Strategies to retain learned information?

[Anonymous No.15480843]

we've all been there: having to learn some material in a rather short amount of time. while the knowledge acquisition itself is not the most difficult, the ever growing pile of material that you expose yourself to kind of makes previous knowledge atrophy, fade away.

even if you learn things in a completely logical manner, sometimes the logical path you need to take to re-teach yourself a strategy/technique gets very convoluted, making it more efficient to have retained that particular piece of knowledge.

so, what strategies do /sci/entists have for retaining information? i was thinking of creating some sort of private blog to serve as an online journal. mnemonic devices and logical "step-wise" maps can get one only so far.

assume the diet, sleep, level of hydration and physical exercise are in check (otherwise i might forget even what my name is)

[Anonymous No.15480857]

>>15480843
Retaining information ain't always easy,
Need some tricks up our sleeve to make it breezy.
Firstly, pay attention and listen real close,
Forgetting is imminent if we don't engross.

(Chorus)
Repeat it, write it, chunk it and link,
Sleep on it, test yourself, assign meaning,
These are tricks to make retention real sweet,
So when its time to recall, we won't skip a beat.

Rehearse and space, that's a deadly pair,
Gives the brain time to process and repair.
Find patterns, make associations,
It helps make sense of all information.

(Chorus:)
Repeat it, write it, chunk it and link,
Sleep on it, test yourself, assign meaning,
These are tricks to make retention real sweet,
So when its time to recall, we won't skip a beat.

Learning every day, expanding our horizons,
Retaining what we learn will help us keep risin'.
It's not just enough to know, gotta remember,
We can achieve greatness, one learned lesson at a time.

(Chorus:)
Repeat it, write it, chunk it and link,
Sleep on it, test yourself, assign meaning,
These are tricks to make retention real sweet,
So when its time to recall, we won't skip a beat.

[Anonymous No.15480862]

>>15480857
you asked chatgpt to make a cutesy little song about my question?... anyways, I'll take it

[Anonymous No.15480866]

>>15480843
For math, I've found that Anki helps immensely with long term retention.
Just latex the definitions and major theorems, or screenshot the textbook if you're feeling lazy. Add on a few exercises per week and you should be near peak performance.

[Anonymous No.15480871]

>>15480866
wow, you've sold me on anki. I've heard great things about it. you're saying it's compatible with latex?

[Anonymous No.15480882]

>>15480871
Yep, here's some more details https://docs.ankiweb.net/math.html
Managing Anki is a bit stiff when you start out but gets easier in no time, good luck

[Cult of Passion No.15480891]

>>15480843
>so, what strategies do /sci/entists have for retaining information
Explain it from zero to your level to professor, a "peer", a first year student, a high school student and a small child.

That should be a number of ways of teaching the same thing and forces you to approach it in several ways, forgetting one isnt so bad.

[Anonymous No.15480892]

>>15480882
thanks. out of curiosity, what branch of mathematics are you studying atm?

[Anonymous No.15480896]

>>15480891
ah, yes, Feynman's technique. i use it all the time. but if i explain something extremely complex from 0, i get lost in the details and end up wasting a lot of time. it's a very useful technique, but not that applicable to concepts that have dozens of layers of abstraction around them

[Cult of Passion No.15480916]

>>15480896
>ah, yes, Feynman's technique
Wouldnt know. Seems like he's a bit angry, yelling at some dude asking about String Theory.

I just explain things to idiots and in the process Im forced to keep it as simple as possible to reduce it to its core principals/axioms etc, eventually Im trying to explain something to a retard and I give up when I realize theyre too dumb.

Then Im irritated like Feynman...maybe thats why he us cranky...

Be like us. Cranks.

[Anonymous No.15480934]

>>15480916
the you must be really good at it and perhaps you can help me teach my 10-year-old cousin about the magnetic dipole moment or nucleophilic aromatic substitution by the elimination-addition path? i think some things are simply impossible to explain to the completely clueless layman, no matter how patient they are and how much time you're given (especially physics topics).

don't you find it tiring to keep peeling onion layers when explaining something that is just so complex?

