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Author: calibre
Date: 2014-09-23 10:32:50.074000+00:00
Description: Personalized news feeds. Go to getpocket.com to setup up your news. This version displays pages of articles from oldest to newest, with max & minimum counts, and marks articles read after downloading. Articles in this issue: לא יודעים מאיפה להתחיל? התחילו כאן! ממשלת ארצות הברית מממנת מחקרים ליצירת פרותזה מוחית תערוכות הגופות: החי, המת, והמבולבל אז איך מגרילים מספרים במחשב? הניסוי שהוכיח טלפתיה! RTFM 0day in iOS apps: G+, Gmail, FB Messenger, etc. How to use Deliberate Practice when writing – part 1 A Student's Guide to Using the Kindle for Research Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! הד החינוך

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ממשלת ארצות הברית מממנת מחקרים ליצירת פרותזה מוחית

הניסוי שהוכיח טלפתיה!

RTFM 0day in iOS apps: G+, Gmail, FB Messenger, etc.

How to use Deliberate Practice when writing – part 1

A Student’s Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

הד החינוך - קונסט…

Completing an MIT Physics Class in 4.5 Days?

Change Your Relationship with Time to Manage It More Effectively

Incremental learning (Full)
The Tyra Banks approach to writing
Mindmapping that works vs TMI
Your two kinds of memory
Why I insist on blathering about mindmapping
About the Study Hacks Blog
Why you should copy (a modest proposal)

Deep Habits: When the Going Gets Tough, Build a Temporary Plan

Why I’m (Still) Not Going to Join Facebook: Four Arguments that Failed to Convince Me

Don’t Fight Distraction. Make It Irrelevant.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

Deep Habits: Plan Your Week in Advance

Deep Habits: Using Milestones to Get Unstuck

Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do

How Double Majors Can Ruin Your Life: Two Arguments for Doing Less

The Danger of Deep Procrastination
How to Cure Deep Procrastination
As much effort as to tap a beach ball…

5 Productivity Strategies from the Mind of Richard Feynman

How to Increase Your Ability to Focus
The Feeling of Learning
Dangerous Ideas: Getting Started is Overrated

Monday Master Class: The Biggest Source of Stress that Most Students Ignore

The Notebook Method: How Pen and Paper Can Transform You Into a Star Student

Have We Lost Our Tolerance For a Little Boredom?

The Straight-A Method: How to Ace College Courses

Monday Master Class: The Study Hacks Guide to Note-Taking

The power of being the best

The Career Craftsman Manifesto

The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

Knowledge structuring for learning
Organize your life with Centrallo
Grit, Grinds, and Living the Low Stress Life

Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours

Monday Master Class: How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer

What If My Dream Major Turns Into a Nightmare?

ממשלת ארצות הברית מממנת מחקרים ליצירת פרותזה מוחית

היום התקשרתי בבוקר בשוגג לידידה מרוחקת שלי. דיברתי איתה חטופות, ולאחר דקה קצרה של שיחה נפרדנו כידידים.

דקות ספורות לאחר מכן, הטלפון שלי צלצל. אותה ידידה החליטה לחזור אלי. זיהיתי את המספר מיד, ובחרתי שלא לענות.

לאורך כל שאר היום, אותה ידידה חייגה אלי לא-פחות מ- 79 פעמים. בממוצע, שיחה אחת בכל שמונה דקות. היא לא עשתה זאת מתוך כוונה רעה, או מכיוון שהחליטה לנדנד לי ולא להתייאש.

היא פשוט לא זכרה, בכל פעם מחדש, שניסתה להתקשר אלי כבר בפעם הקודמת.

אותה ידידה לוקה בדמנציה – שיטיון – בשלב מתקדם. כלומר, יכולתה לתפקד בחיי היומיום נפגמה בשל ליקויים בזיכרון ובכישורים קוגניטיביים אחרים. שני שבצים במוחה גרמו לפני כמעט עשור לאובדן יכולתה ליצור זיכרונות חדשים. היא חיה בעולם של הווה ועבר, מגיבה מדי דקה לדברים שאומרים לה ושוכחת אותם בדקה הבאה. גם אם הייתי מדבר איתה בטלפון, היא לא הייתה זוכרת זאת. גם אם הייתי מספר לה כמה אני אוהב ומעריך אותה, היא לא הייתה זוכרת. היא איבדה את עצמה, עמוק בנבכי המוח, ואיבדה את כל חבריה, מכריה ואוהביה בתהליך. אבל היא אינה לבד.

ידידתי שותפה בגורל למיליוני אנשים הסובלים משיטיון ומאובדן זיכרון. קיימים סוגים שונים של שיטיון, אך הנפוץ מכולם הוא זה הנגרם לחולים במחלת אלצהיימר, בה לוקים 26.6 מיליון בני-אדם ברחבי העולם (נכון לשנת 2006). מספר זה צפוי לעלות ל- 106.2 מיליון חולים, או 1 לכל 85 בני-אדם בשנת 2050, עקב הזדקנות האוכלוסייה. אם אתם מתכננים לחיות עדיין בעוד שלושים וחמש שנים, הנתונים הללו הרי גורל עבורכם: זו תהיה החברה בה תתקיימו. כזו בה, אם לא נמצא פתרון למחלה, כל משפחה הגרה ברב-קומות תמצא עצמה בסמיכות לחולה אלצהיימר או עשרה.

ההווה (למעשה העבר מ- 2006) והעתיד של שכיחות מחלת אלצהיימר בעולם.

המשמעות הברורה היא שיש צורך לעשות מעשה ולמצוא טיפול לשיטיון. כאן נכנסת לראשונה לתמונה דרפא, הסוכנות למחקרי ביטחון מתקדמים בארצות הברית. סוכנות זו נועדה לממן מחקרים בעלי חזון גדול ומרקיע שחקים, וסיכויים נמוכים יחסית להצלחה (או לפחות לקבלת מימון ממקורות אחרים). דרפא מימנה את המחקרים הראשונים שהביאו ליצירת רשת האינטרנט, את הטכנולוגיה מאחורי מיפוי הרחובות של גוגל והבינה המלאכותית העומדת מאחורי SIRI של אפל, את מערכת הניווט הלווייני (GPS), ועוד רבות אחרות. בקיצור, דרפא עוזרת לשנות את העולם מאחורי הקלעים, באמצעות מחקרים שהערך המלא שלהם מתגלה לרוב רק כמה עשרות שנים לאחר ההשקעה המקורית. עתה החליטה דרפא להשקיע חלק ממאה מיליון הדולרים של ‘יוזמת המוח’ של אובמה בניסיון ליצור ‘פרותזת זיכרון’ שיוכל לסייע לאנשים לגבש מחדש את זיכרונותיהם.

דרפא אינה מודאגת רק ממספרם הרב של חולי אלצהיימר בעולם, אלא גם (ואולי בעיקר) מקיומם של 270,000 חיילים אמריקניים שחזרו מהמלחמות בעיראק ובאפגניסטן כשהם סובלים מפגיעות בזיכרון. נכון להיום, לא נמצאו עבור פגיעות מסוג זה טיפולים הולמים המסתמכים על תרופות או פסיכותרפיה בלבד, ולכן החליטו הבכירים בדרפא להשקיע בפרותזה למוח האנושי. אני חוזר: לא בעכברים, לא בחולדות, לא בקופים. פרותזה למוח בבני-אדם.

המחקרים שבדרך

שתי קבוצות מחקר זכו במכרז לביצוע הפרויקט, והן ניגשות אליו משני כיוונים שונים. הקבוצה הראשונה, אותה מוביל פרופ’ מיכאל כהנא מאוניברסיטת פנסילבניה, תתמקד בהתחלה בזיהוי האותות הביולוגיים במוח המעידים על יצירת זיכרונות חדשים ו- ‘שליפת’ זיכרונות ישנים מעמקי המוח אל המודעות. כדי לעשות זאת, מתכוון כהנא לבחון חולי אפילפסיה שזכו כבר להשתלת אלקטרודות במוחותיהם, ולכן ניתן לקרוא ברמה גבוהה את המתרחש בין קירות גולגולותיהם. באמצעות התחקות אחר תהליכי יצירת ואחסון הזיכרונות במוח, מקווה כהנא להבין אלו אזורים במוח מכילים את הזיכרונות הרלוונטיים, ולעורר אותם בעת הצורך. הוא רוצה, למעשה, להבין חלק מהשפה בה מקודדים הזיכרונות – ולקרוא להם בשפתם כדי לחלץ אותם מנבכי השכחה.

לפי הדיווח ב- , כהנא מקווה שיצליח תוך ארבע שנים ליצור מערכת הניתנת להשתלה במוח האנושי ומשפרת את הזיכרון באמצעות מעקב אחר יצירת זיכרונות וסיוע למוח לעורר אותם בזמן הנכון. הוא מתכוון להדגים את המערכת בחולי אפילפסיה או פרקינסון, שבמוחותיהם מושתלות כבר אלקטרודות בלאו הכי. אם יצליח, המערכת תיבדק גם על חיילים שחזרו משדה הקרב עם פגיעות מוח קשות, ובסופו של דבר – גם על חולי אלצהיימר.

הקבוצה השנייה בחרה בנתיב דומה להשגת המטרה, אך מתכוונת לרכז את עיקר מאמציה באזור האנטורינל קורטקס, המתווך בין ההיפוקמפוס (היוצר זיכרונות חדשים לטווח ארוך במוח) לבין המוח הקדמי בבני-אדם. בספרי “המדריך לעתיד” כתבתי כבר על ההיפוקמפוס כ- ‘צוואר הבקבוק’ דרכו צריך לעבור מידע רב המגיע אלינו מן החושים והפעילות המוחית. רק מעט המידע שמצליח לעבור בצוואר הבקבוק, מצליח להפוך לזיכרון לטווח ארוך, המשתקע במוחותינו שנים רבות. ראש הקבוצה השנייה, יצחק פריד, הראה כבר ב- 2012 כי הוא מסוגל לשפר את יצירת הזיכרונות לטווח ארוך בשבעה חולי אפילפסיה באמצעות הפעלת אלקטרודות באזור האנטורינל קורטקס. האם יצליח לעשות זאת גם בחיילים שחזרו מהשירות עם פגיעת מוח טראומטית, או בחולי אלצהיימר? לכאורה, אין סיבה שלא.

אל תחליפו את המוח במחשב (עדיין)

כשכתבתי “לכאורה, אין סיבה שלא”, עשיתי זאת מתוך כוונה מלאה לשוות למשפט נימה של פקפוק. המוח האנושי הוא המכונה המורכבת ביותר המוכרת ל… ובכן, למוח האנושי. ניסוי שהצליח בשבעה חולי אפילפסיה עשוי שלא להצליח בחולים או נפגעים אחרים. וחזונו של כהנא להבין את השפה והמקומות בהם נכתבים זיכרונות במוח הוא כמעט מגלומני בטבעו. נדרשים כוחות המחשוב עצומים לביצוע המשימה, וכהנא עצמו מודע לכך היטב.

“אנו צריכים לבצע אנליזות שנהגו להעסיק מחשב אישי במשך מספר שעות, ולסכם אותן לאלגוריתם של עשר אלפיות השנייה.” הוא מודה בראיון ל- IEEE Spectrum. האם רכיבים חישוביים מתקדמים מספיק יהיו קיימים בעוד ארבע שנים, כאשר הפרויקט יסתיים? ניאלץ לחכות ולראות.

בואו נעמיד דברים במקום: אני אישית מייחל להצלחתם של החוקרים, אך מסופק אם נראה פרותזות מתפקדות שיגיעו לציבור החולים הרחב בעשור הקרוב. ייתכן שאני פסימי מדי, אך צריך להכיר בכך שהמוח הינו חידה שעדיין רחוקה מהבנתנו, ופריצות דרך בתחום לא יושגו בקלות. ואם זה לא מספיק, הרי שהדרך היחידה להשפיע כיום ישירות על תאי עצב בודדים באיבר האפרפר הזה היא להשתיל אלקטרודות עמוק בתוכו, בניתוחים מורכבים שגוררים לעתים תכופות תגובה קשה מצד מערכת החיסון. זו אינה פרוצדורה פשוטה, נעימה או בטוחה, ורבים יעדיפו לוותר עליה… אבל רק אם יזכרו לעשות זאת.

גרייה בעמקי המוח באמצעות אלקטרודות מושתלות. מקור: ויקיפדיה.

סיכום

משמח לראות את האמונה של דרפא וממשל ארצות הברית ביכולתנו לפתח בעתיד פרותזה מוחית. העובדה שהממשל משקיע בתחום כסף, מעידה כי הבכירים שם למעלה מאמינים באמת ובתמים כי נצליח להתממשק עם המוח האנושי ולשפר את יכולותיו הטבעיות או את אלו שנפגמו. אבל העובדה שהמימון למחקרים עובר דרך דרפא מרמזת גם שאותם בכירים אינם צופים שההצלחה, אם תהא כזו, תגיע בשנים הקרובות. דרפא משקיעה במחקרים לטווח הרחוק, שאת השלכותיהם על החברה ניתן לראות לאחר עשרים או שלושים שנים – ואז הן בדרך-כלל מרקיעות שחקים מעבר לכל מה שהיה צפוי בעבר.

אני מאמין שזה יהיה גם עתידן של הפרותזות המוחיות. יש עוד דרך ארוכה שעלינו לעבור עד שכל חולה שיטיון יזכה בפרותזה שתסדיר את תהליך החשיבה שלו, אבל כל מסע ממושך מורכב ממספר רב של צעדים קטנים, שמתרכזים בשביל שמשורטט מראש עבור המטייל. דרפא והממשל האמריקני התוו עתה את השביל לאורכו נפסע בעשורים הקרובים, אל העתיד הלא-נודע של המוח, הזיכרון והתודעה.

———–

הערות מנהלתיות:

1. אתם מוזמנים להירשם לעדכונים בבלוג בתיבה מימין.

2. יש לבלוג שני עמודי פייסבוק: “מדע אחר” ו- “המדריך לעתיד”. אתם מוזמנים להצטרף לשניהם, וגם שם אני מפרסם מאמרים!

3. ניתן לרכוש את “המדריך לעתיד” בהנחה (שישים ש”ח בלבד, כולל משלוח) בכפתור Buy Now. אם מעניין אתכם לעזור לסופרים, הרי שהזמנה ישירות ממני ברשת היא הדרך בה אני מקבל את מירב התמלוגים -

הניסוי שהוכיח טלפתיה!

והפעם משהו קליל ואקטואלי, שמדגים יפה לדעתי איך ידיעות מדעיות מתנפחות ומשתנות עד שהן מגיעות אלינו.

אתמול רעשה התקשרות המקומית (בעקבות סערה עולמית) לגבי ניסוי מסוים. ניתן לכותרות לדבר בעד עצמן ונערוך ניסוי משלנו. מה אפשר להבין מקריאת הכותרות בלבד?

(באופן מפתיע אולי, דווקא Ynet סיפקו את המידע המדויק יותר כבר בכותרת).

קריאת גוף הכתבות מספקת רמזים נוספים לגבי מה שנעשה באותו ניסוי, אבל הדברים עדיין מעורפלים ביותר.

ב-Ynet מספרים כי “לפי ה”דיילי מייל”, ברגע שהאדם במומבאי התבקש לחשוב על ברכות השלום “צ’או” ו”הולה”, דיווח חברו בפריז על הבזקי אור במוח. הוא אמנם לא קלט את המילה עצמה, אך הדיווח שלו תאם את הרגע המדויק שבו עמיתו חשב על המילים.”

והשאלה שנשאלת היא כמובן – מדוע לסמוך על מה שהדיילי מייל כותב, אם ההודעה הרשמית לעיתונות ואפילו המאמר המקורי המלא נמצאים במרחק הקלקה?

אז מה באמת עשו שם?

בהפשטה, ה”שולח” חבש קסדה שמודדת פעילות חשמלית של המוח. אחרי אימון מסוים הצליח השולח לגרום לעיגול שמופיע על המסך לנוע למעלה או למטה בהתאם לכך שדמיין כי הוא מניע את ידיו או את רגליו. באופן כזה נשלח רצף של ביטים לאדם ה”קולט” (0 או 1, אם חשב על ‘יד’ או על ‘רגל’), באמצעות האינטרנט. כמובן שהמרחק אינו משחק כאן שום תפקיד – אינטרנט זה אינטרנט. הניסוי היה מעניין באותה המידה אם האדם הקולט היה יושב ממש מאחוריו.

את הביטים “שדרו” למוחו של מקבל המסר בעזרת פולסים מגנטיים שכוונו לאזור הראייתי בחלקו האחורי של המוח. אם התקבל ביט ‘0’ שודר פולס מסוג אחד אשר גרם לנבדק לראות נצנוצים מסוימים בשדה הראייה (למרות שעיניו היו מכוסות), ואם התקבל ביט ‘1’ שודר פולס מהסוג השני שלא גרם לנצנוצים. החוקרים הקפידו שהנבדק לא יקבל שום רמזים חושיים לגבי המידע המשודר, כמו למשל תחושה פיזית או רמזים צליליים לגבי שינוי זוית הסלילים המגנטיים בין שני מצבי השידור.

באופן כזה הועברו כמה סדרות של כמה עשרות ביטים כל אחת, והתהליך כולו הצליח באמינות גבוהה יחסית. זה הכל.

כמובן שהמילה טלפתיה לא מוזכרת בכלל לא במאמר המקורי, ולא בהודעה המקורית לעיתונות.

כאן אפשר לראות את הכותרת המקורית של המאמר, בליווי צילומים מתוכו שממחישים מה נעשה בניסוי:

בוידאו הבא תוכלו לראות מה לפרופ’ אילון ועדיה יש לומר בנושא. ושוב, שאפו ל-Ynet על ההתייחסות המקצועית הזריזה לידיעה. חבל רק שהדבר לא נעשה לפני הפרסום הראשוני.

כצפוי, היו אנשים שמאוד התלהבו מהגילוי המדהים:

כשהערתי לכותבת על כך שנחפזה קצת להסיק מסקנות מהפרסום, הודתה כי לא קראה כלל את הכתבה. “הספיקה לי הכותרת כדי להנגיש את המידע למרחב שבו אנשים כן יביעו בו עניין. אני מבחינתי לא צריכה שום הוכחה גשמית לידע שאני יודעת…”

אנחה.

נסיים בקריקטורה מוצלחת בנושא:

ונעבור לדבר המפרסם:

לכבוד החגים המתקרבים אפשר לרכוש כעת את ספרי “חשיבה חדה – בין מציאות לאשליה” במחיר מוזל. הספר יכול לשמש מתנה מצוינת לחג לקרובים וחברים – כי חשיבה חדה זה לא רק ספר, זה גם מסר!

הנה ריאיון איתי על הספר, ששודר בתוכנית “עושים סדר” עם בן כספית:

כאן תוכלו לראות מה חשבו קוראים שסיימו כבר לקרוא את הספר.

RTFM 0day in iOS apps: G+, Gmail, FB Messenger, etc.

Update:

Turns out Guillaume K. Ross also had related discoveries.
Check his presentation here: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/bsideslasvegas2014/pg10-ios-url-schemes-omg-guillaume-k-ross
Follow him: @gepeto42

Intro

Normal people spend their nights watching movies, reading articles, socializing or (yes, I know it’s odd) sleeping.

I spend my nights reading RFCs and pentesting various applications/services.

One night I was randomly reading the tel URI scheme RFC as I am fascinated by old relics that are still used today, their flaws and the way people never read the RFC which leads to RTFM pwnage as I call it.

Let’s try it out

As I finished reading the tel RFC I looked at my iPhone and said: Cool, let’s try it out!. I instacoded a small html page and loaded it in Safari, here is the code:

As I clicked the click me link I was prompted with a nice dialog asking me if I really want to call 0000.

Apple

I didn’t have much as this point and I was not looking for a security issue, just trying out the tel thing. As Apple likes to change stuff and make it better I thought: Hey, maybe Apple has its own RFC for tel!. And I was right: here it is.

The one line I fall in love with

Apple’s documentation on the tel scheme is really short and easy to read. While reading the first paragraph something caught my attention:

When a user taps a telephone link in a webpage, iOS displays an alert asking if the user really wants to dial the phone number and initiates dialing if the user accepts. When a user opens a URL with the tel scheme in a native app, iOS does not display an alert and initiates dialing without further prompting the user.

So if I click the link in Safari I get the prompt asking me to confirm my action, if I click the link in a native app’s webView it doesn’t ask and performs the action right away (makes the call).

Do people read documentation?

No. And it’s bad.

I instantly assumed people do read documentation so there was no way a big player like Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc. would do such a silly mistake… but I was wrong.

Testing on Facebook Messenger

I sent the page link through Facebook Messeger, clicked it to get to the webView (social apps don’t want you to ever leave the app and that’s why the use webViews) and then clicked the sneaky click me link:

So clicking on the link initiates the call right away. Hold on… that’s bad.

Making the link click itself

A lot of people make fake assumptions such as links are only clicked by users. Using some sneaky-beaky-like javascript I quickly made the link click itself:

Watch what happens:

Note: you can also do this server-side by redirecting the user to a tel location: header(“Location: tel://0000”)

So how is this a security issue?

I can make you call a phone number by clicking a link in any app that didn’t implement custom handling for tel links.

Imagine I register a premium-rate phone number and then I send you the link on Facebook Messenger or Twitter. You click it and call me, I pick up instantly and charge you.

Facetime: “Hello pretty!” attack

I just made out the name for this attack, it’s cool right? Facetime also had a URL scheme just like tel, and you can use it the same way. Needless to say it’s vulnerable to the same exploit.

Facetime calls are instant. Imagine you clicking a link, your phone calls my (attacker) account, I instantly pick it up and (yes) save all the frames. Now I know how your face looks like and maybe where you are. Hello pretty!

Yes, it works. I tried.

This is wrong! Who did the mistake?

Well Apple did not. People didn’t read the documentation at all. The first paragraph of the tel docs says what, when and how happens and also clearely specifies that However, a native app can be configured to display its own alert.

Who didn’t RTFM?

Facebook Messenger

Gmail

Google+

Everybody…

Beware

While I only tested on a few apps which are big names, it is safe to assume that the smaller teams and platform haven’t even thought about preventing this.

Comment on this on Hacker News

Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8208244

How to use Deliberate Practice when writing â part 1

Word count: 746 words

Reading time: About 3 minutes

Here is the first entry in my three-part series on Deliberate Practice for writers.

I’ll never forget the headline that led me to Cal Newport. It read: “How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30 pm.”

As a time-management zealot, I was hooked. And curious. How could this guy – an academic — manage to end his day by 5:30 pm? As a professional writer, I’ve almost never been able to pull this off.

I started following Cal’s blog, Study Hacks, to learn his strategies and I’ve bought and read two of his books. My verdict? He’s a really smart guy who offers terrific advice for students. But here’s the interesting part: adapt his ideas slightly and they’ll improve your own working life, even if you never intend to darken a school doorway ever again.

And of all his fascinating subjects (including how to accomplish a large volume of work in little time, the importance of batching email, and having a good shutdown routine), I find his advice about Deliberate Practice the most relevant for writers.

The concept of Deliberate Practice was identified by K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of Psychology at Florida State University. If you’ve read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, or Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer you will have already encountered Deliberate Practice. Basically, it holds the following tenets:

- Lack of natural ability is never an adequate excuse.

- Hard work is more important to success than talent.

- The hard work is vastly time consuming (requiring 10,000 hours according to Gladwell).

- The type of work you do is even more important than the volume of it.

- Your work must explicitly address your own weaknesses and deficiencies.

- Your work must have clear objectives and goals.

- You are far more likely to succeed if you have a coach, a teacher or a mentor.

- You must be highly motivated.

- The work is hard and tiring.

If you want to see Deliberate Practice in action, look no further than your nearest music school. Here is an excerpt from one of Cal’s interviews with an accomplished pianist:

“The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing,” Cal’s subject said. “If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”

I’ve even seen this in my own children. My son – who is studying to become an opera singer – is intensely musical. He could play piano by ear at age seven and he could improvise chords with his left hand, before he was officially taught how to do it. Yet he resisted practicing with the intensity of a pitt bull trying to get off a leash. My daughter (now studying Sciences) was not as naturally musical but she worked her brains out at it. She went to the piano every day — without being reminded by her parents (!) — taking with her a kitchen timer, which she always set for 30 minutes. She took her pieces apart and practiced only the difficult bits, often one hand at a time, before she put them back together.

Almost immediately, she outstripped her more talented brother and he has only recently caught up. (He found his motivation when he decided to apply to music school.)

So how does Deliberate Practice affect non-scholars? Here’s what Cal has to say: “Unless you’re a professional athlete or musician, your peers are likely spending zero hours on deliberate practice,” he writes. “Instead, they’re putting in their time, trying to accomplish the tasks handed to them in a competent and efficient fashion.”

The sad truth is, once people get out of school, they frequently lose the will to improve. They also lose the impetus because they’re being paid whether or not they improve. And improving is hard work!

But here’s a fundamental point that likely affects you. Most writers are highly motivated. While some of us are doing it for the money, many of us simply want to improve because we value the activity and want to get better at it.

Because I’ve committed to keep this newsletter brief enough to be read in three minutes, I’m making the topic of Deliberate Practice a three-part series. Next week I’ll suggest ways in which you can incorporate the principles of Deliberate Practice into your own writing.

Photo courtesy FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you enjoyed this post you might also like:

17 things to stop doing to improve your writing

Do you think you’re a multi-tasker?

10 ways to achieve your writing resolutions

A Student’s Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

The Kindle is great for reading the occasional book, but you might not know that it’s also a fantastic tool for students. When used correctly, it can essentially operate as a portable tool to keep all your books, notes, and research in one place. Here’s how to turn a Kindle into your new best friend for school.

First things first, you’ll need a Kindle or one of the Kindle apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. Since the Kindle is easily the most popular ereader, we decided to concentrate on its features here, but many of these tips apply to other ereaders or reading apps.

Embrace Textbook Rentals, Library Books, and Free Books

Kindle digital textbooks are usually cheaper to buy than physical textbooks, but you don’t get the benefit of selling them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. So, if you’re on the fence about buying your books on your Kindle—don’t buy them. In a lot of cases, you can rent them, grab the book you need from the library, or if you’re majoring in literature, get most of your textbooks for free.

Amazon’s textbook rental is a consistent way to get cheap ebooks since nearly every textbook is available as a rental. These rentals work just as you’d expect: instead of purchasing a book outright, you rent it. After a set number of days, the ebook won’t be accessible from your device. These are usually about a third of the price of buying the ebook. For example, this copy of Shigley’s Mechanical Engineering Design is $93 to buy the ebook, or about $62 to rent it through May. To compare, the physical hardcover is $207 new, and most of the legit used copies sell for around $175-$200. If you have no interest in keeping your textbooks around after the semester is over, renting them on a Kindle saves you a pretty massive chunk of cash.

If you’re truly lucky, you can snag free copies of your textbooks from your library. We’ve talked about library rentals before and if your local library participates, you can often score free copies of textbooks this way. Just search Overdrive for the book you need, and if it’s available from your library you can check it out with your library card number. Unfortunately, Shigley’s Mechanical Engineering Design isn’t available, but many textbooks are.

Finally, a lot of those classic books you have to read in college are public domain. This means they’re free, and if you’re in a literature, philosophy, or history class sifting through public domain books on Project Gutenberg is an excellent way to save a ton of money. Likewise, you can find free books in a number of fields. For example, this list on GitHub is a great place to find free books to get your education started.

Send Your Other Readings to Kindle

Regardless of what your major is, you’re probably reading more than just textbooks. Thankfully, you can send all your digital reading materials to your Kindle using Amazon’s Send to Kindle service. Send to Kindle can send articles from a website to to your Kindle with a click in Chrome or Firefox, or you can send documents (including Word documents) from your computer or email address. You can even forward emails, your syllabus, and your schedule from your professors over to your Kindle if you need to. It’s incredibly handy consolidate all your reading materials into one place, so make use of the Send to Kindle feature whenever you can.

Highlight What Matters and Take Notes

One of the Kindle’s best features is the ability to highlight and take notes in any book. Even better, you can see what others have highlighted and where they’ve written notes.

Highlighting blocks of text lets you create your own collection of terms and ideas you want to return and study later. To highlight, just tap a word and drag the cursor across the entire section you want to highlight. On the tablet apps, you can then select different highlight colors to help organize notes within a book. For example, you could use different highlight colors for different tests to make it easier on yourself when you’re reviewing those highlights later. You can also see where other people have highlighted in the book by turning on popular highlights. Just head into your Kindle’s Settings and turn on “Popular Highlights.” You’ll see these highlights as dotted underlines in your book.

Likewise, you can also add your own notes directly in your book at any point as well. Just tap and hold the place where you want to make a note and select the note option. Type your note in and it saves it in the book and online so you can access it from anywhere.

Your highlights and notes are always available on your Kindle itself and online here, so it’s an incredibly powerful tool for studying because you can easily share your highlights with friends in your class. You can even send those highlights over to Evernote if you like or just snag the plain text file directly from your Kindle.

Organize Your Books with Collections

Collections are a subtle feature, but it’s worth mentioning since it’s not the most noticeable feature on the Kindle. As the name suggests, Collections allow you to organize your books in any way you see fit. Since the Kindle doesn’t have a way to organize your digital shelves, Collections lets you group all your books together by class, research project, or however else you like. It’s incredibly helpful if you have a lot of ebooks or documents and you need to find them quickly.

To create a collection, head into the Collections menu, tap the “+” sign, and add any books you want. You can organize them and add more books over time.

Use X-Ray and Smart Lookup to Learn More About Any Topic

The Smart Lookup and X-Ray features are easily my favorite tools on the Kindle because they allow you to read more about any given topic, without even leaving the page you’re on (or switching to another app on the tablet versions).

Smart lookup is simple: just tap on a word and the Kindle will look up the dictionary and Wikipedia definition. This makes it so you can instantly research a word without losing your place in the book.

Lookup is great for simple concepts, but X-Ray does the same basic thing using just the text you’re reading. Tap the X-Ray button in the app (or tap on a word and then select “X-Ray” on the Kindle) and you’re shown a list of where the word appears in the book you’re reading. You get a summation from Wikipedia, but more importantly, you can look up other places important terms and characters appear in the text. So, if you’re reading about Abraham Lincoln, you can instantly see where else he’s mentioned in the book in front of you, key concepts like “absentee ballots,” or “The Battle of Antietam,” and other important people like Abner Doubleday or Carl Schurz. Basically, if you’re reading a textbook with a lot of complicated terms, or a lot of different important people, X-Ray makes it easy to keep track of those all those terms.

If you really want to drill those words home, you can make your own set of flash cards in certain books. When you’re looking at an X-Ray page for a print replica textbook (books will list this in their description if they retain the rich formatting of the hardcopy book), just tap the flash card button and your Kindle will automatically create a series of flash cards you can use to test yourself on a glossary of terms. Likewise, if you’ve been highlighting and adding notes to your textbooks, you can turn those notes into flash cards are well.

X-Ray and flash cards are special features in certain books, so they’re not available all the time, but when they are, they’re worth using.

Ebooks are nice because you don’t have to lug around your giant backpack with six textbooks in it every single day, but they’re also fantastic study tools when they’re used to their full potential. Since everything you do in a Kindle book syncs to the apps on desktop and mobile, as well as the Kindle itself, you’ll always have your most important notes and highlights with you. This is a pretty great feature if you’re the type to forget school materials at home a lot. Plus, used correctly, a Kindle might even save you money on textbooks in the long run.

Image by UBC Library.

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הד החינוך - קונסט…

“מטרת השיעור היא שהתלמיד יִלְמַד ולא שהמורה יְלַמֵד”

על הקונסטרוקטיביזם והשלכותיו ללמידה ולהוראה

מאת: תמי יחיאלי

מבוא

המונח “קונסטרוקטיביזם” הוא אחד המונחים ה”לוהטים” בשיח החינוכי בשנים האחרונות: הוא מופיע בכותרותיהם של מאמרים וספרים רבים ומוקדשים לו כנסים, ימי עיון ואתרי אינטרנט רבים. במאמרים בתחום החינוך ניתן למצוא ביטויים כמו “סביבות למידה קונסטרוקטיביסטיות” (למשל:  סלומון, תשנ”ח 1997), או “פדגוגיה קונסטרוקטיביסטית” (כרמון, תש”ס 2000), שמהם משתמע  שהקונסטרוקטיביזם הוא שיטת הוראה מסויימת (כאשר בדרך כלל מתכוונים ל”למידה בדרך החקר”, ל”למידה באמצעות פרוייקטים”, ל”קהילות חשיבה” וכד’).

המושג קונסטרוקטיביזם ונגזרותיו מתורגמים לעברית להטיות שונות של הפועל “לְהַבְנוֹת”. בשיח של קהילות שונות בארץ בכלל ושל הקהילה החינוכית בפרט, נעשה שימוש רב בפועל זה. הנה מעט מהדברים שאותם מַבְנִים (תוצאה של הקלקת המילה “הבניית” במנוע החיפוש google): “הבנייה חזותית”,” הבניית הסביבה הלימודית”, “הבניית חונכות”, “הבניית זהות קולקטיבית”, “הבניית המציאות בתקשורת”, “הבניית סיכומים”, “הבניית דימוי עצמי”, “הבניית ידע”, “הבניית שיקול הדעת של השופט בקביעת העונש”, “הבניית מותג”, “הבניית יחסים”, “הבניית משמעות טקסט”, ועוד ועוד.

מהי המשמעות של המושג “קונסטרוקטיביזם”? מהי משמעותו של המושג “הבנייה”? האם בכל הביטויים הללו (וביטויים אחרים) משמעות המושג “הבנייה” זהה? מהן ההשלכות של מושגים אלו ללמידה והוראה?

במאמר זה ייעשה ניסיון להשיב על שאלות אלו.

הקונסטרוקטיביזם – מהו?

הקונסטרוקטיביזם הוא שם כולל לגישות פילוסופיות, פסיכולוגיות, פדגוגיות, סוציולוגיות, בלשניות, מתודולוגיות, ועוד.  הטענה המשותפת לכל הגישות הללו היא שהידע נבנה ולא מתגלה או מועבר (To construct  - לבנות). זוהי טענה כללית מאד שמפורשת ומיושמת באופנים רבים ומגוונים במסגרת דיסציפלינות שונות, ונקשרת בשמותיהם של הוגים וחוקרים רבים מתחומים שונים (למשל: קאנט, פיאז’ה,  ויקו, הוסרל, פון גלזרספלד, רורטי, פופר, קוהן, אוסובל, ויגוצקי, קלי ואחרים). לאור זאת ברור שאין טעם ואי אפשר לחפש את ‘אבי’ הקונסטרוקטיביזם (כפי שמנסים חוקרים אחדים לעשות). במאמרים שונים על הקונסטרוקטיביזם ניתן למצוא משפטים כמו “הקונסטרוקטיביסטים חושבים ש…” (לדוגמא: Roth, 1993), שמהם ניתן להתרשם שהקונסטרוקטיביזם היא גישה מונוליתית, בעוד שכפי שנכתב לעיל,  הקונסטרוקטיביזם הוא אוסף של גישות רבות בעלות נקודות השקה מסויימות, שהתפתחו זו לצד זו.

לעתים מתקבל הרושם שזו מילה “אופנתית” מסוג המילים המכונות באנגלית בשם Buzzwords  - כלומר מלים “מזמזמות” או “מילות קסם” הנכנסות לשיח של קבוצה מסויימת בצורה מסיבית ואשר משמעותן לעתים מעורפלת (ויש הטוענים שהיא מעורפלת בכוונה תחילה).

חוקר בתחום הוראת המדעים בשם Strike קובל על כך בציניות כבר ב-1987:

“..נדמה לי לעתים קרובות שהמילה “קונסטרוקטיביזם” מתפקדת בשיח של הוראת המדעים כמו המילה “דמוקרטיה” בויכוחים פוליטיים. מה שלא תהיה “דמוקרטיה”, היא נחשבת לדבר טוב. אבל ספק אם כל שני אנשים המשתמשים בה מתכוונים לאותו דבר.

אבל “דמוקרטיה” היא גם מילה שימושית,  ולו רק בגלל שהיא מאחדת אנשים שבפועל אין הרבה מן המשותף ביניהם. יכול להיות שמילה זו לפחות מזכירה לאנשים שהם חולקים מסורת פוליטית משותפת, או שיש להם  מתנגדים משותפים. המילה “קונסטרוקטיביזם” מתפקדת באופן דומה.  מה שלא  יהיה  מובנה של  מילה  זו,  אם  אנחנו “קונסטרוקטיביסטים”, אנו יודעים לפחות שזה מאד חשוב להתעניין בתפיסות השגויות של ילדים, לתאר איך הם חושבים, שפיאז’ה הוא חלק מהמורשת שלנו, ושהביהביוריסטים הם ברנשים רעים”.

Strike (1987)  עמ’ 480.

לאור העובדה שהקונסטרוקטיביזם הוא “תערובת נזילה למדי של תיאוריות ואידיאולוגיות” (הרפז, תש”ס 2000), הרי אין זה סביר שיהיה ניתן לגזור ממנו  אסטרטגיית הוראה אחת ויחידה. הוזכר בתחילת המאמר שהקונסטרוקטיביזם הוא  שם כולל לגישות פילוסופיות, פסיכולוגיות, פדגוגיות, סוציולוגיות, בלשניות, מתודולוגיות ואחרות. במאמר זה ייעשה ניסיון להציג את אחד הזרמים של הקונסטרוקטיביזם שהוא בעל הרלבנטיות הגדולה ביותר לפדגוגיה  - הזרם הפסיכולוגי (שיכונה בשם “הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי”). כמו כן ייבחנו ההשלכות של זרם זה לפדגוגיה.

מהו הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי?

הקונסטרוקטיביזם  כגישה פסיכולוגית שייך לתחום הפסיכולוגיה הקוגניטיבית ועוסק בשאלה:

כיצד לומדים בני האדם?

תשובות לשאלה זו מכונות בפסיכולוגיה הקוגניטיבית בשם “תיאוריות למידה”. העיקרון המונח בבסיס תיאורית הלמידה הקונסטרוקטיביסטית  היא הטענה  כי ידע אינו מועבר לאדם אלא נבנה אצלו באופן אידיוסינקרטי (באופן ייחודי, עם צביון מיוחד), בעזרת תבניות ותהליכים המצויים כבר בהכרתו. גישה זו יוצאת כנגד הדימוי של הלומד הפסיבי הקולט גירויים ומגיב תגובות, דימוי הנמצא בבסיסה של תיאורית הלמידה הביהביוריסטית (התנהגותנית).

Novak & Gowin  (1984) כותבים בהקדמה לספרם  Learning How to Learn :

” במשך כמעט מאה שנים סבלו  סטודנטים  לחינוך  משעבוד  לפסיכולוגים ההתנהגותניים, הרואים את ה”למידה” כמילה נרדפת לשינוי בהתנהגות. אנו דוחים נקודת מבט זו, וטוענים כי למידה על ידי בני אדם מובילה לשינוי במוּבָנָה של ההתנסות (Experience)”.

בעוד שהביהביוריסטים שללו את התופעות המתרחשות בתוך המוח כמושא מחקרי, וסברו שיש לחקור רק את הביטויים החיצוניים והגלויים שלהן באמצעי מחקר אובייקטיביים, הרי הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי הוא חלק מתנועה פסיכולוגית נרחבת יותר שביקרה קשות את תיאוריית הלמידה הביהביוריסטית,  וקראה לחזור ולעסוק בתהליכי ההכרה (ולא להתייחס אל המוח כאל  ”קופסא שחורה”, כפי שעשו הביהביוריסטים).

הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי אף הוא איננו גישה מונוליתית. יתרה מזאת, מקריאת הספרות הפסיכולוגית והחינוכית מתקבל הרושם שבמובנים רבים - הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי הוא בבחינת ‘שפה’ חדשה שבה מדברים אודות תופעות שהיו מוכרות קודם לכן, או ‘נקודת תצפית’ חדשה שממנה רואים דברים אחרים שלא נראו קודם לכן, או שרואים בצורה מסויימת דברים שנראו קודם לכן בצורה אחרת (כפי שמציעה  Solomon 1994).

למרות שכפי שצוין כבר לעיל, אי אפשר ואין טעם בחיפוש  ’אבי הקונסטרוקטיביזם’, הרי אחד המקורות עליהם נשענים הקונסטרוקטיביסטים הפסיכולוגיים הוא פיאז’ה. Solomon (1994) מציינת שאמנם מבחינה רעיונית פיאז’ה הוא אכן ‘קונסטרוקטיביסט’, אבל -

“…כאשר אנחנו בוחנים את אוצר המילים בהם משתמש פיאז’ה בתיאוריו - רק מילים מועטות ‘מצלצלות’ כמילים בהם משתמשת הגישה הקונסטרוקטיביסטית המודרנית”.

דמויות מרכזיות נוספות בקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי הן למשל: הפסיכותרפיסט ג’ורג’ קלי (Kelly, 1955) והפסיכולוג החינוכי דיויד אוזובל (Ausubel, 1978).

נזכיר שוב את הטענה המרכזית של הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי: ידע אינו מועבר לאדם אלא נבנה אצלו באופן אידיוסינקרטי (באופן ייחודי, עם צביון מיוחד), בעזרת תבניות ותהליכים המצויים כבר בהכרתו.

לטענה זו שלושה חלקים, ומעניין לציין שכל אחד מהאישים שהוזכרו לעיל הדגיש חלק אחר של הטענה:

בהקשר לקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי חשוב לציין שלוש נקודות נוספות:

אנשים רבים (ובכללם מורים) מחזיקים בתפיסה המנוגדת לקונסטרוקטיביזם, הרואה את הלומד כ’לוח חלק’ או כ’כלי ריק’ (ראה למשל: שטראוס ושילוני, תשנ”ח 1997; בק, תש”ס 1999 ו-Inbar, 1996). von Glasersfeld (1995) מכנה את הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי בשם “קונסטרוקטיביזם טריוויאלי” (בניגוד לזרם אחר של הקונסטרוקטיביזם - הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפילוסופי - שאותו הוא מכנה בשם  ”קונסטרוקטיביזם רדיקלי”). מעיון בספרות החינוכית ומצפייה בפרקטיקה החינוכית עולה שגם הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי איננו טריוויאלי כלל ועיקר.

הסבר מעניין לכך שטענת היסוד של הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי מנוגדת ל’שכל הישר’ מספק הבלשן מייקל רדי (Reddy, 1979). הוא מראה כי התפיסה הרווחת של הלומד כ’לוח חלק’ פסיבי שתפקידו לקלוט את דברי המורה, מעוגנת חזק מאד בתפיסה הרווחת בציבור אודות תהליך התקשורת הבינאישית. הוא מוכיח באמצעות דוגמאות מהשיח האנגלי שהדימוי של התקשורת הוא שישנו צד “משדר” השולח מסר לצד האחר - שהוא הצד ה”קולט”, הפסיבי, שכל תפקידו הוא לקלוט את המסר. הוא מנתח את מגבלותיה של מטאפורה זו וטוען שה’תחלואים’ התקשורתיים נובעים ממנה. כצעד ראשון בשיפור ‘תחלואי’ התקשורת של החברה (האמריקאית) הוא מציע מטאפורה נגדית, קונסטרוקטיביסטית - מטאפורת “בוני הכלים” (Toolmakers Paradigm) - לפיה כל בן אדם חי בגזרה משלו. גזרה זו סגורה ומסוגרת ואין לאף אחד גישה אליה, והתקשורת בין האנשים הגרים בגזרות השונות היא מוגבלת מאד ודורשת פעילות לא רק מהצד המשדר אלא גם מהצד הקולט, שאיננו קולט אינפורמציה, אלא בונה את משמעותה מתוך הנתונים החושיים שהוא קולט.

לאור הכתוב לעיל - מה יש לקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי להציע לפדגוגיה?

ראשית, נציין מה הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי אינו מציע לפדגוגיה. הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי אינו מכתיב שיטת הוראה, ואינו מעניק עדיפות לשיטות הוראה המכונות “למידה עצמית”, “למידה פעילה”, “למידה בדרך החקר”, “קהילות חשיבה” ועוד. יתרה מזאת, על פי הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי ניתן לטעון כי אף הרצאה פרונטלית ואפילו בצורתה הקיצונית - הרצאה ברדיו - יכולה להיחשב כהוראה קונסטרוקטיביסטית!

