We learn many things. Some things we use repeatedly and remember them even better. Some things become irrelevant, so we need to adapt and relearn them. Other things we simply forget. Do the things we forgot haunt our memories? This post is inspired by this article. The long term memory and the short term memory …
Chinese visualizations vs English mnemonics
Different languages and cultures develop different parts of our brains and personality. For example, Asians are more introvert than Europeans etc. For me, it seems that Chinese is just the opposite of English. Since I do not know Chinese and do not have enough motivation to actually learn it, I rely on experience of other …
Continue reading “Chinese visualizations vs English mnemonics”
Activities that will make you smarter
You can create your own training routine, improving it with exercises that work for you. These exercises may be highly unconventional. When I was learning, the exercises that worked best for me were memorizing sequences of colored lights and hidden object games – you will not find these games in now official resources. This article …
Programming psychology
A friend of mine was dreaming of writing the first book about programming psychology, and after a year of collecting anecdotal material he found out there is more than one book on the subject. This sounds strange and stupid, but smart people try to reinvent the wheel even more often than people who are not …
Focus control
When learning, focusing may be quite hard there are several reasons for it, and several strategies to bring the focus to the subject at hand. People with attention-deficit (ADHD) and emotional problems may occasionally need some extra help to regain focus, including breathing exercises and medicine. Fatigue Quite often focus drifting away is quite natural. …
Distributed practice
There are several ways of generating long-term retention. Distributed practice is the most natural way to achieve this. We do not need any additional mnemonic devices: we just need to space our learning sessions intelligently and quiz ourselves. How does this work? If we want to remember something for years, we need many exposures to …
Making your own story
A good way to generate long-term retention is building a great story. Our autobiographical memory is usually very good, and we remember the stories we own for a long time. This post has been inspired by this, this and this articles. Who should use it? Most of us can remember stories very well. Some of …
Productive failure
We are not as open minded as we would love to think. Sometimes only a resounding failure can trigger a learning experience. This and this articles inspired me to write the post. Learning is not always good. If we would learn and relearn everything, question any piece of knowledge we have, we would not be …
Overlearning
The theory of overlearning is complex, the implementation of overlearning is very simple. You learn something till you get nearly 100% score, take some rest and then you learn it some more to get nearly 100% score the next time you need to use your skill. In other words, if you simply learn something and …
Increasing your creativity
What can I do to increase my creativity? Many people think creativity is some sort of magic skill: you are either born with it or not. The truth is very far from this misconception. There are systematic methods to increase personal creativity and anyone can learn them. Some components of creativity are psychological, some are …