keep a rigid schedule and keep at it every day, so long as you don't fuck up the flashcards then you'll cement the knowledge you learn via this method in your mind for a long time.

It's a slow process though and you need to git gud at making proper flashcards, but it's great for stuff like math which is the majority of the time formulas or remembering the names of all the shit in your field of study. Things that can't be broken down into simple sentences requires creativity, pictures, or even videos which the right program can pull off for you.

archive.is/5ZUDt

There's a simple solution for that:

justgetflux.com/

It shouldn't be an habit but if you're going to stay in front of a computer screen before going to bed – and it isn't graphics related work where color precision is important – then with F.lux you won't be suppressing your melatonin.

Try it.

f.lux was great, used it for a couple years.
also, blu blocker glasses do the same thing.

before I click any of that shit that installer doesn't install malware does it?

(check)

Agree Flux is great, makes a huge difference in night-time surfing. Much easier on the eyes.

never had any problem with it.

justgetflux.com/faq.html

"My PC's Anti-Virus program flagged f.lux as malware – As long as you've downloaded f.lux from this site, you don't have any malware. Every once in a while we get flagged as a potential threat due to the nature of our installer and updater. If this happens to you, please send us a note with your anti-virus program and details and we will contact them for review."

Thanks for posting this user, thanks to this I found something of extreme importance.

So is it an end of the day sort of thing? Logging what you've done before bed?

I'll try getting into this.

Now what do you do when its hard as fuck to remember anything.