אפרט ואסביר את דברי.

אם נקבל את חלקה הראשון של הטענה שבבסיס הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי - ידע משמעותי אינו מועבר לאדם אלא נבנה אצלו - הרי פירושו של דבר, שכל דבר הנמצא בהכרתו של האדם הוא תוצר של תהליך בניה - כלומר: האדם מסנן, מפרש, ומעבד את האינפורמציה שהוא קולט בעזרת החושים, והוא בונה לה משמעות ייחודית לו (התלויה בידע הקודם ובתבניות המושגיות הקיימות בהכרתו). מנקודת מבט של הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי, אין יתרון לאינפורמציה שהלומד מוצא בעצמו (בלמידה בדרך החקר, או בלמידה בדרך הגילוי), על אינפורמציה שהוא קולט ממורה (ולעתים קרובות יש לאינפורמציה זו חיסרון – ראה מאמרו של בק תש”ס 1999)!  אם הלמידה של הלומד היא משמעותית - הרי שני סוגי האינפורמציה עוברים עיבוד במוחו של הלומד והוא מפיק מהן  משמעויות הייחודיות לו (היכולות להתאים למשמעות המקובלת ויכולות גם לא להתאים לה). תרומתו העיקרית של הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי לפדגוגיה - הוא הפניית הזרקור לעבר המשמעותיות של הלמידה. למידה קונסטרוקטיביסטית פירושה – למידה משמעותית! זוהי   למידה שבמהלכה הלומד עיבד את האינפורמציה שהוא קלט - בעוד שלמידה שאינה משמעותית ושאינה קונסטרוקטיביסטית - היא למשל: שינון מכני או דיקלום מכני (לדוגמא: הסתכלות במדריך הטלפון ושינון המספר שאליו ברצוננו להתקשר), למידה של ניסוי וטעייה מכניים ללא הפקת משמעויות, או ניחוש ‘עיוור’.

לצורך המחשת הדברים, להלן תיאורים של  שלוש סיטואציות לימודיות:

1. המורה דינה עומדת לקיים מבחן בכיתתה. כדי להקל על תלמידיה את ההתכוננות למבחן, סיכמה דינה את כל החומר בחמישה עמודים, שכפלה אותם וחילקה אותם לתלמידים. היא הבטיחה לתלמידים ששאלות הבחינה יתבססו על החומר המסוכם. התלמידים למדו את החומר והצליחו במבחן.

2. ירון, תלמיד כתה ה’, שאוהב סרטי מדע בדיוני, חיפש חומר בספרים ובאינטרנט על “חורים שחורים” וכתב עבודה אישית על נושא זה. העבודה מכילה קטעי טקסט ותמונות על הנושא הנ”ל.

3. המורה דוד הרצה בפני תלמידי כתה ח’ על תפקידי מערכת הדם. הוא הכיר היטב את הנושא וידע מהם הקשיים של תלמידי כיתה ח’ בהקשר לנושא זה, ובנה את ההרצאה בהתאם.

האם היתה בשלוש הסיטואציות הללו למידה משמעותית - קונסטרוקטיביסטית?

בסיטואציה הראשונה – נדמה שהמורה דינה היא מה שמכונה בעגת התלמידים והמורים ‘מורה משקיענית’. היא לא הסתפקה בכך שמסרה לתלמידיה את העמודים בספר שעליהם ייבחנו – אלא  טרחה וסיכמה את החומר עבור תלמידיה. מה עשו התלמידים לקראת המבחן? הם בוודאי ישבו בבית ושיננו את חמשת עמודי הסיכומים שמסרה להם מורתם. האם היתה כאן למידה משמעותית? רוב הסיכויים שהתשובה היא שלילית (אם כי ייתכן בהחלט שחלק מהתלמידים למדו חלק מהחומר בצורה משמעותית) . לכל אחד מאיתנו יש זיכרונות על קורסים שבהם הוא לא הבין דבר וחצי דבר ממה שהמרצה הסביר, ואף על פי כן הוא הצליח במידה כזו או אחרת בבחינה, הודות לכך ששינן על פה את מחברת הקורס וידע להתאים את התשובות לשאלות. כדאי לשים לב לכך שבהוויה הבית ספרית – מורה כמו דינה זוכה לתיוג כמורה טובה ומסורה.

בסיטואציה השניה – אין ספק שירון היה פעיל וחיפש חומר במקורות שונים. לכאורה יש כאן למידה קונסטרוקטיביסטית במיטבה – התלמיד בנה את הידע בעצמו. אבל, מי שמכיר את הנושא של “חורים שחורים” יודע שכמעט ואין זה סביר להניח שתלמיד כתה ה’ יגיע להבנה משמעותית של נושא זה, משום שכדי להבינו – יש צורך בידע מוקדם בתחום הפיסיקה המודרנית. כלומר, כדי שתתרחש למידה משמעותית – אין די בכך שהלומד יתאמץ וירצה ללמוד למידה משמעותית, אלא, יש צורך בתנאי נוסף – היותו של חומר הלימודים בעל פוטנציאל ללמידה משמעותית על ידי הלומד הספציפי. ירון אמנם העתיק חומר ממקורות שונים ואולי אף צירף אותם למסמך אחד – אך לא  היתה כאן בהכרח למידה קונסטרוקטיביסטית - משמעותית של הנושא הנלמד (למרות שייתכן מאד שלירון היתה מכוונות מאד גדולה ללמוד את הנושא בצורה משמעותית). כותב בק (שם): “הפיכת למידת החקר לדגל חינוכי עלולה לשרת דווקא את החינוך לחשיבה טכנוקרטית, צרת אופקים, שיטתית, מרובעת, מקובעת ומגמתית” (עמ’ 21). לו היה עושה את העבודה הזו תלמיד כיתה י”ב הלומד פיזיקה ברמה מוגברת – סיכוייו לעבור תהליך של למידה משמעותית בהקשר ל”חורים שחורים” היו גבוהים יותר.

בסיטואציה השלישית – נראה לכאורה שלא היתה כאן “למידה משמעותית – קונסטרוקטיביסטית” אלא “למידת מסירה”. אבל, אם לתלמידים היתה מוטיבציה להקשיב (כלומר, ה’פתחים’ שבראשם היו פתוחים – ראה:  שטראוס ושילוני , תשנ”ח 1997), ואם המורה פיתח את הידע והיכולת ל’היכנס לראשם’ של התלמידים, להיות מכוון אליהם, והרצה בצורה שהתלמידים היו יכולים לבנות מדבריו את המשמעות שהוא התכוון אליה – הרי אין ספק שהיתה כאן למידה משמעותית, כלומר – למידה קונסטרוקטיביסטית. כולנו למדנו הרבה מאד דברים בצורה משמעותית באמצעות הקשבה להרצאות פרונטליות. התנאי לכך שהרצאה תיחשב כ’קונסטרוקטיביסטית’ הוא שההרצאה תאפשר למאזינים לה לבנות בראשם את המשמעויות שהמרצה התכוון אליהן,  ואם ההרצאה מעוררת חשיבה על משמעויות נוספות – מה טוב.

כלומר – הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי מציע לפדגוגיה את ההתכוונות ללומד. הוא  מפנה את תשומת לבנו לכך שמטרת השיעור היא שהתלמידים ילמדו ולא – שהמורה יְלַמֵד. הוראה משמעותית – היא הוראה כזו המאפשרת ללומד למידה משמעותית. אמירה זו נראית טריוויאלית ואולי אף טאוטולוגית, אך אין היא כזו כלל ועיקר. כל מי שצופה בשיעורים בעין בוחנת וקשוב לסבטקסט שלהם (כמו למשל: ג’ון הולט. ראה ספרו המרתק “כיצד נכשלים ילדים” תשל”ד 1974) יכול להעיד שמתקבל הרושם כי בשיעורים רבים המורים מכוונים לכך שהם יְלַמְדוּ ולא בהכרח לכך שתלמידיהם יִלְמְדוּ .

מדוע אין ההוראה המשמעותית - קונסטרוקטיביסטית מובנת מאליה? הרי סביר להניח שאם יישאלו – כמעט כל המורים יטענו שמטרתם היא לגרום ללמידה של תלמידיהם. ישנם כמה מכשולים הניצבים בפני ההוראה המשמעותית, ואזכיר שלושה מהם:

א. האגוצנטריות של המורה - פיאז’ה בספריו השונים (למשל: תשכ”ט 1969) טען שתוך כדי ההתפתחות – עוברים הילדים תהליכים של דה-צנטרציה (כלומר, יציאה מהאגוצנטריות). הוא ודאי צדק לגבי היבטים מסויימים - אך לגבי היבטים אחרים הוא שגה. כולנו מתקשים מאד להתגבר על הנטייה האגוצנטרית שלנו. מאד קשה לנו להבין איך משהו שנראה לנו ברור ומובן – איננו מובן וברור לזולתנו. כולנו מכירים מורים ומרצים המדברים במהלך השיעור או ההרצאה בלשון רבים ואומרים משפט כמו:    ”לאחר שהבנו את X נפנה עתה ל-“Y. מדוע הם מדברים בלשון רבים? מדוע הם בטוחים שהשומעים אכן הבינו את X? משום שהם משוכנעים שאם הם הבינו את X – גם כל שומעיהם הבינו זאת. ברוח הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי ניתן לומר שאמירה כגון: “ההסבר הזה הוא כל כך פשוט וברור” ראויה להיאמר על ידי התלמיד - לאחר שהבין את ההסבר, ולא (כפי שקורה לעיתים קרובות) - על ידי המורה לפני שהסביר!

גורם נוסף המשמר ומתחזק את האגוצנטריות של מורים ומרצים – היא המקובלות החברתית של  אמירות ‘נימוסיות’ כגון: ‘ברשותכם נעבור עתה לנושא הבא’ או ‘נדון כעת בעניין הזה’. כשמורה אומר משפטים אלו – הוא ‘מרגיע’ את עצמו שאין הוא נמצא ב’הצגת יחיד’ וכי הקהל ‘שותף’ עימו בתכנון ההרצאה ובהוצאתה לפועל: הרי אין הוא באמת מבקש את רשות הקהל, והוא כמובן לא דן בנושא עם הקהל אלא נושא הרצאת יחיד. הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי מלמד אותנו שעלינו להיות בכל מאודנו מכוונים לקהל היעד שלנו.

ב. רוב התלמידים אינם מכוונים ללמידה משמעותית - זהו מכשול נוסף הניצב בפני מורה המנסה לגרום ללמידה משמעותית. אם נבדוק את מאפייני התלמיד בכיתה,  כיחיד וכחלק מקבוצת לומדים, נבחין כי  לא תמיד מכוונים התלמידים ללמידה משמעותית, גם אם למורה יש מכוונות להוראה משמעותית. למשל, תלמיד עלול לא להבין את דברי המורה ובכל זאת לא לשאול שאלה מסיבות שונות (למשל: בגלל שאינו רוצה להיראות כתלמיד חלש או טרחן, או בגלל סיבה פרוזאית – החומר איננו למבחן!). מצב זה עלול לגרום למורה ללמד בצורה לא משמעותית.   ג. הקושי ליישם את הגישה הקונסטרוקטיביסטית בפועל, הלכה למעשה – גם אם מורה מצליח להתגבר על שני הקשיים הקודמים, הרי , כמו בכל דרך הוראה, קיים פער בין הידע ההצהרתי של המורה לבין הידע והיכולת ליישמו בפועל, הלכה למעשה.  כדי לעבור מתפיסת הוראה הממוקדת במורה ובחומר הלימודים לתפיסת הוראה הממוקדת בתהליכי הלמידה האמורים לעבור על התלמידים – אין די בהשתלמות אחת, טובה ככל שתהיה. מה גם שכפי שכתוב לעיל בעמ’ 5-6 – (ראה את המקרה של  המורה דינה) הוראת מסירה – זוכה להתייחסות חיובית של מרכיביה השונים של מערכת החינוך.

אלו השלכות פדגוגיות יש לקונסטרוקטיביזם?

הקונסטרוקטיביזם הוא, ככתוב לעיל,  תיאוריית למידה, וככזו , ראוי לבדוק לאלו סוגי למידה היא רלבנטית. אחד המיונים המוקבלים של סוגי למידה , היא ההבחנה בין למידת תכנים ללמידת מיומנויות. הבחנה זו באה לציין כי יש ידיעה של משפטים עובדתיים או תיאורטיים  (מה שמכונה Knowing that)) ויש ידיעה של מיומנויות או יכולות (מה שמכונה Knowing how)). הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי רלבנטי בעיקר ללמידת תכנים. בלמידת מיומנויות, הן פיזיות (כמו: רכיבה על אופניים, שימוש במיקרוסקופ, הקלדה על מקלדת), והן שכליות יותר (כמו: פתרון משוואות ריבועיות, שימוש במפה), אמנם חל שינוי בהכרה ובתודעה, אך המרכיב העיקרי הוא שינוי ביכולת או בהתנהגות.  בלמידה “טהורה” של מיומנות – האדם נבחן האם הוא יודע כיצד לבצע מיומנות מסויימת ולא במה שהוא יודע על אותו נושא. תיאוריית הלמידה הפורייה יותר בהקשר זה היא, לא אחרת מאשר תיאוריית הלמידה שאנשי חינוך נהנים להשמיץ – הביהביוריזם.  מושגים מרכזיים בתיאוריה הביהביוריסטית הם אימון ותרגול, ואכן הגורם העיקרי המשפיע על מידת השליטה במיומנות כלשהי – הוא מידת התרגול והניסיון שרכש האדם במיומנות זו. ככל שאדם מתרגל מיומנות מסויימת – כך גוברת שליטתו בה.

ומה באשר ללמידת תכנים? הביהביוריזם אינו רלבנטי, שכן אדם לא ידע (ידיעה משמעותית) תוכן מסויים יותר טוב אם הוא ישנן אותו 100 פעמים. השינון אמנם יגרום לו לזכור את התוכן טוב יותר אך לא לדעת אותו ולהבינו.  ההנחייה המעשית העיקרית שניתן לגזור מהקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי לפדגוגיה של למידת תכנים היא: בדוֹק מה צריך להתרחש כדי שתתקיים למידה משמעותית - ותכנן את סביבת הלמידה בהתאם.

אפרט את דברי:

בכל נושא לימודי, ישנם תכנים שאינם מציבים קשיי הבנה מיוחדים בפני הלומדים. מהי הדרך ההוראה המומלצת של תכנים מסוג זה? הואיל ואלו תכנים “קלים” ללמידה,  הרי תלמידים יכולים ללמדם בעצמם, בשיטות הוראה המזמנות למידה עצמאית (כמו: פתרון בעיות, למידה בדרך החקר, קהילות חשיבה, פרוייקטים, עבודה קבוצתית וכד’) תוך שימוש במקורות מידע שונים: ספרים, מאגרי מידע, תצפיות, אתרי אינטרנט וכד’. דרך אחרת ללמידת תכנים מסוג זה היא באמצעות הוראה פרונטלית.

אולם, יש תכנים לימודיים שלמידתם המשמעותית דורשת מהתלמיד שינוי תפיסתי. מדובר במקרים שבהם יש לתלמיד תפיסה מסויימת, ומטרת הוראת הנושא – היא לגרום לו להחליף את תפיסתו ולאמץ את התפיסה המקובלת בדיסציפלינה. בכל דיסציפלינה יש תכנים מסוג זה, הנחשבים לידע בסיסי, ידע הכרחי או ידע קנוני (בהנחה שלא נוקטים ב”רלטיביזם וולגרי” ובתפיסה שאין תכנים קנוניים, ושצריך לאפשר לתלמיד ללמוד מה שהוא רוצה ואין תכני חובה). תכנים מסוג זה הם למשל: המודל החלקיקי  של החומר (העומד בסתירה לתפיסה האינטואיטיבית והיומיומית על מבנה החומר), מושג ה- 0 במתמטיקה (העומד בסתירה לתפיסה האינטואיטיבית והיומיומית על ה-0 כלא מספר), הרעיון שאין מוקדם ומאוחר בתנ”ך (העומד בסתירה  לתפיסה האינטואיטיבית והיומיומית על התנ”ך כספר היסטוריה המתאר בצורה כרונולוגית את האירועים), התפיסה שהעולם הוא גוף כדורי שכיווני מטה הם רדיאליים (העומד בסתירה  לתפיסה האינטואיטיבית והיומיומית שהעולם הוא שטוח וכיווני מטה הם מקבילים), ועוד ועוד.

כאשר מטרת הלמידה מחייבת התרחשותו של שינוי תפיסתי אצל התלמיד – הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי מפנה את תשומת ליבנו לכך  שהתלמיד הוא זה שצריך לעבור את השינוי ולבנות בראשו את הידע החדש, והמורה אינו יכול להעביר או למסור לו את התפיסה החלופית. במקרה כזה, בבסיס שיטת ההוראה צריך להציב את הדיאלוג בין המורה ותלמידיו. תפקיד המורה הוא “לתווך” (בלשונו של פויירשטיין – ראה  פויירשטיין ופויירשטיין, תשנ”ג 1993) את התפיסה ה’חדשה’, ולנקוט בכל מיני שיטות הוראה שיעזרו לתלמיד להשתכנע מדוע עליו לאמץ את התפיסה החדשה ולא להמשיך ולדבוק בתפיסתו הקודמת. שיטות אלו עשויות להיות למשל: “הוראה בשיטת המשא ומתן הכיתתי” (יחיאלי ונוסבוים תשנ”ט 1999), “השיחה המתמטית” (רגב ושמעוני תש”ס 2000), “הוראה באמצעות קונפליקט קוגניטיבי” (דרייפוס ויונגוירט תשנ”ב 1992), “דיונים קבוצתיים”, ועוד.

בהקשר זה נציין כי הפועל “לְהַבְנוֹת” שבו נעשה שימוש רב בעיקר בתחום החינוך (כפי שצוין בתחילת המאמר) אינו ראוי לשמש כתרגום או כהתייחסות לקונסטרוקטיביזם. אם נבחן שוב את שימושיו השונים בפועל הזה (שצויינו בתחילת המאמר), ניווכח שמשמעותו אינה חד משמעית. בחלק מהמקרים – מדובר על משהו שעושה האדם בעצמו (למשל: “הבניית דימוי עצמי”, “הבניית ידע”, “הבניית שיקול הדעת של השופט בקביעת העונש”),  ובחלק מהמקרים מדובר על משהו שעושה אדם אחד עבור אדם אחר או עבור קבוצה אחרת (למשל:  ”הבניית הסביבה הלימודית”, “הבניית חונכות”, “הבניית זהות קולקטיבית”). לדעתי, השימוש בפועל “לְהַבְנוֹת” בעייתי בשני המקרים: במקרים מהסוג הראשון – אין בו צורך. ניתן וראוי להשתמש בפועל “לִבְנוֹת” – “בניית הדימוי העצמי ע”י האדם”, ” בניית הידע ע”י האדם” וכדומה). במקרים מן הסוג השני - המשמעות שלו מנוגדת בתכלית למשמעותו של המונח קונסטרוקטיביזם. הרי לפועל “ללמוד” לא קיימת צורת הִפְעִיל , כלומר,  הפועל “להלמיד” אינו קיים בעברית , כי למידה היא פעולה שהאדם עושה בעצמו ואין אדם אחר יכול לעשותה במקומו. בדיוק מאותה סיבה,  הפועל “לְהַבְנוֹת” אינו מתאים לשמש כתרגום לקונסטרוקטיביזם, שכן ע”פ התיאוריה הקונסטרוקטיביסטית, כל אדם צריך לבנות את הידע שלו בעצמו ואף אדם לא יכול “להבנות” את הידע עבור זולתו. המורה יכול וצריך לגרום לבניית הידע, לעודד את הבניה, לתווך את הצורך בבנייה וכו’ וכו’ – אבל אינו יכול “להבנות” את הידע עבור התלמיד!  מובן שגם אי אפשר “להבנות זהות” , “להבנות דימוי עצמי”, “להבנות משמעות של טקסט” או “להבנות שיקול דעת”  וכדומה.

מן הכתוב לעיל משתמע, כי הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי איננו שיטת הוראה (כפי שאנשים רבים טועים לחשוב),  אלא בבחינת גישה כללית או תפיסה כללית לגבי למידה. אפשר ליישם אותו גם בהקשר לכתיבת ספרי לימוד. ספר לימוד הוא ‘קונסטרוקטיביסטי’ – אם כותבי ספר הלימוד כתבו אותו מתוך מכוונות לקוראיו הפוטנציאליים – המורים והתלמידים - ועשו כל שביכולתם לכתוב את ספר הלימוד כך – שהתלמידים  יוכלו, באמצעות קריאת הספר ולמידתו, לבנות את המשמעות שהכותבים התכוונו אליה. הוא הדין לגבי מאמרים. לצערי הרב, מצויים מאמרים רבים שמקריאתם מתקבל הרושם שמטרת הכותב היתה להרשים את קוראיו בידע שלו, במקום לעזור להם להבין את דבריו. מאמר ‘קונסטרוקטיביסטי’ הוא מאמר הכתוב כך שהקורא יכול לבנות באמצעותו את המשמעות אליה התכוון הכותב.

לסיכום: מה יש לקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי להציע לפדגוגיה?

כאמור, הקונסטרוקטיביזם איננו בבחינת ‘תרופת פלא’ לכל תחלואי מערכת החינוך, כמו שהביהביוריזם איננו ‘עשב רע’ שיש להיפטר ממנו. במאמר זה נעשה ניסיון להראות כי ההשלכה העיקרית של הקונסטרוקטיביזם הפסיכולוגי לפדגוגיה הוא בתחום למידת תכנים והוראתם.

אחת המטרות של כתיבת מאמר זה היתה להראות שאימוץ הקונסטרוקטיביזם איננו מחייב בהכרח שינוי מהפכני בארגון הסביבה הבית ספרית. הוא דורש בעיקר – שינוי תפיסתי אצל המורים והתלמידים. דרישה זו אינה טריוויאלית (בניגוד למה שטען von Glasersfeld, 1995), הואיל והיא דורשת התגברות על תפיסות יומיומיות ואינטואיטיביות על מהות הלמידה וההוראה. מצד אחר, דרישה זו איננה מחייבת זניחת כל הפרקטיקות הפדגוגיות והמרתן בשיטות הוראה ‘מתקדמות’ יותר (כמו: למידה בדרך החקר, למידה  באמצעות פרוייקטים, קהילות חשיבה, ועוד), אם כי ראוי בהחלט שהן תשולבנה בהוראה.

הכשרת מורים והשתלמות של מורים  ברוח הקונסטרוקטיביזם

מהן ההשלכות של הדברים הללו להכשרה ולהשתלמות מורים?

אין ספק שיש לעסוק בקונסטרוקטיביזם בתכניות להכשרה ולהשתלמות של מורים. הואיל ורוב המורים ורוב הסטודנטים המכשירים את עצמם להוראה התנסו בעבר בהוראה ‘קונבנציונלית’ ומחזיקים בתפיסות “מסורתיות (שלא לומר “שגויות”) על  מהות הלמידה וההוראה (ראה לדוגמא:  שטראוס ושילוני, תשנ”ח 1997Inbar, 1996;), הרי עליהם לעבור תהליך של שינוי תפיסתי לכיוון של תפיסות יותר קונסטרוקטיביסטיות. על המורים במכללות להכשרת מורים לשנות את תפיסתם כלפי תהליכי למידה לכיוון יותר “קונסטרוקטיביסטי”  ולעודד את הסטודנטים לעבור תהליך כזה בעזרתם.

כאן המקום לציין בשמחה כי העמדות המובעות במאמר זה זכו לתמיכה חשובה בעת האחרונה מאז שנכנסה פרופ’ ענת זוהר לתפקידה כיו”ר המזכירות הפדגוגית במשרד החינוך. מדיניות “האופק הפדגוגי” שעליה הכריזה זוהר (זהר תשס”ז 2007, תשס”ז 2007b) הולמת להפליא את התפיסה הקונסטרוקטיביסטית ללמידה והוראה.

ביבליוגרפיה:

בק, ש. (תש”ס 1999) על כמה מבעיות הקונסטרוקטיביזם הרדיקלי – מגבלות למידת החקר. דפים 29, 10-27.

ברינגייה, ז. (תשמ”ח, 1988) הלמידה האנושית: שיחות עם פיאז’ה. ירושלים: כתר.

דרייפוס, ע. ויונגוירט א. (תשנ”ב 1992). אסטרטגית הקונפליקט הקוגניטיבי כאמצעי לשינוי תפיסות התלמיד: - השלכות, קשיים ובעיות. העלון למורי הביולוגיה, 130, 10-29.

הולט, ג’. (תשל”ד 1974). כיצד נכשלים ילדים. רמת גן: מסדה.

הרפז, י. (תש”ס 2000). הוראה ולמידה בקהילת חשיבה מנקודת מבט קונסטרוקטיביסטית. תדפיס בהוצאת מכון ברנקו וייס, ירושלים.

הרפז, י. (תש”ס , 2000ב’). לקראת הוראה ולמידה בקהילת חשיבה. חינוך החשיבה 18,  עמ’ 6-31.

זוהר, ע. (תשס”ז 2007) אופק פדגוגי ללמידה. חוזר מנכ”ל משרד החינוך ס”ז/ 8(א
http://www.education.gov.il/mankal/education_gov_il/meyda04_2007_1.htm

זוהר, ע. (תשס”ז 2007ב’). האופק הפדגוגי – רפורמה או שינוי? הד החינוך , גליון 8, 40-44

יחיאלי, ת. ונוסבוים, י. (תשנ”ט 1999). מבנה החומר – ריק וחלקיקים: מדריך למורה. רחובות: מכון ויצמן, פרויקט מטמו”ן.

כרמון, א. (תש”ס 2000). פדגוגיה קונסטרוקטיביסטית וארגון הידע הבית ספרי - תקציר הרצאה ביום עיון ” קונסטרוקטיביזם - המקרה של קהילות חשיבה”, מכון ברנקו וייס.

נוסבוים, י. (תשנ”ט 1999). מבנה החומר – ריק וחלקיקים: ספר לתלמיד. רחובות: מכון ויצמן, פרויקט מטמו”ן.

נוסבוים, י. ויחיאלי, ת. (תשנ”ט 1998). תפיסות שגויות ושינוי תפיסתי בהוראת המדעים (מהדורה שניה). תל-אביב: מכון מופ”ת.

סלומון, ג. (תשנ”ח 1997). סביבות למידה קונסטרוקטיביסטיות חדשניות: סוגיות לעיון. חינוך לחשיבה 11-12 עמ’ 27-41.

פוירשטיין, ר. ופוירשטיין, ש. (תשנ”ג 1993). התנסות בלמידה מתווכת: סקירה תיאורטית. בשדה חמד, 36 (א’-ב’), 7-50.

פיאז’ה, ז. (תשכ”ט 1969). תפיסת העולם של הילד. תל אביב: ספרית הפועלים.

רגב, ח. ושמעוני, ש. (תש”ס 2000). לשוחח מתמטיקה – מדוע? למה? איך?  על”ה – עלון למורי המתמטיקה 25, 77-89.

שטראוס, ס. ושילוני, ת. (תשנ”ח 1997). מודלים שיש למורים על שכלם ועל למידתם של ילדים. חינוך החשיבה 11.

Ausubel, D. P., Novak, J.D. & Hanesian, H (1978). Educational Psychology A Cognitive View. 2nd edition. New York:  Holt, Rinehart & winston.

Inbar, D. E. (1996). The Free Educational Prison: Metaphors and Images. Educational Research, 38 (1), 1-16.

Kelly, G. A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton and Company.

Novak, J. D. & Gowin, D. B. (1984). Learning how to learn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reddy, M. (1979). The Conduit Metaphor. In: A. Ortony (Ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roth, W. M. (1993). In the Name of Constructivism: Science Education Research and the Construction of Local Knowledge. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 30, 799-803.

Solomon, J. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Constructivism. Studies in Science Education, 23, 1-19.

Strike, K. A. (1987). Toward A Coherent Constructivism. In: H. Helm & J. D. Novak (Eds.)  Proceeding of the Second International Seminar on Misconceptions, Cornell University, V. 1, 481-489.

von Glasersfeld, E. (1995). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London: The Falmer Press.

Completing an MIT Physics Class in 4.5 Days?

Reprinted from my free newsletter, Learn Faster, Achieve More.

Last week I sat down to write one of the hardest exams I’ve ever had to prepare for, and I’m not even a student anymore.

The class was Classical Mechanics, an MIT physics class. MIT generously puts up many courses online, for free, so you can see the exact course here.

What made writing the exam difficult wasn’t the subject, but that 4.5 days before writing the final exam, I hadn’t seen any of the material. I started the course Tuesday morning, and wrote the exam Saturday afternoon. Less than five days to learn a class that MIT claims requires doing 120 hours of work.

Today I’m going to share how I prepared for the exam (and my results). If you’ve ever needed to learn something quickly, I hope you can adapt some of the strategies I used to your own learning.

Why Learn Physics in 4.5 Days?

For the last month I’ve been secretly researching for a huge learning project I’ll be starting in October. Successfully completing this course in 4.5 days was the last stage of my research to see whether I was up to the challenge.

I’ll be letting newsletter readers know what the challenge is in August, but 4.5 wasn’t a random number I picked simply to be a masochist. It was the pilot experiment of a much larger trial I’ll be starting in two months.

How Can You Learn a Class in Under a Week?

Learning a class in 4.5 days is a lesson in efficiency. A single moment wasted of confusion or idea not deeply understood could be fatal. In completing my experiment, I relied on a combination of macro-level strategies and micro-level tactics.

I’ll discuss both the strategies I used to fit the coursework into the time period, as well as the specific tactics I used to quickly learn the hard ideas deeply.

Strategies for Fitting 120 Hours into 4.5 Days

Strategy #1: Watch Lectures at 1.5x Speed

My first strategy was to watch the lectures at between 1.5-2x speed using VLC Player. Lectures are great at getting a more vivid explanation of ideas than the textbook, but had I watched all 35 lectures at normal speed, that would have easily eaten up most of my learning time.

By adjusting the speed to zip through demonstrations, but slow down at the algebra, I could keep up with all the lectures, and finish all 30 hours in the first two days of learning.

Strategy #2: Work Early, Finish Early

Scheduling was incredibly important too. Because my restriction was in days, not hours, I wanted to squeeze as much work as possible out of my days. I did this by adopting the following routine:

5:55 – Wake up
6:00 – Begin work
8:00 – Breakfast
1:00 – Lunch + 25 minute nap
5:00 – Dinner
7:00 – Finish working

Two elements stand out in this schedule which enabled me, despite the pace, to take my evenings off after 7pm each night:

1. I began work first thing in the morning.

2. I took a midday nap.

Working first thing in the morning was actually easier than expected. The adrenaline of the challenge helped me stay focused and stopped me from hitting the snooze button. By starting work at 6am, I could complete an extra 2-3 hours of work before most people would start, leaving a much larger period of time off in my evenings to relax.

The midday nap was a suggestion from my friend Benny Lewis, who despite seemingly perpetual jet lag and an aggressive social calendar, has tons of energy. I learned that if I could fall asleep instantly (thus timing it so that I was maximally tired before my nap), that I would have an extra 4-5 hours of energy post-nap.

Surprisingly, I didn’t feel burnt out by this pace either. I woke up Sunday morning at 7am without an alarm, just out of habit.

Strategy #3: Relate Everything to the Subject

The final strategic element I used was a complete obsession with physics, while I was learning. When I was at the gym, I found myself absentmindedly calculating torques and energy consumption. Running the tap triggered thoughts of fluid dynamics.

I enjoyed learning the material, so the extra obsession meant that every experience was being translated into metaphors automatically, even when I wasn’t trying to learn. I’m not sure how replicable this is, but the attitude of being obsessed was one I tried to foster.

Tactics for Rapidly Learning Under Constraints

The big three tactics that were most useful to me in learning the material were:

1. Deliberate practice.

2. The 5-Year Old Method.

3. Visceralization.

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice was crucial because it had been awhile since I had done serious algebra or calculus. Understanding the gist of the concepts was fairly easy, but transforming complex sets of equations into meaningful answers quickly was hard.

My weapon was to do tons of practice problems. Since the number of assignments and practice problems exceeded my time limits, I developed a method for highlighting which problems would be the most useful.

First, I would scan through the problems thinking in my head if I knew the method to solve the problem. If it was a clear yes, I’d go straight to the answers and confirm if my conceptual understanding was correct. This allows you to do a weaker self-test on the easier topics much more rapidly, so you can devote time to the hard questions.

Next, for the questions where no immediate answer came to mind, I would try to solve them. I would keep going until my efforts at algebra were exhausted, and then I would try for another 10-15 minutes. I wanted to develop the habit of thinking hard about the problems, rather than just jumping to the solutions.

When I got the answer wrong, I would see which concepts it was connected to. As an example, early on I was messing up questions involving torque. That meant it was time to switch gears and deeply understand what torque was about.

The 5-Year Old Method

Once I identified, through a practice problem, a concept I didn’t fully understand, my next goal was to develop a deep intuition about the idea.

My best method for that was to write on a blank piece of paper the name of the concept and write out an explanation to myself in terms even a 5-year old could understand. Then, when I’d hit a point where I was drawing a blank, or couldn’t adequately simplify, I’d jump to the lecture which explained the topic and carefully watch over that segment.

You can see an example here (PDF).

Visceralization

Visceralization is the name I give for a combination of visualization and visceral. Basically, it’s a way of associating ideas and concepts to tactile feelings and senses.

I used this tactic a lot with the physics concepts, in addition to metaphor, so that I would remember how ideas worked. When understanding the relationship between torque, angular momentum and angular velocity, I imagined feeling twisting, spinning and rate of spin as forces applied to my body.

This tactic may sound silly, but I can vividly recall making the corkscrew motion with my right hand to determine which direction the torsional vector would be.

Final Exam Results and Rapid Learning Lessons

Even with my tactics, it was a difficult week. I’ve never taken university-level physics before, and I was even missing a lot of the calculus necessary to do a few of the problems (my initial exposure to calculus stopped before integrals and Taylor series).

My final score was 75% (and you can see the exam I wrote, and MIT official solutions), written under the same conditions of the actual exam.

Not an A+ by any standard, but considering I wrote the exam Saturday, and had never touched most of the concepts before Tuesday morning, I was pleased with the result.

Action Items and Takeaways

Some of my methods weren’t ideal. Watching lectures at twice the speed and skimming over practice problems isn’t the best way to learn. But, if you’re in a similar time crunch and need to learn a lot of material quickly, here’s my advice:

1. Have a clear strategy. I never just “studied”. Every single hour was devoted to a specific goal, whether that was to go through lectures, focused problem sets or active recall on key ideas.

2. Never memorize what needs to be understood. Under time pressure, I often felt like certain ideas would just have to be memorized. But I resisted this temptation, sometimes repeating the explanation 4-5 times, before explaining it again in my own words. Understanding is an investment in less future studying.

3. Clearly separate work from time off. I took almost no breaks during my day of work. Even eating breakfast, I’d replay lectures or re-read my notes. This may not be desirable every day, but it meant that I could still relax at night, despite the workload.

If you’re interested in going deeper to understand some of the productivity and learning tactics I used, I explain them with a lot more examples and depth in my course.

Change Your Relationship with Time to Manage It More Effectively

Managing your time is a struggle for many of us, but author Marie Forleo has a basic, often-overlooked tip to get your schedule under control: Stop looking at time as the enemy. As long as you do, you’ll have an antagonistic relationship with it, and it’ll always be a source of pain and stress.

Of course, changing your relationship with time doesn’t suddenly make it easier to manage or give you more hours in the day, but it does help make rearranging your calendar and scheduling to-dos and appointments less of a stressful thing you avoid doing at all costs (or until it’s too late.) In short, if time is your adversary, you’ll always struggle against it instead of working with it and learning what you can and can’t do in a given day.

Instead, as she explains in this video above (starting at 2:36), if you try to have a more dispassionate relationship with time, you immediately give up that unnecessary stress—and get back the energy you put into feeling terrible about managing your schedule. The rest of the video is full of productivity tips as well, so it’s worth a watch if you’re looking for some other ways to be productive, including some things we’ve mentioned before like creating your own productivity method by remixing the things you like from others, the importance of a good morning routine, and the productivity benefits of exercise. Hit the link below to give it a watch.

Want more tips and tricks for living life better? Check out other articles like this on Lifehacker.

Incremental learning (Full)

Our cultures don’t encourage us to think much about learning. Instead we regard it as something that just happens to us. But learning must itself consist of sets of skills we grow ourselves; we start with only some of them and slowly grow the rest. Why don’t more people keep on learning more and better learning skills? Because it’s not rewarded right away, its payoff has a long delay.

Marvin Minsky

What is incremental learning?

This article describes the fastest avenue towards rock-solid lifetime knowledge: Incremental Learning.

Incremental learning is the fastest and the most comprehensive way of learning available to students at the moment of writing (2013).

Incremental learning is a consolidation of computer-based techniques that accelerate and optimize the process of learning from all conceivable material available in electronic form, and not only.

Currently, SuperMemo is the only software that implements incremental learning. In SuperMemo, the student feeds the program with all forms of learning material and/or data (texts, pictures, videos, sounds, etc.). Those learning materials are then gradually converted into durable knowledge that can last a lifetime.

In incremental learning, the student usually remembers 95% of his or her top priority material. That knowledge is relatively stable and lasts in student’s memory as long as the process continues, and well beyond.

The cost of high knowledge retention is very small when compared with various traditional learning methods. For example, in learning a language, the vocabulary of an educated native speaker can be retained in SuperMemo at the cost of 20 minutes per day in the first years of the process, and mere minutes in later years (assuming the original set is acquired in portions spread over 4 years in 30-50 min. sessions).

The incremental learning derives its name from the incremental nature of the learning process. In incremental learning, all facets of knowledge receive a regular treatment, and there is a regular inflow of new knowledge that builds upon the past knowledge. In incremental learning, the student sits in the driving seat and determines which knowledge should be mastered. He or she determines when this happens, with what degree of detail, at what priority, and at what desired degree of recall/retention. For example, in a single session, the student may learn a few facts of geography, discover a few rules of healthy lifestyle, figure out a few statistical formulas, read a couple of paragraphs from a friend’s blog, process a few minutes of his home video collection, annotate a few family pictures, watch a few pieces from his YouTube video collection, and read a few articles in subjects related to a forthcoming exam. In other words, all areas of knowledge keep growing in parallel in proportion to interests and importance.

Typical learning at school puts an emphasis on a few areas of knowledge and neglects all the remaining areas. A medical student may spend a few months mastering anatomy, while gradually forgetting his biochemistry material in the meantime (or the other way round). At the same time, he or she will not find time to study important issues of the day that will always depend on a given person in a given context. With blinkers imposed by the heavy load of school material, the student may never find time, for example, to figure out what incremental learning is. Narrow horizons and narrow perspectives only make it harder to further rationalize the selection of the learning material.

General outline of incremental learning

In incremental learning, you acquire and maintain knowledge using the following steps:

- importing knowledge from various electronic and non-electronic sources (e.g. articles on the web, YouTube videos, music files, pictures from your camera, e-mails, scanned paper notes, etc.)

- prioritizing knowledge for incremental processing (e.g. high priority for physics, low priority for movie trivia, etc.). Incremental approach means processing knowledge in small bits and in small steps

- gradually converting the learning materials into lasting knowledge in your memory. This conversion may also produce an easily searchable and well-annotated computer media archive that does not even need to be part of the learning process

- expanding creatively upon the acquired knowledge (e.g. in the process of incremental writing, problem solving, etc.)

Components of incremental learning

Incremental learning tools differ substantially for various forms of learning material, media, and goals. Here are the main components of incremental learning:

- incremental reading

- incremental image learning (or visual learning)

- incremental video
- incremental audio
- incremental mail processing

- incremental creative elaboration (incl. incremental problem solving, incremental writing, etc.)

With the rich toolset offered by incremental learning, all reading, learning, viewing, archiving, and annotation functions can be delegated to SuperMemo. This goes far beyond standard learning and includes personal notes, home videos, lectures available in audio and video formats, YouTube material, family photo-albums, diaries, audio files, scanned paper materials, etc.

The oldest, most popular, and the most mature component of incremental learning is incremental reading. We will use incremental reading as the comprehensive introduction to other forms of incremental learning.

The value of interruption in learning

In incremental learning, we often quickly move from one subject to another. Such interruptions may occur many times during a single learning day. When people first learn about this incremental methodology they immediately ask “Why interrupt? Aren’t these the prime principles of human endeavour to be thorough, persist, and do things right to the end?”

The 3 main advantages of interruption in learning are:

- improving memory: spaced learning has long been proven dramatically more efficient than conglomerate learning massed in time

- improving learning choices/priorities: unless the learning material has been pre-selected by a higher authority, student’s own choices require prioritization, which in turn requires preview. Previewing is a form of interruption. Regular interruption allows of prioritizing on the go

- improving attention: whenever attention declines, change of the subject is the simplest remedy other than taking a definite break from learning

As for the disadvantages … there are none! Simply put: interruption is optional! It is true that incremental learning may lead to “learning impatience” and “craving interruption”, however, these have never been proven detrimental beyond showing that once you employ incremental learning, you may never want to go back to traditional “book at a time” learning. Nevertheless, you should not forget that schools are incremental too. Just on a slightly moderate scale. Schools employ interruption when kids move from geography to physics, or when they close the books for the day.

Once the art of incremental learning is mastered, the advantages go far beyond the advantages of the interruption or spaced repetition. Here is a shortlist (for a detailed discussion see: Advantages of incremental learning).

- massive learning - you learn more than you thought your memory can hold

- 95% knowledge retention - you nearly eliminate the problem of forgetting

- lifetime memories - your memories will last for life (as long as you stick with the regular review schedule based on spaced repetition)

- comprehensive learning on all fronts (rather than the school-like focus on 2-4 majors)

- better understanding of the studied subject is assisted by moderation in consuming details, and easy inclusion of explanatory material (e.g. from dictionaries and/or encyclopedias)

- better consolidation of the knowledge structure by incremental approach, interrupted learning, spacing, and slotting in of the new knowledge. Contrary to popular belief, incremental learning helps you keep the big picture in your mind

- better attention by focusing on a single issue at a time without ever missing a detail, and by remedying attention deficits with a constant change of the learning material

- creativity - by encountering different subjects in unpredictable sequences, your creativity soars. You can employ it, for example, in the process of incremental problem solving or incremental writing (this article was written using incremental writing tools in SuperMemo)

- battling chaos - it is easier to resolve contradictions in SuperMemo, e.g. when processing new research with contradictory claims and findings. Unlike your memory in “real life” where you keep oscillating between contradictions, SuperMemo does not tolerate information discrepancy. Contradictory material converges up to a point when you realize you need to decide on the nature of the truth

- all knowledge is well prioritized

- all knowledge is easily searchable

- all knowledge is quantifiable (size, retention, workload, etc.)

- stresslessness - nothing frees your mind for learning efficiently as the sense that no detail will ever be missed and you can focus on a single problem at a time while delegating other problems to later

- fun - once you master incremental learning, it can truly be the best part of your day with few other earthly pleasures giving you as much satisfaction as new useful knowledge

In short, with incremental learning you learn fast, you acquire massive loads of knowledge, retain memories for life, remember almost all that you have learned, understand things better, develop harmoniously in all directions, enhance your creativity, and all that while having incredible fun! If that sounds too good to be true, please read more below or just give it a solid try. For a detailed explanation see: Advantages of incremental learning.

Interruption is not a problem

In learning, choosing the right learning sources is the first step to success. A well-written article will get you to the basic idea from its first paragraph or even a sentence. Incremental reading is best suited for articles written in hypertext or in an encyclopedic manner. Ideally, each sentence you read has a contribution to your knowledge and is not useless without the sentences that follow.

