I first learned about spaced repetition in 2005 when I had a chance to spend a fellowship year at complete liberty and to ask myself the question, “What do I want to learn?”
At the time, I was monolingual and very frustrated by that fact. I had started language classes half-dozen times and never emerged with any real knowledge. I have trouble being attentive for long periods of explicit instruction. I was very bad at memorizing things. As an aside, having become a science journalist, it’s interesting for me to think about how much I loved science and how thoroughly the world of science permeated our family life. I knew by the time I was seventeen I could never be a scientist since the facts were so hard for me to remember. Draw the outline of a cell membrane for me, and you’ll watch me start to glitch as the names of the organelles flash confusingly and incorrectly in my imagination.
So during these nine months at Stanford, while other people did serious research, I put myself into a freshman Spanish class. I memorized all the words I was presented with, using a technique I had found recommended on the internet called the spaced repetition. It was quite difficult to apply the technique in the right environment, and I ended up using a Palm Pilot. I went through several of these devices as the software became more popular and the tools evolved, eventually settling, like many of you, on Anki.
Over the years, I’ve tried to memorize many things besides Spanish vocabulary and verb tenses, often with some short term success. Chemistry facts, some stuff about Quantum Computing, organelles, geographical facts, and so on, but almost nothing has survived. I don’t even have most of the cards anymore. They were lost during updates and upgrades, maybe not fully lost, but stuck somewhere in my poorly organized archives.
In the end, only two sets of facts have survived as a long term practice. I still study Spanish, and am right now in the middle of memorizing a deck of Spanish irregular verbs in all tenses and moods, since I never really focused on things like the past subjunctive. And, weirdly, a small set of cards with the birth and death dates of 17th century people that I memorized a few years ago and still want to keep going.
Since I know my system, I know its value, and I enjoy using it, I’m going to try to explain why so little long term practice survives, as a way of starting this discussion. My explanation involves dividing explicit facts you might need to memorize into three categories:
1. Facts that will become useful in your daily life and work, where explicit practice will no longer be necessary after the initial burst.
2. Facts that you care about for a brief period, but then are ok forgetting when your situation changes.
3. Facts that you always care about, but don’t use in your daily life and work and therefore need to keep learning and keep being reminded of.
And at the end, I’m going to add a fourth, somewhat mysterious category:
4. Facts that you will care about, if reminded, but have forgotten you care about.
You don’t need long term spaced practice for categories 1&2. You do need it for 3. And you might need it for 4, if you can trust the process that will serve you the reminders.
My Spanish vocabulary and my 17th century birth/death cards are an example of category 3. I don’t get to practice Spanish much, and I want to maintain at least the illusion that I will achieve the fluency I long for. I get psychological satisfaction from accomplishing this simple learning task daily. And the biographical details, perhaps somewhat more interesting, are so dull and trivial that I would never be able to remember them, especially because I’m so easily distracted and poor at remembering things, but they comprise a lattice that helps me in my reading. It is still hard for me to remember these facts, by the way, so that a few cards still come up each day.
We can talk about any of this, but I think the most interesting discussion may be around category 4. Because this is a risky category. I’m happy to abandon my old decks because I don’t want to keep memorizing these facts forever. I’m happy to practice my category 3 cards, because they are meaningful to me today. But what about things I will want to know in the future even if I don’t have a great model of myself, or at least not an explicit model, that I can rely on today? What kind of feedback loop am I creating? What kind of automated process am I letting loose on my mind?
In this sense, the question of “what do I want to remember forever” is an instance of the larger question of how we want to handle automated processes.