poto

the pattern/curve thing is pretty nifty... I forget stuff all the time, so I'm gonna play with this a bit and see if it helps meh tired ol brain...



SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

...Philosopher William James once wrote that mental life is controlled by noticing. Climbing out of the sea and onto the windy beach, my skin purple and my mind in a reverie provoked by shock, I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life...

source: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

link: Super Memory

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hawksdeals

Ah yes, I am a student and I have some experience using this.

Ever since I read the article on Wired I was quite curious as to whether it would help. I did some digging and soon found a community of users that were successfully implementing Wozniak's ideas with programs such as SuperMemo and Anki, mainly for vocabulary learning purposes.

The way I implemented this was by installing FullRecall, a spaced repetition software on my PDA and using it to revise while on the bus or on random lost moments. It is not exactly Wozniak, but I think that it is a good way to implement it if you do not want to 'surrender to the algorithm', as it were.

My interest is not languages, but Humanities - which is what I am studying. I googled up a few good glossaries of literary and sociological terms, wikipediaed the definitions if needed and then loaded them unto the software. i have also used it to remember precise definitions of a philosopher's ideas and so on.

This method has given me an incredible advantage in my exams, all while living my life. It is not just the fact that you memorise the terms, but I believe that being reminded of concepts is a good way to engage the subconscious, which results in lots of creativity and original thought.

Just my two cents...

I plan on using it to learn PHP, mySQL, Affiliate marketing and SEOing soon, and I will defo keep you posted on this.

pussyluver

Thanks for the links. Next I'll need a speed reading course. Oh, I have that on CD. Now what did I do with that damn thing?..... Evelyn Wood's course. Anyone have comments on that? Haven't looked at the CD yet.

poto

I tried the speed reading thing, but I always seem to miss stuff when I do that...

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