Imagine that you would like to learn a few things about Gamal Abdel Nasser. You will, for example, import to SuperMemo an article about Nasser from Wikipedia. In the first sentence you will find out that “Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918 - 1970) was the second President of Egypt“. If you are new to Nasser, you may be happy to just know he was the Egyptian president and safely jump to reading other articles. Thus you may delay the encounter with the historic role of Nasser and economize some time to finding out, for example, who Shimon Peres is. When you see the Nasser article for the second time, you might find that “He was followed by after President Muhammad Naguib and can be considered one of the most important Arab leaders in history“. This piece of knowledge is also self-contained and you can patiently wait for your third encounter with Nasser. When you return the next time, you may conclude that another piece about Nasser is of lower priority: “Nasser was born in Alexandria“. You can schedule the review of that piece in 2-3 years. Perhaps your interest in Nasser or in Alexandria will grow to the point that this knowledge will become relevant. If not, you can always dismiss or delete such an extract. Alternatively, you can skip a few paragraphs and extract a more important sentence: “In 1952, Nasser led the military coup against King Farouk I of Egypt“. Even if your read individual sentences about Nasser in intervals lasting months, your knowledge will progressively expand and will become increasingly consolidated (esp. if you employ cloze deletions, which are mandatory for longer intervals).

Naturally, not all texts are are so well-suited for incremental reading. For example, a research paper may throw at you a detailed description of methods and leave results and conclusions for the end. In such cases, you may extract the abstract and delay the body of the paper by a period in which you believe the abstract will have been sufficiently processed. Then, if you are still interested in the article, you can schedule the methods well into the future (you will or will not read the methods depending on the conclusions of the article). You can schedule the results and the discussion into a less remote point in time, and proceed with reading the conclusions.

The hardest texts may not be suitable to reading in increments. For example, a piece of software code may need to be analyzed in its entirety before it reveals any useful meaning. In such cases, when the text (here the code) comes up in the incremental reading process, analyze it and verbalize your conclusions. The conclusions can then be processed incrementally. You will generate individual questions depending on which pieces of knowledge you consider important and which become volatile. The original computer code can be still retained in your collection as reference only.

When learning at the university, you do many courses in parallel. That’s a macro version of incremental reading. Many people love to zap TV channels and play a chaotic version of incremental video with their TV set. Zapping may not be a recommended way of learning, but it won’t leave your mind blank. Another example can be seen in people who have a habit of reading a few novels in parallel. Their limit on the number of novels comes from the limits of human memory. There is a breaking point beyond which a novel, if read in bursts separated by longer intervals, cannot be followed due to fading memories. Incremental reading is based on SuperMemo, and by definition is far less limited by your forgetful memory. The number of articles in the process can reach a hundred thousands, and given basic skills, you won’t get confused.

Complexity of incremental learning

Unlike classic SuperMemo, incremental learning requires quite a lot of experience and training before it becomes effective. However, your investment will be returned manifold once you become proficient with the method.

Incremental learning is a consolidation of technologies that have been in development for nearly 3 decades. It is still in the process of maturing and it is still pretty complex. It requires skills that take months to develop. It requires your own strategies that may mature over years. Moreover, incremental learning requires the mastery of SuperMemo, which has been optimized for professional use. As such it is not beginner friendly.

Users complain that SuperMemo has a steep learning curve. They are right. SuperMemo has been optimized to make a life of a pro easy. It makes life of beginners hard because it does not ever compromise the learning efficiency for sleekness or marketing value. Take the priority queue as an example. Nearly everyone asks why the articles of highest value have a priority of 0% rather than the obvious 100%. They ask: “Why is SuperMemo always keeping things upside down?”. They got a point. However, no pro user would ever swap the ease of typing 1, 2, 3 for his top priority material as opposed to 99, 98 or 97. Those dilemmas slow down the adoption of SuperMemo. However, once you become a pro, you will appreciate this approach and will more likely become a lifelong devotee.

Incremental reading

Introduction

Traditional linear reading is highly inefficient. This comes from the fact that various pieces of the text are of various importance. Some should be skipped. Others should be read in the first order of priority. Old-fashioned books are quickly being replaced with hypertext. Hypertext will help you quickly jump to information that is the most important at any given moment. Hypertext requires a different style of writing. All linear texts can assume that the reader is familiar with the preceding sections. This makes them context-poor. Within hypertext, individual texts become context-independent, and all difficult terms and concepts are explained primarily with additional hyperlinks. In the same way in which the web helped delinearize the global sources of information, SuperMemo can help you delinearize your reading of whatever linear material you decide to import to SuperMemo. While reading with SuperMemo, you will see a linear text as a sequence of sections subdivided into paragraphs and individual sentences. SuperMemo will help you provide a separate and independent processing for each section, paragraph or sentence.

What is incremental reading?

Incremental reading is a learning technique that makes it possible to read thousands of articles at the same time without getting lost. Incremental reading begins with importing articles from electronic sources, e.g. the Internet. The student then extracts the most important fragments of individual articles for further review. Extracted fragments are then converted into questions and answers. These in turn become subject to systematic review and repetition that maximizes the long-term recall. The review process is handled by the proven spaced repetition algorithm known as the SuperMemo method.

In incremental reading, you read articles in small portions. After you read a portion of one article, you go on to a portion of another article, etc. You introduce all important portions of texts into the learning process in SuperMemo. This way you do not worry that you forget the main thread of the article, even if you return to reading months later. Your progress with individual articles may be slow, but you greatly increase your efficiency by paying less attention to less important articles and spending more time on articles that are more beneficial to your knowledge. Difficult articles may wait until you read easier explanatory articles, etc. Last but not least, incremental reading increases your efficiency because it is fun! You never get bored. If you do not like an article, you read just a sentence and jump to other articles. This way your attention and focus stay maximized.

Warning! Incremental reading may seem complex at first. However, once you master it, you will begin a learning process that will surpass your expectations. You will be surprised with the volume of data your memory can process and retain!

Five basic skills of incremental reading

Incremental reading requires skills that you will perfect only over months and years of use. This overview will only help you master the basic skills and help you make a start with incremental reading. The 5 basic skills are:

Skill 1: Importing articles

Five article import methods

Initially, you may limit your imports to a simple copy&paste of individual articles. Later, you will want to master automatic imports from the web that offer many advantages.

Here are the 5 main article import methods in SuperMemo:

- Copy&Paste: select a text of an article in the browser (or any other application that allows of copying texts), copy it to the clipboard, and copy it to SuperMemo with a single keystroke: Alt+N

- Mass import: use a dedicated web import option to import many articles from Internet Explorer. This methods allows of avoiding duplicate imports, marks your imports with references, imports only selected portions of texts, and offers many other advantages.

- Dedicated imports: SuperMemo makes it particularly easy to import material from Wikipedia (the recommended source of basic incremental reading materials) and from YouTube (a source of incremental video materials)

- Local file imports: import files that you have already collected on your hard disk

- Mail imports: for incremental processing of your mail

Import by Copy&Paste

To import an article with copy and paste, follow these steps:

- Select the imported text in your web browser and copy the selection to the clipboard (e.g. with Ctrl+C)

- Switch to SuperMemo (e.g. with Alt+Tab)

- In SuperMemo, press Ctrl+N (this is equivalent to Edit : Add a new article on the main menu). SuperMemo will create a new element, and paste the article. You can also use the Paste an article button () on the learnbar or on the Read toolbar

- Optionally, use Alt+P to define priority of the imported article. Use the Percent field and remember that 0% is the highest priority, while 100% is the lowest priority

- Optionally, use Ctrl+J to specify the first review interval. For example: one day for high priority material or 30 days for low priority material

Please remember that if you have many articles opened in Internet Explorer, you can most easily import them with web import as described in the next section.

Import of multiple articles

The most convenient way to import learning materials to SuperMemo is a direct import of multiple articles right from the web. To import many articles at the same time, open these articles in Internet Explorer, and click the import button on the learnbar (or press Ctrl+Shift+A, or chose Edit : Import web pages on the main menu). To avoid importing advertising and other garbage, in Internet Explorer, select portions of the text that is to be imported. If you select texts before imports, you are less likely to need filters to get rid of troublesome HTML (F6). If you prefer to use other browsers, e.g. Chrome or Firefox, you will need to use Copy&Paste method, or re-open the selected articles in Internet Explorer. This is because, at the moment, SuperMemo supports direct imports only from Internet Explorer.

For more details on importing multiple articles see: Web import

Dedicated imports (Wikipedia, YouTube, and pictures)

The most popular sources of learning materials are Wikipedia (for incremental reading) and YouTube (for incremental video). For those sources, you have separate options available on the import menu (right click on the import button on the learnbar). You can also use shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+W (Wikipedia) and Ctrl+Shift+Y (YouTube) to import from those two sources. If you choose those options, only articles available from those sources will be displayed on the import list. Additionally, a dedicated filter will best prepare the imported pages for convenient learning.

If you want to import pictures, you can also use a picture filter that will ignore all non-picture pages opened in Internet Explorer. Use Pictures on the import button menu on the learnbar (right click). You can also click Filter : Pictures in the web import dialog when importing pages (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+A).

For more details see: Web import

Importing articles from local files

If you want to import articles from files that reside on your local drive, you can use the following methods:

- Single article from Internet Explorer into a new element

1. open the local article in Internet Explorer

2. import in the same way as you import articles from the web (e.g. Import by Copy&Paste or Import of multiple articles)

- Single article from local drive into a new element

1. use Edit : Add to category : HTML file on the main menu

- Single article into existing HTML component

1. choose File : Import file on the HTML component menu

- Multiple articles (stored in a single folder)

1. use File : Import : Files and folders

2. point to the folder that contains the articles (make sure no other files are stored in the folder or its subfolders, otherwise, they will also get imported to SuperMemo)

Skill 2: Reading articles

Here is a simplified algorithm for reading articles:

Choose an article: Import an article as explained earlier or bring up previously imported articles with Learn (Ctrl+L). Learn will display only articles imported in the past. If you import an article, and want to have it shown later during a learning session on the same day, you must place it in the outstanding queue (e.g. Learning : Later today on the element menu, Ctrl+Shift+J, etc.). If you import many articles that you want to process on the same day, you must place them all in the outstanding queue. For example, open the articles in the browser, and choose Learning : Add to outstanding. Most of the time you can rely solely on Learn to schedule articles optimally for review.

Click the article to enter the editing mode, in which you can modify text, select fragments, etc. Optionally, use filter F6, if the text is hard to process (e.g. selections are hard, extracts not marked correctly, etc.)

Start reading the article from the top or from the last read point (i.e. a bookmark left in the text last time you read it)

Extract texts: If you encounter an interesting text in the article, select it and choose Remember extract on the learnbar (or press Alt+X). This operation will introduce the extracted fragment into the learning process as an independent mini-article. If you would like to specify the priority of the new extract, choose Reading : Schedule extract () instead of Remember extract. Also, if you have an impression that the article is difficult and you would like to read some fragments later, extract those fragments with Reading : Schedule extract and provide a review interval that will reflect the time you believe you will be better equipped to understand the extracted fragment.

Optionally, use Delete before cursor (Alt+\). This will delete the text that you have read, clean up the article, remove garbage, and help tackle HTML that is difficult to process.

Optionally, if you read a fragment that seems unimportant, select it (e.g. with the mouse) and either delete it (e.g. with the Del key) or mark it with the ignore style. To mark a text as ignore, choose Reading : Ignore on the component menu, click the Ignore text button () on the Read toolbar, or just press Ctrl+Shift+I.

Optionally, if the selected fragment does not include all the important reading context, you can add this context manually. For example, if you are learning history, you may extract the following fragment from an article about Lincoln: On Sept. 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the most important messages in the history of the world. He signed it Jan. 1, 1863. If you would like to extract the fragment related to signing the Emancipation Proclamation, you will need to change He to Lincoln and it to Emancipation Proclamation so that your stand-alone fragment is understandable: Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. You can use the Reference options on the component menu to easily add context to your extracts (see: References). Context added by Reference will be added automatically to all extracts of a given article. For example, select the text that you want to serve as the reference title of all extracts and choose Reference : Title on the HTML component menu (or press Alt+T). This text will appear at the bottom of all extracts (in reference pink font by default).

Optionally, mark your last read point: Once you decide to stop reading the article before its end, mark the last processed fragment as the read-point (e.g. with Ctrl+F7 or by choosing Reading : Read-points : Set read-point from the HTML component menu). Next time you come back to this same article, SuperMemo will highlight your read-point and you will be able to resume reading from the point you last stopped reading the article. To go to your current read point, press Alt+F7. If you forget to set a read-point, SuperMemo will leave a read-point at the place of your last extract or last highlight.

Go to the next article: After you finish reading a portion of one article, choose Learn or Next repetition to proceed with reading other articles. Those buttons are located at the bottom of the element window. You can also use Enter, which will work as long as the selection in the text is not empty (e.g. marked as a reading point), or if you have left the editing mode (e.g. with Esc). If no text is selected, Enter will add a new line in the text (as is the case with standard text editors).

Optionally, determine the next review date (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+R), or set the new priority for the article (e.g. with Alt+P).

In incremental reading, interrupted reading is a rule, not an exception! With a dose of practice, you will quickly get accustomed to this not-so-natural state of affairs and learn to appreciate the power of the incremental approach. The main role of interruption is to prevent the decline in the quality of reading. Use the following criteria to decide when to stop reading the article:

- lack of time: if you still have many articles for review for a given day and your time is running out, keep your increments shorter. After some time, being in a hurry will be a norm and you will tend to read only 1-2 paragraphs of each article and dig deeper only into groundbreaking articles that will powerfully affect your knowledge.

- boredom: if the article tends to make you bored, stop reading. Your attention span is always limited. If your focus is poor, you will benefit more from the article if you return to it after some break. Go on to reading something that you are not yet tired of. If SuperMemo schedules the next review at a date you consider too late, use Ctrl+J or Shift+Ctrl+R to adjust the next review date.

- lack of understanding: if you feel you need more knowledge before you are able to understand the article, postpone it (e.g. use Ctrl+J or Shift+Ctrl+R and schedule the next review in 100 days or so). If you believe you have already imported articles with relevant explanatory knowledge, you can search for these articles (e.g. with Ctrl+F). Once you find them, you can (1) execute a subset review, or (2) add the articles to the outstanding queue for reading on the same day, or (3) advance the articles (for example, in the browser, you can execute: Learning : Review all, or Learning : Add to outstanding, or Advance : Topics). If you have not yet imported any explanatory articles, you can do it now (e.g. search the web and import articles as explained before). Note that you can select a piece of text in SuperMemo and use Ctrl+F3 to search encyclopedias or dictionaries for more material on a given subject.

- lower priority: read lower priority articles in smaller portions thus reducing the overall time allocation to low priority subjects.

- overload: if you have a long queue of articles to read, you will naturally read in smaller portions

Once you complete reading the entire article and have extracted all the interesting fragments, choose Done! () on the learnbar. You can also press Shift+Ctrl+Enter, choose Done! in the Commander, or choose Learning : Done on the element menu. Done! will dismiss the article, i.e. remove it from the review process, and delete its contents (without deleting the extracted material). Done will delete a childless article (i.e. an article that did not provide any interesting extract). Using Done will greatly reduce the size of your collection and eliminate “dead hits” when searching for texts.

Skill 3: Extracting fragments, questions and answers

Extracting texts

In the course of traditional reading, we often mark important paragraphs with a highlighter pen. In SuperMemo, those paragraphs can be extracted as separate mini-articles that will later be used to refresh your memory. Each extracted paragraph or section becomes a new element that will be subject to the same reading algorithm as the original article. Extract important fragments and single sentences with Remember extract (Alt+X)

Adding references

Why need references?

In incremental reading, you always need to quickly recover the context of a question or a piece of text. The easiest way to recover context quickly is via references. References propagate from element to element as you produce extracts and cloze deletions. With all child elements produced from a given text marked with references, you would never need to worry about losing the context of the question.

For example:

cannot be answered without the context. However, the following question is already easier to understand:

To speed up learning, in the incremental reading process, the above question should naturally be replaced with:

References are not stored in HTML files that hold your articles but in a reference registry (i.e. in a separate database). The reference registry does not hold the text of references either. All reference texts are held in the text registry and are available for global text searches. In earlier versions of SuperMemo, each text would keep its own copy of references. In newer SuperMemos, elements keep only pointers to reference registry, which in turn keeps pointers to individual text fields in the text registry. As a result, many elements can hold the same reference, and many references can hold the same text. This results in a significant saving in space in your collection. More importantly, you can update the reference in a single element and see the change show in all elements using the same reference. This way, you do not need to waste time on search&replace to correct a single misspelling or reference inaccuracy that propagated to many elements.

Example: references inserted automatically

If you select the title of the source article and press Alt+T (Reference : Title on the HTML component menu), each extract will be marked by the title of the source article. If you use File : Import web pages : All, your articles will be provided with basic references (such as #Title, #Link, #Date, etc.). If you need more context (e.g. to add the author, the journal, etc.), you can use the Reference link button () on the navigation bar to jump to the source article from which the extract was produced. On the parent article, that button will lead you to the original link on the net.

Reference system highlights

- To mark texts as reference fields use the Reference submenu on the HTML component menu (e.g. Reference : Select or Alt+Q)

- Reference fields #Article, #Parent and #Category are added automatically and are not stored in the reference registry. These fields are not generated in elements that have no other reference fields defined

- References marked with Alt+Q options show up in the reference field and can be deleted from the text’s body (if no longer needed)

- From the user’s point of view, there is a little difference in the way the references are handled as compared with earlier SuperMemos. SuperMemo 2008 or later differentiates between the following 2 types of references edits:

- local edits that affect only the present element and create a new reference record vs.

- global edits which change the original reference in all the elements that use it.

When SuperMemo is not sure if your edits are local or global, it will ask you

- You can edit references in the reference area or in a dedicated window that you can open by choosing Reference : Edit from the element menu. You only need to use legal reference field tags at the beginning of each reference line (e.g. #Author:). If SuperMemo is not sure if your changes should apply to the current element only, or to all elements that use the reference, it will ask you

- References no longer clutter your HTML files. In the past, the size of references would often be greater than the length of the text itself

- Reference registry keeps the references (see below), and their individual text fields are stored in the text registry

- References are added to HTML texts at load time, so that you can still have references located at the bottom of your texts as in earlier versions of SuperMemo

- Adding an existing reference to an element (e.g. with Reference : Link from the element menu) does not add to the size of the collection

Editing references

You an use Reference : Edit in SuperMemo Commander, however, you can also edit references in the reference area (which is pink in the default stylesheet). You can safely delete reference fields, but you need to decide if that change should be local (for that element only) or global (for all elements using this reference). You will not be able to delete #Article or #Category fields because they are added automatically to the reference section (i.e. they are not part of the reference itself). You can freely change the text of references. Illegal changes are all changes that do not comply with the reference format, e.g. lines that do not start with reference field tags, or lines that start with unknown reference field tags (e.g. #Country). If you are unsure how this process works, import a single article from Wikipedia to a newly created collection, create some extracts and play with editing to see how references are processed.

Cloze: Generating questions

SuperMemo will show you that extracting important fragments and reviewing them at later time will have an excellent impact on your ability to remember. However, it will also show that once the time between reviewsincreases beyond 200-300 days, reading and re-reading (passive review) will often result in insufficient recall. For this reason, sooner or later, you will need to convert your texts to specific questions. For that purpose you will use cloze deletion.

A cloze deletion is an item that uses an ellipsis ([…]) to replace a part of a sentence.

For example:

Question: The capital of Sierra Leone is […]
Answer: Freetown

In incremental reading, cloze deletions are generated from topics that have a form of a sentence or a simple paragraph.

To create a cloze deletion do the following:

1. make sure a topic contains a short sentence only (e.g. The capital of Sierra Leone is Freetown)

2. select an important keyword in that sentence (e.g. Freetown)

3. do one of the following:

- click the Cloze button () on the Read toolbar, or

- press Alt+Z, or

- choose Reading : Remember cloze from the HTML component menu.

Remember cloze will convert a sentence into a specific question with an answer. By using cloze, you will move from passive review to active recall. You do not need to wait until a paragraph or a sentence becomes hard to recall in passive review. For your most important material, you can create cloze items immediately after finding a piece of information that you need to remember well.

The examples below show how to effectively use Remember cloze.

When you click Cloze, you will not see your newly generated cloze. Only the selected keyword will change the color. This will speed up your work. However, if you would like to immediately edit the newly created cloze deletion, choose the back button () on the navigation bar or press Alt+Left arrow. This will make it possible to add context clues, shorten the text, improve the wording, etc.

Simplifying questions

While converting extracts into questions and answers, you should make sure your questions are simple, clear and carrying the relevant context. For example, if you have extracted the following fragment from your reading about the history of the Internet:

The Internet was started in 1969 under acontract let by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah)

you may discover that when review intervals become long enough, you may not actually be able to recall the name of the ARPA agency or even forget the year in which the Internet started. You can then select an important keyword, e.g. 1969, and use Remember cloze to produce the following question-answer pair:

Question: The Internet was started in […] under a contract let by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah)
Answer: 1969

In the course of learning, you will need to polish the above item by manual editing it to a more compact and understandable form:

Question: The Internet was started in […](year) under a contract let by the ARPA agency
Answer: 1969

Or better yet:

Question: The Internet was started in […](year)
Answer: 1969

As for the precious information “lost” during the editing, it can (but does not have to) be learned independently with separate questions generated by Remember cloze.

The mini-editing of questions presented above added the following benefits to the newly created question-answer pair:

1. clearer purpose of the question: the fact that the question is about the year in which the Internet began is emphasized by using the red-colored (year) hint.

2. brevity: by removing superfluous information, you will not waste time on information that is not likely to be remembered (only actively recalled material will be remembered for years). You will answer the question and never focus on which universities were originally connected by the early Internet. If you believe this information is also important, you will use the original extract to produce more cloze items that will focus solely on the universities in question by naming them in the answer field (if you disagree, read: 20 rules of formulating knowledge).

3. understandability: “the ARPA agency” phrase may defy grammar rules you have learned in primary school, but it is by far more understandable than just the ARPA. In SuperMemo, understandability is more important than stiff rules of grammar or spelling!

Skill 4: Repetition and review

SuperMemo is based on repetition. You will review the learned material from time to time to make sure you prevent forgetting.

If you have never tried SuperMemo before, you will need to get the hang of standard repetitions as described here.

In incremental reading, your review will be based on similar principles as in classical SuperMemo. The main differencesare:

- the learning process will intermingle reading of new articles with reviewing your items

- your items will mostly have a form of cloze deletions, i.e. sentences with a question posed by a missing part […] (e.g. The planet nearest the Sun is […])

- as the entire learning process is incremental, your cloze deletions will often show up in an unfinished form

Incrementally processed articles will be subject to periodic review/reading. When you resume reading an article after a certain period, you will proceed to new sections, extracting newly acquired wisdom intoseparate elements with Alt+X (i.e. Remember extract). Usually, you will delete the remnants of the processed article with Delete before cursor (Alt+\).

The algorithms that determine the timing of (1) repetitions of question-and-answer material and (2) reviewing reading material are analogous but not identical. Most importantly, all repetitions and article presentations happen in increasing intervals by default. In incremental reading, you will see a constant inflow of new articles into your collection. Unprocessed material will need to compete with the newlyimported material. Increasing review intervals make sure that your old material fades into lower priority if not processed early. The speed of processing will depend on the availability of your time and the value of the material itself. Articles that are boring, badly written, less important for your work or growth, will receive smaller portions of your attention and may go into long review intervals before you even manage to pass a fraction of the text. That is an inevitable side effect of a voluminous flow of new information into your collection and into your memory. However, intervals and priorities can easily be adjusted. If your priorities change, you can modify the way you process important articles. At review time, you can either read the entire article without interruption, or bring it back for review in a shorter interval. You can manually change its priority (e.g. with Alt+P). You can also use search tools (e.g. Ctrl+F) to locate more articles on the subject that you feel you have neglected. You can reprioritize a bunch of articles by changing their priority. You can shorten intervals of articles, or review them all when needed (see: Subset review).

The algorithm for reviewing questions and answers (e.g. cloze deletions) is quite complex and limits your influence on the timing of repetitions (see: SuperMemo Algorithm). This is to ensure that you achieve a high level of knowledge retention, which might be compromised by manual intervention. However, the algorithm for determining inter-review intervals for topics is much simpler and is entirely under your control. Each article receives a specific priority. The priority determines which articles are reviewed first and which can be postponed in case you run out of time. Each article is also assigned a number called the A-Factor that determines how much intervals increase between subsequent reviews. For example, if A-Factor is 2, review intervals will double with each review. Priority and A-Factors are set automatically, but you can change them manually at any time. You can also set priorities for individual categoriesof the learning material. Priorities and A-Factors are determined and modified heuristically on the basis of the length of the text, the way it is processed, the way it is postponed or advanced, and by many other factors. You can change the priority and A-Factor of an article by pressing Alt+P. You can also use Shift+Ctrl+Up arrow and Shift+Ctrl+Down arrow to increase or decrease an element’s priority. Note that A-Factors associated with items cannot be changed by the user, as they are a reflection of item difficulty that determines the length of optimum inter-repetition intervals (see: Forgetting index).

You can control the timing of article review by manually adjusting inter-review intervals. Use Ctrl+J (Reschedule) or Shift+Ctrl+R (Execute repetition) to determine the date of thenext review. Ctrl+J will increment the current interval, while Shift+Ctrl+R will first execute a repetition and then set the new interval. For example, if your current interval is 100 and you specify thevalue of 3 in Reschedule, your new repetition date will be set in 3 days, and the last repetition date will not change (the new interval will be 103). If you do the same with Execute repetition, your new interval will be 3 and the last repetition date will be set to today. In other words, Reschedule increments the interval (it can also shorten intervals), while Execute repetition sets the length of the interval (while leaving a trace of a repetition executed in the learning process). Note that Reschedule executed during the repetition cycle will first complete the repetition and will have the same effect as Execute repetition.

In a heavily overloaded incremental reading process, you will often want to focus on a specific subject on a given day. For that purpose, readabout the priceless concept of subset learning.

Summary

- use the Learn button to process, learn, and review all your knowledge

- the review of items is handled by the SuperMemo Algorithm. Grade your items well, formulate them well, and mark them with honest priorities. SuperMemo will take care of the rest

- review of topics/articles also occurs in increasing intervals, however, you can always manually set the next date with Execute repetition (Shift+Ctrl+R). Make sure you mark your top articles with high priority. Otherwise, they can quickly fade from view

Skill 5: Handling large volumes of knowledge

In incremental reading, you may quickly import and produce more learning material than you can effectively process. To make sure that you can swiftly handle the overload, SuperMemo uses the priority queue.

Using Alt+P (Learning : Priority : Modify on the element menu), you can set each element’s priority from 0% to 100%. Note that 0% correspondswith high priority!

By default, the outstanding repetitions will be auto-sorted from high to low priority. This way, if you fail to complete your daily load of learning, it will only be the lower priority material that will suffer. Also by default, at the beginning of your working day (i.e. at your first run of SuperMemo), your outstanding material from previous days will be be auto-postponed (again with high-priority material being least affected).

Read an article about the priority queue to learn more about:

1. manual sorting of elements,

2. defining sorting criteria,

3. turning off auto-sort and auto-postpone, and more.

For more options for handling the overload, see:

Other basic skills

Evolution of knowledge in incremental reading

3 main principles will underlie the evolution of knowledge in SuperMemo:

- decrease in complexity - articles will be converted into sets of paragraphs. Paragraphs will be dismantled into sets of independent sentences and statements. Sentences will be shortened to maximize the information-vs-wording ratio, etc.

- active recall - all pieces of information will ultimately be converted into active recall material such as question-answer pairs, cloze deletions, picture recognition tests, sound recognition tests, etc. This is to maximize your recall of knowledge

- incrementalism - all changes will take place gradually in proportion to available time, with respect to your selected material’s priority, and in line with the gradually increasing strength of memory traces. Incremental nature of learning in SuperMemo will help you get the maximum memory effect in minimum time. See: The value of interruption in learning

Using pictures

For additional information, mnemonic cues, and a sheer fun of learning, an article that you read incrementally in SuperMemo can be illustrated with meaningful pictures taken from its contents, or from other sources. Press Ctrl+F8 to choose one of the pictures embedded in the article.

If you happen to import from Wikipedia, SuperMemo 16 makes it possible to download full resolution images instead of just thumbs. Check images marked with THUMB!!! and click Download.

For more, see: Visual learning

Topics vs. Items

In SuperMemo you see pieces of information presented to you in 2 basic forms:

- topics: these are usually longer articles that you want to read

- items: these are usually specific questions that you will need to answer

Topics and items are presented in a different manner and at different times. Topics keep the knowledge you want to learn (i.e. things you want to read about), while items keep the knowledge that you want to remember (i.e. the knowledge you already posses, but might forget).

Topics

A topic in SuperMemo is an article, its part, or a sentence that you want to learn. Topics can also have a form of a picture, a video, a piece of music, etc. Unlike items, topics donot test your knowledge. They are used in passive reading, watching, or listening only. Short text topics are used to generate cloze deletions. Topics take part in the incremental learning process. Once they are converted to items, they are often dismissed (i.e. ignored in learning) or done (i.e. deleted from the learning process altogether). Both Done! and Dismiss must be executed by the user (i.e. they are not automatic).

Using topics

Topics are marked in Contents with a green T icon (). Topics may be very long (entire articles) or very short (single sentences). This is how you work with topics:

- read the topic from the top

- if you find some interesting information, extract it (e.g. with Alt+X); the extract will form a new independent topic; the new topic will be shorter and will be handled in the same way as all other topics

- decide how far you want to go into reading the topic depending on its priority and available time (e.g. interrupt fast, if you are in a hurry, or read it all, if the topic is of top importance)

- if you finish reading the topic, execute Done! (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+Enter); this will delete the topic without deleting the material that it produced

- only if the topic is as short as a single sentence, create cloze deletions (e.g. with Alt+Z)

- return to reading the topic next time it comes for review

On longer topics you read and extract, on very short topics you generate cloze deletions.

Items

Item in SuperMemo is a piece of knowledge that you want to remember. It usually has a question&answer form. The main difference between an item and a topic is that an item actively tests your memory (e.g. with a question), while a topic is used for passive review only (e.g. for reading, viewing, watching, etc.).

Reading overload

Overload occurs when the student has more outstanding items or topics to review than (s)he can handle. Few users can sustain more than 200 item repetitions per day. When the Outstanding parameter in the Statistics window starts going above that number, overload is likely.

Overload can best be handled with Auto-postpone. However, a one-time big load can be resolved efficiently with Postpone (delaying all elements), or Mercy (spreading all review intime).

You can also postpone a specific topic with all its extracts using the following method:

1. Go to the topic in question

2. Press Ctrl+Space to open the topic, its extracts, and clozes in the browser

3. Choose Process browser> : Postpone on the browser menu

Note that you may need to use Learning : Locate extracts on the element menu if you have moved portions of your learning material to other branches.

See also:

Auto-sort and auto-postpone

As long as you prioritize your learning material well, you should make your life easier by checking the following 2 options:

- Learn : Sorting : Auto-sort repetitions that results in sorting your outstanding queue by priority at the start of each day.

- Learn : Postpone : Auto-postpone that results in postponing outstanding repetitions of lower priority at that start of each day. It ensures you do not get overloaded,

and it ensures that you minimize delays for top priority material.

Auto-postpone always leaves a number of top-priority elements in the queue. The purpose of the postpone is to get rid of the main mass of low-priority material and focus on top-priority material. You aremost likely to use Postpone after a day of learning, while Auto-postpone is executed before your learning day begins. This is why it never affects today’s material, and does not postpone top-priority material from previous days. If you have Auto-postpone checked on the menu, you will always start the day with all the repetitions scheduled for that day, and a number of unexecuted top-priority repetitions from previous days. Even though Auto-postpone increases the intervals and reduces the retention of low-priority material, it also makes you benefit from the spacing effect. Research shows that longer intervals may paradoxically increase the speed of learning (up to a certain point). This comes from the fact that the default retention in SuperMemo (around 95%) is higher than the retention that delivers the largest number of items remembered per unit of time invested.

You can start with default settings of the sorting criteria, however, if you feel you make insufficient progress with items (e.g. high forgetting index), you can reduce the proportion of topics. If the inflow of new material is too slow, you can increase the proportion of topics. If your priorities are imperfect, increase the degree of randomization. If you think you miss too many high priority items (see: Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Priority protection from the main menu), reduce the randomization. By trial and error, you will arrive at your optimum. Even after you find your optimum, keep experimenting with different randomization and topic levels. This will help you avoid various cognitive biases that develop through the routine of learning. It may also be helpful to execute random review from time to time (just to get a general feel of your overall progress).

With Auto-sort and Auto-postpone, you will nearly never have to worry about material overload. Each time you start SuperMemo for the first time on a given day, it will first postpone repetitions that you failed to execute on previous days. It will use default postpone criteria which you can always modify (e.g. with Learn : Postpone : All elements). After postponing the backlog of repetitions, SuperMemo will sort today’s repetitions and those that were left outstanding by Auto-postpone. Auto-sort will use sorting criteria specified earlier with Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria.

With Auto-postpone and Auto-sort, you can always begin your day with a manageable portion of material sorted by priority. Your learning sequence will be optimized with no action on your part (i.e. no options to choose, and no keys to press).

Hints

- With or without Auto-postpone, your only sure remedy against forgetting is always the same: complete your repetitions!

- Auto-postpone affects all days except for today. If you have low-priority topics scheduled for today, Auto-postpone will delay them only tomorrow and only if you do not review them today. This is to ensure that low-priority topics also have a chance to enter repetitions as determined by your Randomization/Prioritization balance in the sorting criteria

- In the Postpone dialog, Skip the following number of top priority elements skips only elements that were skipped by Skip conditions on the Parameters tab. It will not protect elements from being postponed if they are not protected by the postpone criteria. Whatever the value of this parameter, you can still have all your elements postponed. You can best view it as a pro-postpone parameter that is used to force extra postpones (not an anti-postpone parameter that protects your from extra postpones). Skip here means “skip postpone protections” not “skip postpones”

- Simulate in Postpone can be used to tell you how well your current postpone criteria work. It ignores Skip the following number of top priority elements because this parameter needs no simulation (it will always enforce skipping the said number of elements protected from Postpone by the postpone criteria)

Subset review

Subset review is a review of a portion of the learning material (e.g. before an exam). The portion may be identified with search, by branch selection in Contents, by category, and other means that determine a subset of elements. The reviewed subset material may be sorted by its sequence in the knowledge tree (Contents), priority, difficulty, interval, retention, recency, etc.

Review types

Search and review

Search and review in SuperMemo is a review of a subset of elements that contain a given search phrase. For example, before an exam in microbiology, a student may wish to review all his knowledge of viruses using the following method:

1. search for all elements containing the phrase virus (e.g. with Ctrl+F)

2. review all those elements (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+L)

The review may include all subset elements (e.g. Learning : Review all in the browser with Ctrl+Shift+L), or only the elements that are outstanding for review on that particular day (e.g. Learning : Learn in the browser with Ctrl+L). Before you execute the review, you can randomize the review material (Ctrl+Shift+F11), sort it by priority, by recency, by interval, by size, by age (in the learningprocess), etc. You can also apply your default sorting criteria with Ctrl+S in the browser. All forms of review run on all elements except for (1) dismissed elements and (2) those elements that have already been processed on this particular day. The latter condition makes sure that you can do a comprehensive review in various subsets without duplicating your work on a given day. You can overcome the block of double review on a given day by using Add to outstanding (see below).

If you build an extensive collection of things worth learning, subset review may help you learn about Subject A, and do a value-rich review of your material across many others domains at the same time! You kill many birds with one stone.

Search : Find elements makes it possible to define OR-searches and to save search definitions. This way you can, for example, choose a set of terms that define your “diabetes” subset and use them each time you want to review your “diabetes” material.

The parameter Subset in the Statistics window indicates the progress of repetitions in subset learning. This field displays the number of items, the number of topics, and the number of pending elements in subset learning. The name in the parentheses describes the currently processed subset.

Branch review

In the simplest case of branch review, the button Learn at the bottom of the contents window can be used to execute outstanding repetitions on a selected branch of the knowledgetree. For example, to make repetitions in the Medical Sciences branch, click that branch and then click Learn. Using Learn in the contents window is like using Learn in the element window, except only elements belonging to the selected branch will be considered in making repetitions.

To thoroughly review a branch of knowledge (including non-outstanding elements), do the following:

1. Select the branch in Contents

2. Choose Learning : Review all on the Process branch> menu (Ctrl+Shift+L)

Random review

To randomly review a branch or a subset:

1. open the branch or subset in the browser

2. randomize the content of the browser (Ctrl+Shift+F11)

3. execute a review (e.g. Learning : Review all on the browser processing menu)

Review modes

In a browser subset, in a contents branch, or in the entire collection, there are 3 main ways of executing subset review:

- review only the outstanding material: Learn (Ctrl+L) will execute only the outstanding repetitions, i.e. the elements that have been scheduled for review today or before today

- review all the material: Review all (Shift+Ctrl+L) will execute all outstanding repetitions as well as force mid-interval repetitions on all elements in a subset (except those elements that have already been reviewed today). Review of non-outstanding elements is equivalent to Learning : Execute repetition (Shift+Ctrl+R) available from the element menu

- review all topics: Review topics works like Review all but it does not include items, i.e. it forces a review of all topics in a subset (except topics that have already been reviewed today). Each time you do subset review on a set of items, you add some extra time to the total cost of learning of that portion of the material. This is why you may wish to exclude items from a review that occurs often

All the above options are available on Process branch> : Learning submenu of the contents menu, or Process browser> : Learning submenu of the browser menu.

Adding elements to the learning queue

Instead of spending your time on a thorough review of a branch or subset, you may prefer to intersperse the review material in your standard learning process. You can do it with Learning : Add to outstanding.

Add to outstanding is a rationalization upon 2 extremes:

1. well-timed incremental learning (or classical spaced repetition)

2. subset review (e.g. before an exam)

On one hand you can proceed with your outstanding queue, on the other, you can smuggle some subset review in between. For example, you might learn about the superiority of “intermittent fasting” over “fasting”. You will want to investigate the subject to perhaps employ it in your lifestyle. However, you do not want the subject to be buried in thousands of articles you keep reading. Nor do you want it to monopolize your learning time on a given day. You can import several articles on intermittent fasting and spread them sparsely in your outstanding queue with Add to outstanding. By the end of the day, you will have a peek at all those articles, have them all well prioritized, and integrated with the learning process (in proportion to the value of the newly discovered content).

An alternative to Add to outstanding is to spread priorities (with Priority : Spread), however, it has 2 flaws:

- you will not get the instant gratification from the instant review of a hot topic

- you risk that new imports will displace the articles of interest before you manage to give them a preview

In other words, Add to outstanding is a more extreme version of Priority : Spread, but not as radical as Learning : Spread in the browser (irreversible rescheduling), or subset review (reversible review).

Repeating items before topics

If you ever neglect learning, you may wish to unload your item backlog ahead of your topic backlog. You can optimally do it with a change to your sorting criteria. However, you can also start your day from 100% item repetitions:

1. Choose View : Outstanding

2. Sort repetitions by type (items first)(e.g. by clicking the header of the Type column), or choose Child : Items

3. Choose Learn on the browser menu to make repetitions (or Tools : Save repetitions on the same menu to make the sorting permanent)

Ideally, in incremental reading, you should have items and topics mixed up. This will help you achieve balance between retention of the old material and the inflow of the new material. By working with items first, you risk slowing down learning by working on high retention. That’s a step back to classical SuperMemo.

Semantic review

If you want to semantically connect a group of elements related to a single subject in incremental reading, you can use subset review based on the elements’ tree structure created in the incremental learning process. This way you can quickly review all elements related to a topic whose “big picture” became hazy.

1. go to any element that makes a part of the knowledge structure related to given problem

2. use the Reference link button () on the navigation bar to get to the original article

3. use Contents to find a relevant subbranch (or stay at the root of the article to review it all)

4. browse the selected branch (e.g. with Ctrl+Space)

5. choose Learning : Review all (Shift+Ctrl+L) to review all elements in the logical/semantic sequence (the sequence of branches reflects the order of processing of individual paragraphs in the article)

You can also choose Learning : Learn branch on the element menu to begin branch learning for one of the ancestors of the currently displayed element. You can use this method if you encounter interesting material that you would like to refresh more thoroughly before you proceed with your standard learning process.

Advance

Advance is not a form of review. However, it makes it possible to shorten the intervals and speed up the review. For example, if your exam comes in 100 days, you can shorten all intervals in a subset to less than 100 days with Advance.

The Advance operation will not work on 2 kinds of topics:

- those whose interval is shorter than the advance interval

- those who have been repeated today (use Learning : Add to outstanding if you need to go around this limitation)

Examples of subset review

Example 1: search and review

If you would like to review the material related to Auguste Comte (1798-1857) do as follows:

1. Press Ctrl+F and paste Auguste Comte in the search box

2. Press Enter or click Find (this will search your collection and open a browser with the results)

3. Choose one of the subset learning options:

- to prevent forgetting: press Ctrl+L or choose Process browser> : Learning : Learn to review only the outstanding material. This will help you review only the items that are most likely to be forgotten and a portion of topics that have been scheduled for review for today

- to learn new things: choose Process browser> : Learning : Review topics to review all topics related to Auguste Comte

- to maximize the review (e.g. before an important deadline): press Shift+Ctrl+L or choose Process browser> : Learning : Review all to review all topics and to force a repetition on all items related to Auguste Comte. Remember that premature review of items may paradoxically slow down your long-term learning

Example 2: branch review

If your history exam is approaching and you cannot cope with all repetitions in the collection, make sure that at least your daily portion of history is thoroughly reviewed:

1. Select History branch in the contents window

2. Click Learn at the bottom of the contents window

Repeat the procedure daily. However, in the last 3-5 days, you could follow that yet with Process branch> : Learning : Review all to protectively refresh the material that would optimally be scheduled after the exam.

If you have final drill enabled, remember that subset learning does not keep a separate final drill queue and elements that score less than Good (4) are put to the global final drill queue.

Hints and tips

Importing articles

- Importing articles from Wikipedia is easiest:

- to search for Wikipedia articles press Ctrl+F3, type in some keywords, choose Wikipedia, press Enter, and right-click on articles of interest

- to search for an article on a subject you are reading about, select a portion of text and press Ctrl+F3. Choose Wikipedia as described above

- to import Wikipedia articles from Internet Explorer, press Shift+Ctrl+W (Edit : Import web pages : Wikipedia on the main menu)

- To quickly import many articles from the web, do the following:

1. find the articles (e.g. with Google),

2. open them in Internet Explorer,

3. in SuperMemo, use Shift+Ctrl+A (Edit : Import web pages : All from the main menu)

- To quickly search for articles on the subject you are reading about, select a portion of text, press Ctrl+F3 and choose Google

- To type your own notes in SuperMemo use Alt+N (Edit : Add to category : Note on the main menu)

- If you would like to store pictures locally on your hard disk (in the image registry), and make them proliferate in incremental reading (e.g. show up in all extracts even if the extracts do not include the picture, etc.), then you must import the pictures to image components using one of the following methods:

- to import pictures included in a single article use Ctrl+F8 (Download images on the component menu), select images and click Insert

- to import pictures from the web, use Copy on the picture in your Internet browser and then press Shift+Ins or Ctrl+V in SuperMemo to paste the picture (if the picture does not paste, press Esc a few times to get to the display mode and try Shift+Ins or Ctrl+V again)

- to import many pictures from many articles in Internet Explorer, use Edit : Import web pages : Pictures) and choose Local images only or Page of images as the import mode

- to optimize the tiling of many pictures after the import, use Components : Tile components on the element menu

- see also: Adding pictures to SuperMemo

- Instead of scanning paper books and doing OCR for the sake of incremental reading, always begin with looking for electronic equivalents. In most basic areas of knowledge, there are multiple sources of learning materials available. There are fewer and fewer cases where you need to do any scanning. These days, you can even be finicky and search for HTML texts to replace your nice PDF materials (to avoid the pain of converting PDF to HTML)

- Some texts rich in pictures and tables may be handled with difficulty by SuperMemo (the older the SuperMemo, the more difficulty you may experience). It may be very useful to learn to use HTML filters (press F6). Some of the problems stem from bugs in Internet Explorer that SuperMemo employs to display and edit texts formatted in HTML. This particularly refers to older versions of Internet Explorer (e.g. IE 6.0). It is therefore highly recommended you install Internet Explorer 7 or later to make your life easier

- If you are pressed by exam deadlines and still not too fluent with incremental reading, it would make more sense to do some of your old and new learning in parallel. For example, 30% incremental reading and 70% traditional learning. You are bound to make many mistakes in strategy and the discovery process may take longer than until the exam. At the beginning you will have a big overhead cost (strategy, material selection, formulation, learning SuperMemo itself, etc.). It would not then be surprising if your performance on the exam actually dropped at your first try! You could pick a couple of chapters that you particularly enjoy and use them in your incremental learning practice. You would then process the rest of the material using your old methods. You cannot possibly embark on a massive conversion of textbooks into SuperMemo material before you get the feel of how to do it right! It can backfire and discourage the use of SuperMemo. As always, proceed carefully and incrementally

Inflow of new articles

- SuperMemo uses 2 basic element types: topics (articles) and items (questions and answers). Those are treated differently in the review process. Topics represent what you want to know, while items hold what you know. To better understand the difference, see: Topics vs. Items

- Keep your topics/articles in check. Use your sorting criteria to make sure you get a solid dose of daily items/questions in addition to your reading. High topic overload may slow your item flow and damage the active recall process. High topic load will make SuperMemo resemble traditional reading where your retention is unacceptably low. You can decide your optimum ratio on the basis of time needed for repetitions. For example, 5:1 item:topic ratio would probably still make you spend more time on reading than on reviewing. Increase that ratio to increase your retention, reduce the ratio temporarily if you need to do a great deal of reading. If you are not sure, set items:topics to anywhere between 3:1 and 8:1. Still too hard to decide? Review 5 items for each topic in the outstanding queue.

