MORTIMER ADLER

After you've read or watched any material, simply look away and see what you can recall from the material you've just taken in.

Practicing recall is counterintuitive to most consumers of content. You finish a chapter and you go to the next one or you finish a video and move on to something ...

Most of the time, we don't aware about illusions of competence, as our working memory can limit our ability to remember information, with multitasking and information overload being two main culprits. The three main methods for improve it are recalling, the Feynman Technique, and spaced repetitio...

People often have difficulty understanding information after learning it. Professor Barbara Oakley from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that many of these illusions of competence are due to memory illusions. 

1. Seeing information in front of you such as reading a book d...

But it's not just information overload that affects our ability to remember things, multitasking is just as bad. 

Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time. When we multitask, all we're really doing is quickly switching from one task to another and our brain struggles to commi...

The first is to eliminate multitasking, distractions, and information streams that cause overload. We're all well aware at this point that these services exploit our psychology and it's hard to resist the addicting dopamine surge that comes from checking them.

The next one is find one sourc...

The best idea to remember things are do all three above; recall, Feynman technique and make it repetition; spaced them out by three days over the course of a couple weeks, it results in the highest amount of memory retention.

The steps in Feynman Technique are:

1. Take something you wanna understand.
2. Write out an explanation as if you were teaching it to someone who didn't understand the subject. 
3. Whenever you get stuck, go back to the material and relearn. Eventually, you'll fill in the gaps i...

There's two main parts: short-term and long-term. Think of the long-term memory like an investment portfolio. As you gather more and more schemas, you gain intellectual compound interest over time. They all begin to connect to each other, increasing your understanding of the world exponentially o...

The problem is what we hold there can quickly vanish if we don't keep thinking about them or rehearse them in our heads. In other words, if we don't grapple with the ideas in our working memory for an extended period of time, they never get sent to the long-term memory. They just disappear.

You don't need to be memorizing and understanding everything that comes your way. That's absurd. spend more time thinking about one important thing at a time instead of trying to absorb as much information as possible only to forget most of it. 

To recognize the limits of your knowledge and...

There is fundamental difference between feeling informed and truly understanding something.

We are as informed as ever. We can more or less parrot opinions we read, cite random facts, but when tasked with explaining what something is all about, why it is the case, what its connections are w...