Shadow

As an educator I found this to be a really interesting article. I'm all for people using the internet to look up facts and question a lot of the rote memorisation that goes on in classrooms, but that doesn't mean that trainees won't need to pick up a vocabulary for the field of study they're engaged with, or an understanding of what things are possible in that field.

Both of these types of knowledge are essential for making good search strings in Google ^_^ and both require a fair amount of memorisation before the student can move from the 'I suck' stage to: 'I rock'. The less time they spend in 'i suck' the more likely they are to persevere and progress to the more interesting aspects of the subject at hand, and Piotr seems to have done some great work in this area.

I was wondering the same thing as marlborotestmonkey7 - this, to what end? Self realization and personal satisfaction? What's the point in becoming a "genius" if you only reach the goal just before you die? And what "few million" items do you choose to learn? Memorization is not the same as understanding or the ability to apply your knowledge.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very interested in the software and I may try it. Certainly this work seems very valuable. I wonder why he didn't collaborate on it? It would be nice just to be able to license his algorithms and plop a decent interface on top :)

I tried SuperMemo a few years ago, on a Palm Pilot. My experience was that the user interface was acceptable, though not good, but data entry was too difficult on a Palm. Furthermore, I was using it to try to learn Italian, and I discovered that, yes, it seemed to be good for memorization of words, but it didn't seem to help me string those words together; for that, I still needed my traditional language books and classes.

Perhaps someone who has "[turned his] back on every convention of social life" isn't the best person to be writing software to help people communicate.

Also: the SuperMemo website is terrible. When I first went to it, I thought it was one of those advertising sites that's just lists of other pages. A good interface is important.

The utter lack of interest by the education community in the science of learning isn't that much of a mystery. Since the industry is dominated by government agencies the importance of learning is diminished. What's important to the people who run a school district, that kids learn or that next year's budget is greater then this year's?

Kids are measured for the learning they've accomplished but education agencies aren't measured for the learning those kids have accomplished. So why bother with all that tedious scientific stuff? You can suit yourself, fall in love with content-free ideologies and there's never any consequences.

It's the intellectual equivalent of Gresham's Law in which bad ideas drive out good. Good ideas - breakthroughs - result in political/organizational upheaval. Very upsetting to people who've achieved a certain degree of success under the old regime so best ignored in favor of innovations which leave the status quo unmarred.

"So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.

"Yes."

This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."

At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but there's something about standing on the beach in the type of minuscule bathing suit you get at the gift shop of a discount resort in Eastern Europe, and watching people stride past in their down parkas, that smacks of danger.

"I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.

"Will I have a heart attack?"

"There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.

I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the rural north, lines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm machinery until they defy the odds and try to pass. There are spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death. So he guards his health. He rarely gets in a car. The Germans on the beach are staring at me. I dive in.

Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change.

These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves through automated steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it incremental reading, and it has come to dominate his intellectual life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that he hasn't gotten to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the system, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropriate time.

From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can sometimes look selfish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has stunted the development of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himself," says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is perhaps a bit unfair. SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of which were coded by licensees: SuperMemo for Windows, for Palm devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet version. It's true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. Still, it can hardly be described as the world's most difficult program. After all, photographers can learn to produce the most arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't more people be able to master SuperMemo?

"It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may be getting closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the struggle to optimize intelligence, a conflict that transcends design and touches on some curious facts about human nature. We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.

The battle between lab-tested techniques and conventional pedagogy went on for decades, and it's fair to say that the psychologists lost. All those studies of human memory in the lab — using nonsense syllables, random numbers, pictures, maps, foreign vocabulary, scattered dots — had so little influence on actual practice that eventually their irrelevance provoked a revolt. In the late '70s, Ulric Neisser, the pioneering researcher who coined the term cognitive psychology, launched a broad attack on the approach of Ebbinghaus and his scientific kin.

"We have established firm empirical generalizations, but most of them are so obvious that every 10-year-old knows them anyway," Neisser complained. "We have an intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little confidence that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior." Neisser encouraged psychologists to leave their labs and study memory in its natural environment, in the style of ecologists. He didn't doubt that the laboratory theories were correct in their limited way, but he wanted results that had power to change the world.

Many psychologists followed Neisser. But others stuck to their laboratory methods. The spacing effect was one of the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely because it was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700 undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.

Obviously, computers were the answer, and the idea of using them was occasionally suggested, starting in the 1960s. But except for experimental software, nothing was built. The psychologists were interested mainly in theories and models. The teachers were interested in immediate signs of success. The students were cramming to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was somehow too abstract, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a useful way. What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he should actually recall the things he learned.

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.

The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.

Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the results that Ebbinghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that have been confirmed by other psychologists in the decades since.

The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.

"Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity," he tells me in English. "You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a sensation."