- Tools : Statistics : Statistics : Protection can be used to inspect your progress in processing top priority material on a given day

- Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Protection can be used to inspect the degree of processing of your top priority material over time

Reading

- While reading, you can display the Read toolbar on the learnbar by clicking the Reading options button (). You can also choose Window : Toolbars : Read to place the toolbar in a convenient place on the screen and press Shift+Ctrl+F5 to save the current layout of windows as the default one. The toolbar may be helpful before you learn to use the keyboard to access all its functions

- If you do not like the large spacing between the lines when you press Enter, use Shift+Enter. Remember this trick! Many users struggle for months with line spacing only to discover this precious tip. This tricky behavior is by Internet Explorer, not by SuperMemo

- Once you finish processing the article, use Done! () on the learnbar or Done from the element menu (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+Enter followed by all necessary confirmations with Enter). This will clean up your learning process without affecting the work you have done (all extracts and clozes will remain in the learning process). Done! deletes (1) the article, (2) its repetition history, (3) its components, etc. However, it leaves the original empty element as a source of reference and as a holder for the derived structure of extracts and cloze deletions. Done! is executed at the moment when you believe you have completed reading and processing a given piece of text. This usually means skipping all unimportant parts and extracting all important parts of the article. You repeat Done! on all topic extracts generated from the article. You will quickly discover that keeping the original articles for reference only clutters your collection, increases its size and produces an excess of search hits. Getting rid of the original is usually the preferred action. You can always get to the original article on the net using its reference link

- If you return to an interrupted article in the learning process, the cursor in the text is set on the last-processed text. That text selection is called a read-point. When leaving the article, you can also manually set the read-point’ at the place where you interrupted reading. Choose Ctrl+F7 to set the read-point, or click the set read-point button () on the Read toolbar

- Highlighting texts automatically sets the read-point

- Use Clear read-point () on the Read toolbar, or press Ctrl+Shift+F7, to remove the read-point

- Enter is the default key used when progressing through the learning cycle. When a read-point is selected and you press Enter, instead of inserting a new line, SuperMemo will automatically begin or resume repetitions. This will also be the case if you make any selections in the text. Enter will play its usual function only if there are no selections in the text. Although using Del and Enter instead of just Enter in these circumstances may seem cumbersome, you will quickly find this behavior indispensable in learning. If you still do not like this Enter behavior despite giving it a try, set Allow Read-Point Enter=0 in supermemo.ini

- If you use Delete before cursor, you may be annoyed by lack of Undo. However, if you mistakenly delete important texts (e.g. when using After instead of Before), you can find a temporary backup of the deleted text in collection’s \TEMP folder (the file is named Last text portion delete with element number and delete time appended). The backup file is deleted only at Repair collection or at Garbage, i.e. it will not disappear if you quit the element

- Horizontal lines can be used to split articles. If you insert a horizontal line and call Split article, the article will be split into separate elements. Split article is also available from the Commander. To insert a horizontal line press Shift+Alt+H or type <hr>, select it, and press Ctrl+Shift+1 (or choose Text : Convert : Parse HTML on the component menu). Parse HTML () is also available on the learnbar

- Use Ctrl+] and Ctrl+[ to change the size of the font in the selected text

Generating clozes

In incremental reading, you should always strive at converting passive texts into active questions. Ideally, all passive texts should be deleted when done with. All interference from “outside world” makes SuperMemo less precise. Passive texts provide little extra help in learning. At the same time, they provide interference, and should only be used to generate new clozes (or for reference)

When you press Alt+Z, the currently selected keyword in the current topic is marked as clozed. The newly created item is not visible (i.e. you will not immediately see the answer nor the deletion brackets). You can see the newly created item by pressing Alt+Left arrow. Use that key to edit the newly created cloze (e.g. to add context clues, shorten the text, improve the wording, etc.). However, if possible, you should do such mini-jobs incrementally, i.e. on the next encounter with the clozed item

Before you apply Cloze, you should make sure that the processed statement or paragraph is as simple as possible. You should try to use only one-sentence extracts to generate cloze deletions! Some newcomers dislike incremental learning at first. Monster cloze deletions are a chief reason for their negative feelings. Simplifying the parent paragraph to a simple statement will produce simple clozes that will require little processing. Using Cloze on complex texts multiplies the cost of re-editing when simplifying texts (in all cases where you cloze more than one keyword). If you use Cloze on a longer multi-sentence paragraph, you will have to put extra effort in simplifying the resulting items. All cloze deletions should be short enough to ensure you read them entirely at repetition time. Otherwise, your brain will tend to “deduce” the answer from non-semantic cues. This will defeat the purpose of learning! By using one-sentence extracts for cloze deletions, you will save ages on repetition time and eons on time needed to simplify clozes and converting them to the final form based on the minimum information principle

Your work on extracting fragments, producing cloze deletions and editing them should be incremental. In each review, do only as much work on the learning material as is necessary! Extracting and editing in intervals adds additional benefit to learning and is more time-efficient. Each time you rethink structure and formulation, you hone the representation and “connectivity” of a given piece of knowledge in your memory. In addition, your priorities change as you proceed with learning. At times, you will over-invest in a piece of knowledge that quickly becomes irrelevant or out-dated. The incremental approach will reduce the impact of over-investment. Incrementalism should then be used not only while reading, but also in the follow-up processing and formulation of knowledge. See: Examples. Unless you work with top-priority material, do not generate all your cloze deletions in one go. Make it incremental. Generate a cloze today, and another one at the next review. The incremental nature of the learning process, variegated coloring of texts marked with processing styles, and a complex extract hierarchy seem to quarrel with the perfectionist nature of many. However, the purpose of incremental reading is the maximum effect in minimum time. For that reason, at extract time, you are already forming passive trace memory engrams of the extracted sentence. The optimum strategy then is not to proceed with generating cloze deletions, but to move on to other elements in the queue or to other extracts in the same article (if the high priority of the article justifies it)

Once you finish processing a paragraph with cloze deletions, use Done! () on the learnbar or on the element menu (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+Enter). This will clean up your learning process without affecting the work you have done. All clozes will remain in the learning process. Done! deletes the extract/paragraph, however, it leaves the original empty element as a holder of the derived cloze deletions. Once you believe your cloze deletions cover all vital keywords of the statement that forms the topic, you execute Done! again. In the end, only cloze items remain in the learning process. Note that the process of descending from the source article to individual clozes may take years. The whole process is incremental and is paced by the declining traces of memory. A single cloze generated from a short sentence often allows of retaining good memory of the entire statement for months. Except for mission-critical pieces of information, you do not execute cloze deletions on all keywords until individual keywords raise questions as to whether they can be recalled individually

Converting to plain text: Plain text takes much less space. Collections rich in plain text are faster to back up. You can convert short pieces of HTML to plain text as long as they do not contain formatting information that may be needed to effectively remember the text. In the long run, simple plain text items might do their work better by depriving you of additional cues carried by the formatting. Leave some of your items as HTML and convert some to plain text. After some time you will probably have your own preferences as to which do their work better

After generating a cloze, the last character remains selected. On one hand it indicates which keyword has just been processed, on the other, selections make it possible to use Enter to move to the next element in repetitions

If you keep getting questions about the template to use at cloze, use Search : Categories to inspect the category to which you imported the article and uncheck Auto-Apply

You can change the appearance of extracts and cloze deletions with stylesheets. See: Changing the appearance of cloze keywords

Changing the appearance of cloze keywords

This is how you can modify the default cloze style in SuperMemo:

1. From the main menu, select Tools : Options

2. In the Options dialog box, click the Fonts tab

3. On the Fonts tab, click the Stylesheet button

4. In the SuperMemo Stylesheet dialog box, select the Clozed option in the drop list at the top; then use Font, Color, and Background buttons to set individual properties of that style

Removing cloze keyword formatting

Display the HTML code behind a given cloze text (e.g. with Ctrl+Shift+F6). In the HTML code, replace class=clozed with an empty string.

Your cloze keywords will be formatted in the same way as the surrounding text.

Mimic real life situations to combat memory interference

Some texts present knowledge in the form that is difficult to remember. Lists and sets are a good example of knowledge that does not stick to memory. Even if you perfectly know the map of Africa, answering the request: “List all countries of Africa” may be pretty hard. There are proven techniques that will help you tackle repetitive, list-rich, or boring knowledge with SuperMemo. All solutions are costly at memorization stage, but will pay handsomely in the long run due to lesser forgetting rate. The basic 2 principles are:

1. gradually glue individual pieces to your overall knowledge structure

2. be as visual and mnemonic as possible

Here are some specific hints:

- use a mind map: search the net for a nice mnemonic picture of the subject studied (e.g. political map of Africa). The picture will provide the basic skeleton for your memory. Like ornaments on a Christmas tree, you will hang new pieces of knowledge on this mnemonic skeleton. Use the picture to illustrate all topics and items in the studied category.

- do not learn it all at once: Add individual items gradually at a point when they acquire some special meaning. Add them when they fit snugly with the rest of your knowledge. Add them when you specifically need them or when you learn about a related subject. If you need enumerative knowledge for an exam, cram it using traditional methods, and still continue adding individual pieces in unique contexts later on when you feel they are interesting or important.

- associate with stories: if you ask an expert in the field, you will probably hear that (s)he mastered enumerative knowledge by association with individual case stories. Whatever he or she learned at school was quickly forgotten, but individual cases or problems to solve leave a good and durable imprint due to their uniqueness. Once you hit upon a story that is relevant to your hard-to-remember items, try to learn those items in the context of that particular story (e.g. hang the Cameroon up on your knowledge tree only when reading about Eto’s move to Chelsea). If you encounter cases in the course of your practise, describe them shortly and use them to supply context.

- supplement with incremental reading: instead of formulating all items along the same repetitive and monotonous template, try to use incremental reading to generate cloze deletions that work on separate storylines. Ideally, you would review your topic and generate just a single subtopic (e.g. on a single country in Africa). Always choose the one that seems most obvious or most important to remember. Always try to add some supplementary material. Be sure you do not provide clues that will make you answer correctly without forming an appropriate association

- compare with experts: ask an expert in the field how (s)he remembers a given fact or association. In some cases you may be dismayed to see how poorly experts recall compulsory college material. At other times, you will see how their memory tackles the problem with ease by using a simple mnemonic. This will help you emulate real life learning at a compressed timescale without ever wasting time on trying to master what others never manage to master anyway. That’s the basic difference between school learning and your efficient incremental learning: you do not cram it dry along a rigid prescription. You use your creativity to incrementally build a durable structure of useful knowledge!

Example: dealing with enumerations

If you happen to learn the geological periods, you are bound to generate nasty leeches, esp. if you are new to the subject. Using the top-down learning rule, be sure you know the eras, before you learn the periods, and before you move on to the epochs, and further down the tree of knowledge.

A typical mistake would be to start from cramming the meaningless sequence of periods. For example, clozing the Paleozoic Era sequence: “Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian” could result in a question that is bound to cause problems: “Cambrian, Ordovician, […], Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian“. This cloze will trouble anyone who is not privy to the field. In other words, only those who come with the knowledge ready in their mind will be able to tackle this type of question at little cost! Conclusion: there is no point in learning lists the hard way unless you already know what you are trying to learn! Catch 22!

Instead of using the above approach, it would make far more sense to first anchor the Silurian period in your mind with some meaningful event. For example, the appearance of the bony fish. This way, we might start with a cloze based on “The bony fish appeared in Silurian (443-419 mn years ago)“. The following question will be far easier to remember: “The bony fish appeared in […](period)(443-419 mn years ago)“. Even if the answer is the same as in the original unfortunate cloze, that question is not semantically equivalent. You will need more cloze deletions. However, working with similar sequences should always proceed incrementally and in proportion to anchoring individual periods in memory. Later on you can move on to clozing dates, epochs, and other details. All the time you should try to add new interesting anchors and work with the material in parallel to the inflow of meaningful information that is likely to stay long in memory.

Learning

Use Ctrl+W (Tools : Workload from the main menu) to view the calendar of repetitions. Double-click a day to see which elements will be reviewed on that day. You can also inspect which elements had been reviewed on individual days in the past (switch from Workload to Repetitions mode)

To inspect the number of today’s outstanding elements, peek at the status bar which can be saved at the bottom of the screen in the default layout. You can also look at the Statistics window (e.g. with F5). The Statistics window can also be saved in the default layout (with Ctrl+Shift+F5)

The optimum time allocation for reading (topics) and learning (items) depends on a number of factors: the subject and the importance of articles, their difficulty, fun factor, your interests, your preferences, your knowledge, your mood, your circadian cycle, etc. The optimum allocation of time can vary from seconds to hours! This is one of the factors where the power of incremental reading comes from. For some texts, you may find it difficult to reach reasonable attention levels for longer than a few minutes. Often you can retain your maximum processing power for just a single sentence or paragraph. On other texts that are highly interesting, well written, highly useful, or highly important, your curiosity and rage to master may kick in and let you go on for several hours without a break. In incremental reading, the primary criterion for time allocation is your level of concentration. You can literally lick a hundred articles in a continuous block of time and still keep your mind highly focused and alert. Some articles will be processed in depth, others will be quickly postponed. The concentration criterion is all-inclusive. It includes all factors listed above: difficulty of an article may affect your concentration, your tiredness will always reduce optimum allocations for difficult texts and increase allocations for interesting or enjoyable texts (those who help you “survive” a bad learning day)

You can leave some low-priority material in the passive form (i.e. without generating cloze deletions). Naturally, this material will gradually become difficult to recall or entirely forgotten. The best moment for using Remember cloze is when you notice that the material becomes volatile. Do not convert the entire passage into clozes at once (unless it is very important). Pick the most important keyword and create just a single cloze deletion. When the next review of the passage comes along, you will be able to determine which other keywords must be used with cloze deletion to prevent forgetting the key information. It is very difficult to predict how many clozes you will need to generate to attain perfect recall of the whole passage. On occasion, a single cloze suffices. At other times, a single passage can require a dozen of clozes!

The better you get, the more often you will want to resort to incremental learning. The stronger your incremental learning skills, the shorter the working period that makes employing incremental learning effective. For a proficient user, even a next day’s assignment might make sense to be done with incremental learning tools. For a beginner though, it is enough to consider that it may take you a few months of practise to truly understand the flow of knowledge in incremental reading (and in your memory). This alone might make it ineffective in learning for a test that comes in a month or two

Auto-postpone brings you closer to the ideal spaced repetition learning by reducing the load of low priority material that you cannot possibly master due to excess volume. In a sense, auto-postpone separates high priority material (spaced repetition) and low priority material (traditional learning). Without it, you are stuck in the middle of those two extremes

You can increase the randomization of your material by adding to Randomization degree in sorting criteria (Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria from the main menu). Randomization can be set separately for topics and items. It should help you avoid tunnel vision and the priority bias

You can shorten or increase the interval for individual elements. If you want to schedule a given article for review on a selected day, choose Learning : Reschedule on the element menu (e.g. by pressing Ctrl+J). You can also use Learning : Execute repetition (e.g. by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R). Execute repetition works like Reschedule with this difference that a repetition will be executed before rescheduling. Choose between the two depending on whether you have seen the contents of the item and have attempted to recall it from memory. Execute repetition requires providing a grade (unless you execute it on day when a repetition has already been done).

For items of lesser importance, reduce priority (Alt+P), increase the interval (Ctrl+Shift+R), or even increase the forgetting index. Forgetting index can be used to optimize the trade-off between the knowledge acquisition rate and knowledge retention. Giving items low priority in an overloaded collection is similar to giving it a higher forgetting index.

The degree of damage incurred by material overload can be seen in Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Priority protection. On one hand you want to increase the value of Priority protection. On the other, limiting the speed of importing new articles in proportion to the progress of learning might make your collection “get stale” resulting in less fun in learning and lesser motivation. Some older articles may be pushed away to lower priorities by overload only to be deleted later as not important enough, not good enough, or outdated

You should never stop thinking about the value of items that you keep in your memory. See: Re-evaluation of items

Use Spread in the browser to change the distribution of your learning material in time. You can speed up learning before an exam by compressing your learning schedule in a selected period. You can also redistribute the material in a longer period after a boring exam (for incremental review, re-learning, deprioritization, and/or elimination). For that latter job, you can choose a specific portion of the material to be served per day. Read about Mercy

Derivation steps in reasoning/mathematics. If you are learning mathematics, you might wonder if you should commit individual derivation steps of a mathematic proof or solution, or should you just focus on the final outcome. The choice will depend on your goals. If you only need the final formula, time spent on learning the derivation steps could be better spent learning other important portions of the material. If you are not sure today what you will need in the future, you could just type in the whole derivation into a single topic and memorize the final formula. Later, in incremental reading, you will make incremental decisions whether portions of the derivation are or are not important in your work or further learning. This piece of knowledge will compete with others in the learning process and in the long term you may ultimately decide if you want to memorize the details, keep them for passive review only, dismiss/delete some of the steps, or dismiss the entire derivation as redundant (or too costly to learn). Naturally, derivation will often enhance your ability to efficiently use the formula. Hence the decision is never easy. Once you have derivation steps committed, you can always play with their priority to determine the probability you will review them well enough to make a difference to your knowledge.

You can separate reading (topic) from review (items). However, variety is a spice of life. A random mix of reading and repetitions is a very powerful tool in overcoming the monotony of the earlier versions of SuperMemo. Interspersing topics with items provides for many of the advantages of incremental reading as opposed to traditional learning or classical SuperMemo. To review topics only (reading) choose (1) View : Outstanding, (2) Child : Topics and then (3) Process browser> : Learning : Learn (Ctrl+L). To make repetitions only (items), use an analogous method. It might be a better strategy to mix topics and items during the reading phase, and consolidate knowledge by making item-only repetitions later in the day. In the end, sticking to priorities, auto-sort, and auto-postpone will be the best least-biased long-term strategy

Fun is the key to success: If your learning text is too “dry”, not too meaningful, too wordy, etc. the fun of learning will drop. If learning is not enjoyable, it is less likely to be effective. If you dislike a specific article, perhaps a Wikipedia replacement would be fun and more meaningful? Even if this is a bit longer, you can process it pretty fast with incremental reading, illustrate with pictures, and enjoy the process

Nurse your hunger for knowledge: You have to find the clear-cut link between knowledge and the value it brings to life. The hunger for knowledge grows as you get more educated (the more you know the more you know you don’t know). So there is an excellent remedy for poor motivation: learn more and see how it can impact your and others’ life

You determine the speed of learning in incremental reading! You can determine the frequency of presentation of topics (e.g. using A-Factors, priorities, Mercy, etc.). You can determine the level of retention for items (e.g. with the forgetting index, priorities, auto-postpone, etc.). You can execute forced ahead-of-time review of any material (see: Subset review)

You MUST NOT memorize material that you do not understand! There is some hope that by doing more learning in other areas you will at some point understand. It is far more likely though that you will build up frustration with items that mean little. If you do not understand a term or concept, you need to dig deep into why. Is it terminology? This can be easily investigated and fixed. Or is it a problem with the material itself? Perhaps you can find an alternative on the net? Perhaps you can find a nice picture on the net to illustrate the item? Obviously, each little investigation takes time, but it is better to master 10-20% of the material well, that to cram an encyclopedia without comprehension. Even if you fail an exam, those 10% can be useful in the future (e.g. if you retake the exam). In general, schools load more than students can master and this leads to lots of stress and frustration. By choosing SuperMemo, you have already made the first good step. Now you need to make order in the process and think carefully about your best long-term strategy. Comprehension is the key to success!

If you want to grade an item Null or Bad, press 0 or 1 respectively

SuperMemo is not yet equipped with tools to help you efficiently use your knowledge for good causes. It will boost your knowledge but… you must be vigilant: Do not spend your time on gaining knowledge for the knowledge sake! Think applicability! Luckily, as your knowledge grows, so does your ability to use it efficiently

Re-evaluation of items

You should remember that all items introduced into your learning process require endless attention in reference to their applicability, formulation, importance, logic, etc. In a well-planned learning process, it should not be necessary to review items in the periods between individual repetitions. However, when an item comes up for a repetition, you should make a quick and nearly instinctive assessment of the following:

1. Do I really need this item?

2. What is the honest priority of this item in the entire spectrum of my (desired) knowledge?

3. Is this item difficult to remember? If so, why?

4. Is it factually correct?

5. Is it as simple and clear as it could be?

6. Do I really need to know it now?

7. Do you need supplementary knowledge to understand all ramifications of the item?

Here are some typical actions you will take depending on the answer to the above questions:

1. edit the item. You will use keys such as Q, A, or E to enter a desired text field and edit it. In more complex items you will use Ctrl+T to circle between components, Alt+click to switch a component between editing and dragging modes, or Ctrl+E to enter the editing mode

2. de-prioritize the item. For items that are not important enough, or you are not sure are important enough, use Alt+P and reduce their priority. You can also use Ctrl+Shift+Down arrow for minor deprioritizations

3. reschedule the item. If you know the item well or for some reason want to manually increase (or decrease) the length of the inter-repetition interval, press Ctrl+Shift+R to select the date of the next repetition

4. dismiss the item. If you are sure you are not likely to need the item in the future, but you would like to keep it in your collection for reference or archival purposes, press Ctrl+D. Dismissed items are removed from the learning process

5. delete the item. The key Del is very useful in cleaning your collection from garbage that results from your desire to know more than your memory can hold. In editing mode or in spelling items (i.e. at times when Del plays text editing functions), you may need to use Ctrl+Shift+Del instead. Please note that deleting an element in SuperMemo will delete all its children! You may therefore wish to learn to always use safer Done (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) instead

6. delay or forget the item. If you think the item is too difficult at the moment, you can postpone learning it. For this purpose, choose Ctrl+J to set a new interval or use Forget to transfer the item to the pending queue. This will give you some time to import some supplementary material that will help you understand the item

Formulation

- Use minimum information principle which says that simple elements formulated for active recall bring much better learning results than complex elements. This holds true even though one complex element may be equivalent to a large number of simpler elements. See: Minimum information principle.

- Some information may be presented as a list. Lists should be avoided. However, some are inevitable (e.g. list of nerves, list of tributaries, list of EU admissions, etc.). If you need to memorize lists, use mnemonic techniques and try to mimic real life situations to combat memory interference. See also: Learning lists

- The way you ask the question in SuperMemo may differ from the way your life asks you the same question. In other words, you may store some material in SuperMemo, but a real-life situation will trick you into being unable to recall it. In other words, you need to properly formulate the material to maximize its recall in all potential contexts

- Remember about the universality of memorized rules. For example, it is better to learn a universal mathematical formula than just the examples of its use. Examples can be used to emphasize applicability in various contexts

- You can use Parse HTML (Ctrl+Shift+1) to convert selected HTML code into formatting (e.g. try inserting <hr> or <br> and parsing it with Parse HTML). You can also use this option to remove formatting (e.g. if you want to get rid of line breaks)

- You can edit your more elaborate texts using your favorite HTML editor. You need to associate that editor with the filename extension *.HTM. For example, if you associate Microsoft Expression Web (free) with *.HTM, you can edit your texts by just pressing Ctrl+F9. If you would rather leave your associations unchanged, you can use F9 to view the file in Internet Explorer, and choose File : Edit with Microsoft Expression Web (that menu item is added to Internet Explorer by Expression Web). For more see: Open HTML files in the default HTML editor

- Background color styles are used in incremental reading to preserve the original font used in documents. However, for this to work you must uncheck the following option in your Internet Explorer: Tools : Internet options : General : Accessibility : Formatting : Ignore colors specified on webpages

To learn more about efficient formulation read: Effective learning: 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Pictures

- Important pictures should be kept in image components (not inside HTML texts). Use Ctrl+V or Shift+Ins to paste a picture from the clipboard. You can paste the picture to a new element or to an image component. Do not paste pictures to HTML. Having pictures pasted into an image component makes it easy to resize, tile, fit, or move the image, as well as to change its attributes such as stretch, transparency, display time (e.g. at answer time only), etc. Pictures pasted or imported to image components are stored in the image registry and can be searched for by their name. They can be reused in many elements. They are automatically used to illustrate all extracts and clozes generated from the article that holds the picture. They cannot be easily lost when editing texts, etc. HTML components can keep remote pictures stored on the web but, naturally, you will lose them once the picture is removed from the remote server

- Use Download with Insert or Localize in Download images on the component menu (Ctrl+F8) to transfer remote pictures to your hard disk

- Use Rename (member) (Alt+R) to give pictures meaningful names for an easy search in the image registry

- To search for a picture, use:

1. Search : Images (to open the image registry), and

2. Ctrl+S to search the registry (same as Search : Find texts on the registry menu)

- If you want a picture to be part of the answer (i.e. not visible at question time), mark it with Answer on the image component menu

To learn more about using pictures, see: Visual learning

References

- Hover your mouse over the Reference link button () on the navigation bar to quickly see the reference in longer extracts.

- Note that all extracts generate elements that are children of the original article. If you have problems with recalling the original context of a fragment, you can always call it back by pressing the Parent button on the navigation bar. You can also use the Reference link button () to get to the source article, or, if you have already reached it, to get to the original article on the web.

- You can edit references in the reference area (which is pink by default). You can safely delete reference fields, but you need to decide if that change should be local (for that element only) or global (for all elements using this reference). You will not be able to delete #Article, #Parent or #Category fields because they are added automatically to references (not being a part of reference). You can freely change the text of references. Illegal changes are all changes that do not comply with the reference format, e.g. lines that do not start with reference field tags, or lines that start with unknown reference field tags (e.g. #Country). If you are unsure how this process works, import a single article from Wikipedia to a newly created collection, create some extracts and play with editing to see how references are processed

- If you choose an empty selection for the #Date reference, you will mark the text with the current date and time stamp

- To see the address under a link, hover over the link with the mouse and see the status bar. If you are in the editing mode, you will need to press Esc to get to the presentation mode for this to work or you can click the link and use Ctrl+K to view, create and/or change the hyperlink

- AND-Search in SuperMemo works on texts, not on elements. This means that reference texts do not take part in AND-Search for the main body of text. This may result in false misses. In SuperMemo, texts and individual reference fields are all treated as separate texts and are all searched independently

- Converting HTML to plain text does not affect the formatting of references (i.e. plain text entries can have their references formatted by a stylesheet)

- Formatting of references can be changed via stylesheets

- You can quickly modify (i.e. set, merge, and delete) the references across a number of elements. To do that, open them in the element browser, right-click your mouse and choose:

- Process browser> : Reference : Set reference to set the same reference to a subset of elements,

- Process browser> : Reference : Merge reference to add reference fields to a subset of elements,

- Process browser> : Reference : Delete reference to remove reference fields from all elements in the subset

Your own discoveries

In incremental learning, you will quickly discover why some of your own ideas about the learning process might not be optimum. Here are some things that you will discover on your own within the first 2-3 months of intense incremental learning:

- recognition is good for your exam, but recall is vital for your professional skills in the long-term

- manually organizing the timing of review is not what suits your memory best; it is actually quite the opposite to the idea of SuperMemo, which says that you review the material at moments that help stabilize memories

- manually organizing the order of review is not what suits your memory best (even though subset review is a very useful tool in SuperMemo when preparing for an exam)

- for beginners, traditional learning might be superior to SuperMemo in a very short-term (perhaps up to 1-2 months) because of the steep learning curve. You need to learn the toolset of incremental reading before you can reap the benefits (unless you employ simple Q&A learning when SuperMemo might be superior even within a week’s perspective)

- you may reach 95% recall within 1-2 weeks on condition that you do not postpone your review. However, if you dump 1,000 pages of topics into the process at once, you will simply not manage to review all that material as scheduled by SuperMemo, and your retention might hover around 60-80% depending on how much time you invested in making repetitions

- once SuperMemo learns a bit about your memory and habits (1-3 weeks), you will oscillate around 95% recall as of the first repetition (if you do not delay, and if you stick to the rules of formulating knowledge)

- you will quickly discover that multiple cloze deletions on a single paragraph are not a good idea (e.g. compare the measured forgetting index with items that have the same cloze keywords separated, or just see how thus gained knowledge works in practice)

- you can look at learning parameters in SuperMemo to see how different approaches to learning affect your progress

Additional skills

Recognizing unsuitable texts

Best articles for incremental reading are fact-rich and context-rich. You need to develop your own rules for selecting quality reading material. Nothing can substitute for your own experience. You will learn to identify texts that are hard to process and yield lower reading efficiency.

Let’s consider two extremes:

- Wikipedia: Wikipedia is great because it is crowd-sourced and many authors edit only a small section of a text in total abstraction of the rest of the article. This is why even a small portion of the text (as in incremental reading) will usually contain all relevant context

- Fiction: Fiction is best read linearly and you can just use a paper bookmark in a paper book to do as well as you would do with incremental reading

Many articles fall in between Wikipedia and fiction extremes. Where Wikipedia would say “the http protocol”, a typical article might just say “the protocol” (if “the” is clear from preceding passages). Some text are peppered with “as I mentioned in the previous chapter”, or “go to the next section”, or “the three points explained in the previous chapter”, etc. Abuse of working memory in text writing makes incremental reading difficult. This means that if authors use a lot of “referential ambiguity”, the texts are not good for incremental reading. Example ambiguity keywords: “the”, “they”, “he”, “it”, etc.

Many articles are also filled with irrelevant chaff (supermemo.com isn’t impervious to that weakness). Too much beating about the bush without clearly stating the conclusions that are most important to the reader. “Speculative philosophy” might be a good inspirational read, but probably not for incremental reading. You need to decide.

Some narratives should just best be read passively. They may be a compilation of facts that are generally obvious. In such cases you can just read and dismiss. Or you can read and schedule another review in a month or in a year (if you worry you miss something important). Or you can try to write, in your own words, a sentence or two on what new things you have learned from the narrative. Your sentence would shortly extract the quintessence from an otherwise lengthy passage. If it is meaningful and quintessential, you shall find little trouble with locating keywords suitable for clozing.

You need to develop your own rules for deciding which articles are good for reading. The chief rule might be: import anything that looks interesting, start reading, and if you recognize tell-tale problems, justdeprioritize or delete or fish for a few highlights and then delete.

Remember that you need to differentiate between unsuitable texts and difficult texts.

Handling incomprehensible articles

In incremental reading, you will often encounter material that is difficult to understand. You will need to develop analytical skills that will help you identify the reasons for the difficulties. If the culprit is the author, delete the article. If you need to digest other pieces of your collection first, delay the article. If you need more knowledge, delay the article and import more knowledge that will be needed to boost understanding. Do not forget that some texts make an inherently poor material for incremental reading (e.g. descriptions of scientific experiments, mathematical derivations, programming examples in source code, case studies, etc.). In such cases, use traditional methods of thorough analysis, summarize results of your analysis, and use SuperMemo to keep track of your own summaries. See: Recognizing unsuitable texts (incl. example).

This is how you can approach complexity in incremental reading:

1. Start reading the article from the top. Once you find a difficult fragment, analyze it, and diagnose the reasons for your comprehension problems

2. If the rest of the article does not depend much on the difficult fragment, extract it, and keep on reading

3. If the rest of the article cannot be understood without understanding the difficult fragment choose one of the following:

- if you need more knowledge to understand the fragment: postpone the article (Learning : Reschedule or Ctrl+J)

- if the fragment is hopelessly intricate and leaves no hope for the future (e.g. because of wrong grammar, wording, formulation, logic, etc.), delete the article, and search for alternative material

4. If you decide to postpone the article with Ctrl+J, decide what new knowledge you will need before getting back to the difficult fragment. List dictionary entries, encyclopedia articles, articles on the net that you will need to process before going any further. Schedule the search for materials as separate topics or try to search for new knowledge instantly

5. Estimate the earliest time when you hope you will be able to understand the difficult article and use the appropriate interval with Ctrl+J. If the article includes high priority knowledge, it is always better to err on the safe side and provide a too early review

Randomizing repetitions

You can execute outstanding repetitions in a subset. If you would like to use a random sequence, follow these steps:

1. open the subset

2. choose Random : Randomize browser on the browser menu (Shift+Ctrl+F11)

3. choose Learn on the browser menu (Ctrl+L)

Read toolbar

You can display the Read toolbar in the following ways (at middle or professional level):

- In the learnbar, click the Reading options button (), or

- Choose Window : Toolbars : Read from the main menu

- Click Read on the toolbar dock

Toolbar buttons

- Close toolbar - hides the Read subbar, and shows the main learnbar back. Note that the button is only visible when the toolbar is docked to the learnbar. It is not shown when the toolbar is docked to the toolbar dock nor when it is floating.

- Paste article (Ctrl+N) - paste a new article from the clipboard to the current collection

- Remember extract (Alt+X) - use the selected part of the text to create a new element and introduce this new element into the learning process. This is one of the most important options used in incremental reading. Use Alt+X on a selected text to tell SuperMemo that the selection is important and that you want to better remember it in the future

- Schedule extract (Shift+Alt+X) - use the selected text to create a new topic and schedule its review on a selected day with a selected priority. Schedule extract is the same as Remember extract but you can manually select the first interval, priority, and more

- Remember cloze (Alt+Z) - create a new cloze deletion element based on the current keyword selection and introduce that new element into the learning process

Example: You can convert the following sentence:

In 1947 the UN voted to divide Palestine into Arab and Jewish states
to question:

In 1947 the UN voted to divide Palestine into Arab and […] states
by:

1. selecting the word Jewish and

2. choosing Cloze (or pressing Alt+Z).

In addition to Extract (above), this is the most important option of incremental reading.

- Schedule cloze - create a new cloze deletion and schedule it for repetition on a selected day

- Task extract - use the selected part of the text to create a new task and put this element on the current tasklist

- Split article - split the article into multiple topics using various chapter markers such as headlines, horizontal lines, Wikipedia sections, SuperMemo splitmarks, etc. This can substantially accelerate decomposition of very long articles and prioritization of article chapters

- E-mail (Shift+Ctrl+E) - send the element or the selected text via e-mail (you can annotate the element or comment on the selected text)

- E-mail FAQ - use the selected text as the basis of an FAQ question, and send the answer to the question’s author. Your response will automatically be added to an FAQ file of your choice. It can also produce a Wiki version. All FAQs at SuperMemo Website have been created by means of E-mail FAQ. Many FAQs at SuperMemoPedia have been created using this option as well

- Highlight - highlight the currently selected text

- Change highlight style - change the highlight style (i.e. font, font style, font size, font color, and text highlight color)

- Ignore (Shift+Ctrl+I) - ignore the selected text in reading by marking it with the ignore style

- Delete before cursor (Alt+\) - delete texts before the cursor (e.g. after processing it)

- Delete after cursor (Alt+.) - delete texts after the cursor (e.g. footnotes, external links, literature references, etc.)(SuperMemo references located at the bottom of the text are not affected)

- Set read-point (Ctrl+F7) - mark the selected text as the point from which you will resume reading the next time you return to the presented article. In incremental reading, you rarely need to use Set read-point as all extract, cloze, highlight, and other operations will automatically set the read-point for you

- Go to read-point (Alt+F7) - go to the text that has been selected as the read-point

- Clear read-point (Shift+Ctrl+F7) - remove the read-point from the currently processed text

One memory, one action

In incremental reading, you achieve highest efficiency if your process knowledge in small steps separated in time. This way you can accomplish a good memory effect at little processing effort. However, many usersfall into traps of inefficiency where too little or too much work is done on a subject in a single review.

Futile review

Futile review is an example of insufficient work done (one action, zero memory). Futile review is born in this mental scenario: you see a topic and think: I am in no mood for this material now. Let’s execute Next repetition. This is wrong! You must take action or you will loop into wasting time and learning little! It is a cardinal sin to execute processing operations without actually learning anything. When a topic arrives, you may have a dozen of excuses: I do not like this one. Let’s do it tomorrow. Or I am too sleepy for this one. Or this one will take too much time. If you find yourself in a loop and constantly rescheduling the same topic, or spending time rescheduling a number of topics, you are hurting the efficiency of learning! This is the time that could be spent on more productive steps.

If you do not want incremental reading to become a waste of time, you must always take some action when you see a topic. For example:

- read a sentence and delete it, or mark as ignore, or extract it

- if the article is not vital for your further progress, set low priority (e.g. 99%)

- for the material that you won’t have time for in a month or more, set the interval (e.g. to 333 days)

In other words, either make tiny inroads into the text, or mark it clearly as low priority or to-be-done later. Consider also Delete or Done!

Item perfectionism

Another facet of the same problem is taking too many actions on a single piece of information. It is highly inefficient to work on colors, fonts, pictures, priorities, etc. during a single repetition. All those actions can be spread over time. Naturally, setting the right priority is one of the most important steps. Perhaps a piece of information is not important enough to ever squeeze through your crowded learning. If so, you will save tons of time on not doing colors and styles.

Here also you should remember: one memory, one action. Each time you review a piece of information, you are allowed to do an edit, font change, template change, category change, etc. However, unless you can do all your actions in a single burst of machine gun keyboard strikes, or unless some actions are associated with learning new things, you should rather limit your actions to a single step per single repetition.

One memory, one action rule demands that every operation in incremental learning should leave a trace in your memory. It also says that one operation on a piece of data is better than two operations atthe same time

Example: incremental item structuring

The following item may look like a violation of the 20 rules:

Question: Inflammation is produced by eicosanoids and cytokines. Eicosanoids include (1) prostaglandins fever and vasodilation, and (2) […] that attract certain white blood cells
Answer: leukotrienes

However, the 20 rules were written in 1999 for classical SuperMemo. Incremental learning is incremental across the spectrum of rules and principles. In particular, formulating items and building understanding are incremental too.

According to the one memory, one action principle, the presented item will assume its final shape some time in the undefined future (or never, if its priority is not high enough). It must be processed incrementally due to the following factors:

1. incremental build up of comprehension, and

2. incremental reformulation that requires time.

The 20 rules say ”’Do not memorize until you understand“, however, understanding is also an incremental process. Converting this item to plain “What eicosanoids attract white blood cells?” might make sense only if the student fully understands and remembers the hierarchy of inflammation factors, and involved eicosanoids. If this is notthe case, carrying the context in the shape of this complex item is a form of transitional stage between a topic and an item. The item still asks the question vital for active recall. However, it also makes sure that full context is provided until the rest of the knowledge structure is firmly established in student’s mind. In incremental reading, the order of reading is often chaotic, the understanding is incremental, and the effort to build a solid knowledge structure is gradual too.

In addition to the incremental buildup of comprehension, extensive edits of items are costly (esp. a total rewrite of the item to a plain question). In fact, one of the main advantages of incremental reading is the minimum need for typing. This is why we use electronic sources in the first place (instead of just books that offer no disadvantage when entire items are typed in anyway). This is why an important efficiency principle in incremental learning is to minimize edits by complying with the one memory, one action principle.

Let us see how the presented item might evolve in successive repetitions. Note that all edit steps my proceed only with solidification of related knowledge (i.e. a single repetition may actually bring no edits at all). The execution of those steps will also be somewhat dependent on item priority. High priority items will receive more exposure, more processing and will demand better formulation quality.

Take 1: original complex item

Take 2: moving a clue to the answer field

Question: Inflammation is produced by eicosanoids and cytokines. Eicosanoids include (1) prostaglandins that produce fever and vasodilation, and (2) […]
Answer: leukotrienes (that attract white blood cells)

Take 3: removing the prelude

Question: Inflammation: Eicosanoids include (1) prostaglandins that produce fever and vasodilation, and (2) […]
Answer: leukotrienes (that attract white blood cells)

Take 4: bare bones item

Question: Inflammation: Eicosanoids include (1) prostaglandins, and (2) […]
Answer: leukotrienes

Learning lists

Lists and sets are difficult to remember. It is hard to remember the whole set of countries that belong to the European Union. When learning lists, you should rather decompose the problem into smaller subproblems.

Let us consider an example in which you want to memorize the entire sequence of letters in the alphabet. It won’t be very effective if you use the following item:

Question: What is the sequence of letters in the alphabet?
Answer: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

You will notice that you frequently stumble on parts of the sequence and need to stop repetitions just to exercise the entire sequence in the traditional way (like we all learn poems by rote).

However, you can approach this in a way that guarantees quick effects:

Question: What is the sequence of letters in the alphabet between A and E?
Answer: A, B, C, D, E

Question: What is the sequence of letters in the alphabet between D and H?
Answer: D, E, F, G, H

Question: What is the sequence of letters in the alphabet between G and K?
Answer: G, H, I, J, K
etc. etc.

After 2-3 weeks of repetitions, you may take on an extra task of recalling the whole sequence after each repetition of these simplified items. This will make sure you can recite the entire alphabet quickly. You will also frequently rehearse that parts of the sequence that are harder for your memory (e.g. V, W, X, Y, Z) as opposed to those that are much simpler (e.g. A, B, C, D, E).

Practical problems with memorizing lists

You may develop a good methodology for memorizing lists in SuperMemo. However, you may later discover that the memorized lists are not very useful in real life, or worse, your memory may fail you when you undergo a baptism of fire. You already know that list should not form an answer to a question. In a list A, B, C, SuperMemo needs to separately understand your difficulties with linking A and B, B and C, etc. You can use cloze deletion to learn lists using multiple items. For example:

Parent template topic/extract:

A B C

Items generated with cloze deletion:

Item 1:

Question: […] B C
Answer: A

Item 2:

Question: A […] C
Answer: B

Item 3:

Question: A B […]
Answer: C

It is important to know that Item 1 above may make you fail to answer with A to the question C if you only learn to answer Item 1 by understanding the association of B with A. In such cases, you will need even more work by formulating items: A-B (where A is the question and B is the answer), A-C, B-A, B-C, C-A, and C-B. Although you will get six items instead of one, you knowledge is likely to be more solid and you may actually spend less time on repetitions of those multiple items than on repetitions of the conglomerate A-B-C item

Lists can often be ignored

In a majority of cases, we do not need to learn lists at all. The perception that a list is worth memorizing is often a reflection of a bad habit we bring from school where lists are a frequent feature at exams.

A user of SuperMemo asked: “Could you please help me with extracting items from the following text? I am really not sure where to mark the boundaries of extracts and how to use cloze deletion?“:

Changing Rates of Mental Illness

Mental illness is becoming an increasing problem for two reasons. First, increases in life expectancy have brought increased numbers of certain chronic mental illnesses. For example, because more people are living into old age, more people are suffering from dementia. Second, a number of studies provide evidence that rates of depression are rising throughout the world

This fragment is difficult to process because it is an enumeration (a list) that forms one large logical structure. However, for understanding the subject, you do not really need to remember how many factors affect mental illness. You primarily need to remember the relationship between the cause and the effect. If you ignore the enumeration, you can simply produce the following topics that will each be easy to process further:

- Mental illness is becoming an increasing problem

- Increases in life expectancy have brought increased numbers of certain chronic mental illnesses

- Because more people are living into old age, more people are suffering from dementia

- Rates of depression are rising throughout the world

If you believe that you cannot live without the enumeration, you can first extract the facts listed above, and then simplify the enumeration by deleting all superfluous information:

Mental illness is increasing for 2 reasons:

1. increases in life expectancy have brought increased chronic illnesses.

