[hf]

I wrote a program I fancifully called 'Human Unit Tests' to aid me in my studies (learning a diverse set of constants for biophysics). I can very much attest to the effectiveness of spaced repetition.

But, /boy/, do you need to stay on the ball. You can't really afford a cavalier, let's-see attitude with this (given any non-trivial amount of items-to-be-memorized). The review process needs to be as much part of a daily routine as workouts ... Yeah.

On the other hand, there's one reward that doesn't usually get mentioned (as in the fine article re-submitted here[0]): the strengthening of corollary knowledge (or coordinate terms, for the linguistically inclined).

[0] Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809762

[summarite]

Can you expand a bit on the coordinate terms issue? My impression would be that comes rather from the encoding rather than recall?

[hf]

Sure, I'll try to elaborate.

Suppose you're reading a biography of Huygens. You may find yourself inspired to memorize a few of the basic facts therein. Dutifully, you feed his life's dates, his major acquaintances and maybe a few places of importance into the SR system of your choice. You are committed and keep repeating those facts in ever-increasing intervals.

After a few years a random conversation touches upon the very subject. To your delight you discover that you are able to hold forth on Huygens, the man and his time.

To your surprise (and this is my contention [and experience]), you also find yourself able to speak with some level of accuracy about tangential matter -- eg. the theories he worked on -- without ever having either added related facts to the database or dealt with the subject matter in the intervening years.

In other words: recall of a whole web of interconnected pieces of knowledge may be strengthened considerably by spaced repetition of just a few of the central facts.

In my experience there's no specific 'encoding' procedure necessary. I never put any thought into carefully selecting facts for the spaced repetition treatment, yet the effect usually manifested itself. So, yes, I would say it's a 'recall' phenomenon inasmuch as the brain does all the heavy lifting.

[summarite]

Fascinating thanks, this is a new term for me but strikes a chord.

It also fits nicely with the limited understanding we have of the recall of information in our brains - it all comes down to context and activating the right network (or paths) which can only be reached by activating related/overlapping networks. So once you activate memory on a specific issue you can more easily activate related information (or even do so without intention as you describe). Having more easily reachable 'access points' (strongly encoded and thus well connected information) makes it then easier to access related information.

A corollary is that in order to remember information it's important to connect it to previous well established memories (eg "how does this new concept fit my own experience").

Thanks for this.