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Remember Anything 30 Minutes Per Day
Posted in Personal Development, Zing Blog on February 25th, 2010 by Rusty

Tags: brain memory, brain tips, spaced repitition, studying

We all have our own perception of time. We count hours but discount how they are spread out. It’s called binge learning and you’ll probably forget everything.

If your like me, there are times when you get excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two non-stop on getting it mastered, only to get tired of it and move on to something else. When mastery is the goal, spending an exorbitant amount of time in one sitting will more than likely burn you out. For example when we work out at the gym we are not expecting to loose 20 pounds of fat or gain 10 pounds of muscle in a single work-out, likewise for learning and remembering information. Our bodies need time to heal; our muscles need time to grow. And the same goes for that muscle we call our brain. When trying to develop a new skill, the important thing to remember isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it.

Say your trying to memorize your HTML tags for a quiz your taking in web design class. You’d probably go with one of two familiar strategies. The first approach is spaced presentation and it just means spreading out the studying over time. The other is massed presentation (i.e. cramming) which helps keep the words in your short-term memory, and is actually more effective if you have an exam the next day – just as working out right before you hit the beach makes a noticeable, but temporary, difference. In psychology, this is known as the spacing effect, and it explains why you can’t seem to remember anything you learned in college. I doubt it was the gallons of beer drinking and frat parties…

There is a third approach and is probably one of the more interesting ways to remember. Developed by a man named Paul Pimsleur. Which you have probably heard his name on learning a new language audio books. Pimsleur dedicated his life to understanding and improving language learning process. He observed that the first time you learned a new word, you’d forget it almost immediately. But if you reviewed it again as you were about to forget it, each subsequent review would exponentially increase the staying power of the word. So if you could only remember the word for 5 seconds at first, coming back to it after those 5 seconds would boost your retention time to 25 seconds, then 2 minutes, 10 minutes and so on. At this rate, the tenth review wouldn’t have to take place until about four months after the first.

cramming vs. spaced presentation

The instant you learn something new your mind begins the process of forgetting it. That means cramming works if you need to remember it in a few hours and don’t plan on using it again. Spaced repetition is ideal for long-term retention, but is more time consuming. But graduated interval recall (Pimsleur’s method) relies on fewer, well timed repitions to make sure the word never fades away drastically. See the diagram below for an example.

Although there are factors that affect the schedule of learning and remembering like the difficult of the word and the background of the speaker, but even a rough time-line would be invaluable for teachers who sometimes need to review old material. This provides a maximum retention with minimum repetition. Now don’t make mistakes, the goal is not to avoid studying every day; it’s to make the repetition manageable so new material can be introduced daily. The most important factor is staying interested and excited about what your learning.

Pimsleur shows us that memory isn’t linear; that even if you spend the same total amount of time studying, the time you spend in between significantly affects what your brain does with the information. Learning is the space between the doing.

Creating a Daily Practice

When software developer Brad Isaac asked Jerry Seinfeld, who in those days was still a touring comic, what his secret was, he advised Isaac to pick up one of those wall calendars that had the entire year on a single page. To Seinfeld, becoming a better comedian meant writing every day, so each day Jerry worked on his writing, he would put a big red X in the box for that day. Pretty soon, there’d be a chain of red X’s and not breaking the chain became his own motivation.

There will definitely be moments when your caught up in the mental resistance that keeps you and I from getting started, we seem to forget how enjoyable the act of doing really is. When you’ve finally started and engaged into your work, you start thinking how much fun it really is. What I love about Seinfeld’s calendar is that it let’s you visually channel your stubbornness and redirect it from being lazy to not missing your mark.  Setup goals and keep to them.

If you reading this and find it interesting I would like to test your abilities by picking one long-term goal and commit to it right now. Make a conscious decision to pursue what used to be “I want” or “I should”. Now is the time to start learning that new language or finally learning WordPress (you know who you are). Your going to accomplish this goal by limiting the amount of time you spend on it to no more than 30 minutes a day. You will learn more by working with your long-term memory rather than against it. if you have trouble finding 30 minutes start with 15. Keep doing it over time, you’ll be surprised at how much you’re able to accomplish.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Personal Development, Zing Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.