2. rates of depression are rising

Using Decompose

Little known but very useful function in SuperMemo can help you tackle lists.

If you are learning the names of fruits, you might see a text like this:

Examples of fruits are apples, oranges, pears, cherries, banana…

You do not want to memorize the whole list of fruits, esp. that the longer it gets the more likely you are to fail. There is no definite or complete list of fruits that would make a good memorization target. All you really want to know is that an apple is a fruit, or an orange is a fruit, etc. The list itself is rather useless. You can keep it as a reference in SuperMemo, but memorizing it would be a waste of time.

You can use Decompose to quickly achieve your learning goals in reference to fruits. Start from modifying the topic:

Apples, oranges, pears, cherries, banana … are fruits.

Generate a template cloze:

Question: Apples, oranges, pears, cherries, banana are [fruits/vegetables]
Answer: fruits

Convert that cloze to a version that can easily be decomposed by placing list members into braces using slashes as separators:

Question: {apples/oranges/pears/cherries/banana} are [fruits/vegetables]
Answer: fruits

You can now treat the question field with Reading : Decompose on the component menu to get a series of clozes like these:

Question: apples are [fruits/vegetables]
Answer: fruits

Question: oranges are [fruits/vegetables]
Answer: fruits

Question: pears are [fruits/vegetables]
Answer: fruits
etc.

Thorough preview of articles

It is hard to formulate a simple algorithm for deciding when to preview the whole article before reading, and/or when to extract the most important fragments during a preview. After all, the article can also be read incrementally in a linear sequence. This is a case a multi-criterial optimization where many factors must be taken into account and the ultimate decision will depend on your own preferences.

Here are some criteria:

- if you need this knowledge today, you should start with a quick preview and extracting mission-critical fragments

- if this knowledge is very important and your learning process overflows with articles to read, extract-preview will increase your exposure to the article

- if the article is not very interesting, line-at-a-time reading will be equivalent to assigning a lower priority (you will just read a sentence once per week or once per month and you may never finish the article unless it gets more relevant or interesting)

- if you believe the article contains very important pieces in its body, you may want to quickly locate these and extract them for separate (more detailed) reading

- if your reviews occur in very long intervals as a result of slow reading, you may opt for shortening the interval or running a preview of the most important sections instead

- if you are reading texts from your e-mail tasklist, preview is highly recommended: not all people start their messages with the most important points and you certainly would not want to delay locating paragraphs requiring immediate action with weeks of delay

- if you import from Wikipedia, high priority articles can be split automatically (with Split in the Commander), and you can assign priorities to individual subsections

In summary, these are the most important incentives for the whole-article preview:

- high priority of the material

- indication of higher-priority fragments buried in a lower-priority text

- high interest

Unified store of knowledge

SuperMemo should conglomerate all your knowledge and your learning material. Ideally, you should just keep a single body of knowledge in a single collection. That main collection should be enriched daily by newimports of articles and multimedia from various sources. Keeping your knowledge in a single collection is vital for subset review, searching for knowledge and references, searching for pictures, statistics, progress monitoring, import defaults, etc. SuperMemo provides a rich set of tools for handling disparate areas of knowledge in a single continuous learning process. However, in certain situations, you may create separate collections for various purposes. There are two main reasons for keeping collections separate:

1. collections that are not part of your lifelong learning, and

2. collections that need special treatment due to various technical limitations imposed by SuperMemo or current technology.

Here are some examples of situations that justify creating collections separate from your main body of knowledge:

- project collections (problem solving, tasklists, creative elaboration): those collections serve a specific project, not your general learning. After the project is complete, they may either be archived or integrated with the main body of knowledge (depending on their nature).

- incremental writing projects, blogs, etc.

- incremental problem solving collection dedicated to a specific problem where you want to focus entirely on a single issue

- picture collections (public: family albums; private: family picture collections, etc.): if your picture database goes into hundreds of thousands of pictures, you will definitely want to keep it separate for easy backup and dedicated processing, which will often be of different nature than learning

- YouTube video collections: learning with YouTube is quite different from incremental reading, you cannot play your favorite music while learning with videos, you may give up learning when you have no access to the Internet, etc.

- video file collections (e.g. home video): those collections will usually call for different processing. In addition, they quickly grow into terabytes in size, which discourages frequent backups

- diaries and journals

- logs

- jukebox: incremental learning process can add an extra level of fun to experiencing music. Only after playing with a jukebox.kno for a few weeks you will truly understand how important priorities and intervals are in the perception of music!

- mail: you may want to separate business from family&friends and from the mail related to the current project

- tasklists and charts

- paper notes

- kid’s collection: if your kids are too young to do SuperMemo on their own

- notes: on occasion you may prefer to keep your notes in SuperMemo rather than a word processor (e.g. easier startup, collection switching, better search, etc.)

- audio archive, and more

Flow of knowledge

The figure below roughly illustrates the flow of knowledge in time depending on knowledge difficulty:

Incremental reading of PDF articles

PDF is a proprietary format. SuperMemo does not support PDF natively. This has always made PDF materials harder to process than ordinary HTML text imported from the web.

There are 4 approaches that are most often used to process PDF incrementally. You will need to see which one is best for your particular material. It may happen that you will need to resort to mixed strategies and use different approaches to different texts. The 4 options are:

- Converters: using PDF to HTML converters to generate HTML text that can be read in SuperMemo

- Pictures: using page snapshots (e.g. with Print Screen) and employing visual learning

- Manual: using copy and paste to copy PDF to SuperMemo page by page (or picture by picture)

- Incremental: using an incremental approach to read-copy-and-paste while working with PDF in Adobe Reader called from SuperMemo

Conversion to HTML is most convenient and least expensive. However, some converters and/or some PDFs produce HTML that is quite different than the original, and/or difficult to process in SuperMemo (e.g. requiring extra filtering, or extra manual formatting). Page snapshots are a fast way to read and import pages that are difficult to convert or are read only (e.g. manuals that require a specific page layout). Copy and paste approach is best for articles that can easily be selected in their entirety and which do not contain too many pictures. Finally, the incremental approach is most natural for SuperMemo, however, instead of using read-points, the student needs to make a note where he or she stopped reading the text.

For more solutions, see: PDF at SuperMemopedia.

PDF to HTML converters

As SuperMemo cannot host PDF files natively for incremental reading, the most promising long-term solution is the use of PDF to HTML converters. However, all converters have their limitations. The languages defined by HTML and PDF are not equivalent. Not all expressions of PDF can be expressed in HTML. This is why you need to check a few converters and see which one is best at processing your type of learning material.

Conversion

Here is a short list of converters as compiled at SuperMemoPedia:

If you are not sure which one to choose, you might use this one: PDF online (it keeps a limit of 2 MB on the size of files to convert).

Processing

Once texts are imported to SuperMemo, they may need further processing:

- filter problematic code with F6 (e.g. bulletizing tables)

- import pictures (some pictures are text-like constructs that need to be snapped with copy&paste)

- split into manageable portions (e.g. with the help of Split: Split the article in the Commander)

- convert portions of text to plain text with Ctrl+Shift+F12 (in cases of most unfriendly formatting)

Using MS Word

Some students use MS Word as an intermediary stage in conversion to HTML. However, as much as the conversion of PDF to HTML is never complete and accurate, there are differences between PDF and MS Word that make lifedifficult. At the moment of writing, there aren’t any tools that would reliably convert PDF to MS Word format. Pasting from Adobe Reader to MS Word yields poor results (e.g. texts in columns lose or mix portions of texts). If you own MS Word, you can give it a try, however, using converters or other methods will probably work better.

Using OCR

Some users swear by OCR. See: Using OCR to convert PDF for SuperMemo.

PDF with visual learning

You can convert PDF to pictures and employ the tools of visual learning.

Here are the steps:

1. convert PDF to pictures either by saving as JPEG, or by using page snapshots with Print Screen

2. paste pictures to SuperMemo or import pictures from a local drive

3. as pictures are not searchable, it is important to copy&paste a part of article (if possible) that could later be used in search and review. For example, abstracts of scholarly articles with necessary reference tags (#Title, #Author, #Source, etc.)

4. use visual learning to process the imported materials. Pictures will need to be trimmed (e.g. (1) Alt+click, (2) marquee selection of the interesting part, (3) press Esc, and (4) choose Permanently cut/crop the zoomed/trimmed image file). Use visual extracts (Alt+X) to focus on smaller portions of imported articles

5. annotate the pictures or write down summaries to further process most important portions with incremental reading. Without the use of cloze deletion, imported material may quickly be forgotten.

This method of reading PDF is analogous to incremental reading of paper materials.

See more at SuperMemoPedia: PDF and Visual Learning.

PDF copy and paste

If convertion of PDF to HTML is not satisfactory, you may need to resort to old plain copy&paste. Some PDF texts paste whole chapters pretty well with little extra text/code (e.g. page headings). Some PDFs respond well to Ctrl+A (for selecting all text) and Copy with Formatting (right click). Usually, Adobe Reader will not let you do multi-page selections that would paste to SuperMemo fast and nicely. You may even get annoyed with your attempts to copy a multi-column portion of a single page. You will get one column selected, middle of the second, and the ending of the third. Other double-column texts will paste as a mix of both columns per line. Sometimes pasting multi-column texts is not possible. This means that you will often need to go from page to page, or even column to column, and repeat copy&paste. That can take ages. Similarly, pictures do not copy as part of HTML. So you need to copy&paste pictures separately. Here again, when Adobe Reader will not let you copy pictures easily, you can just use Print Screen, paste to SuperMemo and trim&crop in SuperMemo (see: Visual learning). Tables are usually best processed in the form of pictures as they usually import poorly to HTML. Some PDF documents do not even allow of selecting texts. In those cases you will need to resort to PDF visual learning too. Sometimes you may just give up and read the article straight without bothering to do it incrementally, or look for alternative texts, or just give up reading altogether. You can also read the article using traditional methods, and copy to SuperMemo only the portions that you would normally extract within SuperMemo.

After pasting text from Adobe Reader to SuperMemo, it will often be jagged, disrupted, wrongly formatted, etc. Converting short passages to plain text often dramatically improves readability. The shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+F12.

For more, see: PDF Copy and Paste

Incremental PDF

If you want to work incrementally with PDF articles, you can use the following strategy:

1. Save your PDF files to a dedicated folder

2. Import them regularly with File : Import : Files and folders

3. Define a PDF template with a large HTML component and a tiny binary component for holding PDF (use that template as the default for the import category, or apply it after import to all PDF articles)

4. When reading is scheduled for the PDF element, click the binary component and jump to the page where you last finished reading (to automatically go back to the last view pages, in Adobe Reader, check Edit : Preferences : Documents : Restore last view settings when reopening documents)

5. Paste all important fragments of the PDF document to the HTML component (if texts cannot be selected, use the Print Screen option, paste the picture, and use visual learning tools to extracts individual fragments)

6. Paste figures to SuperMemo by clicking a selected picture, right-clicking, and choosing Copy Image in Adobe Reader or Print Screen. Use visual learning tools to process larger pictures (trimming, zooming, extracting, etc.)

7. Process the pasted texts in parallel with reading the PDF document (esp. if they are very important). Alternative, start incremental reading in HTML only when you finish reading the document in PDF

Incremental reading of paper articles

If you have many notes taken from paper journals, or you must read paper articles, you can use a few methods to employ incremental reading in that process. Working with paper will never be as effective as working with electronic material. However, you can still triple your performance with the benefits of incremental learning.

Here is an exemplary algorithm for processing paper notes:

1. before getting down to processing, search the net! Many noteworthy articles have already been published online. That saves lots of time

2. if the text is of general nature, you might find a better equivalent (e.g. at Wikipedia)

3. create a dedicated PaperNotes.kno collection for easy backup. It might grow to a huge size! You can use a dedicated processing time slot for your paper notes

4. very short notes or very important notes, you can type by hand. The advantage of typing is that it can shorten the texts, give them more meaning, and have them instantly searchable in the collection

5. the rest of texts you can import as pictures or process with OCR (e.g. use a pen scanner to pick the most valuable pieces from the book)

6. use a digital camera to quickly snap paper pages. A scanner yields better quality but is too slow

7. copy the pics to the hard disk

8. use File : Import : Files and Folders to import all pictures at once

9. use visual learning and the tools of incremental learning to prioritize and process the imported material (the extract option is particularly useful)

A user of SuperMemo wrote a few words about his experience with OCR in Studying Law with SuperMemo.

See also:

Philosophy of incremental reading

Advantages of incremental learning

In incremental learning, you learn fast, you acquire massive loads of knowledge, retain memories for life, remember almost all that you have learned, understand things better, develop harmoniously in all directions, enhance your creativity, and all that while having incredible fun! If that sounds too good to be true, please read more below or just give it a solid try.

Massive learning

Incremental learning offers a possibility of studying a huge number of subjects in parallel. In traditional reading, very often, one book or academic subject must be completed before studying another. With incremental learning, there is virtually no limit on how many subjects you can study at the same time. The volume of processed knowledge can be staggering. Only the availability of time and your memory capacity will keep massive learning in check.

Lifetime memories

As incremental learning is based on spaced repetition, all memories that you form while learning will be indefinitely protected from forgetting. See: General principles of SuperMemo. Only SuperMemo makes it possible to implement incremental reading. Incremental reading requires continual retention of knowledge. Depending on the volume of knowledge flow in the program, the interval between reading individual portions of the same article may extend from days to months and even years. SuperMemo (repetition spacing) provides the foundation of incremental reading, which is based on stable memory traces that would not fade between the bursts of reading

High retention

In incremental learning, the review of the learning material is governed by a spaced repetition algorithm known as the SuperMemo method. The algorithm ensures 95% knowledge retention by default. That fraction can be increased at the cost of higher cost in time (i.e. more frequent review). Retention can also be reduced to increase the overall speed of learning. In heavily overloaded collections, 95% retention figure refers only to top-priority material. To save time, low priority material may be reviewed less frequently, resulting in lesser retention.

Comprehension

One of the limiting factors in acquiring new knowledge is the barrier of understanding. Building knowledge in your brain is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces cannot be placed in the puzzle before the others. Some pieces capitalize on others. There is no point in memorizing facts about Higgs boson before you learn what the standard model is and that, in turn, should follow the general understanding of particle physics which itself requires some ABC of physics. In incremental reading, if you encounter texts related to Higgs boson you can manually delay it until the time you hope your Physics ABC will provide the ground for understanding the boson. In traditional reading, you would just waste your time on reviewing Higgs boson material just because you would not have tools to effectively reschedule and reprioritize your reading in the middle of a longer article. Traditionally, your decision to skip the material would provide no definite way of coming back to the skipped material in the future. With incremental reading, you waste no time on reading material you do not understand. You can safely skip portions of material and return to them in the future. You become the master of the conscious knowledge building process. You can gradually build understanding of complex phenomena.

All written materials, depending on the reader’s knowledge, pose a degree of difficulty in accurately interpreting their meaning. This is particularly visible in highly specialist scientific papers that use a sophisticated symbol-rich language. A symbol-rich language is a language that gains conciseness by the use of highly specialist vocabulary and notational conventions. For an average reader, symbol-rich language may exponentially raise the bar of lexical competence (i.e. knowledge of vocabulary required to gain understanding). Incremental reading makes it possible to delay the processing of those articles, paragraphs or sentences that require prior knowledge of concepts that are not known at the moment of reading. The processing of the learning material will only take place then when the new information begins to slot in comfortably in the fabric of the reader’s knowledge. You can then gradually proceed through this material and gradually build the understanding from basic or simple facts towards details or more complex components of knowledge. You will build understanding, resolve contradictions and ultimately creatively discover new truths about the learned material. Over time, you will optimize the structure of knowledge in your mind in terms of coherence, integrity, and representation. Incremental reading will make it possible to tackle the hardest material that might otherwise seem unreadable.

Uniform progress

Instead of focusing on a single subject of study, the student will review dozens of subject areas in a single day. Instead of monopolizing his or her knowledge with a single area of expertise, he or she will harmoniously deepen all facets of his knowledge in proportion to needs and/or interests. The growth of the knowledge tree will also be guided by the present level of understanding of individual subjects, in proportion to the growth of the supporting knowledge and specialist terminology. Instead of growing a few thick branches, the knowledge tree will grow twigs in all possible directions while still adding bulk to the trunk and main boughs. Incremental learning is inherently incapable of producing medical experts who have never heard of the Kuiper Belt, or astronomers who have no idea what constitutes a basic healthy diet. SuperMemo helps you prioritize the acquisition of knowledge in various fields. It also helps you fine-tune the balance between specialization and general knowledge. See also how SuperMemo prevents tunnel vision

Creativity boost

The key to creativity is an association of remote ideas. By studying multiple subjects in unpredictable order, you will increase your power to associate ideas. This will immensely improve your creativity. Incremental reading may be compared to brainstorming with yourself. SuperMemo will throw at you various articles, paragraphs, statements and questions in a most unexpected order. In the long run, the greatest creative advantage comes from knowledge permanently stored in your memory (as opposed to knowledge that requires Google). It is only a matter of creative effort and invested time before different pieces of knowledge can be associated to form new quality. This will also provide your brain with an entertaining form of mental training that will be highly appreciated in all forms of professions based on intellectual performance.

With incremental mail processing, it is also possible to mesh your learning, creative writing, and creative problem solving with a creative mail exchange with other people. This may appear helpful in collective problem solving or in complex projects when you need to strike a balance between focused individual work and pulling the team brains together. This process is called incremental brainstorming. Incremental brainstorming is slower, but it does not need synchronization (circadian rhythm, time zones, motivation, etc.), and you do not need to interrupt each other’s work. Incremental brainstorming will never replace face-to-face interactive collaboration, however, it has many advantages associated with incremental learning (creativity, prioritization, attention, meticulousness, long-term viability, etc.). It may provide an excellent knowledge-based supplement, or be your best creative collaboration tool when working at a distance (esp. via different time zones). The creative process is unpredictable, and when you hit your best ideas when the rest of the team is asleep, it makes a good sense to strike the iron while hot: employ creative elaboration and send your idea out.

For more on the employment of incremental learning in the creative process see:

Consistency (resolving chaos and contradiction)

Contradiction and chaos in your learning material comes from bad sources, from errors, from disagreements in science, or from the fact that you start the process from importing a set of unrelated or even chaotic articles describing a studied complex problem.

If your learning material contains contradictory information, your brain will quickly alert you to this fact. In classical learning, you would often relearn new facts that would contradict earlier learned facts. Then you would relearn the older version again and this wasteful cycle might repeat more than once. In SuperMemo, the same process can take place; however, there will be two mechanisms that will turn chaos and contradiction into a self-limiting condition. The first mechanism relies on high retention of knowledge in SuperMemo that will often make you instantaneously spot the contradiction: Wait a minute! I have already learned this fact and the answer was different! Unfortunately, even SuperMemo isn’t hermetic to contradiction (your retention actually never reaches 100%). The second mechanism is the convergence of contradictory material in time. If you, for example, learn two different answers to What is the size of human population?, say, 5.5 billion and 6 billion, you will naturally provide a wrong answer to one of these questions. Once you relearn it the new way, you will provide a wrong answer to the other question. Inter-repetition intervals for these two contradictory items will get shorter with each relearning cycle. The repetitions of contradictory items converge in time. Sooner or later, the red alert will be raised by your brain. You will quickly resolve the difference and delete one of the items. Similar process will affect hazy or incompletely specified information. Your knowledge will grow in consistency with time.

In scientific research, acquiring engineering knowledge, studying a narrow topic of interest, etc. we are constantly faced with a chaos of disparate and often contradictory statements. By introducing the chaos of new research into SuperMemo, you will gradually locate contradictions and strive at building better and more consistent models in your memory. Incremental reading stochastically juxtaposes pieces of information coming from various sources and uses the associative qualities of human memory to emphasize and then resolve contradiction. You will quickly lean towards theories that are better supported by research findings. Those supported poorly will be less firm and will often cause recall problems. Naturally, it may happen that you wish to learn contradictory statements too. For example, the opinions of dissenting scientists. In those cases, SuperMemo will help you emphasize the need of rich context. You will label individual statements with their proponent names or with the school of thought labels.

Stresslessness

Observers and new users of SuperMemo believe that complexity of incremental reading must make it stressful. Some report that even reading about incremental learning is stressful. However, even though complexity always leads to a degree of stress or confusion, in the long-term, the opposite is true: SuperMemo helps you combat stress. Stressless learning is one of the greatest advantages of incremental learning. All the advantages listed in this section contribute to the sense of fun and relaxation. However, SuperMemo’s ability to combat information overload might be the chief factor. Conversely, low stress levels have a miraculous impact on the effectiveness of learning.

Not everyone is stressed with information overload. There is a precondition for experiencing stress of having too much to read or too much to learn: obsessive hunger for knowledge, fear of not being able to keep up, pressing need for new knowledge, etc. This precondition is met in a great proportion of the general population according to a number of studies, and is actually less likely in younger individuals, including students, who are shielded from stress by their less crystallized motivation for learning.

The term Information Fatigue Syndrome has been coined recently to refer to stress coming from problems with managing overwhelming information. Some consequences of IFS listed by Dr. David Lewis, a British psychologist, include: anxiety, tension, procrastination, time-wasting, loss of job satisfaction, self-doubt, psychosomatic stress, breakdown of relationships, reduced analytical capacity, etc. The information era tends to overwhelm us with the amount of information we feel compelled to process. Incremental reading does not require all-or-nothing choices on articles to read. All-or-nothing choices are stressful! Can I afford to skip this article? For months I haven’t had time to read this article! etc. SuperMemo helps you prioritize and skip articles partially (by decision) or opaquely (i.e. behind the scenes). Oftentimes, reading 3% of an article may provide 50% of its reading value. Reading of articles may be delayed opaquely, i.e. not by stressful procrastination but by a sheer competition with other pieces of information on the basis of their priority. In incremental reading, instead of hesitating or procrastinating, you simply prioritize.

If you happen to open a dozen of tabs in your web browser, you will often be stressed about the optimum course of action. You might be late for sleep, or late for work, and yet you do not want to lose the information. In SuperMemo, you just import&prioritize. Or just import. Nothing is lost. You will encounter the imported material as soon as your learning time allocations permit. Similarly, you can clear your 1,000 pieces mail Inbox in a few hours with all pieces of mail well prioritized and scheduled for review.

Once you know you can rely on SuperMemo in presenting review material for you, you can eliminate the stress and anxiety related to having too much to study or too much to read. You will never manage to read or learn all that you would hope for, but you will at least not lose sleep over planning and scheduling. SuperMemo is a promise of the best use of your potential. With this conviction, you can devote all your energy to comprehension, analysis and retention of the learned material.

SuperMemo helps you take away a big deal of information overload stress. In a typical IFS stress therapy, you will see that scrupulous notes, ordering one’s desk, planning one’s work, keeping a calendar of appointments, etc. all have a strong therapeutic value. SuperMemo does exactly the same: it helps you keep a scrupulous and well-prioritized record of what you want to read and takes away stressful chaos from the process of acquiring information and learning the collected material. SuperMemo eliminates disorder and the ensuing uncertainty that often characterizes wild searches for information on the net.

Attention

Human brain has an in-built limit on the attention span. We all get bored with things. This is particularly visible in kids. Limited attention helps maximize the learning input. This is why most toys have a short lifespan, and other kids’ toys seem always more interesting. The same is true of reading. Even the best articles can become taxing if they get too long. Millions of people do a daily channel zapping on TV. This absurd activity is driven precisely by the craving for dense action and information variety. A gripping movie goes “too slow” for a typical channel zapper. This is why he or she prefers to watch three movies at the same time (even though the coherence of the plot of each will suffer). Incremental learning is a perfect remedy to the limited attention span. Even a single unlucky paragraph in an article may greatly reduce your enthusiasm for reading. If you stumble against a few frustrating paragraphs, you may gradually develop a dislike of reading a particular article. You may even become fed up with reading for the entire evening.

In incremental reading, once you sense any sign of boredom or distraction, you can jump to the next article with mostly positive side effects (expressed mainly in better memories produced by spaced learning). Unlike in channel zapping, you won’t miss any information. Just the opposite, you will maximize attention per paragraph. Your attention to the same piece of information may depend on your mood, amount of prior reading, today’s interest that may depend on the piece of news you heard on the morning radio, etc. With incremental reading, you can fit your best attention to each individual piece of reading. You can change the approach depending on your circadian status (i.e. the time of the day, mental energy, etc.). You can deprioritize articles that undermine attention. You can split intimidating articles into more manageable portions. The boost in attention is one of the main reasons why incremental reading is more fun than ordinary reading.

Consolidation

Everything we learn must be reviewed from time to time in order to be remembered. If you read an article in intervals, you already begin the consolidation of memory which may save you lots of time. In traditional reading, you would need to read the whole article, and then to review the article later several times. With earlier releases of SuperMemo, you would need to read the whole article, and then only review the most important parts of the article in SuperMemo at intervals determined by the program. Now you can begin the consolidation-review cycle already during reading! Incremental reading combines the process of extracting pieces of valuable knowledge with memory consolidation. This pre-consolidation will often dramatically reduce the number of repetitions required before your material gets to be reviewed in long intervals of months and years. By the time you convert parts of the material into clozes or question-answer items, you will already have it well-consolidated. This consolidation will be based on solid context, a degree of redundancy (that helps retention), and an easy-to-remember formulation based on cloze deletion. Extracting pieces of information from a larger body of knowledge provides your items with all the relevant context. This slow process of jelling out knowledge produces an enhanced sense of meaning and applicability of individual pieces of information. Semantically equivalent pieces of information may be consolidated in varying contexts adding additional angles to their associative power. In other words, not only will you remember better. You will also be able to view the same information from different perspectives.

Prioritization

You always have a long queue of articles to read, and there are always more articles to read than you can ever hope to remember. In incremental reading, you can precisely determine the priority of each article, paragraph, sentence or question. Evaluating articles and prioritizing them is difficult because you cannot do a good evaluation without actually reading a part of the article in question. In incremental reading, you can read the introduction and then decide when to read the rest. If an article is extremely valuable or interesting, you can process it entirely at once. Other articles can slowly scramble through the learning process. Yet others may ultimately be deleted. The prioritization will continue while you are reading the article. If the evaluation of quality or content changes while reading, so will the reading-review schedule.

Prioritization tools will ensure that important pieces of information will receive better processing. This will maximize the value of your reading time. This will also reduce the impact of material overflow on retention. You will always remember the desired proportion of your top-priority material. While the lesser priority material may suffer more from the overflow and be remembered less accurately. Priority of articles is not set in stone. You can modify it manually while reading in proportion to the value you extract from a given article. The priority will also change automatically each time you generate article extracts. It will change if you delay or advance scheduled reading. The priority of extracts is determined by the priority of articles. The priority of questions and answers produced from individual sentences is determined by their parenting extracts. Multiple prioritization tools will help you effectively deal with massive changes in your learning focus. With the prioritization tools you can always determine your learning focus in numbers!

This is one of the most important things about incremental reading: efficient fishing for pieces of golden knowledge!

Speed (of reading)

Incremental readers can beat speed readers in the speed of reading! This is true even for relative beginners with little or no speed-reading training. The caveat: all that is possible at the cost of delayed comprehension. In speed-reading, you always need to worry about the comprehension level. High comprehension is where speed-reading skills are vital. However, in incremental reading, you can quickly skim through less important portions of the text without worrying you will miss a detail. The skimmed fragment will be scheduled for later review. You can optionally determine when the review will happen and at what priority (low priority review may be delayed further, often automatically). You can quickly jump from paragraph to paragraph, get the overall picture, mark fragments for later reading, mark fragments for detailed study, etc. This speed-reading method, with a bit of training, is stress free. You will eliminate the greatest bottleneck of speed-reading: fear of missing important pieces of information. When you come back to the skimmed fragments in the future, they may have already become irrelevant or less important. That is one of a savings in time generated by incremental reading. You always focus on top priority material and you spend little time worrying about things that are left for later reading. Incremental reading is speed-reading without the loss of comprehension. Once you speed-read the entire article, you can slowly digest it again from the very beginning in the incremental reading process. Needless to say, speed-reading is not a patch on incremental reading when it comes to long-term retention. Memories are always subject to forgetting. Whatever valuable information you gather while reading may be forgotten at any time. Pieces that would be retained without SuperMemo (e.g. through regular use), produce minimum workload. Other pieces will allow you to never need to come back to the article in question again. In conclusion, all knowledge that you need in the long-run, should be best acquired via incremental reading. Traditional reading can still be used for entertainment, temporary knowledge (e.g. how to install a sound board), curiosity (e.g. news), etc. This is not to say that speed-reading skills are not useful in incremental reading. If you are already a solid speed-reader, you can add to your speed and comprehension with the help of incremental reading. In the process, you will hone your skills further and become even a faster reader.

Speed (of formulating items)

Cloze deletion is the fastest tool for converting texts into items. In addition to massive imports, you can introduce your own rough notes into SuperMemo and later gradually convert them into well-structured knowledge. Less important material may remain unstructured and, as such, less well-remembered. You will see how passive notes gradually fade in your memory and how their individual components will need to be reinforced by formulating specific well-structured items. You will make such reinforcement decisions on the one-by-one basis depending on the importance of the fading material and the degree of recall problems. Naturally, due to a typical learning overflow, you will always neglect some portions of the material. This is how you will gain additional speed understood as the time invested per item. You will generate items faster, re-formulate them with greater ease, and save additional time by neglecting less important material. This is prioritization via formulation. Less important material will remain in a less processed and messier state characterized by lower retention.

Meticulousness

With well-prioritized stream of information, you are served knowledge in smaller chunks. This makes it possible to truly focus on most important pieces and discover things that would never get noticed in the mass of voluminous learning. Good attention brings meticulousness and creative discovery. In other words, this is a marriage of prioritization, attention, and creativity advantages with a new twist: noticing things that are hard to notice in massive learning.

Training

With massive incremental reading, you will hone a set of skills that are vital for efficient learning. By repeating the same procedures over and over again, day in and day out, over the months and years, you will become a master of processing and retaining knowledge! If you want things well done, do them often. Here are some example of skills that will get a boost and change your learning:

- Recognizing suitable texts at a glance of an eye. Some texts are great for efficient reading, some are full of chaff and waffle. The more articles you need to preview fast and prioritize, the faster you can do it and more accurate you become. This is an exercise in expert pattern recognition.

- Formulating knowledge efficiently. In terms of learning efficiency, the difference between well-formulated and ill-formulated items may be as high as 1:10 or even 1:100. Some items are mnemonic. Others are confusing. Some require 5-6 repetitions in a lifetime. Others permanently reside among leeches that come back for review and waste your precious time.

- Mnemonic skills. The more you try to remember, the better you know how to remember things fast and for long. Mnemonic skills can be developed in dedicated courses. They can also improve with each single item you formulate and memorize.

- Speed-reading skills. Fast reading is a hallmark of incremental learning. Traditional speed-reading is very different from speed-reading with SuperMemo. You nearly never need to worry about missing information. Incremental reading carries none of the burdens of a typical hit-and-miss speed-reading. There is no limit on the speed of skimming. Mastery of keyboard is as important as the eye saccades. The more you skim, the better you skim. The more you hurry, the more you skim. Incremental learning accelerates your hunger for knowledge, and the speed at which you devour it.

- Semantic skills. The language is a jigsaw puzzle of words and phrases played on a set board of grammar. Understanding the language is vital for speed-reading where the structure of a sentence needs to be parsed in a fraction of a millisecond at a single glance. In incremental reading, correct formulation of clozes will often require minor rewording. Like in a puzzle, you will need to shift a word from here to there, remove sections of sentences, insert context, change the tense, remove referential ambiguity, etc. Mastery of the grammatical sentence skeleton and the semantics will increase with every and each new cloze polished for long-term memory.

- Prioritizations skills. New students, however smart, are often totally blind to the priority of knowledge. They are unable to judge the extent of their present and future knowledge. They find it difficult to differentiate gold from garbage. Seemingly precious knowledge becomes garbage if it does not pass the priority test that ensures it can ever be mastered. The lifetime capacity of the human brain is limited. Without understanding the limits, newcomers to incremental learning will often embark onto a futile quests for mastering details that would steal room needed for memories that are essential to one’s existence (professional and beyond). With every passing month and with the constant increase in the size of your knowledge and your collection (i.e. also “knowledge to-be”), you will better understand your ultimate limits. Your knowledge selection skills will keep improving for years to come.

- Editing and SuperMemo skills. SuperMemo is complex. It takes months to fully explore. SuperMemo is also keyboard-oriented. The list of keyboard shortcuts is overwhelming. Only with the mastery of the keyboard and SuperMemo itself can you become a true pro of incremental learning who can whiz through dozens of articles per hour. You will edit dozens of little pieces of texts to optimally formulate your questions. Speed-reading and semantic skills, combined with editing skills will help you instantly mold the texts in your collection to suit your long-term goals.

Knowledge database

Once your collection grows rich in materials from various domains, you can use it before you use Google to search for information about a subject within the material that you already want to learn. The search results will not be as rich, but they will be far more focused on the areas of your interest. While doing search&review, you will be able to reduce the future workload in many areas. This is fun!

All-in-one archive

Once you become proficient with SuperMemo you can use it as an all-encompasing archive of all your media files. Those files do not need to be part of the learning process, however, you can combine archiving functions with the incremental process (e.g. when annotating your family photo album collection). SuperMemo may be a great way to get rid of those dusty paper documents, tape recorder cassettes, CDs, photo albums, school notebooks, etc. You can archive this in dedicated folders on your computer and import it all to SuperMemo. Incremental processing of archive has many advantages. For example, while annotating family pictures from two centuries ago, you can fill in the gaps in information by simple face recognition that may rely on a degree of learning or creative juxtaposition of photographs from different sources in close intervals. Incremental audio can also convert your jukebox SuperMemo into a stream of music with a maximized fun factor. There are millions of ways of sorting tracks on your media player device, by filename, by date, by annotation, by priority, by recent viewing… all that does not compare to the incremental review process. This is because the quality of your experience when processing music or photos is based on the same forgetting mechanisms that affect learning. You want to see or listen to some things more often than others, but not too often. Forgetting is the key to experiencing music or imagery or videos again and again with a heightened degree of fun, pleasure and, last but not least, learning.

Fun

The sense of productivity might be one of the most satisfying emotions. This is why incremental learning should be highly enjoyable. This only magnifies its powers. To experience the elation of incremental learning, you may need a few months of focused practice. You will first have to start with the basic tools and techniques. Then you will need to master knowledge representation skills. Finally, you will need a couple of months of heavy-load incremental learning to perfect the details and develop your own “incremental learning philosophy”. You will also need to grow your collection as size matters for the fun of learning. Last but not least, incremental learning requires good language skills, some touch-typing skills, and patience (SuperMemo will often want you to go against your own intuition). Although the material is originally imported from electronic sources, it always needs to be molded, shortened, provided with context clues, restructured for wording and grammar, etc. The skills involved are not trivial and require practice.

If you have used SuperMemo and/or spaced repetition, you may have concluded that learning with SuperMemo is boring due to its repetitive nature. Those who can compare the classic SuperMemo with incremental learning will testify that incremental learning is by far more fun. In contrast to classic SuperMemo, where you focus on the review of the old material, incremental reading interweaves the old with the new. Novelty adds to the fun and efficiency of learning. Incremental learning is by far more challenging and colorful than typical repetitions. In addition to review and reading, you can import rich graphics, audio and video to spice up your learning process.

In the end, you risk becoming seriously addicted to incremental learning. The statement “I do not read books” should no longer be considered in a negative light! As long as you keep incremental learning in rational check, it will benefit you and others around you.

Disadvantages of incremental learning

Most of disadvantages of incremental learning come from factors that are a disadvantage in nearly all human pursuits: opportunity and overhead costs. However, there are also disadvantages that come from the fact that incremental learning is not for everyone. Poor selection of knowledge may result in wasting time on low-quality learning. Moreover, incremental learning may lead to frustration, stress, addiction, compulsive use, and other undesirable effects on user’s psychology.

Here is the short list of disadvantages to consider:

- opportunity costs: each time you learn with SuperMemo, you are not doing something else. You might be neglecting your creative pursuits, other people, your children, your own health, etc. Incremental learning makes sense only if it is done in the right proportion to your other activities. That proportion will depend on your skills, goals, profession, lifestyle, personality, and more. You need to strike the optimum balance on your own. It might be just a few minutes to polish your English or professional knowledge. Or it might be a few hours if you are a medical student. You always need to keep opportunity costs in mind and keep a score of costs and benefits.

- overhead costs: there is no way around a steep learning curve in incremental learning. You will be thwarted by limitations of software, and the overall complexity of the concept. You will wonder why some solutions in SuperMemo have been set upside down against your best intuition. You will keep improving your skills, and strategies over long months and years. Even mastering the basic techniques will take a lot oftime. You should be aware of that difficulty before you embark on the process that is bound to cause some stress and frustration at the beginning. At the same time, you should find hope in the fact that for a pro, the overhead costs are negligible. All extra operations are semi-automatic while the learning process proceeds largely uninterrupted in student’s mind. While keystrokes are issued, knowledge is actively being processed by the memory system. All operations have been optimized for pro use. Once you get to a pro level and follow the recommended strategy, overhead cost disadvantage will cease to matter.

- learning garbage (GIGO): if your selection of learning material is poor, or your formulation skills inadequate, you risk wasting lots of time on learning things that you do not need or that do not bring a tangible memory effect. This is why you must read 20 rules of formulating knowledge, keep knowledge selection at the front of your mind, and be honest with your priority queue.

- frustration and stress: incremental learning is not for everyone. It requires a certain level of proficiency with the language that may be hard for some to reach. It requires a mind that is somewhat abstract-enabled. Did you do well in math? Or science? These are good omens. If incremental learning is not fun after a few months of determined study, you need to re-read this entire article with utmost attention. Otherwise, your incremental adventure will not bring fruit.

- Incremental learning must be fun to work!

Incremental learning is not for everyone

Incremental learning is powerful. We believe it might spell a revolution in learning. Its present incarnation will reach only a small fraction of society. This is why:

Most of people will never arrive to this website. A great part of this planet do not have access to the Internet. Of those who are privileged enough to be able to use Google or Wikipedia on a regular basis, most are too busy with work, family and other pursuits. The rest are busy with Facebook, Twitter, games and other “blessings” of the Internet.

A significant fraction of the users of the Internet realize that the web offers incredible self-help opportunities. Many of those will realize that their memory can be improved, and that their learning can be advanced to a new level with some help from the net or software. However, the language barrier is the first big sieve. The best materials about learning techniques have been published in English. Language divisions result in a global inequality in the access to information. You can read about SuperMemo in a couple of major languages. Perhaps you might learn about incremental reading too. The article you are reading at the moment will take months or years to percolate to non-English areas of the net.

For anyone interested in learning, it does not take long to find out about spaced repetition. The term was quite exotic when first used in the context of SuperMemo in the mid 1990s. In those days it could only be found in a couple of scientific publications. However, it was SuperMemo that helped popularize the concept, which now has entered the popular culture. Those who seek better memory will quickly be informed that spaced repetition is the way. They will get they introduction to spaced repetition from SuperMemo freeware, or an array of other excellent free spaced repetition applications, some of which use SuperMemo algorithms. The fact that the newest SuperMemo is a commercial product will prevent many potentially excellent students from ever going in the direction of incremental learning. This must made be clear then. At the moment of writing, SuperMemo 2004 is freeware and supports incremental reading. It might be missing the priority queue, but this will matter only much later in the process when you build a collection of unmanageable size. In SuperMemo 2004 you can do Import, Extract and Cloze. That’s the core of incremental reading!

Among users of SuperMemo, only a fraction will ever become interested in a complex concept of incremental learning (probably still below 5%). A typical newcomer is more likely to drop out altogether than to move on to the next level. The chief culprit is the incompatibility of SuperMemo with the human nature and the modern lifestyle. Stressful and busy lives do not help in forging new paths and acquiring new habits. It is not just that humans like to live in their comfort zones. It is also that the pressures of the modern dog-eat-dog society are pretty effective in stifling higher inspiration, lifelong learning, creative pursuits beyond one’s job, etc. Those issues are inherent (human nature), or systemic. As such they cannot be easily remedied.

Some users might hold a relatively positive opinion about incremental reading, but will excuse their lack of commitment by technological limitations of SuperMemo. For example, “unless you give me a Mac version, I won’t go there“, “I hate Internet Explorer“, “Your interface comes from Windows 98 era” or “I will come back if you have a mobile version“. Incidentally, there is an inherent incompatibility between mobility and incremental learning. Mobility correlates with multitasking and low attention (interaction with others, arriving mail, phone calls, browser pop-ups, etc.). The power of incremental learning lies in balancing creativity with attention. As such, incremental learning is inherently immobile (unless you understand mobility as a transfer between two or more peaceful and static environments). In addition, without a standard-size keyboard, incremental reading might feel like paddling up the creek.

Among those users of SuperMemo who get down to reading about incremental reading, a large proportion will come with a preconceived goal: proving that incremental learning is not really worth the investment of time. “Negative reading” is more likely to occur in a bad state of mind: low-spirits, irritation, or reading outside one’s optimum circadian brainwork bracket. This preconception may be largely subconscious and based on a defense mechanism: proving that incremental learning is a weak concept is easy, should save one a great deal of investment in mastering the concept, and prevent the need to leave one’s comfort zone. Discovering that incremental learning is a must will simply augur long hours of plodding through the documentation that is notorious for its poor readability index. The presented article is harder to read than 70% of articles at Wikipedia. The ultimate judgement is strongly correlated with your present state of mind. You are more likely to say “Incremental learning is full of fluff” or “Incremental learning goes against human nature” than to say “I have discovered a new great technology that will change my life“. You might be just seeking affirmation of your preset frame of mind: “Incremental learning must be a hoax or at least a waste of time“, or simply “Incremental reading is not of much use in my particular profession“. It is easy to find the desired confirmation. Imperfections in this article will provide a rich material for dismissal. A perfection is not achievable. Prejudiced mind will always find a way to misinterpret. Naturally, if you are enthusiastic about incremental learning at your first encounter, this is a very good predictor of your ultimate success.

Having passed all this rich obstacle course, you are now bound to be in a tiny group of people who arrived at this point. The good news is that you might be part of a special elite. People with fertile minds who are open to new challenges, motivated well-enough and self-disciplined enough. Naturally, you might have equally well come here exhausted with your failure in learning, in hope of finding a remedy to your recent bad exams results. Whatever the answer, the road is still very long. Even with a brisk mind and great enthusiasm, you may still drop out at later stages.

When reading about incremental learning, you might hit another major obstacle: “This is more convoluted than I thought!“, or “The whole idea of priorization makes me nauseous“, or “The toolset may be rich but is it natural?“. You can get discouraged either by incomplete understanding of the concept, or the incompatibility of the concept with your personality.

If you have already decided to try incremental learning, and you have SuperMemo 16 installed, you may get an unpleasant shock. SuperMemo 16 is not user friendly! It has been optimized for pro users and only simplified enough at lower levels (File : Level) to make it somewhat palatable for a novice. You can overcome this impression only with a firm belief: incremental learning works and it is worth the investment of my time. After a year, you may love the solutions you hated at first in SuperMemo. User unfriendliness and complexity will make many give up in the first days or weeks. Those dropouts rarely return! We are guilty here too. New solutions are never perfectly encapsulated and/or interfaced. You will get your neat iPad and Android version only when incremental learning is more popular, which is not soon.

The dropout rate in the first weeks is still high. Some of the main problems: importing unsuitable text, difficulty in parsing the text with extracts, losing context of extracts, comprehension problems (not related to SuperMemo), clozing texts that are too complex, difficulty in formulating items, excessive time spent on styles and templates, learning overload, confusion, problems with SuperMemo (e.g. layouts), lack of sense of progress, etc. Without clear gratification, many users come to the conclusion that the cost is greater than the benefits. They are not wrong. It is not easy to get a return on your investment in a month or even longer. Few users start their learning swiftly on a wave of solid enthusiasm!

