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Marvin Minsky

He says, You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Marvin Minsky, cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer.

He says, You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

we remember 90% of what we teach to others. This teaching can be tutoring, giving a dramatic presentation, or possibly even creating online materials designed to teach others.

The act of teaching something to another requires that you recast the content into a form to which the other person can relate. This may require you to think about the content in more than one way, possibly dramatically increasing your own understanding and retention.

By now, you will recognize the three strategies that applying learning activates in your brain. The first is attention and active learning. You can’t apply learning when you are daydreaming in the back row of the classroom. The second is rehearsal. But the third may be the least understood but the most important. If your brain regards the learning activity as personally relevant, then it will activate its natural learning machinery. If the brain perceives the activity to be irrelevant, then it will learn very little.

Short-term memory can hold an average of seven discrete items for only about 30 seconds. That memory may become encoded into long-term memory if the brain has a motivation to do so. To cement the memory, it must be rehearsed or recalled shortly after it is learned. To reliably recall long-term memories, we must have some way to “look up” the memory.