Fluent Forever : How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
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• Every time you successfully recall a memory, you revisit and rewrite earlier experiences, adding bits and pieces of your present self to your past memories. • You’ll make the best use of your time when practicing recall if your earlier experiences are as memorable as possible. You can accomplish this by connecting sounds, images, and personal connections to every word you learn. • When you do forget, use immediate feedback to bring back your forgotten memories. T IMING I S E VERYTHING : T HE E ND OF F ORGETTING μέτρα φυλσσεσθαι καιρòς δ’ ∊̓ττὶ ττα ̴ σιν α̋ριστσς Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor. —Hesiod How do we combine the five principles? We want our original memories to be as deep and multisensory as possible (1: Make memories more memorable). We want to study as little as possible (2: Maximize laziness), and practice recall as much as possible (3: Don’t review. Recall). We want our recall practice to be challenging but not too hard (4: Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!). Last, when we practice, we want to nearly forget those original experiences but not forget them completely. When we do forget, we want immediate feedback to put us back on track (5: Rewrite the past). If we could predict exactly how long we could remember each thing we learn, we would be able to work miracles with our minds. We would have an alarm that went off right before we forgot where we left our car keys, and life would be a wonderful paradise free of forgetting. Unfortunately, our memories are too messy. They make unpredictable connections to everything we experience or imagine. They lose pieces of our past and gain pieces of our present. Any mention of a car, a lock, or even a word that rhymes with key can enhance or suppress our key-related memories. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve memorized some word, only to have some new, similar-sounding word come along and screw everything up months later. We can’t accurately predict when we will forget a single memory. However, we can make predictions about a group of memories. Take a gaggle of college students and teach them obscure trivia, like “Who invented snow golf?” Then let them practice recall once, and test them six months later. 10 Depending upon the timing of that single practice session, you’ll see quite different results: For students trying to remember something for six months, the immediate practice session (which produced a 27 percent final score) is not bad at all. But as the delay increases to twenty-eight days, the students’ scores double. This pattern appears in numerous studies, although the ideal delay changes depending upon the final test date. There is a complex balance between the advantages of nearly forgetting and the disadvantages of actually forgetting, and it breaks our forgetting curve in half: 11 That single practice session has made the difference between forgetting nearly everything and remembering quite a bit. Here’s the final leap: if immediate recall practice is good, and delayed practice is better, and if one session is good and many sessions are better, what happens if you delay your recall practice many times? We’ve found the end of forgetting. You learn a word today and then shelve it for a while. When it comes back, you’ll try to recall it, and then shelve it again, on and on until you couldn’t possibly forget. While you’re waiting for your old words to return, you can learn new words and send them off into the future, where you’ll meet them again and work them into your long-term memory. At least until you can upload jujitsu directly into your brain, this is the most efficient way to memorize large amounts of information permanently. tải về 3.86 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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