Many of the advantages of incremental learning rely on the size of your learning collection. The value of search&review increases with the size of the collection. At the beginning of the process, when collection is knowledge-poor, you may feel like laying the first brick of a large pyramid on a vast boring desert. The greatest fun can be found at the top of the pyramid, when you can see the extent of your knowledge in a good perspective. This metaphor should not imply your pyramid will ever stop growing. You keep adding stone blocks to the sides. The pyramid keeps growing high and wide for lifetime.

The extent of failure does not only cover the dropouts and the never-has-beens. Even long-term users may enter a never-ending struggle with item formulation, complex material, priorities, overload, etc. The later you start, the longer the transition from pain to fun. Old habits die hard. There is one clear litmus test for success: once incremental learning is fun, you know you do things right. If you have not reached the level of fun after a couple of months of trying hard, you need to re-think your strategies. For example, you may need to start from reading this article cover-to-cover again.

If you happen to be a happy user of incremental learning, your knowledge will keep growing fast, and your hunger for learning will keep increasing at an ever faster rate. This makes you a part of a very tiny elite. This also imposes an obligation. It is time to help others reach your level!

Big picture in incremental learning

A frequent reservation voiced by skeptical observers is that dismembering texts into little units will result in an inevitable loss of the ability to see things from a distance in their entirety. The question is: Does incremental learning produce a loss of the big picture? What the skeptics fail to appreciate is the power of spaced repetition that stands behind SuperMemo. The SuperMemo method ensures high retention of once-mastered knowledge. This means that there is minimum disintegration of the coherence of knowledge once it is understood and well modeled in student’s mind.

The main advantage of SuperMemo is that you convert lots of disparate pieces of information into a solid model of reality that lives in your memory. All these pieces can be dispersed randomly in your collection like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, however, they fit into a coherent entirety that stays firmly intact in your mind. In other words, incremental learning is reductionist at the level of knowledge processing, but is holistic at the level of memories stored in your brain.

The big picture worry comes from the fact that in traditional education, students rely heavily on their short-term memory. They cram a single subject intensely before an exam only to forget most of that knowledge in the following months unless the subject is reviewed in later courses. It is true that short-term memory can act as a glue that holds the big picture in memory. However, it is the short-term memory and the weakest long-term memories that are gone first. With that in mind, it is only natural that you might worry that if you start intermingling more than a few courses, you will end up with chaos and confusion. It is not the case with incremental learning. New memories, once established, are gradually reinforced to permanently enter the long-term storage. All incremental learning does is to help you focus on a small portion of the material at any given moment.

Worrying about the big picture in incremental reading is as if you worried that you might forget the structure of your family just because you meet too many members at the same time at a big family occasion, or that you might forget your name when focusing too much on spelling its individual letters. Once the big picture resides in your long-term memory, you can play with details to your heart’s content. Today, tomorrow, or in a couple of years.

Incremental learning can make you smarter

User of classical SuperMemo, T. Sz. wondered:

If I use incremental learning for a couple of years. How will that affect how I am perceived by others? Will they see the difference? Will I be smarter and appear smarter? Will I be able to shine with knowledge in social circles? What do people say after 20 years of using incremental learning?

Incremental learning is just a few years old. For example, incremental reading was introduced in 2000. The essential concept of the priority queue was introduced only in 2006. Without the priority queue, massive learning may lead to massive chaos. Incremental video was born in 2009. So you won’t find users with 20 years of experience.

Incremental learning is faster

Despite the young age of incremental learning, it is easy to theorize about its power. This is because learning incrementally isn’t much different in its ultimate effect as other forms of learning (e.g. extensive reading, studying for the university, research, etc.). For that reason, the results will be comparable. The main difference is that you will get to the levels of higher knowledge much faster (assuming sufficient skills). This way, someone with a few months of intense incremental learning, may get the knowledge and act not much different than a university graduate. Naturally, incremental learning will not substitute for laboratory practice, problem solving, discussions with friends, and professors, etc. So there will be differences. You can then ask: how does the university make you into a better person?

No amount of learning can eliminate ignorance

If you hope that incremental reading will make you a universally knowledgeable and smart, you are wrong. Human knowledge is vast enough for a 2-year-old to know things that a PhD does not know (esp. if he is trainedfor the trick, e.g. to answer “What is the capital of Burkina Faso?“).

Incremental readers are different

Incremental reading is more likely to be less focused and more general. At the university, you may learn extensively on a specific subject, while in incremental reading you are more likely to stray to multiple related areas depending on your interests and the encountered gaps in knowledge. Your priorities will reflect your individual profile and your knowledge may be far more customized to your own needs and passions. All in all, an incremental reader will not differ much from a well-learned person. The main difference may come in personality because only a few have the mental characteristics needed to get interested and then sustain the incremental reading process. Thus incremental readers may appear more knowledgeable just because of their natural curiosity or even obsession with knowledge. This quest for general knowledge may result in short moments of amazement with the gaps in knowledge exhibited by other people. In September 2013, scientists announced that Voyager 1 entered the interstellar medium. A panel of high-IQ journalists on a respected news channel discussed that historic moment. One of the journalists mentioned that Voyager 1 was launched in the 1990s and has now left the solar system. The other journalists nodded. This is where an obsessive incremental reader may stumble and realize he or she is indeed a bit different.

Nobody likes a smart aleck

It is not how others perceive you that matters, but how you change your thinking and the ability to solve problems. In most cases, few people in your surroundings care about your problems and your goals. The knowledge you obtain for those goals will be of little interest to others (beyond a narrow circle of close friends). If you ever attempt to show off at parties, you will rather be politely dismissed as an annoyance. Being a smart aleck is universally perceived in a negative light. If you shine with your knowledge in a relevant context (i.e. not for the sake of shining), the perception will be different. We all love the doctor that can provide an accurate diagnosis at a glance and instantly come up with a solution to your health problem. However, chances are rather slim that you will be able to show off your specialist knowledge at a party (unless it is a professional party of your colleagues in the field).

Reward in higher awareness

The greatest advantage of incremental reading may show in the areas of general knowledge. These are the areas that most of people neglect due to a simple lack of time and lack of sufficient pressure or motivation. Astudent may need to study for his geography course, a medical researcher may need to read dozens of papers, but they both may have too little time or need to refresh the ABC of physics that might otherwise be useful in understanding things that happen around them. An obsessive incremental reader might therefore reach a sort of higher level of awareness. If you hear about a chaffinch for the first time in your life, you might likely say “I have never seen that bird“. However, you might then be amazed if you see the bird a few times in the course of the following week.

With a narrow focus, few people are able to point to the galaxies that are likely to collide with the Milky Way. Knowledge and understanding of similar facts and processes may seem to have little application to daily activities, however, it does seem to change how people view their place in the universe. Ignorance is blind. Knowledge makes you see things that others do not see. That should be sufficient reward.

Smart learning makes you smarter

As explained in Roots of Genius and Creativity: Smart and dumb learning, smart learning will help you get smarter. However, bad learning practices can result in a monumental waste of time. SuperMemo helps you eliminate the problem of forgetting. As such, it can also help you remember time-wasting garbage. The main rule of smart learning is: learn what is highly applicable. Learn things that change your life. Learning things that help you change the life of others. Rules are better than facts. You can employ probability or statistical formulas in dozens of contexts. If you memorize phone numbers, it won’t make you much smarter.

Incremental learning can make you dumber

We believe that incremental learning is the acme of learning in 2013. However, it can also make you dumber. If you take on heavy learning, you are bound to suffer from serious memory interference. This means that you will also forget much faster, esp. the things that you do not keep in SuperMemo. Instead of looking smarter, to the outside world, you might appear more forgetful and even absent-minded. You might forget events, promises, encounters, jokes, movies, and all those little memory things that we take for granted. Incidentally, this forgetfulness is also produced by Facebook, Twitter, and the like. In this chaotic modern world, we hardly ever have time to stop and ponder important things. These days you can buy a shower cabin or a sauna with speakers built in. It’s a matter of time before you can engage into a conversation with your toilet. Perhaps you already chat with your Facebook friends while sitting on the toilet? This means that the last preserves of peaceful thinking and creativity are in danger of being swamped with information overload. This makes us smarter in a different way. However, without your rational intervention, it may work against your long-term success. The same is true about incremental learning, you must stay vigilant and learn only things that are highly relevant and applicable to your goals and your position in society. Turn off your phone in the night, leave your MP3 player at home when you go for a jogging, and keep your incremental reading in check and order.

Understanding your own ignorance

Incremental learning helps you quantify your knowledge. If you do incremental learning, this might be your most distinguishing feature: you know what you do not know and why. You better understand the limitations of human memory and its value!

Knowledge that makes you smarter

Smart and dumb learning

Not all knowledge is of great value. Memorizing all tributaries of Amazon make take precious time from other areas of learning. Unless you are an expert on Amazon, rain forest, geography, Indian tribes or related areas, you would rather not want to begin your incremental learning experience from that Amazon exercise.

Your learning efforts must be based on high applicability of newly acquired skills and knowledge. If you memorize the whole phone book, your problem solving ability will increase only slightly (mostly through the beneficial effect of memory training on the health of your brain). On the other hand, a simple formula for expected payoff may affect all decisions you make in problem solving and in life in general. It can, for example, save you years of wasted investment in lottery tickets. Millions of people are enticed with huge lottery jackpots, yet they would never agree to give up their whole income for life in order to get it back at retirement in one-off payment, which is a frequent probabilistic payoff equivalent of taking part in lotteries. Using the terminology defined above, you will find most benefit in mastering and understanding highly abstract rules of logical thinking and decision making.

To accomplish smart learning, you will need to constantly pay utmost attention to what material you decide to study. You must avoid short-term gratification at the cost of long-term learning. It may be great fun to learn all Roman emperors and details of their interesting lives and rule. However, unless you study with a big picture in mind (e.g. in an attempt to understand why civilizations thrive or fall), you may benefit less than by struggling through less entertaining but highly applicable formulas of operation research, which might, for example help you optimize your diet, investment, daily schedule, etc. In other words, you cannot be guided by just the fun of learning but by your goals and needs. In time, you will learn to see the link between long-term learning and long-term benefits. You will simply condition yourself to love beneficial learning. Hard study material can still provide instant gratification.

While you focus on your goals, you cannot forget about the overall context of human life. You cannot dig solely into studying car engines only because this happens to be your profession. This would put you at risk of developing a tunnel vision. You might spend years improving a liquid fuel engine efficiency while others would leap years by getting involved in lithium batteries or hydrogen engines. One of the main reasons for which companies go bankrupt is that their leadership fails to spot the change. As corporate darwinism eliminates short-sighted teams, future society will witness more and more intellectual darwinism. To understand the trends and the future, you need to study human nature, economics, sociology, history, neurophysiology, mathematics, computing sciences, and more. The more you lick, the stronger your predictive powers and your problem solving capacity and the creative strength.

Should we learn “trivia” such as “Which year was the Internet born?“. The concept of trivia is highly relative! To a child in a kindergarten, the birth of the Internet is rather meaningless. At this stage of development, the child may find it difficult to grasp the concept of the Internet itself. Many parents will wait until the primary school before showing a web browser to their child. The value of putting the date on the birth of the Internet probably develops only in the context of an effort to understand the history of technological development. In this context, 1969 may be as important as the name of Gutenberg. Only when multiple events of the 1960s and the 1970s dovetail together, the commissioning of ARPANET becomes meaningful. When we figure out that we landed the man on the moon before making the first connection via the net, 1969 looms larger. If we dig deeper, we may find it inspiring to know that when Charley Kline tried to log in on October 29, 1969, the network crashed as he typed the letter G. Imagine, you work on commissioning a major installation that you have worked on for several years. You know that the installation implements revolutionary concepts yet it keeps on crashing. You are about to lose heart. This may not necessarily be an emotional event, after all you also need to apply probability to deciding when to give up blind-alley pursuits even after years of investment. The juxtaposition of the small letter G and the groundbreaking concept of the interconnected world will help you see the big picture. If your concept is great enough, you will go on through another 100 crashes in hope of diagnosing the reason. That perseverance may seem to have little to do with “being smart”, but it will make you into a winner (given a bit of luck).

Listen to other people’s advice and valuations. The younger you are the more you should listen. In the end though, it must be you who determines the criteria for sifting golden knowledge from trivia. Only you can measure the value of knowledge in the light of your own goals.

Remember that not all knowledge can easily be formulated in a declarative manner. Remember then to use the power of your own neural networks: solve problems, practice your skills, compute, abstract, associate, etc. You and others may not be able to see or verbalize some rules but your brain will extract them in the course of practice. Once the rules have been developed, try to formulate them and write them down. This can be of benefit to you and others.

Knowledge that assists problem solving

Problem solving in artificial intelligence can be used to mimic those mental faculties of a human being that we associate with intelligence and creativity. There are many approaches to problem solving such as deduction, induction, abduction, reasoning by analogy or probabilistic methods, neural networks approach, searching in state space, and more. And even though some of these can generate false conclusions or uncertain responses, they can all be expressed by means of deductive methods such as those used in theorem proving in mathematics. Deduction proceeds from axioms or premises towards true formulas or assertions through logical derivation using valid inference rules. The better the selection of assertions and the selection of inference rules, the broader the reasoning capacity of an expert system or human brain. Rich inferential knowledge stored in our memory makes us fast in thinking, creative, intelligent, efficient in problem solving, etc. Yet we need factual knowledge as the raw processing material for derivation. Eventhe creative vein and inspiration can be expressed in terms of multithreaded derivation and backtracking well formalized in logic programming. No magic fluids or reflections of the soul are involved here. Just a plain network of firing neurons recovering the encoded patterns of facts and rules. See also: Roots of creativity and genius.

To boost your problem solving capacity you need to master a great deal of inferential knowledge. If you learn about specific classes of problems to solve, you may need to choose between memorizing the outcome of inference or its individual steps. Both equip you with a formula for transforming knowledge into new quality. Learning derivation steps is costly. At the same time it can equip you with highly abstract derivation rules. You need to balance cost and benefit. We cannot blindly assume that it is better to derive answers to problems than to simply memorize the answers. In problems with multiple instances, we will tend to learn the derivation. For example, it is easier to learn how to derive the third power of X than to memorize all useful pairs: argument-result. On the other hand, most of people memorize the multiplication table at the time when they could still derive the result from bit-operations on binary numbers. Memorizing some 40 or so combinations seems more practicable, esp. that derivation always takes time and we make use of the multiplication table thousands of times in a lifetime. Here memorization saves hours and days in the lifetime perspective. Brain armed with rich factual and inferential knowledge will associate the most remote ideas and derive the most unexpected conclusions. Through a conscious control over this rich reasoning process, we have built the present civilization.

Knowledge that assists creativity

Creativity is based on association of ideas. It is helpful to be born with a creative brain that keeps spewing new ideas in all circumstances. However, creativity can also be assisted. When you master a great deal of facts and rules in areas adjacent to the problem that you try to creatively solve or elaborate upon, your creativity gets enhanced. If you employ incremental learning, the association of random ideas will be a norm throughout the process.

All innovation in the history of science and technology is based on association. Forgetful memory can be helped with external sources of knowledge and each major scientific breakthrough is based on a series of smaller steps, many of which will be based on hours of search, trial-and-error and experimentation. The brain armed with extensive knowledge is more likely to come up with the needed associations. As in problem solving, inferential knowledge is also particularly valuable in creative efforts. The rules that you know, help you derive new truths, and associate these with all your current knowledge.

Two ideas do not come together to produce a great invention unless they sit in the same head. They either have to be called up at the same time or one has to come unexpectedly from the outside:

- Archimedes stepped into a bath and immediately associated the fact with all he knew about weight and buoyancy. Thousands of Greeks at his time failed to make the link. This was not solely because of their less lively minds. It was mostly because of their lack of understanding of hydrostatics

- Isaac Newton is said to have been hit by an apple that produced an immediate use of his knowledge of physics and mathematics to enhance his three famous laws of motion published in Principia by the laws of gravity. Even though the story cannot be verified, it makes for a good example of creative association

- James Watt is rumored to have watched a kettle boil to combine this inspiration with his knowledge of engineering to improve upon the Newcomen steam engine. This association changed the industry upside down in the course of the hundred years that followed

SuperMemo can help you be creative not only by combining various pieces of knowledge in your mind. It can help you generate new ideas while making repetitions! Creative associations do not come from the mere existence of two pieces of knowledge in your brain. Those two pieces of knowledge have to light up at the same time. Only this way can your brain make a connection. Strangely, a repetition related to genetically modified tomato can light up memories related to tomato juice, cucumbers, genetic disorders, take-home dinner, flu or even the silent Mars Polar Lander. If your collection combines knowledge pertaining to different subject domains, the stream of new ideas and unexpected associations coming to your mind may surprise you!

Incremental learning vs. human progress

Incremental learning has a potential to boost your knowledge and boost mankind’s potential to solve major problems of the day. However, in the long perspective, the role of human learning will be lessened by the development of artificial intelligence.

Knowledge and history

Throughout the ages, knowledge was the cornerstone of human progress. From Stone Age to Information Age, in pain, we have built a tiny oasis of civilization in ruthless expanses of the evolving universe. The history of the mankind is made of billions of individual lives that keep on sparking and fading. Born of self-preservation instincts imprinted by evolution, history books paint a picture of a constant string of wars, conflict of interest, loss and gain of influences, lust for power and submission to weaknesses of human nature. On the other hand, the greatest achievement of the evolution, the rational mind, kept on contributing to new findings, discoveries, technologies and philosophies. Progress has always hinged on discovering new truths and preserving them for posterity in form of stories, solutions, tools, books, and other carriers of information. Knowledge is the basis of human power, yet it constantly struggles with two forces that regularly diminish it: death andforgetting. We can preserve knowledge in books and other forms of information storage. However, this knowledge translates to value only then when it is used by the creative power of the human brain. The limitations of the human brain will remain a bottleneck of progress for many years to come. We will develop artificially intelligent knowledge processors not earlier than in a decade or two.

Knowledge and death

Death poses an ageless challenge to educating new generations. Years of hard work needed to gain knowledge on professorial level are obliterated in a single act of death. Newborns need to go through years of education before they are able to access, read, and comprehend this text. They all have to struggle with basic literacy skills, lessons of safe sex and teen pregnancy, lessons on superiority of altruism over egoism, the difference between wise and not-so-wise choices, existential questions, etc. Although constant reeducation may contribute to gaining a fresh perspective in each generation, it is also painfully wasteful. As yet, there is no efficient remedy to the death of knowledge. All we can do is to attach more weight to healthy lifestyle and health research. Those two promote longevity of knowledge in a single generation.

Knowledge and forgetting

Forgetting is a natural process that makes it possible to efficiently use the limited memory space of the brain. We forget to dispose of knowledge deemed less important in order to make space for knowledge of higher importance. Currently we have only a limited control over what we remember and what we forget. Today, the most important tool that we can use to prevent forgetting is practice. We can minimize time needed for practice by using spaced repetition (i.e. learning technique based on computing optimum intervals between repetitions). Spaced repetition is the key to maximizing knowledge within a single human lifetime.

Immortal knowledge

Artificial intelligence is our best hope for approaching immortal knowledge. It can nearly eliminate the problem of death (except for the heat death of the universe or factors that we cannot foresee today, e.g. the collapse of space, and the like). Artificial intelligence can also eliminate the problem of forgetting (at least within the bounds of the available storage). Some forgetting is needed to shape crisp associative knowledge, but that is a welcome phenomenon that leads to more applicable knowledge. Despite great hopes we might have about artificial intelligence, the best path towards immortal knowledge must still rely today on the use of the human brain. This is why we believe that incremental learning is so vital for further human progress.

Incremental reading is an extension of traditional book reading

Someone remarked: “If Gutenberg was a blessing then incremental reading might be a curse!“. Is incremental reading an attack on traditional books? If you read in pieces and with endless interruption, does it not destroy the storyline?

Whether incremental reading is a curse or a blessing depends on the way it is employed. There is no sharp transition between traditional reading and incremental reading. In the simplest case, you can use incremental reading exactly in the same way as you would read a book. Partitioning of texts and interruptions are not compulsory. You can read the entire text from top to the bottom without a single interruption. This would make sense if you needed a storyline for context, and did not want to bother with committing it to long-term memory. If you do take breaks or skip portions of texts or change the natural sequence of reading, it all happens in situations that have their counterparts in the world of books:

- Interruptions: you can read an entire book in a single evening, but very often you take breaks and read a book in portions on a daily basis. You may even put it back on a shelf in a busy period and return after a few weeks

- Multiple subjects: it is not unusual to read more than one book in parallel. You may pick one that matches your mood for a given evening, or read portions of different books on the same day

- Changing the sequence of reading: many readers are tempted to peek at the end of the book for its ending. Or browse back to earlier chapters to check some details that failed to register in prior reading

- Deleting portions of the book: deleting portions of the text in incremental reading is analogous to dropping them from your memory through forgetting once you read a book. The book is still on the shelf, the original electronic article may still exist in your archive, but your collection or your memory retain only highlights that may get sparser as weeks go by. Years after the original reading you may retain only single quotes or golden thoughts. The rest is gone

In other words, in extreme cases, there may be no difference between traditional and incremental reading. Gutenberg’s blessing is safe. If you believe interruptions or multiplicity of subjects are beneficial, you can employ them at greater ease that it is the case with book reading. At the other extreme, you may wish to take on thousands of independent articles, make interruptions a norm, focus your reading only on portions that you deem most important, etc.

A rule of the thumb is: use traditional reading when you read stories or you read for enjoyment. Use incremental reading to process learning material, textbooks, notes, or scientific literature that you need to remember for life (or at least for many months).

Knowledge acquisition: Areas of optimization

There are seven main areas where the learning process can be enhanced. Incremental learning plays a role in each, however, the first two areas will benefit only through your growing experience, and ability to quantify your progress:

1. access to knowledge: with the advent of the world wide web, we all have information literally at our fingertips. Searching for knowledge with Google is fast, easy and accurate. Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia in human history. Access to knowledge is no longer a bottleneck of human learning. It virtually became a non issue! Web’s quality and role will for continue increasing exponentially as more and more people appreciate its potential and contribute to its growth. There are still many complementary sources of information that compete successfully with the Internet. However, it is only a question of time before you will be safely able to rely on the Internet as your sole source of information. The great benefit of reading the web, as opposed to reading the books, is that the hypertext nature of the web enforces a very compact and usually self-explaining nature of individual articles. A jump to a randomly selected page in an average book will leave you confused due to the context-dependence of the material. On the other hand, it is less likely the same confusion will trouble you in a random jump to a selected page of an equivalent material placed on the web. Web authors usually put more effort to add contexts to the page (at least in the form of hyperlinks). In other words, it is easier to build quality knowledge by reading single pages of the web than by reading single pages of paper books. We are getting closer to the ideals of incremental life-long learning as opposed to thorough-review learning which for many ends with the end of school years. In the busy days of modern society, few can afford a thorough review of their rusty knowledge in individual fields. It is much easier to fix the gaps incrementally: today an article on the structure of the atom, tomorrow an article on a healthy diet, etc. And all that strictly adjusted to individual’s interests and professional priorities

2. selecting knowledge: you will face the need to fill the gaps in your knowledge in many more areas than your time permits or your memory makes possible. You can ask SuperMemo to help you scrupulously note down and prioritize all areas of knowledge that need an enhancement! In SuperMemo, you are the master of what you learn and what you neglect. Your ability to select valuable information will grow in proportion to the acquired knowledge. Incremental learning helps you quantify your knowledge and extrapolate into the future. This will help you be more selective in choosing your learning materials.

3. reading: this is the first stage where knowledge makes an actual intimate contact with the brain. Traditionally, it is streamed into memory in a more or less linear manner (i.e. paragraph after paragraph). Incremental learning helps you delinearize this process and optimize reading by enhancing knowledge selection and prioritization concurrently with reading. For example, you should be able to say “This paragraph can be processed later” or “This paragraph requires utmost attention right now” or “This paragraph can be skipped for good even if I decide to read the article again” or “I want to read this paragraph again in three days and in more detail” or “I want to mark this paragraph with lower priority and come to it only after all higher priority paragraphs have been processed“, etc.

4. representing knowledge: the way in which you present knowledge will affect comprehension and retention (i.e. how well you remember). Things that are simple are easier to understand. Things that are simple are also easier to remember. Many people do not realize the degree to which simplicity can affect learning. Many people doubt that even the most complex material can be presented in a very simple way. Einstein noticed that “it should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid”

5. remembering knowledge: SuperMemo helps you eliminate the problem of forgetting. You will base all learning on spaced repetition that SuperMemo pioneered a quarter of a century ago. SuperMemo produces immense savings in time by scheduling review of the studied material only then when the review is necessary (see: Introduction to SuperMemo)

6. life cycle of knowledge: knowledge in your collection and in your memory keeps on evolving and maturing. This will involve continual rewording, reprioritizing, and re-associating pieces of knowledge. You will often give up portions of knowledge that become outdated or lose their high-priority status. You will apply the rules of knowledge representation that will make knowledge easy to remember. Your knowledge will also become more associative in time. In other words, it will become a more suitable ground for making intelligent choices

7. using knowledge: knowledge translates to value when it is properly used. In the long-run, skills discussed in this article will indirectly help you become more creative and skillful in using your own knowledge. Not surprisingly, your skills needed to efficiently use knowledge are also part of knowledge itself and tend to grow spontaneously as your knowledge increases

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost of knowledge

Each piece of knowledge stored in SuperMemo adds to the total cost of learning in terms of time. If knowledge is well-formulated, we can estimate that a single element will be repeated from 8-20 times in a lifetime. If a single repetition time falls in the range from 3 seconds to 15 seconds, we could conclude that the expected lifetime cost of a single item ranges from 24 seconds to 5 minutes. SuperMemo has a statistical measure called Cost. It measures the total time cost of a single memorized element. In a well-managed long-term learning process, this cost is usually estimated at 2-3 minutes/item in a 10-year bracket. This is then more than the theoretical prediction due to the fact that each collection contains a small subset of so-called leeches which dramatically increase the average cost/item (note that leeches can easily be detected and removed from the learning process).The rational criterion for deciding if a piece of knowledge should be memorized by means of SuperMemo is to judge the benefits of having the given piece constantly available in memory. If the benefits do not seem to add up to more than 10 minutes, the student might simply not add an item to SuperMemo. With a dose of practice, this analysis becomes a semi-automatic process, and should painlessly blend with your life

Cost

Cost of a single well-structured item in lifetime ranges roughly from 24 seconds to 5 minutes. At any given moment it may be approximated for a 30-year bracket, by multiplying Future repetitions (in element data) by Avg time (in learning statistics). SuperMemo displays this value in the element data window. If your item is ill-structured (i.e. difficult to remember), this cost may bloat! To eliminate ill-structured items use leech analysis.

Benefit

Each piece of knowledge in your collections should be associated with a tangible benefit. Only you can accurately guess the value. For example, the value of memorizing the opening hours of your gym in a given time might be approximated by multiplying (1) the probability you will choose wrong hours by (2) the time-cost of missing the gym. For example, if you believe that the probability is 25% and the cost of choosing wrong hours is 40 minutes, the cost of knowing the opening hours is around 10 minutes. In such a case, memorizing the opening hours will be cheaper than missing the gym. However, if the probability is sufficiently low or the time loss sufficiently small, you should not add opening hours to SuperMemo. For example, if the probability is 10% and time loss is 3 minutes, you are not likely to recover your learning investment! There are naturally less clear-cut cases in-between. If you are not sure if you should add a piece of knowledge to SuperMemo, add it with sufficiently low priority. With overflow tools (e.g. auto-postpone, auto-sort, etc.), you can drag along less valuable pieces of knowledge at little cost.

Priorities

You will quickly realize that there are awfully many pieces of information that pass the cost-benefit criterion. You cannot ever hope to learn all this information. This is actually optimistic. This means that with a good selection of knowledge, you can gain far more than just a few minutes on memorizing the gym hours. You may gain untold hours by learning things that transform your life. Your best tool in making sure you always focus on the most beneficial material is to use the priority queue. If you have too many items to remember, those of lower priority will get a less meticulous treatment and will carry a higher probability of forgetting. However, this also means that they will benefit from the spacing effect and you will learn more of such items at higher speed (despite lower retention).

Selecting knowledge

The microscopic capacity of the human brain has not prevented it from building the present civilization as we know it. The human power comes from:

1. collective effort - a billion heads is more than one

2. specialization of labor - all collective tasks are subject to top-down functional decomposition and a single brain usually only needs to process a fraction of information at a time

3. knowledge selection skills - the associative power of the human brain combined with the selective nature of forgetting help us retain memories that are actually most useful in problem solving

Incremental learning is a great way to combat forgetting. However, forgetting plays an important role in our lives. It runs a valuable garbage collection on knowledge we acquire daily. If the power of forgetting is diminished (as it is the case in incremental learning), your responsibilities in the area of selecting knowledge increase manifold!

A piece of information that occupies just several bytes of your hard disk may carry a relative value that my translate to a net gain of millions of dollars as well as a net loss of millions of dollars. It may also carry no value whatsoever. For example, a sentence written in French “SuperMemo vous aide a mémoriser et apprendre diverses informations comme une langue, des chiffres, etc.” may be of nearly zero value for someone who does not know French. At the same time, an item related to a Heimlich maneuver can save the life of a family member. We know that the expected payoff equals the value of the payoff multiplied by its probability. Therefore, the low probability of a family member choking and the probability of actual successful application of the maneuver make the value of “Heimlich item” a fraction of the value of the human life. At the same time, even minor errors in medical knowledge of a physician can actually cost somebody’s life and carry substantial negative value!

Readers are leaders

You must have heard it from your parents or teachers that “Readers are leaders“. Harry Truman added a pessimistic twist to that claim: “Not every reader is a leader, but every leader is a reader“. That qualification tells you that reading is not a panacea, and that making reading smart is vital. With the advent of the web, Wikipedia, blogosphere, and other sources of knowledge, access to information is easier than ever. This also means that information becomes more overwhelming. There are always too many things to read. And it is hard to select from a myriad of essential sources. This is no longer a world with a hundred books of which you needed to pick five. Now you literally have thousands of menu options for a single meal. Old bookworm dilemmas are now even more painful. Search the web for solutions for book selection, and you will literally find dozens of blogs with advice. However, most of the advice is based on volatile skills that are hard to master. You need to become an expert in book selection, in speed-reading, in skimming, in skim-or-read decisions, in highlight-and-review strategies, in margin notes and in underlines. For traditional massive reading mastery (without SuperMemo), you would need to go for the extreme: reading in the toilet, reading on the train, reading on your mobile phone, making use of your dead time, etc. You would need to ruthlessly control youremotions with “not to read” decisions, or “not to finish” decisions, or “not to re-read” decisions, etc.

If you master incremental learning, you will not solve the problem of information overload. However, you will systematically address all issues that pester massive readers. Once you embark on the only rational reading road, you will free your mind from all the dilemmas and stresses involved in reading. Incremental learning helps you focus on learning itself!

As for the bathroom time, incremental learning can free that for creative thinking. After all, you also want to ponder your own ideas, not only process other people’s output.

Does incremental reading slow down mastering complex subjects?

Could incremental reading slow down or hamper learning complex subjects such as quantum mechanics? Is complex knowledge based on just “remembering passages” or does it go well beyond it. Any form of interruption or delay while working on many things in parallel can potentially slow down this process. Many people believe that incremental reading is good for cramming, but not for serious learning, esp. when complex subject matter is concerned.

Example Opinion 1: tackling quantum mechanics

Here is an example opinion of someone who never tried incremental learning:

I believe that incremental reading (IR) may slow down or hamper learning complex subjects that require deeper understanding — as opposed to superficial remembering. From what I’m told, in IR, the student spends but a few seconds on a passage related to one subject, and then jumps to another, completely unrelated subject. Such switching among disparate subjects makes it difficult, if not impossible, to engage in deeper thoughts and thus to discover deeper truths beyond the superficial remembering of passages. When I read, I look for concepts and methods that underlie the necessarily descriptive language used to convey them, and I try to imagine their applicability in my other pursuits. In other words, discovering deeper truths requires deeper thoughts. The latter are difficult to reach if only a few seconds are spent on a subject at a time. As a practical aside, technical papers in hard sciences and engineering are peppered with notational inconsistencies among different authors, different research groups, and different journals. The same symbols may mean different things in different scientific papers. Similarly, different authors may use different symbols to denote the same quantity. Sometimes the differences are gross and easy to spot, and sometimes they are only subtle. When reading one paper at a time, the reader familiarizes him/herself with the terminology and notation, and can follow the line of reasoning while recognizing the subtleties. Having a few dozen (or hundreds!) articles read in parallel, frequently switching among them, creates a nightmare scenario of confusion where the meaning is lost in the jungle of various notations and subtle terminology differences. This makes it impossible to follow the line of reasoning in any one of the papers. Below are a couple of (imperfect) metaphors that may convey the sense of loss when trying to apply IR to learning complex subjects and to discovering deeper truths:

1. If you are a wine connoisseur, imagine that you are only allowed to smell the wine, but that you are not allowed to drink it, or even to put it in your mouth. How good would your knowledge of wine be? With practice, you would probably learn to distinguish various wineries, age, etc. You may even be more efficient at it, and be able to do it in record time. Yet, I venture a guess that you would feel something missing, that you would feel somehow cheated, that you would feel that you don’t know all that there is to know about wine. And rightfully so. Same with IR. You just ‘smell’ the knowledge, but you never ‘taste’ it. It may be enough if your goal is to learn a foreign language. But some areas require that you dig deeper if you want the real insight, the real truth.

2. Physical exercise. A well-rounded routine has both cardiovascular and resistance training elements to it. IR is like having only the high-intensity cardio. Sure, if you stick with cardio, after a while you will be able to deliver a small package across town in record time — and that may be all you aspire to. However, it will not give you the upper body strength to help move a 400-kg optics bench. Same with IR: you may impress your audience with the breadth of your knowledge, but you will have to leave the heavy intellectual lifting to others.

The above reasoning can easily be proven false. We can imagine two extremes:

- all learning is done using traditional textbook processing with all the academic arsenal of teachers, practise, reasoning, interaction, labwork, and more

- all learning is purely incremental with no breaks for free thought, calculations on the margin, walking around, conversation, etc.

It easy to show that both are flawed. For example, traditional learning is deprived of spaced repetition, while pure incremental learning may be seen as deprived of conversation or lab practise. Clearly, the optimum falls somewhere in the mix between the two extremes. Incremental learning is a supplementary tool in well-rounded education. It is not supposed to monopolize your day and your thinking. It should not be seen as a replacement, but as an enhancement. As such, it is up to you to find your optimum.

Incremental reading is all you want it to be. It can be speed-reading, cram-reading, or mass-reading. It all depends on the priority criteria which you choose. For that reasons, it would be best described as a reading management technique. As such it is indispensable independent of the complexity of the studied matter. On one hand, you can speed-read articles faster than in conventional speed-reading and yet leave vital paragraphs for future review. On the other hand, you can meticulously dismantle individual paragraphs and convert them into classical questions-answer knowledge that will stay with your for ever. In addition, you can freely manipulate the volume of the material flowing into the reading/learning process. You can focus on a hundred most important articles or you can opt for thousands. Naturally, in the latter case, your time allocation for individual articles will be minute. For example, if you import 10,000 articles to SuperMemo, you might end up with 50,000 to 100,000 extracts within a year of 1-hour daily reading. In such circumstances, low priority articles will indeed linger for months in the process. Naturally, this is exactly the purpose of incremental reading: focus on what is important without neglecting anything that falls within your area of interest. If your focus changes, you can use search and navigation tools to speed up the review of most important portions of your reading material.

Incremental reading is universal in textbook learning. Whatever complex concepts you need to analyze, and whatever computations you need to make on the margins, you can do in parallel with incremental reading of the textbook (assuming you have an electronic version). An old rule says: whatever you need to remember for life (or at least months), process incrementally (to improve memory, boost understanding, and save time in the long term). Whatever you need at the moment, for the sake of understanding the subject, process in bulk (non-incrementally). By combining the two, you can get the most of your learning.

Metaphorically, a pencil is a useful tool that can enhance your life. You will not want to replace your computer with a pencil, or use a pencil while cooking. However, you can still enhance your life by having the pencil handy. Needless to say, we believe, incremental reading is far more useful than a pencil.

The presented reasoning is not only wrong, it is also based on a few misconceptions about incremental learning:

- It is not true that, in incremental reading, you spend only a few seconds on each topic. The time depends on your needs. It may be a few seconds or it can be an entire day (e.g. before an exam, when doing research, or when being consumed with one’s learning passions)

- It is conceivable that an incremental reading novice would suffer from the lack of knowledge of the toolset and get lost in the process thus making it more confusing than it is the case with standard textbook learning. Weighing up pros and cons should always consider an ideal case in which the student truly understands the methods of incremental learning. This often takes months of use. The learning process should begin with easier concepts and easier subjects before more complex subjects can be tackled.

- Some research papers are less suitable for incremental reading. Papers that require a vast use of working memory or a large investment in short-term memory are not suitable for incremental reading. Incremental reading is useful each time you study knowledge with lifetime application. Research papers with complex methodology and rich in new specific symbols and notations are not suitable. You should read such papers in your own way and leave just a few notes (“deep thoughts”) in SuperMemo. Use your working memory while it lasts and dump it right after reading. Naturally, for massive learning, you will target texts that produce a minimum discardable burden of short-term memory, i.e. are well-written with concise formulations focused on lifelong value.

- For novices, knowledge acquired with incremental reading may not taste as sweet as for a professional. In the latter case, the “taste” may be exquisite due to a well-established contextual knowledge and solid semantic context that relies strongly on long-term memories. A seasoned incremental reader will have a totally opposite feelings about the wine metaphor. Not only will incremental reading allow of sensing the intricate fabric of the full spectrum of volatiles. Instead of just a single evening, the taste, aroma and pleasure will last a lifetime!

- The effects of incremental reading will always depend on the goals. If the goal is to impress some audience, it will likely be accomplished. However, if the plan is to do some “heavy intellectual lifting”, incremental reading will provide a rich toolset to enhance that process and provide you with solid long-term knowledge grounding needed for the job.

Example Opinion 2: struggling with basic physics

Here is another example opinion of someone who tried incremental learning but found it difficult:

I think incremental reading is either very difficult or impossible to use when learning some concepts of physics. For example, I have the following text about the Earth and the Sun, how would you handle this with incremental reading?

The Earth is moving very very slowly away from the Sun. This happens for two reasons. The first is that the Sun is constantly losing mass because of the solar wind. As the mass of the Sun decreases its pull on the Earth decreases and so the Earth moves slightly further away. The second reason is to do with tidal forces. In exactly the same way that the Moon is slowly moving away from the Earth, the Earth is very slowly moving away from the Sun. In the Earth-Moon case the Moon pulls on the Earth creating tides and slowing the Earth’s rotation very slightly, making the day longer. This action has a reaction - the Moon’s orbit is speeded up. If something travels faster it must move outwards to remain in an orbit and so the Moon slowly drifts away from us at a rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. The same situation happens with the Sun but the Earth’s influence on the Sun is much smaller than the Moon’s influence on the Earth. The result is the Earth’s tiny tiny drift away from the Sun

The example isn’t much harder to process than other pieces of knowledge suitable for incremental reading. For success in similar cases one needs an encyclopedic text or a degree of editorial effort to dismantle portions of more elaborate prose. The presented example poses two obstacles:

1. Implicit enumeration. The text mentions two reasons why the Earth moves away from the Sun but it does not name them in an explicit sentence. One needs to read the entire passage to find out the second reason.

2. Explaining by analogy. The effect of tidal forces on the Sun is explained by describing similar forces created by the Moon. You cannot extract the “second reason” without including and understanding the “Moon example context“.

Here is how the presented text would be handled with incremental reading (note the editorial effort as well as the need to entirely rephrase one of the sentences):

Some authors make incremental reading very difficult by assuming a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader or, as it is the case here, loading student’s working memory with a great deal of data rather than building knowledge gradually (i.e. from the ground up). In the discussed example of quantum mechanics, the basic vocabulary needed to process any meaningful text is pretty extensive and capitalizes on manybranches of physics and mathematics. In addition, good understanding of all concepts requires a great deal of mathematical practice that goes beyond linear reading.

Incrementalism and interruption are not compulsory

If you love to go through texts from cover to cover without a stop, and always find it hard to stop reading a book before sleep, you may still benefit from incremental reading.

There are no incremental readers who did not begin from misgivings about interruption. Paradoxically, the stronger your misgivings, the better candidate for a good incremental reader you might be!

A popular misconception is that there are impatient people who are predisposed to be incremental readers - let’s call them sippers - and those who love to devour knowledge in large chunks - let’s call them gulpers. The truth is that all creative individuals are of a gulper nature. Incrementalism is both a skill and a habit all gulpers may learn over time.

Nobody loves SuperMemo as of the first day. It may take a few weeks to notice its power. And still, as we do not have sensors of the speed of forgetting, you need a dose of rational mathematical appreciation of what SuperMemo does to your brain. You cannot easily sense the power of knowledge and how fast it is being undermined by forgetting.

Incremental reading takes far longer to be appreciated than SuperMemo itself. To employ SuperMemo, you need to learn only two operations (Add new and Learn). For incremental reading, you need a toolset that keeps growing and improving over the years of use. Yes! Even after a few years of learning, you will discover new ways you can speed up your own learning with incremental reading. It may take a year before you might notice first signs of addiction to incremental reading. A benign form of addiction, mind you, with few negative side effects.

The paradoxical tendency of “gulpers” to become good incremental readers comes from their hunger for knowledge. The fact that you cannot stop reading is a powerful expression of this hunger and it is the primary driving force that will help you become an addictive reader. What you might be missing still is the understanding of the power of incremental reading and the hunger to “switch for more“. Incremental reading will help you develop a hunger for maximizing the value of information you are processing at any given moment.

You can begin incremental reading today without ever having to stop reading an article that you find fascinating.

You can read all articles from front to back and only use incremental reading tools for prioritizing articles and extracting most important sentences and converting them to clozes. In other words, you do not need incrementalism to achieve solid retention of knowledge. An ordinary web surfer has only two alternatives when encountering an article that seems worth reading: (A) Fascinating, let’s read, and (B) Not fascinating enough. Perhaps I will read some other time. In contrast, an incremental reader can determine the priority of the article and always read only the articles from the top of the current priority list (perhaps with a user-defined degree of randomization). Moreover, at any time, he or she can say: Interesting, but not as much as I thought. Let’s downgrade the priority and come back later (if ever).

A gulper is driven by a natural neural mechanism that underlies all human progress: curiosity. The same mechanism can be used to magnify incrementalism: curiosity of what article or paragraph comes next. Once you develop a healthy incremental reading process, you will add another natural neural mechanism: impatience. Impatience is also a buttress of progress. We do not like long stretches of low efficiency. We like instant gratification of success and the bigger the success the better. In incremental reading, you are constantly driven by curiosity and yet you itch-to-switch as soon as the text you are reading does not bring sufficient value-per-time. The healthier your incremental reading process, the more value per second you can extract. You will develop a sense of the realistic average value stream, and each time you fall below that expectation, you will add up to the incremental nature of reading (even if the fault is yours, not the text author’s, e.g. when the gaps in your knowledge produce poor comprehension). By combining curiosity with impatience, you can convert from a gulper to a sipper. And still you will be able to read top-quality articles top-to-bottom without interruption. Incremental reading helps you prioritize by content instead of reacting to transient evaluative impressions.

You will notice that incremental attitude is a habit you grow as your technical and parsing skills improve. Rarely will you delete lower quality articles, but these will fade in priority and may indefinitely linger in the process. As a result, you will maximize the educational effects of every precious second you spent on learning.

As an incremental reader, you might gradually develop a dislike of old-style books (as opposed to importable e-books and articles). If you choose to read a book, it is as if you said: “this is the most important reading material in the whole world“. Then the whole series of paragraphs in the book are considered the most important paragraphs to read in their precise sequence as they appear in the book. You give the author of a book God-like powers to stream information into your brain in a flawless, omniscient, and omnipotent way.

Incremental learning for perfectionists

If you are a perfectionist, you may initially have problems with accepting the chaos of incremental learning. You may wonder why you should leave your cloze deletions unfinished before they look perfectly adorned with fonts, stylesheets, and pictures.

