Tero Toivanen's List: learning

• Can psychology give us all the same astonishing command of our minds? That’s Whately’s aim. With former memory champion Ed Cooke, he’s already designed a learning app, Memrise, that uses some of the mnemonist’s principles, as BBC Future has described in the past.
• Memory experts from across the world were asked to conduct experiments to find the easiest, and most effective, way to memorise new information.
• The competition’s task is superficially simple, says Rosalind Potts at UCL. “We wanted to know if you had an hour to study a list of 80 words, what do you have to do in order to remember them a week later.” The task is made more difficult by the fact that those 80 words are all Lithuanian.
• Rather than focussing on one single technique, they tended to use combinations of the following strategies:
• 1) Embracing ignorance. Self-testing is one of the best ways to improve recall.
• Simply recognising your own ignorance, it seems, primes your mind into action – doubling the recall compared to a group who didn’t use the technique. This builds on the idea of “desirable difficulty” in psychology – by making a task a little bit harder, it can engage your attention and construct firmer foundations for later recall.
• 2) Surfing the memory’s waves.
• You can easily waste time over-studying. So many of the entrants had designed algorithms that cleverly work out how strong your memory for each of the 80 words is, so they could rekindle it once you had started to forget. Memrise’s app has one version of this approach that you can use for now – and the entrants may suggest ways to further refine it.

  • Memrise
• When you’re studying, it’s certainly worth taking short breaks to ensure that fatigue doesn’t overcome your natural abilities.
• 3) Buffet studying.
• Whately points out that memory champions memorising a pack of cards take a similar approach – rotating quickly through the whole pack rather than learning it block by block.
• 4) Story-telling. Any form of “elaboration” can help reactivate those synapses and seal the memory.
• The program they designed might show a picture of a living room and give you the Lithuanian word “lova” – bed. You could then imagine your lover sitting on a couch, for example, eating bread. Once you have mapped out your learning in this way, you should be able to retrace your steps and recall the word with ease.
• This was, in fact, the technique that allowed the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci to learn Chinese to such an advanced level – and it also lies behind Cooke’s ability to remember 2265 binary digits in less than 30 minutes. The team’s computer program may simplify the process by making it more automatic.
• “Repetition testing, spacing – all these techniques work for almost everything.”
• Having short-listed five entries, the team are now in the process of uploading them to Memrise’s website.

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