[Anonymous No.15480938]

>>15480916
also, where do you find those "retards"? are they on sale?

[Cult of Passion No.15480942]

>>15480934
>don't you find it tiring to keep peeling onion layers when explaining something that is just so complex?
No, because in doing I can find new ways of viewing the same problem, and the example Im most familiar with was explaining Number Theory which occationally I would get new ideas from.

Sure, sometimes I end up with a rotten onion because I reduced it too much, cranky, but others I could sometimes exlain something in a way I hadnt thought of before because thr person Im explaining it to didnt get it the "normal way". I guess in Physics thats a little hard unless outside of Theory, so in Physics I would try to explain it in one sentence.

I used to read the Thesaurus, reading the lines of a word and looking for words I havnt seen before, helps if you actually know the word that took up half a sentence before.

[Anonymous No.15480947]

>>15480942
i do the last one too and i must agree. anyways, thank you for your response. do you have any criteria when it comes to labeling people as retards or smarts?

[Cult of Passion No.15480956]

>>15480947
>do you have any criteria when it comes to labeling people as retards or smarts

Yes. How morally or empathetically corrupted they are.

[Anonymous No.15481229]

>>15480956
what's the worst example you've encountered? and, more importantly, how does ted kaczynski do in terms of your criteria?

[Cult of Passion No.15481260]

>>15481229
>worst example you've encountered
Satan.
>how does ted kaczynski do in terms of your criteria
High moral, low empathy. High morals to theorize a pro-benefit patway for humanity, low empathy because killing innocent people was considered an acceptable cost to do "the right thing".

A Matematical approach to Sociology.

[Anonymous No.15481359]

any low moral high empathy examples? perhaps promiscuous women who empathize with other promiscuous women ("new" in the "industry")

[Cult of Passion No.15481372]

>>15481359
...and lead men into bad situations that "they got themselves into" or something like that, yeah. Getting high off the empathy of someone else being in a intense bad situation, mirroring it and experiencing it by-proxy without caring for them.

Its a little harder to wrap my head around.

[Cult of Passion No.15481400]

>>15481260
>ted kaczynski
I would consider the Christchurch shooter to be the same as Ted, just low IQ version.

[Anonymous No.15481432]

>>15480843
The premise of this thread sucks. You don't need to retain anything that you understand. I assume you don't wake up every day trying to remember who, what, where, how, when. I bet you don't even need to read philosophy to explain what Baudrillard meant with ''murder of the real'' because you live in the digital age.
Now suppose you need to learn law. That's much easier if you apply law everyday in your work environment than trying to memorize law in a dorm room of some university.

Do you understand?

[Cult of Passion No.15481452]

>>15481432
>I assume you don't wake up every day trying to remember who, what, where, how, when.
I do, yes, for years on end every single day I review my life's work checking for errors.
>Do you understand?
No, I think you are insane.

[Anonymous No.15481595]

>>15481432
im on the bike rn ill reply bCk 2 u when i get home

[Anonymous No.15481700]

I'm reading two books on that matter:
>How to read a book, Mortimer J Adler
>How to take smart notes, Sönke Ahrens

[Cult of Passion No.15481720]

Mothefucker is reading a book to learn how to read and write. I'm at a loss.

[Anonymous No.15482395]

>>15480843
go on a long walk while autistically ruminating on all the things you've learned, with excessive exitement at the feeling of having superior knowledge to everyone else

[Anonymous No.15482553]

>>15481432
Circular logic. What you understand you have already memorised, although not vice versa. It's possible and common to forget what you understood, especially if it's a very dense subject. Let's say the last math textbook you read. What percent of the most recently finished chapter do you remember?

[Anonymous No.15482712]

>>15480843
do it a lot

[Anonymous No.15482769]

>>15482395
uh, anon... how did you know... i already do that. are you me or are we starting to see something big unfolding?