If you give incremental learning a more determined try, you will understand that the opposite is true: perfectionists should love incremental learning! Your perfectionist nature should accept the overriding rule: maximum quality knowledge in minimum time. It is not the beauty of clozes in your collection that counts, but the beauty of knowledge in your mind. For a skillful student, incremental learning is based on a set of perfectly-formed strict and rigid rules that guarantee the maximum speed of knowledge acquisition. It is true that some of these rules can make you uneasy at first. If you see a sentence that qualifies for a cloze, the rule is: execute the cloze deletion and defer worrying about its exact formulation to its first repetition. The mere choice of the cloze keyword will leave sufficient traces in your memory to qualify as a repetition. In such circumstances, perfecting the formulation of the cloze will become art for art’s stake. A higher level rule is: minimum work for maximum memory effect. Therefore, you will improve the formulation of the cloze as soon as you proceed with the first repetition. And again, you will do only as much work as it is necessary to successfully complete a single repetition act. Again you give up details and frills. Ultimately, your cloze will become perfectly formulated, perfectly prioritized, and perfectly placed in your knowledge tree. Alternatively, it will be deleted or left lingering in your “to do” subset. It is the perfect rules of incremental learning and the perfect learning results that should feed your perfectionist needs, not the perfect “look” of your learning material.

Many people tend to hold the world wide web in contempt calling it the “human information garbage dump”. This attitude makes it hard to utilize the web as the “goldmine of human knowledge”. Tim Berners-Lee created “perfect rules” (HTML, HTTP) for knowledge dissemination by the populace. We can adapt our own “perfect rules” for mining the web. Incremental learning uses “perfect rules” to convert web data into golden knowledge. As a perfectionist, you should not worry about the chaos of the web or chaos of your collection. What really matters is the perfect golden end-result: wisdom!

Finally, if you still cannot live with imperfectly formulated clozes, nothing prevents formulating them perfectly. The formulations may be more satisfying to your perception, but you will, naturally, learn at a slower rate.

Incremental reading is not an attention destroyer

In incremental learning, it is very important to make the right choice of the learning material. Many texts or videos are unsuitable for incremental processing. SuperMemo user who never tried incremental learningwrote:

It is possible that article structure and quality do matter that much in incremental reading because the real learning bottleneck is the human brain (speed of cortex plasticity)? What if you can only absorb X items of knowledge each day — if you try to do more, you do something bad to your brain? Here’s one idea: If you overload your brain with new stuff, it won’t have the time to form meaningful connections between the things you know, so your knowledge may be reduced to the ability to answer gameshow-like questions.
Solving any significant problem requires periods of prolonged concentration. I fear that an information addiction (200 new tidbits per day) leads to attention deficit. Your brain is used to getting something shiny and new every 15 seconds (a new tweet, new funny pic, new headline, etc.), so when you tell it to work on one thing for 4 hours, it doesn’t listen. I think I was able to concentrate more on one thing in times before Web surfing.

So, to put a tabloid spin on it, incremental reading could be the ultimate attention destroyer!!!

There is a lot of truth in the above reasoning in reference to attention, memory bottlenecks, “meaningful connections”, etc. However, comparing SuperMemo to Twitter or Facebook as used by Internet junkies is very inaccurate! The reward in incremental reading is based on quality learning, not “something shiny or something funny”. Naturally, nothing prevents “shiny/funny” things to be imported to SuperMemo. This is why the nature of the ultimate reward will also depend on one’s personality and self-discipline.

When employed along the recommended rules: incremental reading should dramatically increase the attention (as explained in Advantages of incremental learning).

Learning speed bottleneck

Cortex plasticity is indeed the bottleneck in the learning process. All speed-reading and speed-learning efforts may go to naught if you do not employ spaced repetition, which ultimately determines the speed of establishing long-term memories. Remember that in incremental reading, the volume of the material may be very high, however, the ultimate number of items entering the learning process, in the ideal case, is relatively small (usu. 10-20 per day, not 200!). It simply takes lots of time to fish for golden knowledge that will bring best value in the long term.

Overloading memory and the role of sleep

The existence of the memory bottleneck is the direct consequence of the overload concern. You can overload your learning process with excess information, however, you are unlikely to “overload your long-term memory”. The processes of forgetting and garbage collection executed in sleep have evolved precisely to prevent this problem. However much you try to learn excess facts, forgetting will clean up the excess, and memory optimization in sleep will ensure you develop all necessary “meaningful connections”. Naturally, this will happen only if you get all sleep that you need (i.e. avoid using alarm clock, sleeping pills, staying up late, etc.).

For more see: Neural optimization in sleep

Learning vs. problem solving

It is true that solving problems requires high concentration. However, in the ideal world, you should devote separate time slots to (1) learning and (2) problem solving. In Covey’s terminology, your learning boosts the Production Capacity, while your problem solving time is your Production time. Naturally, you can marry the two slots when problem solving occurs in conditions of information deficit. Incremental reading is an ideal tool for such situations. You can combine the inflow of new information with creative efforts and problem solving while retaining maximum focus on the problem at hand. This is explained inAdvantages of incremental learning: Creativity. You can optimize the degree of monothematic focus by using various tools of incremental reading, esp. Search&Review as well as branch review.

See also: Incremental problem solving.

Internet addiction

Internet distractions can be focus destroyers when working with SuperMemo. However, this is more a matter of self-discipline than an inherent problem associated with SuperMemo. It is up to you to decide if you wish to stray to Facebook or Twitter. Incremental reading may encourage a degree of straying (e.g. to import supplementary material from Wikipedia and/or dictionaries). The whole concept of the priority queue was developed precisely to counteract the cost of such straying. In incremental reading you stray, import, prioritize and… forget (about the excursion to the web). You may visit 20 pages, but instead of wasting time, you import and prioritize. You are back onto your focused path in minutes. The whole process can be under your rational control and the web may become an ally rather than an enemy. Metaphorically speaking, an Internet junkie is constantly distracted with shiny titbits, while incremental reader focuses on fishing for golden knowledge.

Incremental reading boosts attention

Incremental reading increases attention by letting you focus on a manageable portions of knowledge without feeling overwhelmed, without straying, without getting stuck on harder material, without worrying that you might miss important pieces when speed-reading, etc. Your best way to experience that improvement is to try incremental reading. However, you should know that the effects will not be instant. You will need to invest a lot of time in learning the tools, and then even more time in honing your strategies and learning about your own memory and reasoning. Few incremental readers become truly enthusiastic in their first months of learning.

Article quality matters in learning

In incremental reading, you will quickly develop skills needed to instantly differentiate between high quality articles and articles that are full of fluff and wasteful prose. You will indeed fish for catchy headlines, meaningful sections, minimum off-topic commentary, etc. Article quality will determine your ability to employ speed-reading, and to quickly prioritize your material. This has nothing to do with instant gratification obtained from social media, instant news, and other net distractions.

Can you really read thousands of articles at the same time?

A visitor to supermemo.com commented on incremental learning claims:

That skepticism is understandable, and yet we stick with the original claim: you can indeed read thousands of articles at the same time. This is because reading can be understood as a process or as anact. No one can make a sane claim of multiple reading acts at the same time. In incremental reading, only one article receives a laser focus at any given moment of time. Few students read more than 50 articles in a single day, and they rarely read them all in their entirety. However, they may easily read or skim a few thousand articles in a month, and keep hundreds of thousands of articles in the incremental learningprocess. In that sense reading thousands of articles at the same time is an accurate if somewhat enticing description.

To understand incremental reading, you need to understand SuperMemo (or repetition spacing in general), as well as the effects of intermittent reading on memory. Reading in chunks without the help of the underlying learning process based on spaced repetition indeed makes little sense. However, once you master and understand the techniques of incremental reading, you will get the effect opposite to the one expected: not only will you not lose the track of the big picture, you will keep a lasting, durable and coherent memory image of whatever you found important in the processed articles.

In a well-managed incremental learning process, the big picture is retained in a state of better coherence than it is the case in traditional learning.

Incremental reading vs. memory interference

You may have read about interference in learning. When students learn two things one after another, they perform worse than in cases where they focus on one thing. This might sound like a reason to disqualify incremental reading as an effective learning method.

It is true that interference can ruin learning. If you read about a subject without fully understanding it and follow it with another subject that is confusingly similar in nature, you will indeed perform worse intests. However, this effect is much less pronounced if the first subject is studied with solid comprehension. Incremental reading makes it possible to read only as much as you understand. Then it encourages long-term retention by producing cloze deletions. Finally, it periodically rediscovers weaknesses in the learning process and fills the gap. When well executed, incremental reading produces an opposite effect. It minimizes interference by forcing you to resolve contradiction in your material. It ruthlessly punishes all cases of incomplete understanding. In classroom conditions, you can get a foggy pass at subject A, then worsen the fog by digging into subject B. In incremental reading, SuperMemo will force you to jump from A to B and back to A until the two form a harmonious body of knowledge withminimum interference and maximum connectivity. Note that the same research on interference produces diametrically different results when the interfering topics are subject to continual re-reading. Re-reading is frequent in SuperMemo and multiple active repetition of cloze deletions is a norm. The outcome of the experiment may also be obscured by adding a degree of novelty to old reviews which greatly improves attention. Better learning follows in the wake.

Why Wikipedia is better than Encyclopedia Britannica?

Wikipedia is better

- every month Wikipedia is richer and mainstream articles show an ever-decreasing error rate

- Wikipedia is better for incremental reading due to its structure determined by crowdsourcing

- some articles cannot be found in Britannica (e.g. search for “SuperMemo” or “incremental reading”)

Britannica is hard

Due to its style, Britannica is often not suitable for incremental reading. It is pleasant to read, it explains things, it digresses, it provides examples, however, it is not fact-packed and context-rich like crowdsourced Wikipedia.

Try working the following text with incremental reading. The text was taken from an article about sleep from Britannica:

In addition to the behavioral and physiological criteria already mentioned, subjective experience (in the case of the self) and verbal reports of such experience (in the case of others) are used at the human level to define sleep. Upon being alerted, one may feel or say, “I was asleep just then,” and such judgments ordinarily are accepted as evidence for identifying a prearousal state as sleep. Such subjective evidence, however, can be at variance with both behavioral classifications and sleep electrophysiology, raising interesting questions about how to define the true measure of sleep. Is sleep determined by objective or subjective evidence alone, or is it determined by some combination of the two? And what is the best way to measure such evidence? More generally, problems in defining sleep arise when evidence for one or more of the several criteria of sleep is lacking or when the evidence generated by available criteria is inconsistent. Do all animals sleep?

This piece begins with an ominous context-buster: “already mentioned“. It poses interesting questions. However, it will take a while for an incremental reader to find cloze keywords that would answer the most essential question of long term learning: What do I really want to remember for life from the passage I have just read?

Simple English Wikipedia is dangerous

Many users believe that Simple English Wikipedia is better for understanding problems than Wikipedia itself. However, simplified terminology leads to terminological imprecision. Even though the language is simpler, the problems presented may get a superficial or misleading treatment. Simple English Wikipedia might be an advantage if you want a short story of the Chinese Empire as opposed to a lengthy Wikipedia dissertation. However, if you try to understand complex economics or quantum physics, relying on simpler texts may backfire. Very often, you should rather struggle with complex terminology by importing supplementary material. Going the easy way may take you astray.

Incremental reading vs. the books

Incremental reading of electronic materials is superior to reading books or reading in the browser (given the same quality of the study material). All basic reading, bookmarks, and highlight methods start falling apart once the volume of books or articles increases beyond a certain level.

Without SuperMemo, you won’t easily prioritize, sort, organize, schedule, re-prioritize, search&review, etc. The whole SuperMemo “engine” in the background is the most important component in the process. For a larger volume of material, when reading in the browser, you will probably be just 5-10% as effective as with incremental reading (in the long run).

In incremental reading you can use the following tools:

Incremental reading is likely to reduce your tolerance for:

- texts with low information content (high prose, low fact)

- poorly structured texts
- texts with referential ambiguities
- texts with low context reference

- texts with poor information anchoring (needed for speed-reading)

Incremental reading will sharpen your skills in:

- text selection
- text prioritization
- semantic/structural processing
- mnemonic processing
- speed-reading

Incremental learning vs. the news

You will rather not want to use SuperMemo to process news!

Donald Rumsfeld claims to live by the rule: “First reports are always wrong“.

News carries knowledge that is usually valid in a short term only. Incremental learning is useful only for long-term memories. The greatest benefits of trying to process news with incremental learning is to realize how transient news is, and to moderate the craving for news by making it “old news” through the incremental approach.

These are the main reasons why news is a poor candidate for your learning material:

- knowledge that comes with the news is incomplete. If you hear “breaking news”, you know this is about news that is “broken”. It is incomplete and inaccurate. If you ever think of retaining it in your memory for long, come back to Wikipedia in a week, or in a month, or in a few years. The news becomes most useful when it becomes history. Most of the time, however, it all gets forgotten by the next “news cycle”

- knowledge that comes with the news is contradictory. If you happen to incrementally juxtapose news with old news, you will realize the extent to which people change their minds as new information becomes available. That evolution in thinking and opinion is probably the most interesting part of news.

- knowledge that comes with the news is scant. What was news yesterday might still be news today with some tiny change in the angle. News is repetitive and monopolized by single “hot” issue. If you watch news once a week, you will rarely miss anything important for your long-term perspective

- knowledge that comes with the news is trivial. Breaking news might be devoted entirely to a plane crash, or a bomb explosion. Unless you or your close ones are directly affected, you hardly ever become a better person by being intimate with the details of the tragedy. Understanding plane crashes or bomb explosions in general is far more relevant. A National Geographic documentary might be a better source of such knowledge. Unless this is your first ever encounter with crashes and bombs, you rarely learn anything of major significance. Your ability to change the world will better be enhanced with other sources of knowledge. Your optimization in this area will also help build a future with fewer bombs and fewer crashes.

News may have more value for you at younger ages when you still need to learn a lot about the world, or when you are trying to learn a new language and want to understand the news broadcast from another country. In such cases, use news mostly as the source of indications of what supplementary material should enter your learning process for you to comprehend the news better.

Unless you study journalism (and need to understand the process), or political sciences (incl. the impact of news on the public), or you just live and die by being up-to-date, you should limit your craving for news and focus on knowledge with long-term applicability.

Example: how breaking news breaks the news

Consider this funny episode from CNN that illustrates the obsession with “breaking news”. On a sunny Sunday of September 22, 2013, Fareed Zakaria spoke about Angela’s Merkel impact on Germany, and Europe:

Merkel has taken important steps to help Europe’s struggling economies, spending tens of billions of dollars directly and indirectly on them. On the other hand, Merkel has imposed austerity on much of Europe, which has been excessive and counterproductive. Her argument is that it is the only way to get governments like Greece and Italy to become more competitive. Now here’s the irony…

Now here is a real irony. The intelligent commentary was interrupted by the breaking news related to Angela Merkel herself. The viewer did not get a chance to learn about the historic role of the German leader. Instead he or she got a 2 min. “deal” to watch Angela Merkel vote in a federal election. Three full minutes of relaxing silence and a chance to admire Angela’s dress and body language in this historic moment.

Ah yes, if you cannot stand similar interruptions and want to learn about the historic role of Angela, see Zakaria’s transcripts at FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: Not the Time for Big Sticks; Interview with Bill Clinton; Will Germany’s Merkel Practice What She Preaches?

Minimum information principle

Minimum information principle says that your items should be as simple as possible and always ask a single simple question. Conglomerating information in [[Glossary:Spaced_repetition|spaced repetition] results in slower learning. For example, you may be tempted to formulate items like this:

Question: What was decided at the Council of Trent, beginning in 1545, and how long did the Council go on?
Answer: The basic beliefs of the Catholic Church; 18 years.

Two separate memories should be separated in SuperMemo due to the fact that they nearly always will require different timing of repetitions. If you can always activate the same mental pathway in thinking about the Council of Trent (“neurons firing together” in the same pattern), your particular item has a good chance of surviving long in the process without a memory lapse. However, once you build a large database of similar items, and you review your sizeable material under the pressure of time, your review will always tend to strip redundant pieces of information. Overtime, your nice item will be reduced to the bare bones of information that will often fail its primary test: applicability in real life. It may happen, that despite zero memory lapses, in 2-3 years, someone will ask you about a Council of Trent in a new context and you will be amazed that you won’t be able to reasonably answer the question despite having all the necessary pieces of information included in your item. Two memories of different difficulty might be compared to two different planes of different flying characteristics. The difficult piece (e.g. 18 year duration of the Council) might be compared to a slow flying plane. The easy piece (here the reference to the Catholic Church) might be compared to a modern jet. Review of the conglomerated item might be compared to flying both planes at the same speed. In an extreme case, this might be impossible. The compromise speed might be too high for a slow plane, which might disintegrate beyond a certain speed limit, while the faster plane cannot slow down enough without stalling. In our memory, forgetting is equivalent to forgetting, while stalling is caused by the spacing effect. By doing complex and repeatable reasoning at each repetition, you might act as if handling both planes using remote control. However, this is always difficult and requires lots of focus and deliberation at repetitions. Your brain has natural defenses against such “enforced repetitive reasoning”. It is designed to be “intellectually lazy” and thus energetically efficient. Practice shows that incremental reading produces many more items. However, those items are usually much easier to remember. In the end, you spend less time on reviewing 5-10 items than you would spend on an item that would conglomerate information and suffer repeated memory lapses or very short intervals.

In the course of the evolution, the brain developed strategies for abstracting away from the details and retaining only the most essential, useful and frequently used information. Those strategies are great forsurvival, but aren’t as good in reaching our educational goals. Council of Trent is a typical example of knowledge we wish to have, but that is pretty expensive. This is because, for most people, it does not get reinforced in run-of-the-mill conversations, TV shows, daily applicability, or at water cooler at work. The situation might differ if you, in particular, read a lot on the subject matter. This might help the memory establish itself in an efficient manner. Incremental reading makes it possible to root such difficult-to-retain knowledge firmly in the context, and still make sure that individual repetitions focus on a very specific and cheap-to-retain memories.

This is how the same paragraph might be processed with incremental reading, and paradoxically cause a significant saving in time in the long run:

Question: The Council of […], which began in 1545 and lasted for 18 years, made decisions about the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church
Answer: Trent

Question: The Council of Trent, which began in […](year) and lasted for 18 years, made decisions about the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church
Answer: 1545

Question: The Council of Trent, which began in 1545 and lasted for […] years, made decisions about the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church
Answer: 18

Question: The Council of Trent, which began in 1545 and lasted for 18 years, made decisions about the basic beliefs of […]
Answer: the Catholic Church

Question: The Council of Trent, which began in 1545 and lasted for 18 years, made decisions about […]
Answer: (the) beliefs of the Catholic Church

Question: […], which began in 1545 and lasted for 18 years, made decisions about the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church
Answer: The Council of Trent

In the end, if you are sure this item works for you, check its performance in the course of the next few years. If you pass the interval of 2 years without a lapse, you can say that this particular item indeed works for you. In that case, there is no disagreement between you and the 20 rules. It is just that for most people, this item is pretty likely to generate a lapse within 2 years even if reviewed at correct timing. Depending on the item difficulty, the number of repetitions in the first 2 years might be as low as 3 or well above 20. If your default forgetting index is 10%, this translates to a span from 70% chance of retaining the item to the totally unacceptable 90% chance of forgetting! This last number is little understood and little realized by the users of SuperMemo, and should always make you think a lot about the rules of efficient formulation of knowledge.

Examples: Incremental reading in action

The following examples have been collected from various articles published at supermemo.com. They illustrate how electronic texts can be converted to cloze deletions, and how formulation problems are solved at the level of articles, extracts and cloze deletions.

Example: Cloze deletion

Passively processed ideas in the form of sentences rarely leave a durable trace in your memory even if they are reviewed regularly. Very often, as soon as after 2-3 months, you will notice that at review time, you actually do not seem able to recall that you have ever had a given sentence in your collection. You will quickly discover that you need active recall in order to remember. Active recall is a process in which you must answer questions. For example, you may be presented with a picture of Charles Darwin and be asked to recognize his face. In the long run, you need to replace passive review with active recall. Otherwise, your memory of the fact will not be permanently consolidated.

The fastest way of converting simple sentences into active recall material is to use a cloze deletion. Using cloze deletion, you work with simple declarative sentences like:

WW1 was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914

Those sentences are converted into question-answer pairs that can be used in actively stimulating your memory for best recall:

Question: WW1 was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of […](country/empire) by a Serbian nationalist in 1914
Answer: Austria-Hungary

Question: WW1 was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in […](year)
Answer: 1914

Question: […](war) was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914
Answer: WW1

Example: Extracts and deletions

Example text (submitted by a student)

After the discovery of Pluto, it was quickly determined that Pluto was too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets. The search for Planet X continued but nothing was found. Nor is it likely that it ever will be: the discrepancies vanish if the mass of Neptune determined from the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune is used

Example processing

There are many ways in which the processing of texts can be done in incremental reading. The example below is just one of the ways.

Extract 1 and 4 clozes: Pluto and orbit discrepancies

Pluto is too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets

1. Question: […](planet) is too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets
Answer: Pluto

2. Question: Pluto is too […] to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets
Answer: small

3. Question: Pluto is too small to account for the […] of the other planets
Answer: discrepancies in the orbits

4. Question: Pluto is too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of […]
Answer: planets

Extract 2 and 1 cloze: Planet X

Pluto was too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets. The search for Planet X continued but nothing was found

1. Question: Pluto was too small. The search for Planet X continued and […] was found
Answer: nothing was

Extract 3 and 5 clozes: Voyager and Neptune

Pluto was too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets. The discrepancies vanish if the mass of Neptune determined from the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune is used

1. Question: Pluto was too small. The discrepancies […] if the mass of Neptune determined from the Voyager 2 encounter is used
Answer: vanish

2. Question: Pluto was too small. The discrepancies vanish if the new […] of Neptune is used
Answer: mass

3. Question: Pluto was too small. The discrepancies vanish if the mass of […] determined by the Voyager 2 is used
Answer: Neptune

4. Question: Pluto was too small. The discrepancies vanish if the mass of Neptune determined from the […] encounter with Neptune is used
Answer: Voyager 2

5. Question: Pluto was too small. The discrepancies vanish if the mass determined from the Voyager 2 encounter with […] is used
Answer: Neptune

Example: Processing an article

Reading the article

Let us have a look at an example of a very short, self-containing article, posted in April 1999 on the CNN website. This short article can be read in minutes and can serve as a positive incentive towards adjustments in your diet.

Antioxidants may slow aging process, study says April 5, 1999 Web posted at: 9:39 p.m. EDT (0139 GMT) From Correspondent Linda Ciampa — Research at Tufts University indicates that a healthy diet fortified with certain fruits and vegetables may slow down and even reverse the aging process. Foods rich in antioxidants — such as blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli — have what doctors call high ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity) levels. Middle-aged rats who were fed a high ORAC diet in the USDA-sponsored study experienced less memory loss than those given a normal diet. Some of the older, slower rats became as lively as their younger peers after taking antioxidants. “We prevented both some brain and some behavioral changes that one normally sees in these rats when they hit 15 months of age,” said USDA researcher Jim Joseph. Antioxidants are effective in destroying free radicals — cell-damaging compounds that can help cause cancer and heart disease and speed the aging process. “It’s pretty well accepted that aging is due to the production of free radicals. So anything we can do nutritionally to provide additional antioxidants is likely to protect us in the process of aging,” Joseph said. That fact already has prompted many to eat a diet rich in antioxidants. “I look at it as sort of a savings account. I’m benefiting today from eating right, but I’m also going to have it in the future,” said 30-year-old Cori Alcock. “As I age and grow older, I’ll have good health as well.”

#Title: Antioxidants may slow aging process
#Author: Linda Ciampa
#Date: April 5, 1999
#Source: CNN

Extracting the essence from the article

In the course of reading, you should select the most important sections of the article. The article introduces some facts related to healthy diet and adds a lot of redundant explanations. For your review, you are only likely to need the core message which usually makes up a fraction of the entire text. Please have a look again at the same text with four most critical sections emphasized (numbering is not needed and is used only for your convenience for further reference):

Research indicates that a healthy (1) diet fortified with certain fruits and vegetables may slow down and even reverse the aging process. (2) Foods rich in antioxidants — such as blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli — have high ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity) levels. Middle-aged rats who were fed a high ORAC diet in the USDA-sponsored study experienced less memory loss than those given a normal diet. Some of the older, slower rats became as lively as their younger peers after taking antioxidants. “We prevented both some brain and some behavioral changes that one normally sees in these rats when they hit 15 months of age,” said USDA researcher Jim Joseph. (3) Antioxidants are effective in destroying free radicals — cell-damagingcompounds that can help cause cancer and heart disease and speed the aging process. (4) “It’s well accepted that aging is due to the production of free radicals. So anything we can do nutritionally to provide additional antioxidants is likely to protect us in the process of aging,” Joseph said. That fact already has prompted many to eat a diet rich in antioxidants. “I look at it as sort of a savings account. I’m benefiting today from eating right, but I’m also going to have it in the future,” said 30-year-old Cori Alcock

Improving the wording of extracts

Once you extract important fragments from an article, you may need to reformulate individual fragments to make sure they are fully context independent, free of redundant information, easy to read, and formulated in such a way that the beginning of the fragment serves as the introduction to the latter phrases and not vice versa. Please have a look at the example from the healthy diet article. We selected four important fragments and these fragments (presented on the left in the table) were reformulated to become fully-independent pieces of information (on the right). Please note that two fragments have generated more than one reworded fragment and that one fragment was deleted as it appeared to be redundant upon closer analysis.

The original fragment pasted without change from the CNN article | Modified fragment: shorter and easier to read (sometimes split into more than one part)
Extract 1

1. diet fortified with certain fruits and vegetables may slow down and even reverse the aging process

1. Diet of fruits and vegetables may reverse aging

Extract 2

2. Foods rich in antioxidants — such as blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli — have high ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity) levels

2. Examples of foods rich in antioxidants: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli

3. Foods rich in antioxidants have high levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)

Extract 3

3. Antioxidants are effective in destroying free radicals — cell-damaging compounds that can help cause cancer and heart disease and speed the aging process

4. Antioxidants destroy free radicals

5. Free radicals are cell-damaging compounds that cause cancer, heart disease and aging

Extract 4

4. It’s well accepted that aging is due to the production of free radicals

After a closer scrutiny, the fragment on the left seems to be redundant when compared with the one listed above. We can delete it from the set

Generating cloze deletions

We can now convert items generated earlier into active recall items based on cloze deletion:

Original extract | Cloze deletions generated from the extract
Extract a

1. Diet of fruits and vegetables may reverse aging

1. Question: Diet of […] and vegetables may reverse aging
Answer: fruits

2. Question: Diet of fruits and […] may reverse aging
Answer: vegetables

3. Question: Diet of fruits and vegetables may reverse […]
Answer: aging

Extract b

2. Examples of foods rich in antioxidants: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli

4. Question: Examples of […] rich in antioxidants: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli
Answer: foods

5. Question: Examples of foods rich in […]: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli
Answer: antioxidants

6. Question: Examples of foods rich in antioxidants: […]
Answer: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli

Extract c

3. Foods rich in antioxidants have high levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)

7. Question: […] rich in antioxidants have high levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)
Answer: Foods

8. Question: Foods (rich/poor) in antioxidants have high levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)
Answer: rich

9. Question: Foods rich in […] have high levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)
Answer: antioxidants

10. Question: Foods rich in antioxidants have (high/low) levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)
Answer: high

11. Question: Foods rich in antioxidants have high […] of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity (ORAC)
Answer: levels

12. Question: Foods rich in antioxidants have high levels of […] (ORAC)
Answer: Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity

13. Question: Foods rich in antioxidants have high levels of Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity ([…](abbreviation))
Answer: ORAC

Extract d

4. Antioxidants destroy free radicals

14. Question: […](food component) destroy free radicals
Answer: Antioxidants

15. Question: Antioxidants (destroy/create) free radicals
Answer: destroy

16. Question: Antioxidants destroy […](harmful compounds)
Answer: free radicals

Extract e

5. Free radicals are cell-damaging compounds that cause cancer, heart disease and aging

17. […] are cell-damaging compounds that cause cancer, heart disease and aging
Answer: Free radicals

18. Free radicals are […]-damaging compounds that cause cancer, heart disease and aging
Answer: cell

19. Free radicals are cell-(building/damaging) compounds that cause cancer, heart disease and aging
Answer: damaging

20. Free radicals are cell-damaging compounds that cause […](health problems)
Answer: cancer, heart disease and aging

Although we have generated 20 cloze deletions from the original 5 extracts, it is important to stress that reviewing this much of the learning material will ultimately cost you less time and the memory effect will be better! Note that cloze deletions meticulously test your knowledge of all important semantic aspects of the learned article.

Converting cloze deletions to plain questions

After you extract fragments and formulate active recall questions, you should continue to constantly reevaluate the importance of individual pieces of information, their wording, delete less important pieces and move them for later review, etc. Examples of reformulated cloze deletions can be found below. Note that Clozes 4-6 and Cloze 20 have been split further to eliminate set enumeration (it is easier to independently associate cancer or aging with free radicals than to list all health problems caused by them)

Original cloze deletion | Reformulated active recall item
Clozes 4-6

4. Question: Examples of […] rich in antioxidants: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli
Answer: foods

5. Question: Examples of foods rich in […]: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli
Answer: antioxidants

6. Question: Examples of foods rich in antioxidants: […]
Answer: blueberries, strawberries, spinach and broccoli

- Question: Are blueberries rich in antioxidants?
Answer: yes

- Question: Are strawberries rich in antioxidants?
Answer: yes

- Question: Is spinach rich in antioxidants?
Answer: yes

- Question: Is broccoli rich in antioxidants?
Answer: yes

Cloze 12

12. Question: Foods rich in antioxidants have high levels of […] (ORAC)
Answer: Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity

- Question: What does ORAC stand for?
Answer: Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity

Cloze 17

17. Question: […] are cell-damaging compounds that cause cancer, heart disease and aging
Answer: Free radicals

- Question: What is the name of cell-damaging compounds that cause cancer? (cleaned off with antioxidants)
Answer: Free radicals

- Question: What are free radicals?
Answer: cell-damaging compounds (causing cancer, heart disease and aging)

Cloze 20

20. Question: Free radicals are cell-damaging compounds that cause […](health problems)
Answer: cancer, heart disease and aging

- Question: Do free radicals cause cancer?
Answer: yes

- Question: Do free radicals contribute to heart disease?
Answer: yes

- Question: Do free radicals cause aging?
Answer: yes

Example: Rewording texts

Wordy articles may require some rewording of sentences before cloze deletions can be generated.

For example, the following texts puzzled a user as it appeared to be hard to process incrementally:

In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease, even after being passed through a porcelain filter known to retain all bacteria, contained an agent that could infect other tobacco plants.

In 1900 a similarly filterable agent was reported for foot-and-mouth disease of cattle.

Before you begin learning, you can save lots of time by looking for articles that are properly structured and written in a concise language that will help you save lots of time. For example, Wikipedia is an excellent source. As it is edited by many people in an incremental manner, it is highly context-independent. In comparison, Britannica is wordy, full of pronouns, definite clauses, and various context references.

Where Britannica might say (fictitious example): “Over the next five years, he struggled to obtain a patent for his invention“, Wikipedia might say explicitly “In the years 1883-1889, Edison struggled to obtain a patent for a filament of carbon of high resistance“. This context-independent style can save you hours of parsing and re-editing.

In the presented example, the first sentence is causing trouble because the author tried to tell you far more than you might wish to process in one go.

One strategy is to start with monster clozes, and simplify them incrementally while learning. However, you could save lots of time with another strategy, in which you split the sentences into more manageable portions. Unfortunately, in this case, some editing will be necessary in the beginning. You will also need to carefully parse the meaning of the passage. You could, for example, separate who and what components of the sentence
who: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria.

what: In 1892, Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco infected with mosaic disease even after being passed through a porcelain filter known to retain all bacteria, contained an agent that could infect other tobacco plants.

From those two mini-topics, you can generate several clozes that will cover the essence of the passage:

Question: In […](year) the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria
Answer: 1892

Question: In 1892 the […](nationality) botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria
Answer: Russian

Question: In 1892 the Russian […](specialty) Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller thanbacteria
Answer: botanist

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist […](name) showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria
Answer: Dimitri Iwanowski

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that […](what?) from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria
Answer: sap

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from […](type) plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria
Answer: tobacco

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with […](disease) contained an infectious agent smaller than bacteria
Answer: mosaic disease

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained […] smaller than bacteria
Answer: an infectious agent

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent smaller than […]
Answer: bacteria

Question: In 1892 the Russian botanist Dimitri Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco plants infected with mosaic disease contained an infectious agent […] than bacteria
Answer: smaller

Question: In 1892, Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco infected with mosaic disease even after being passed through a […](type) filter, contained an agent that could infect other tobacco plants
Answer: porcelain

Question: In 1892, Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco infected with mosaic disease even after being passed through a porcelain filter known to […](property), contained an agent that could infect other tobacco plants
Answer: retain all bacteria

Question: In 1892, Iwanowski showed that the sap from tobacco infected with mosaic disease even after being passed through a porcelain filter, contained an agent that […](property)
Answer: could infect other tobacco plants

The above questions are only a rough beginning. Only during learning will you be able to identify holes in these items. You will see where they cause trouble, why they may be hard to remember or what questions are imprecise or confusing. You will fix those deficiencies incrementally while learning.

Example: Conglomerating information

A frequent sin committed by new users of SuperMemo is to create “monster items” that include many bits of information. Those items should tackled by treating all bits individually.

Example of a monster item

Question: a rod-and-tube element temperature sensor consists of:
Answer: a high expansion metal tube containing a low expansion rod. The rod& tube are attached on one end. The tube changes length with changes in temperature, causing the free end of the rod to move

Suggestions

This is a typical case of combining a number of items in one with a detriment to the ability to recall the combined item. The suggestion here is to split the item into a number of simpler items that reproduce the same information in student’s memory:

Question: What are the two parts of a rod-and-tube temperature sensor?
Answer: rod and tube

Question: What is the expandability of the tube in rod-and-tube sensor?
Answer: high

Question: What is the expandability of the rod in rod-and-tube sensor?
Answer: low

Question: How is temperature indicated in the rod-and-tube sensor?
Answer: tube moves relative to the rod

Question: Where are rod and tube connected?
Answer: On one end
etc. etc.

Example: Evolution of knowledge

Changes to individual pieces of knowledge will take place in steps upon successive reviews. Here are exemplary steps that show a complete evolution of a single article into a finished item based on active recall:

1. Imagine that you find an article on the net, e.g. The criticism of global capitalism, and you decide to read it and remember it for ever

2. You import the article to SuperMemo

3. You read the article (e.g. once its turn comes up in incremental reading)

4. While reading, you extract most important paragraphs. One of these, let us say, refers to Kuznets hypothesis

5. The extracted paragraphs will live separate lives in SuperMemo and will be scheduled for separate review, i.e. independent of the review of the parent article. The extracted paragraphs in the parent article will be marked as processed. Once all paragraphs in the parent article are processed, you will terminate the review of the parent article and keep on reviewing only its components (e.g. selected paragraphs)

6. Upon the first review, usually after a few days, you read the extracted paragraph again and analyze it as to how it should be processed further. You may decide to postpone it, remove it from the learning process, shorten it or extract the most important sentences that you want to remember

7. If you decide to extract a single statement in reference to Kuznets hypothesis it will again be marked as processed in the original extract and will assume a separate review cycle in SuperMemo

8. Upon the first review of the extracted sentence, you make further decisions as to its further life in SuperMemo. Let us say, this is the wording of the Kuznets sentence:

Acc to Kuznets hypothesis, growth (from the low income levels associated with predominantly agrarian societies) would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease in income inequality

9. In order to capture the essence, you would probably decide to shorten the above sentence to the following form:

Acc to Kuznets hypothesis, growth would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease in income inequality

10. At the same time, other parts of the same parent article might establish a memory trace that would say that Kuznets hypothesis has been based on relatively weak empirical data. Moreover, recent research clearly indicates that the hypothesis is false (growth actually seems to equally benefit both the poor and the rich). You could then enhance the extract with words controversial or even recently falsified. For example:

Recently falsified Kuznets hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease in income inequality

11. Upon the next review of the same sentence, you may decide to convert it into a number of cloze deletions. This conversion will be incremental, i.e. you may decide to first create a cloze deletion asking about the name of the controversial hypothesis and only later ask about its actual meaning (the meaning is relatively easier to remember and shall survive longer in your memory without active recall). Your cloze deletion could then look like this:

Question: Recently falsified […](name) hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease in income inequality
Answer: Kuznets

This cloze deletion would again assume a separate life from the original sentence in which the keyword Kuznets will again be marked as processed. This is the original Kuznets sentence with one keyword marked as processed:

Recently falsified Kuznets hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase, and then to a decrease in income inequality

12. The same sentence will generate a few separate cloze deletions that will be processed independently. Upon the first review of the cloze deletion created in the previous point, you may decide to simplify it in accordance with the rules of formulating knowledge in learning:

Question: Recently falsified […](name) hypothesis claimed that growth would first lead to an increase in income inequality
Answer: Kuznets

13. Upon the next review, you can, but you do not have to, convert the cloze deletion into a standard question-answer item:

Question: What is the name of the hypothesis that falsely claims that income inequality initially increases with growth?
Answer: Kuznets hypothesis

14. The above question-answer pair is probably as simple as it can only be. Certainly, it is simple enough to be relatively easy to remember. This item will be repeated in intervals determined by SuperMemo. You can decide how well you want to remember it. By default, it will be remembered with 95% probability of recall and require 5-15 repetitions in lifetime. The establishment of durable memory traces in your memory, completes the life cycle of this particular piece of knowledge. The only thing that remains is the memory-sustaining review in intervals ranging from months to years (as determined by SuperMemo)

15. Once you convert all important keywords from the Kuznets hypothesis into separate cloze deletions, you will remove the parenting paragraph from the review process. You will no longer passively review the original declarative hypothesis. You will continue repeating individual clozes and that will ensure your perfect recall of the hypothesis for as long as you deem necessary

Example: Building comprehension incrementally

It is not unusual to generate a cloze that will keep causing problems. It is not the subject in question, but the complexity of the sentence that seems to send the brain into a panic mode. You may keep re-reading bad clozes and get the impression that at each re-reading the understanding decreases (instead of growing).

Here is an example of a bad cloze taken from a real learning process. It caused 5 lapses in succession, and needed special treatment to make it palatable and useful.

Question: Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of […] (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specificamount
Answer: allowances

With some experience, you will quickly notice that the problem resides in the poor quality of the chosen text. Your first red flag should come with “companies or other groups“. Unless you are an insider to the subject, you will instantly wonder what “other groups” means. If you look at the essence of your question, you will notice that “other groups” does not add to the core of the question and can easily be skipped. After some analysis, you can make an effort to formulate a straightforward question, however, it is easier and more cost-effective to take an incremental approach (as long as you keep understanding the question, which may not be the case with you).

As soon as you notice that “other groups” are out of place, you can simplify the cloze:

Question: Companies are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of […] (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specific amount
Answer: allowances

You may also notice that allowances and credits are synonymous (acc. to that particular question), and you may not need to tax your memory with both terms. You can therefore make the question easier:

Question: Companies are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of […] which represent the right to emit a specific amount
Answer: allowances/credits

During the next repetition you may wish to simplify the question further. You can now start feeling confident that the question will stick to your memory. If that makes you feel better, you will have made a big step towards better recall:</p>

Question: Companies hold a number of […] which represent the right to emit a specific amount
Answer: allowances/credits (emission permits)

Some time in the future, you might take yet another incremental step:

Question: […] represent the right to emit a specific amount (by companies)
Answer: allowances/credits (emission permits)

Finally, you may realize that you question is actually a definition of a term (credit/allowance). As such, it does not even need the cloze. You may also notice that the definition misses an important context point. The original question spoke of carbon emissions (which is probably indicated by the Wikipedia references that provide the context of the question).

Question: (What is the name of) the right to emit a specific amount of CO_2 (by companies)?
Answer: (carbon) permits/allowances/credits

With the above definition, learning should finally be easy and fun. Remember that it is a frequently used standard to separate synonyms or equivalent answers with a slash (“/”). This means that any answer will do permits, allowances, or credits. You do not need to list them all and you do not need to remember about semi-obvious carbon prefix.

Interestingly, it can easily be found that the text comes from May 7, 2010 version of Wikipedia. It was red-flagged with “clarification needed”, which instantly tells you that you are not the only one who got an issue with the paragraph. In such cases blame the author and search for better texts. In this particular example, the Wikipedia text was improved just 2 weeks later, and the current version of Wikipedia holds a better version (Aug 2013).

Example: Unsuitable texts

Not all texts are suitable or easy to process with incremental reading. You will not want to process a literary novel with incremental reading. You may still prefer to read it on paper in a bathtub. Examples of texts that are difficult to process are: flowery materials, materials rich in explanations and metaphors, programming code, case studies, mathematical derivations, experimental research documentation, etc. Incremental reading is easiest for encyclopedic materials. Materials that are not suitable will often include a valuable message; however, you will often be better off by phrasing it on your own and processing your summary with incremental reading. For example, you would not want to memorize the Linux source code. However, you could find some specific facts or regularities in the code, describe them shortly and then learn the description incrementally (perhaps with snippet code illustrations).

Example 1: Texts that are too general

Here is an example paragraph that caused learning problem to a user of SuperMemo:

A good enterprise architect should enable the right balance between the needs of the organization for an integrated IT strategy, permitting the closest possible synergy across the extended enterprise, and allowing individual business units to innovate safely in their pursuit of competitive advantage.

The user wrote:

I have no problem understanding this phrase (synergy across business units must be balanced against freedom to innovate within business units), and I constructed two cloze deletions from it for either side of the balance, and when presented with either question I can fill in the blanks. Yet, I was in a discussion recently defending a synergy position, not realizing that it might jeopardize innovation, not even realizing I had this SuperMemo question pointing it out to me. In other words, even though I can answer the question in SuperMemo, it is not something that stuck in my memory, i.e. the synergy is not associated with freedom-to-innovate and vice versa (maybe it will after this mail). So, I suspect that I am only able to answer the question based on recognition of the question or some such, and not on recognition of the association. I figure that a better way to associate the two would be to ask something like “what must be balanced against each other” but this question would be so general in nature that it would create serious interference with other questions that deal with other aspects of enterprise architecture that need to be balanced against each other. Or I would have to make it more specific, again risking to give away the answer in the question, which would also not cause the association to form.

Can you identify a problem here?

In similar cases, you need to pause to ponder what kind of questions you want to be able to answer having read the passage. If the questions are too general or too obvious, you just need to trust your own intelligence and creativity to be able to answer them on the basis of your experience and more specific questions in the given area of knowledge.

In this case, keywords such as “synergy” or “innovate” might provide a hazy way to capture the meaning of the passage. However, very general texts are not suitable for treatment with cloze deletions. You may waste unnecessary time on re-reading the entire passage at question time, or waste time on simplifying the passage to capture the essence. In school jargon, you might call similar passages “waffle”. They may carry an important message, they may help the flow of text, they might be explanatory, but they do not yield material suitable for memorization. In the extreme case you can juxtapose Wikipedia-like “IT = Information Technology” with obvious “waffle” that cannot be clozed: We should be nice for other people.

In all sorts of exams, you will always need to tackle lots of “waffle”. You will also meet teachers who demand fluent “waffle” performance. However, this is not the type of knowledge that will make you a better expert or a better person. If you meet “waffle”, pause to think if there are questions that truly flow from the text, or if the text is too general to be handled with SuperMemo. In your case, you might do better by perhaps adding some meatier passages on enterprise synergy or constraints on innovation or… Actually, you are the best person to find supplementary material that will help you better understand the underlying issues.

If waffle bothers you, try to find a Wikipedia equivalent. Due to the nature of crowdsourcing, Wikipedia lends itself perfectly to incremental processing. Once you get the hang and feel the benefit, you will quickly learn to spot text and passages that are less suitable and provide less benefit when processed with incremental reading.

