Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0291: Reprise: How do you retain something once you’ve memorized it?

Episode Date: April 20, 2015

Today Timothy revisits the question on how to retain something once you’ve memorized it, with some extra comments on how he would change his answer today. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Today we're doing a reprise episode. When we release this episode, it's going to be during my sabbatical for some extended overseas travel, so we're representing an old Master of Memory episode that I think is worth a refresher, but also with some new comments from me based on my more experienced perspective. Today we're representing episode 9, which is about retaining information once you've memorized it. Something that I wouldn't change about this episode is the fact that it does present a good retention schedule for making sure that you actually review what you're learning at less and less frequent intervals after you've learned it, but also that in the first place,

it emphasizes making sure that your mnemonics are making the subject memorable in the first place so that it actually does stick between those review times. Something I would add though is different ways to review other than just quizzing. So I used to be a big quizzer, but now I don't use the quizzing so much as other methods of review, although I do quiz once in a while. I mean, quizzing is good and it kind of depends on your topic. So for example, with a language, you don't want just to quiz on vocabulary. You also want to spend some time speaking the language and listening to things in the language

so you're not fooling yourself as far as how much Spanish or how much Mandarin you actually know. So that's my update, but for now, let's enjoy this reprise episode from Master of Memory. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today's question comes from Brandon, who asked on the Facebook page, In your experience, after you go through and successfully memorize a large chunk of information, how much upkeep is required to still remember it,

say, five years down the road? So this question is all about long-term retention, which all comes down to first learning an item well in the first place, and then second, reviewing it at the right intervals. Now I talk mainly about the first thing, which is, you know, learning something well in the first place, and that's all about, you know, using mnemonics and other tactics that make things memorable. But retention is a significant topic. So sometimes you can learn something really well, spending your best, most focused energy and bringing your strongest mnemonic tactics, only to forget it four weeks later because you never reviewed. Now, actually, as I talked about in the last episode, sometimes

the reason we don't remember things is not because they're not still there. Sometimes you learned it well and you still know it. And so it's in your brain somewhere, but you can't actually recall it. So if, you know, somebody asks you, what's the population of Chile? And you'll rack your brain trying to remember. And when they finally spoil the answer and say, well, there are 17.4 million people, you'll go, oh rats, I knew that. And you actually did know it. So why couldn't you recall it? Review is what keeps it at the front of your mind and puts it into more accessible long-term storage. So the good news is you don't have to review it very frequently to keep it in your memory. In fact, it's actually better not to review it very frequently. You'll actually want your review to be less and less frequent as time goes by in order to strengthen how well you know

it. So if you want to be really good at remembering something in the long term, you might actually want to come up with an active schedule for when to review it. I think that a solid review schedule would be to, you know, in order to make sure that you've actually learned something, review it some evening and then the next day, you know, the next morning, and then review it a day later, a week later, two weeks later, four weeks later, etc. That way, you know, you practice remembering it in the longer and longer term. So let's say you wanted to learn 16 new things and you wanted to learn one each week. If you drew out a schedule for the first 16 weeks, you'd be learning one new thing each of those weeks and you'd be reviewing at least one thing almost every week.

Actually, you would be doing some review every week. But what happens is even though you're learning 16 new things, by the end of those 16 weeks, you've only had to review a maximum of four things, you know, four of those items any given week. So you've learned 16 new things, you know, 16 sets of vocabulary words or 16 passages that you want to memorize, but you haven't had to review that many things because you have a review schedule that ensures you'll memorize things long term, but it's set out in such a way that you don't have to do too much review in order to do it. It's the minimum necessary amount. Putting a schedule together like that might seem complicated but the you know it's really worth it and if you actually take the effort to create a good schedule and stick to it consistently you can learn a

ton with very little review time. To look at a schedule like this to see how you could make this work, you can go to masterofmemory.com slash retention, where I've written some stuff about this and have a picture of a schedule that works. All right, I hope you've enjoyed this reprise episode. For anyone who has any questions about learning or memorizing anything faster than ever, feel free still to leave a message at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll be able to respond quickly to your message from wherever I am. I just won't be able to record an episode on that topic until I'm back in the States in May. Meanwhile, if you want to support

the show, please check out our Spanish course at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish. Or if you want to follow my adventures in Argentina or wherever else I might happen to be, you can do that at timothymoser.com.