Example 2: Unsuitable text from supermemo.com

Here is another example that comes from supermemo.com. The text itself is not bad, but it resorts to metaphors that should serve as explanations, not as learning material suitable for generating cloze deletions.

Intelligence as processing power: the raw nimbleness and agility of the human mind. When you see a smart student quickly learn new things, think logically, solve puzzles and show uncanny wit, you may say: This guy is really intelligent! See how fast his brain reacts! The student has a fast processor installed and his RAM has a lightning access time. He may though still need a couple of years to “build” good software through years of study. IQ tests attempt to measure this sort of intelligence in abstraction of knowledge. The difficulty of improving processing power by training comes for similar reasons as the fact that programming cannot speed up the processor

The above text is metaphorical. It reiterates the same message a few times using different words in an attempt to find a metaphor that will strike a cord with the reader. Consequently, it is enough you extract only the core message. For example:

Intelligence as processing power: IQ tests attempt to measure this sort of intelligence in abstraction of knowledge

You could also add:

Intelligence as processing power: The difficulty of improving processing power by training is similar to the fact that programming cannot speed up the processor

Once you learn the above 6 cloze deletions (marked by 6 clozed keywords), you will most likely be able to recall that it should be very difficult to train for an improved score in an ideally designed IQ test.

Incremental reading: Summary

- If you are serious about learning, you must learn incremental reading! Without it, you might be missing the best part of SuperMemo!

- Incremental reading makes it possible to read thousands of articles in parallel without getting lost.

- Use Extract (Alt+X) and Cloze (Alt+Z) to extract the most valuable pieces of knowledge while reading. Use the keyboard for maximum speed. However, if you are new to SuperMemo, you can also use the learnbar or the Read toolbar buttons for the job.

- Standard repetitions and incremental reading should be intermingled. This serves variety and creativity. Auto-sort repetitions will sort your repetitions, introduce a tiny degree of randomness, and ensure a steady, moderate, and prioritized inflow of new articles into the learning process. Read more about the priority queue

- You can control the timing and priority of review in incremental reading by modifying intervals (Shift+Ctrl+R or Ctrl+J), priority (Alt+P), and the forgetting index (e.g. Shift+Ctrl+P).

- Use read-points (Ctrl+F7), good titles (Alt+T), reference labels (Alt+Q), and manually inserted context clues to minimize context recovery overhead (i.e. the cost of recalling the correct context of individual questions).

- Auto-postpone will automatically delay the review of the excess of low-priority material. Use Postpone to manually handle the overload or define the postpone criteria.

- Do not forget to review 20 rules of formulating knowledge to make sure you do not waste hours on badly formulated material.

What do people say about incremental reading?

Incremental learning has its followers and its hardline critics. The following two sections present both sides of the story.

Incremental reading in the eyes of its users

Here are a few excerpts from blogs that speak of incremental reading.

Dealing with information overflow

At bobo23.net you learn the following:

To read the entire entry, visit bobo23.net: Incremental Reading - Dealing with Information Overflow

Len Budney on incremental reading

Len Budney wrote the following:

Visit Len Budney’s blog to read the article: Incremental reading

How to supercharge your language learning

In his blog tmwbuckley writes:

For the entire article, see: Incremental Reading – How to supercharge your language learning

Taking note: Incremental Reading

In a blog devoted to note taking, MK is skeptical when writing about incremental reading.

MK introduces the process with these words:

MK then voices the reservations:

Here is the blog entry from MK: Incremental reading

Big picture

The issue of the big picture has been raised over and over by observers who are not intimate to the incremental learning process. See: Big picture in incremental reading

Reading thousands of articles at the same time

As for the phrase “reading thousands of articles at the same time“, we will continue using that catchy phrase. It should be pretty obvious that we do not mean the same “moment of time” but the same “period of time“. We do not envisage a user with a thousand of monitors, nor a user photoreading thousands of articles flashing in front of his eyes in a second. We, naturally, mean having thousands of articles in the learning process, which, in heavily overloaded collection, may mean that an article will never actually gets read due to scoring too low in priority. For more see: Incremental reading marketed dishonestly

The way of the ronin: About incremental reading

The way of the ronin blog says:

Read more in Anki vs. SuperMemo

How to incrementally read anything

LittleFish in his blog writes:

Visit the blog: Supermemo Adventures: How to Incrementally Read Anything

Luis Gustavo Neves da Silva on memorization

Luis Gustavo writes about cramming and wisdom:

Read more: It’s more than just memorizing

Incremental reading diagram
bababan.net writes:

Note that the diagram uses old icons, old terminology and old keywords.

Criticism of incremental reading

Incremental reading is useless

Critics of incremental reading are not too numerous or vocal. The credit probably goes to the fact that this technology is relatively new and not too popular beyond SuperMemo insider circles. Nearly all criticism comes from those who never used incremental reading themselves. As such, it hardly ever addresses the substance of the technology. Some of the criticism seem to address the technology in general (e.g. the Internet, the web, computer software, etc).

For example, Emil K. wrote the following criticism of incremental reading:

Observer’s Opinion: Why I would not use incremental learning?

Here is an exemplary opinion of an observer who is focused on problem solving and short-term goals. For this observer, lifelong learning is understood as “I learn what I need right now“. Naturally, this approach is missing an important factor: learning in anticipation.

SuperMemo user’s opinion: Why I do not use incremental reading?

Here is an exemplary opinion of a user of SuperMemo who understands incremental reading, and still has many reservations:

Comment: You need to try incremental approach to get a good feel

In the section: Incremental learning is not for everyone, you can read about personality factors that may conspire to make you fail with incremental learning. It is hard to make a prediction on the basis of your text. The fact that you studied incremental reading is a very good predictor of success. On the other hand, the fact that the mere concept of priority queue can generate stress, tells you a lot about your personality. You might just be one of those who excel at theory and fail in practical situations for a number of reasons. You should definitely give incremental learning a try and see how it works. If frustrations keep multiplying beyond the first two months of use, your chances may drop. It is vital to start from simplest concepts: import, extract and cloze. All the remaining tools should wait for their turn until you start enjoying the process. For the same reason, you should start from learning about things you love (not about algebra or economics). Your hobby, your pet, your favorite sport, health, your favorite music band, your favorite actor or actress, etc. Use Wikipedia as its texts are well-suited for incremental reading. Only after 2-3 months, when you start sensing the new quality of knowledge emerge in your mind, will you be able to anchor emotionally in the process and find sufficient motivation to overcome successive obstacles.

Short comments on the rest of your text:

- tunnel vision: experience shows that incremental learning favors broad learning as opposed to developing a tunnel vision. After all, the more you know, the more you know you do not know. You are more likely to have your day monopolized by a single topic when you do traditional reading or browsing. In incremental learning you face the whole spectrum of your knowledge (with a natural bias towards your interests). Unpredictability of incremental learning sequences, also in different moods or different contexts (e.g. change of interest), increases the quality of the creative processes. This is where curiosity is born. You are more likely to become interested with a seemingly irrelevant detail when you have a peaceful time allocation typical of incremental learning. This is how you keep branching to new areas. This branching is less likely when you work in conditions of stress, time constraints, and information overload, typical to free browsing on the net. In free browsing, you can open 20 browser tabs and struggle with the right course of action: read now, make favorite, save to disk, skim, give up, etc. In incremental learning, you just import all tabs, and return to your main line of thought. Naturally, it helps greatly if you prioritize the tabs. This is a way of consolidating new interests as opposed to giving them just a temporary brush. SuperMemo’s capacity to prevent tunnel vision is mentioned amongst its advantages. See: Advantages : Uniform progress

- wild goose chase: the way shifting priorities work in SuperMemo is exactly how priorities behave in real life situations: your yesterday’s interests are ruthlessly replaced by today’s interests, and so on. This is a wild goose chase indeed. But the fault is not with SuperMemo, but with human nature. Please recall that incremental reading started from reading lists. Priority bias could result in having a thousand or ten thousand top priority articles. This situation was not manageable and not rational. With relative priorities you can observe the process, and work to improve your strategies, and your personal honesty about priorities. This will not stop the wild goose chase, but you have a range of tools to correct your mistakes (e.g. when discovering a neglected portion of the material). However long you think about it, you are not likely to find a better remedy to your knowledge greed than a simple priority queue! You have signaled the problem, but you neglect the fact that in real life, the problem is incomparably greater. In SuperMemo, if you discover neglected material, you can up-prioritize it. In traditional learning, you forget the material and the problem itself. It is better to chase the goose that to have it swept under the carpet.

- stress: if the prioritization process is stressful, you can initially ignore the priority queue. You will needed it only when your collection grows beyond a manageable size. You can then gradually introduce various prioritization levels. For example, you can have a shy start with just two levels: Important: 22% and Unimportant: 88%. You will soon discover that you need more precision, esp. that you will never escape the feeling “this article must land in top 3 articles“, which at some point may mean you need decimal places or referencing the priority queue by position.

- user friendliness: the problem of Step in Spread priorities is typical of SuperMemo, which claims to be unfriendly for novices to better satisfy the pros. This option might display a message: “You are trying to squeeze more elements into the range than the size of the range“. However, this would make pros apoplectic, as it is very easy to input wrong data. You do not want to waste time on clicking away the message. A pro will just want to correct the input. This problem cannot be remedied by File : Level because Spread priorities is available only at advanced levels. This means that the user should already be inured to the fact that the first use of any function in SuperMemo may be difficult. A more sophisticated solution, e.g. a wizard or messages incorporated in the dialog, would probably not pass Value/Time criterion on the ever-bloating SuperMemo tasklist. You are right, SuperMemo is not nice for novices. If you have simpler solution ideas, please mail them. They are always read carefully.

- programming: it is not true that incremental reading is unsuitable for programmers (for example see: SuperMemo as a new tool for programmers). This misunderstanding might come from statements such as “computer code is not suitable as text to be processed with incremental reading“, even though it is conceivable that incremental reading might be useful in code analysis (e.g. when a large number of well-encapsulated short procedures of different priority needs to be reviewed).

Priority queue

Priority queue: Introduction

Human knowledge resources are vast. Our appetite to aquire knowledge is usually also exceeding our learning capacity. Incremental learning makes it easy to import huge volumes of knowledge. However, if you cannot effectively process all that imported knowledge, you risk neglecting high priority material by being overwhelmed by subjects that might be relegated to later study. This state of affair was the main reason for introducing priorities to SuperMemo.

In incremental learning, all elements are organized into a sequence determined by their priority. That sequence is called the priority queue. The priority is determined by the importance of the element for a particular student. Elements with lower priorities will be sacrificed first when the student runs out of learning time on a given day. As a result, only high priority elements will receive the desired level of recall/retention. At any point in time, elements with lower priorities will be more likely to be discovered as forgotten.

During learning, on a given day, elements with highest priorities are processed first.

If you do not finish your learning for a day, do not despair. With the priority queue, you know, you did your best and only lower priority material was left behind. Remember to use auto-sort and auto-postpone to make the most of the priority queue.

Can we learn the entire Encyclopedia Britannica?

Early in the learning process, many students do not bother to prioritize their learning material. This attitude is caused by two factors:

- smaller volume of learning early in the process

- false conviction that human memory is vast enough to hold all that dream knowledge

Do you think you are able to memorize the entire Encyclopedia Britannica line by line, fact for fact?

Chances are your answer might be: “I might be too lazy, I might be too busy, but if I had all the time of my day for the job, I would“. Or perhaps “I might not, but I have heard of geniuses able to do it! How about Kim Peek?“. If you believe the encyclopedia is within the realm of possible, you will soon realize that you desperately need the priority queue to help you overcome a big surprise: our memory is far more limited than you think!

Assuming we do not deal with humans affected with a mutation to their memory system, memorizing Britannica would falsify the theory of SuperMemo which should apply to all healthy adults. In the light of SuperMemo, memorizing Britannica verges on impossible. There are 44 million words in Britannica’s 32 volumes. This translates to 6 million SuperMemo items (“human memory bits”) assuming the average keyword extraction on information dense texts as 1:7. Assuming a 50-year learning span, we get to 18,250 days and 330 items per day. Assuming optimum representation of knowledge (say Britannica is already “perfectly formulated”) you cannot learn faster for a given level of knowledge retention than with SuperMemo (it simply finds the mathematical optimum), and practice shows it is very difficult to sustain more than 100 items per day in the long run with retention around 95%. In other words, for an intelligent man, for perfectly formulated Britannica knowledge, with SuperMemo, you are hardly able to accomplish the goal with your whole life devoted to the task!

Volume vs. retention battle in learning

Incremental reading makes it easy to import large volumes of learning material from the Internet. By default, all imported material enters the learning process. As a result, large volumes of unprocessed information begin to compete for your attention with most important pieces of knowledge that you decided to remember. It is a clash of priorities. On one hand you want to ensure high retention of your mission-critical knowledge (as in classical SuperMemo), on the other, you want to devour more and more new knowledge.

Before SuperMemo, your learning would largely be based on reading and reviewing books or your own notes. With older SuperMemos, you would divide your time between reading (on paper) and repetitions (on the computer). With incremental reading, those competing processes were blended into one. You can read and review concurrently in SuperMemo. However, for the most avid incremental readers, the balance of priority will always dangerously shift in favor of new reading at the cost of the previously acquired knowledge. This comes from human nature. New reading provides instant gratification: Today, I learned something new. I am wiser now. Reviewing the material you already know will always feel like a burden. We are always unhappy with our forgetful memory. It always feels that the nature should have given us a natural choice of what to forget and what to remember without the painful effort of reviewing what we already know.

To settle the Volume-vs-Retention battle and to resolve the perpetual clash of priorities, you need better weapons than those made available by older SuperMemos. Before the arrival of the priority queue (2006), you would need to use a complex set of tools to employ massive learning and still protect the retention of your most important knowledge. You would use complex concepts such as A-Factors, forgetting index, subset learning, selective postpones, repetition sorting, etc. These tools were poorly automated and required substantial effort and knowledge on your part. In practice, most incremental readers would have to opt for the simplest prioritization tool: moderation. You could best protect your previous investment in learning by limiting your hunger for knowledge.

Newer SuperMemos use a simple and fully automated mechanism that will help you combine high volumes of reading with high retention of the most important material. This mechanism is based on the concept of the priority queue.

Priority bias in incremental reading

In SuperMemo, each element receives a priority from 0% to 100%. Elements sorted by their priority form the priority queue. An element’s priority can also be expressed as its position in the priority queue. The most important element in your collection will sit at Position=1 of the priority queue. The queue is a relative queue. This means that if you, for example, insert an important article at Position=3, all items and articles at higher positions will be shifted by one position up in the queue (i.e. towards lower priority). Thus the element at Position=999 will be pushed to Position=1000, while the element previously sitting at Position=3 will now occupy Position=4. The first two elements in the queue, i.e. Position=1 and Position=2, will not move. The relative nature of the priority queue will help you instantly inspect the current priority of each element in your collection. In earlier versions of SuperMemo, you could observe crowding of elements at high-priority ranks. For example, you could amass a large number of topics with A-Factor=1.01 and be practically unable to prioritize within that group. (A-Factor=1.01 is the lowest possible and would correspond to the highest priority).

The fundamental rationale for using a relative priority queue is the existence of a form of cognitive bias, which we will call the priority bias. This bias makes us always think that the newly found article is extremely important to read. The new article feels so important, because we underestimate the value of all the previously imported articles. Our memory is unable to produce an effective estimate of the importance of the current mass of remembered knowledge. Even less so is it capable of producing a remotely accurate estimate of the importance of the mass of knowledge stored in your incremental reading process (of which, usually, only a tiny fraction is part of your long-term memories). The net effect is that we always underestimate the volume of what we know, the volume of what we keep in incremental reading, and the importance distribution of those volumes of knowledge. This psychological mechanism is also the primary force that works against the universal adoption of SuperMemo. Humans are, by biological design, very weak at estimating the size of their knowledge, the cost of learning, and the power of forgetting. As a result, without an intimate knowledge of what SuperMemo is, individuals rarely ever pause to sense the need to use spaced repetition. This underestimation effect is by far more damaging in the case of incremental learning, which is far more complex and has still not been explained in sufficiently simple and catchy terms.

By employing the priority queue, SuperMemo will help you visualize the priority bias and the process in which large volumes of new material quickly displace the old material from your learning focus. Moreover, SuperMemo highly automates the process in which you can handle material overflow and reconcile high retention with high volumes of learning. Incremental reading has always boasted of its capacity to bring the volume of learning to unprecedented levels. With the priority queue, you can nearly take away the moderation factor and increase the volume of learning even further without undue worry about your hard-earned knowledge.

Priority queue in SuperMemo

You can define the element’s priority by:

To set the element’s priority, you can either choose the position of the element in the priority queue (from 1 to Total), or you can choose the percent value (from 0% to 100%). Position=1 corresponds to Percent=0%. Position=Total corresponds to Percent=100%.

Important! Low position and low percent mean high priority! This counterintuitive choice was made due to the fact that you are more likely to choose a high priority of 0% or 1% than the low priority of 99% or 100%. Typing the number 2 takes much less time than typing the number 98 (roughly 3-4 times less). As you are likely to set priority manually many times in the course of a single learning session, this counterintuitive choice will save you a lot of typing time over years of learning (and will likely be grateful for things set upside down in SuperMemo).

You can use Learning : Priority : Increase on the element menu (Shift+Ctrl+Up arrow) to increase the priority of an element, or Learning : Priority : Decrease (Shift+Ctrl+Down arrow) to decrease it. Those operations also affect the A-Factor of topics.

You can view your entire priority queue with View : Priority queue on the main menu.

Prioritization is difficult before it becomes easy

Everyone struggles with priorities as it is very hard to admit things are not as important as they seem. Of good things, there is a correlation between the hunger for knowledge and creativity. If you struggle with priorities and overflow then it might be a good indicator, as long as you win the battle and learn to prioritize honestly.

To prioritize well, you only need to know that the most important material has priority 0%, while your least important material is 100%. You need to develop a sense for where, in the queue, a piece of information belongs. If you think that everything is “top priority” then you are clearly at the beginning of the road. Pick two items and ask a question: if I was to forget/delete one, which one would that be? This exercise will help you see different applications of different items and different value behind the applications. Another exercise is: try to give items as low priority as you can stomach. Can you make it 10%? Would you be hurt if it was 20%? Would the world collapse if it was 66%? With some conscious effort you will realize that you can live without some portions of your knowledge (after all, most people do not use SuperMemo at all and survive ok). Over months of training, you will get better at this.

If you keep peeking at Protection statistic, you may also realize that sending items beyond your average priority protection will help you clear them from view for a while. This way, if you have created too many cloze deletions that crowd your process, you might actually enjoy sending most of them out of the protected zone, and focus on just one or two that capture the essence of knowledge you are trying to learn.

SuperMemo will not help you much in the prioritization work unless you manually play with intervals (e.g. by saying “this cannot wait 30 days, I must see it in 11“). This tell SuperMemo that the priority must increase slightly.

Sorting repetitions

In a high-volume incremental reading process, you will be served more elements in a single day than you could possibly manage to process in a week (or worse). It is therefore vital that you begin your review process from elements of the highest priority. Low priority elements might linger in the queue for months or years. High priority items should be reviewed at the exact time that SuperMemo finds optimum. Only this way will you be able to meet your requested forgetting index criteria for high-priority material while still being under no pressure to limit your hunger for knowledge. In simpler terms, in an overloaded learning process, the SuperMemo promise of “excellent memory” will only apply to your top-priority material. The lower the priority, the lower the retention (see: Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Graphs : Forgetting index vs. Priority for empirical evidence).

By default, your repetitions will be auto-sorted at the beginning of each learning day (unless you uncheck Learn : Sorting : Auto-sort repetitions). This means that the elements reviewed on a given day will be ordered by priority. In addition to auto-sorting, you can also sort the learning queue manually at any time with Learn : Sorting : Sort now.

You will quickly discover that a precise sort executed strictly along the priority criteria has serious flaws. On one hand, due to the priority bias, you will quickly displace older high-quality material with whatever dominates your current interests. That would be a throwback to your pre-SuperMemo times when you kept reading new material, while forgetting your previous investment in learning. New material always feels very important and will always show a tendency to shift all your previous learning towards lower priority. In addition, you might overwhelm your classical SuperMemo repetitions (i.e. question-and-answer review) with the inflow of new articles to read. Again, instead of making sure your previous investment becomes durable, you keep rushing through new material and forgetting the old.

SuperMemo solves the problems of the priority bias and the problem of the massive inflow of topics by letting you define:

1. the proportion of topics in learning, and

2. a degree to which the learning queue is randomized.

You can determine the sorting criteria by using Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria. You need to adjust the proportion of topics and the degree of randomization by trial and error. This will all depend on your goals and preferences. If you admit too few topics in the process, you will not gain much new knowledge. If you admit too many topics, you will start forgetting previously learned material. If you randomize the learning queue too much, the whole prioritization mechanism will unravel, and your retention of high-priority material will drop. If you sort repetitions strictly by priority, the new material will keep displacing the old material due to the priority bias. Even for item repetitions, where the priority bias is less prominent, a degree of randomization will help you increase the priority of less appreciated items, disperse clozes generated from the same extract, and compensate some loss in retention by improving the overall speed of learning (through spacing effect).

Proportion of topics tells you how many topics you will be served during your repetitions as compared with items. If you want to ensure that you keep a high retention of previously added material (as per SuperMemo definition), you cannot overload the learning process with new material (new topics) because you will not have enough time left to do your daily item review. In a healthy learning process, you should limit the inflow of topics to 1:4 or less (i.e. allow of repeating at least 4 items per each topic served).

Random repetitions

To make sure you have a good understanding of the contents and distribution of the learning material in your collection, you should make randomized repetitions from time to time. This is to prevent tunnel vision and priority bias. You can randomize repetitions with Learn : Random : Randomize repetitions (Shift+Ctrl+F11), or with Tools : Mercy with Criteria : Sorting options set to Randomize.

Occasional random repetitions may be quite revealing as they will not favor any portions of your material. Your learning will not be biased by an increased proportion of elements such as: short interval elements, long interval elements, specific element types (e.g. articles, extracts, cloze deletions, etc.), element content (e.g. a specific branch of the knowledge tree), the degree of element processing, nor (most importantly) the element’s priority. Random repetitions will help you understand the possible negative trends such as an excessive inflow of new material, low retention due to frequent rescheduling, poor formulation of newly created cloze deletions, low quality or applicability of the acquired knowledge, excessive emphasis on certain subject at the cost of other subjects, etc. Most importantly though, random repetitions should help you sense the power of the priority bias. You will notice that you will instantly be tempted to up-prioritize large sections of the material that has slipped your attention while focusing on new imports.

Prioritization rulebook

Learn to work on priorities of new elements. Try to visualize the entire collection and learn to position elements in the spectrum of your entire knowledge. Try to ignore urgency, and to focus on the lifetime priority of knowledge (unless under a pressure of a deadline or an exam). If all your new elements get priorities of 1-10%, you know you are not being honest. Some of the new material must be down to 80-90%. There are things that you want to know, but you do not really need to know. Add them to your collection, but give them an honestly low priority. Do you learn about movie stars? That’s ok. However, unless you want to be an actor yourself (or similar), you should rather give the stars the deserved 95-99%.

Early in the process, you may find it hard to sense the difference between 30% and 60% priority. Or you may keep setting the priority always to 1%. The fact that SuperMemo displays the priority at four decimal places may make you feel your prioritizations are not adequate. Ignore those feelings. You can start from a 3 point scale: 1%, 33%, and 88%. The more you prioritize, the more natural and automatic it feels. Be patient.

Deprioritization is very hard and very painful, however, it might be a key to your success in a heavily overloaded collection. It is very easy to wish to up-prioritize nearly anything. You need to train your brain to permit low priorities! You need to let some knowledge go (at least to lower priority areas)! You cannot know everything that you want to know! (unless you want to know little)

Regularly inspect Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Priority protection : Items (Shift+Alt+A opens this tab as you left it last time). Priority protection is the most honest indicator of what proportion of your collection can actually meet your requested forgetting index criteria. For example, if your Priority protection stand at 3%, you know that no knowledge in the 3%-100% priority bracket is safe! If you keep overrating priorities, items will crowd at high priority positions and the Priority protection parameter will be very low. If you are honest, you will increase that value and make it easier to protect top priority items from being delayed and possibly forgotten. You will be amazed how fast you can increase Priority protection with a focused effort and deprioritization in just a few days (let alone over a longer period)! See the example in the picture below. Such efforts will do miracles to the quality of your knowledge. Importance should always overrule urgency and emotion.

Regulary inspect Tools : Statistics : Statistics : Protection. This parameters tells you how far you managed to cut into your top priority material in a given session (this is an equivalent of Priority protection for a single day). If those numbers get very low, you need to start deprioritizing your items (or topics). You do not need to cut your import appetites as long as you keep priorities reasonable.

The most important moments to prioritize elements or element sets:

- at item failure, you need to rethink the priority. Items that fail often are the biggest contributor to slowed progress. Reducing their priority is one way of remedying this (and possibly helping your memory by inducing the spacing effect or reducing interference)

- at article import, high priority will ensure early reading, however, once you get to reading, you may want to deprioritize and only give high priority to important extracts! You can set the priority for the entire article and split it all in one go (while reading or by an auto-split). It is however much easier to split the article incrementally as you progress with reading, and only then spread the priorities of all children elements with Priority : Spread on the browser processing menu. Once you finish reading the article, some of the generated extracts and clozes will be given higher priority (as per your decision), while most elements will get their priority set automatically on the basis of article’s priority. This will usually be a priority that is higher than deserved. Hence Priority : Spread is recommended each time you complete reading an article

- it makes sense to give new clozes a very high priority to make sure they are reviewed at least once to “hatch” in your memory. However, once the first repetition ends with success and your future recall at longer intervals is a bit more likely, you can provide a more honest priority, which is usually lower than when first prioritizing extracts for the sake of generating cloze deletions. If you are still worried about possible forgetting, you can wait with establishing the honest priority until the 3rd or 4th review. The longer you wait, the greater the chance you will forget something truly important in the meantime.

If you hesitate between a lower priority and a higher priority, a lower priority is nearly always better! (due to the priority bias that is likely to crowd your learning process)

If you skip some of your daily repetition sessions, item protection will drop (as indicated by Priority protection in Analysis : Use). If you do not prioritize well, item protection will drop as well. The best way to keep item protection high is to learn regularly, learn a lot, and provide honest priority evaluations

Your measured forgetting index will increase if you are honest with priorities in an overloaded collection. However, it will more honestly reflect your actual knowledge of the material in the collection. To see how forgetting index changes with priority, see Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Graphs : Forgetting index vs. Priority

If you manually change the interval, element priorities will change. If you shorten the interval, the priority will automatically increase. If you delay the next repetition, the priority will drop.

Priority protection can at times drop by a huge margin in a single day. This is not a reason to worry, as long as this does not become a trend. For example, if you discover a set of clozes whose priority is too low, and you increase that priority in the entire set, all items that have been outstanding, but not at the front of the outstanding queue, will affect the item protection measurement on the next day. This is a one-day phenomenon. However, you will also notice a destructive impact of massive up-prioritizations. It is easy to say “that branch is very important”, and very difficult to undo the damage by indiscriminate change of priorities.

If you are curious which postponed item reduced your item protection (Priority protection), choose View : Recent : Postponed, choose Child : Items on the browser menu, and sort by priority (e.g. by clicking the Prior column heading). The offending item should land on top. It will tell how your item protection dropped. This is the highest priority item missed on the previous day of learning.

A simple way to get the feel of the relative importance of an article is to look at the After and Before fields in the priority dialog (Alt+P). For example, it may be tempting to give ahigh priority to an article that vexes your curiosity. However, you may need to pause and ask if the story of Scott Peterson is as important to your knowledge as an article about the causes of autism. If you happen to watch a documentary about Peterson (e.g. in your incremental video collection), you may temporarily accept a higher priority to that article, and use Priority : Spread on the browser processing menu to deprioritize all extracts after you finish watching the program. This way you will let various pieces of information dovetail together, which will benefit long-term retention.

The main difference between lifelong learning and school learning is that schools artificially distort the priority of the learning material. Before an exam, a section of material must receive high priority and high processing, while after the exam, the same material must be realistically re-assessed (which usually means a manifold decrease in priority and heavy dilution of the overload).

Priority queue: Summary

- SuperMemo uses a priority queue in which all elements are arranged by their priority in the learning process

- The highest priority is 0%. The lowest priority is 100%

- SuperMemo can auto-postpone the excess of the outstanding material

- SuperMemo uses the priority queue to auto-sort the learning queue. This means that each day, you will first be served high-priority elements

- Priority queue softens the need for moderation in learning; however, it does not entirely solve the priority bias (i.e. your tendency to attach excessive priority to new material)

- SuperMemo automates moderation by strictly limiting the inflow of topics into the learning process

- SuperMemo helps you combat the priority bias by a user-defined degree of randomization in sorting the learning queue

- In a heavily overloaded learning process, the retention of low-priority material will drop substantially

- Deprioritization of elements is painful, but it is a key to your long-term success. Due to the priority bias, lower priority is nearly always better than a higher priority!

- Tools : Statistics : Analysis : Use : Priority protection : Items can be used to inspect the degree of item protection in an overloaded learning process

- Tools : Statistics : Statistics : Protection can be used to inspect one’s progress in processing top priority material on a given day

- Priority queue will help you increase the volume of learning, and still increase the retention of top-priority material

Visual learning

Visual learning: Incremental picture processing and learning

A picture is worth a thousand words. This ageless maxim expresses a well-known fact taken from neuroscience: we have an extremely effective visual memory systems that should be used often to complement the memorysystems used for more abstract knowledge that is the chief target of incremental reading. Pictures have a great mnemonic power and should be used profusely to illustrate the learning material. SuperMemo implements picture operations that should make your work with pictures easier than ever as long as you master the basic skills of visual learning.

Visual learning is an equivalent of incremental reading, but is used to master material represented as pictures. In visual learning, you get a series of pictures as your input, and produce lasting memories of the most important pictures, picture fragments, or annotations associated with pictures.

The tools and techniques of visual learning can also be used to learn texts that are available only as pictures (e.g. book snapshots, read-only PDF screen prints, paper notes, etc.). A scanner or a digital camera can be used to take pictures of the notes. However, text searches cannot be executed unless high-quality OCR software is used or picture texts are annotated manually.

Adding pictures to SuperMemo

Pasting pictures from the clipboard

To paste a picture to SuperMemo, copy it first to the clipboard. In SuperMemo, go to the element that is to display the picture. Make sure you are in the presentation mode (e.g. press Esc a few times if you are not sure). Press Shift+Insert or Ctrl+V to paste the picture or click the Paste button () on the learnbar.

If the element does not have image components, SuperMemo will shift the existing components to the left to make space for the picture. Otherwise it will reuse the first empty image component, or tile existing images to add a new one in the space devoted to pictures. Depending on your category template settings, and the existence of picture templates associated with your default template, SuperMemo may also prompt you Do you want to use a picture template?

If your template has a picture hosting equivalent, you will be asked if the picture template should be used. The picture template should have the same name as the currently applied template with the suffix Picture or P. For example, if the applied template is called Physics, and you want picture templates to be suggested automatically for elements with the Physics template, name the picture template Physics Picture or PhysicsP in the template registry (e.g. available via Search : Templates on the main menu).

A newly pasted picture is always added to the image registry and becomes linked to the image component that hosts it.

Importing pictures from a local drive

A single picture

If your picture resides on the hard disk:

1. right-click over the image component you want to import the picture to,

2. choose File : Import file,

3. choose the picture from the disk.

A folder of pictures

If you want to import an entire album of pictures stored in a specific folder on your hard disk, use File : Import : Files and folders, and choose the folder to import. All files (including non-picture files) will be imported to separate elements that will form a tree structure in the contents window analogous to the structure of imported folders (i.e. the selected folder and its subfolders (if any)). Note that you can automatically delete imported pictures from the import folder. Use this option with caution. To accelerate the import, there is no undo for import delete. Moreover, if you choose a wrong folder, the process may take ages and you will end up with a collection peppered with, for example, EXE applications.

Importing pictures from the web

You can import pictures from the web. You can either search for pictures (e.g. with Google Images), or you can import pictures that are included in the articles that you process with incremental reading.

Import from the web

If you find some pictures on the net, open them in the Internet Explorer, and use Shift+Ctrl+A to import them to SuperMemo. See Import web pages for details. Download progress for large pictures is displayed on the status bar.

The import template is determined as follows:

1. Default topic template for the current category is used if it contains at least one text component (for picture descriptions) and one image component (for the picture)

2. Predefined Article Picture template is used if it still exists (you can redefine this template or save your own template under this name as long as it contains the required text and image components)

3. In all other cases, template-less element is created with text and image components as required by the import procedure

Import from articles included in SuperMemo

Once you import an article from the net, all its pictures will still reside on the net. If you would like to make sure you do not lose those pictures (e.g. when the article is pulled off), or if you want the pictures to show up in all extracts and clozes produced in incremental reading, use Ctrl+F8 (Download images on the HTML component menu).

Pictures as answers

If you want a picture to be part of the answer (i.e. not visible at question time), check Answer on the image component menu.

Tiling pictures

If you are not happy with the way your pictures are tiled, you can rearrange the components and re-tile your pictures. To rearrange components, set them in the dragging mode first. You can switch a component to the dragging mode with Alt+click (click twice until the component becomes gray and draggable). You can switch all the components to the dragging mode with the Switch mode button () on the learnbar, with double Alt+click over an empty element area, over the navigation bar, or over the bottom bar of the element window. Once in the dragging mode, components can be moved around with the mouse.

To tile components, set the to-be-tiled components in the dragging mode, and choose Tile components in the Commander (Ctrl+Enter), or Components : Tile components (Shift+Alt+T) on the element menu. Component tiling assistance will help you arrange the components into the optimum set of rows and columns. Components will be tiled into the rectangle determined by the topmost, bottommost, rightmost and leftmost edges of all the components selected for tiling. Positions of all other components are not taken into consideration. Note that once you change either Rows or Columns you need to press Enter in order to recalculate the other parameter and to update the preview grid.

To choose components to tile, you can also press Ctrl+E to set all components in the editing mode, and return non-tile components to the presentation mode with double or triple Alt+click. Finally, you can just check or uncheck the components on the list displayed right before they are to be tiled.

Big pictures

Zooming, slicing, trimming, and cropping pictures

Some pictures are too big to be effectively used in learning. They carry too much information. In some cases you will want to focus on the important part of the picture, in other cases you will just want to discard unnecessary information.

For example, when learning political geography, you might import a huge map of Africa to SuperMemo. However, for individual items, you might want to limit the displayed portion of the picture to a single country with its direct neighbors.

To display only a small portion of a picture in a given element, enter the zoom&trim mode by Alt+clicking the picture. You can now use several operations to zoom in onto the interesting portion of the picture:

- Zoom: click the middle mouse button to zoom in on an interesting portion of the picture

- Unzoom: Shift+click the middle button to unzoom

- Move: Shift+drag the zoomed picture to adjust the displayed area

- Trim: Ctrl+swipe unwanted edges of the picture:

1. press Ctrl,
2. point to the edge that is to be cut out,
3. press down the mouse, and

4. move it in the direction of the area that is to be cut.

- Select: drag and select to mark the area that is to be displayed in the picture:

1. point to one corner of the desired area,

2. press down the left mouse button,

3. drag the selection marquee to select a portion of the picture, and

4. release the mouse button to slice the picture.

Once you zoom in onto the interesting area, press Esc to quit the zoom&trim mode. You will be given the following options:

- Leave the picture zoomed/trimmed without changing the file. This will display the selected portion of the picture in the current element without changing the original picture file that might be used elsewhere in its entirety or with other portions zoomed onto. This is the default option. When you revisit the element, it will still be marked with a zoom border. However, the lime-colored border of the zoom&trim mode will be replaced with a red border, which indicates a zoomed picture in the display mode.

- Permanently cut/crop the zoomed/trimmed image file. This will replace the original picture file with a smaller picture representing the zoomed-in area).

- Unzoom/undo. This will cancel the changes introduced in the zoom&trim mode.

- Cancel. This does nothing (i.e. you will stay in the zoom&trim mode)

If you leave the element without terminating the zoom&trim mode, the picture will remained zoomed, and the original picture file will remain unchanged (i.e. as if you chose the default option when terminating the zoom&trim mode with Esc)

Picture processing options

You can quickly access picture processing options with Shift+Ctrl+F8. If you have more than one picture in the element, start from clicking the one that you want to process.

The following picture processing options are available:

- Zoom - enter the zoom&trim mode (you can enter this mode even faster with Alt+click over the image)

- Unzoom - unzoom the zoomed picture, i.e. show the entire original picture

- Extract (Alt+X) - extract portion of a picture into a new element. SuperMemo (1) duplicates the element, (2) clones the image, and (3) enters the trim&zoom mode. This will, in essence, produce an extract in the same way as you produce a text extract in incremental reading. Once you finish selecting or trimming the extract, press Esc, and choose Permanently cut/crop the zoomed/trimmed image file. If you do not want the original picture to be marked with extract boundaries, respond with No to Replace picture with a JPG image? After executing Extract, you will have two elements: one with the original picture with extract boundaries marked (or unchanged, if you do not want to modify the picture), and the new element with a new picture, which is a portion of the original picture (see: example)

- Crop - delete invisible portions of the picture from the original file (i.e. reduce its size to the visible portion of the zoomed picture). This will affect all elements that use this picture

- Clone - create a copy of a picture in the image registry (this way, cropping a picture or marking it with extracted portions will not affect other elements that use the same picture in the collection)

- Compress - reduce the size of the picture by choosing a new size; compression will produce a file that is no greater than the size you choose. In most cases, you can compress a 2-5 MB picture to 200-500 kB without noticing the difference in quality

- Scale - reduce the size of the picture by reducing its quality, increasing compression, reducing its dimensions, trimming its edges, etc

Extracting pictures from larger pictures

Extracting picture fragments from larger pictures is analogous to extracting fragments of texts in incremental reading. They can also be executed with the same shortcut Alt+X. The Alt+X will work for a picture extract if (1) no text is selected, and (2) there is a picture available in the element.

When you press Alt+X on a picture, the element will be duplicated (as is the case with text extracts), the picture will be cloned (i.e. a duplicate of its original will be created), and you will enter the zoom&trim mode. Once you zoom onto a portion of the picture, press Esc to crop the extract and return to the original element (from which the extract has been made). SuperMemo will ask you: Replace picture with a JPG image? Note that the above sequence is slightly different from the one you use in extracting texts: you press Alt+X and generate a new element before you select a picture fragment.

If you choose Yes, the original big picture will be marked with a bright yellow-red extract rectangle (marking the area that has been extracted). If extract rectangles overlap, you may wish to answerNo to make sure the extracts themselves do not get obscured by previous extract borders; however, in such cases you will need to remember which portions of the picture have already been extracted. This means that in those cases you will rather need to do all your extracts one after another (i.e. while you keep your progress fresh in memory).

Example of a picture extract

This large picture of a stunning Freiburg panorama is too large to view details in SuperMemo. You can therefore extract all interesting portions for independent review. After producing an extract, yellow-red border can indicate which portions of the picture have already been processed:

Individual extracts are small enough to view details without zooming:

Instead of extracting portions of the panorama, you might equally well just zoom in. However, if you extract only a tiny portion of pictures from a very large image, extracts will consume less disk space because the portions of the picture you are not interested in, will be discarded.

Cloze for pictures

To create graphic deletion tests (occlusion tests), do the following:

1. Choose Add new (Alt+A) to add a new item

2. Apply the Occlusion template (e.g. press Ctrl+Shift+M and choose “Occlusion“)

3. Paste the image prepared for the graphic test (e.g. Ctrl+V)

4. Use Ctrl+T a few times to select the occlusion rectangle

5. Size the rectangle so that to occlude the portion that makes the question

6. Type in the question (e.g. “What portion of the image is covered by the red rectangle?“)

7. Type in the answer

8. Use Shift+Alt+L to test your new occlusion test

9. Use Edit : Duplicate (Alt+D) on the element menu to generate more tests with the same picture

10. Remember that for best scaling results you need to keep your template/element Scaled and your picture Stretch : Filled (without those two, resizing the element will move the rectangle relative to the image and reveal the answer)

Incremental video

What is incremental video?

Incremental video is a technique for learning or watching video recordings with the view to forming lasting memories of the material viewed. Incremental video makes it possible to learn from multiple sources of video without neglecting any one of them. The processing of individual sources proceeds in parallel and time allocations for individual sources depend on student’s priorities. Incremental video is to video as incremental reading is to learning from electronic texts. In incremental video, it is the user who decides which portions of a video are important to remember. Those portions are part of a standard learning process known from other applications of SuperMemo. Each portion of the video forms a separate topic that is reviewed at increasing intervals. Despite working with thousands of videos, you do not ever need to feel lost, ever get bored, or ever miss a valuable scene. You can also use SuperMemo as your video or music jukebox. You can work with individual videos for mere seconds. Just as much as is needed to set the new viewing point, determine the priority and determine the date of the next viewing. This way, you can process dozens of videos daily and work with thousands of videos in parallel. You shall feel overwhelmed with the richness of YouTube never again!

On the face of it, incremental video looks like channel-zapping on steroids. However, it is also a powerful learning technique that makes it easy to process thousands of videos in parallel without getting lost. It also makes it easy to learn individual video scenes for long-term retention. It can be used to learn sports, master musical instruments, understand biology, or learn fun dialogs in your favorite movies. Individual videos are processed in small portions. Viewing can be resumed at any time at the last viewing position. Best pieces are preserved for repeat viewing. Individual videos are prioritized and served on a daily basis in manageable portions in order of priority.

Although, incremental video can roughly be implemented with a pair of digital video recorders working in tandem, only SuperMemo provides a bona fide implementation with the whole set of incremental learning tools. SuperMemo makes it possible to learn from standard video files (e.g. MP4). It also makes it easy to learn from YouTube videos. At the moment of writing these words, no other software in the world provides the incremental video learning toolset.

Incremental video with YouTube

Incremental video in SuperMemo can use YouTube videos. You can capitalize on the video streaming power of YouTube and speed up SuperMemo even though you may suffer video lags on weaker Internet connections. You will also dramatically save on hard disk space. Videos are notorious hogs of space, your YouTube collections will take a tiny fraction of space needed for video based on local files. YouTube collection will actually take less space than incremental reading collections while carrying lots of learning power. If your network is slow or frequently down, you should take comfort in the fact that this situation is likely to change for the better as networks improve worldwide all the time (and this progress is not likely to be slowed soon). Last but not least, SuperMemo will hopefully encourage you to upload your own educational videos to YouTube and thus share them with others.

Incremental video with video files

Incremental video in SuperMemo can use video files from your local drive. You do not need to limit your learning to videos available from YouTube that can be notoriously volatile (e.g. with accounts closed for copyright violations, embedding blocked by account holders, videos made private, etc.). You are not limited by the need to access to the Internet. You can also process private videos.

Using incremental video with local files requires computers with significant processing power. On a strong PC, processing video files is fast and painless. It may be slower on weaker PCs. Your collections may grow to be terabytes large, which is the main disadvantage of keeping files local. Make sure you have a big dedicated external drive for a backup of your material. The time-scale resolution of local videos is higher than that of YouTube-based videos, which are limited to setting Start and Stop points in increments of 1 second. With local files, you can review fragments that last milliseconds. You can review your best football move at nauseam. Moreover, with local files, you can work when disconnected from the net.

Incremental video can use local files in several video formats (incl. MP4, WMV, AVI, MOV, Mpeg, and more). Not all video formats are supported. Before you commit to SuperMemo, give it a try to see if your files can be processed or converted to acceptable format with third party tools.

Incremental video in SuperMemo

SuperMemo is a pioneer in implementing versatile incremental video. For those who are familiar with incremental reading (also pioneered by SuperMemo), incremental video is an analogous technique. Instead of text extracts, you generate video extracts, i.e. portions of a larger video. Video extracts are viewed repeatedly in increasing intervals (as it is thecase with other pieces of information in SuperMemo).

Individual videos and their extracts are treated in the same way as all other topic elements and enter the learning process according to the rules that are known from incremental reading. Currently, only passive review of extracts is supported. There is no equivalent of cloze deletion in incremental video. However, you can use videos as answers if you choose so.

Incremental video with YouTube: Outline

This is how you work with incremental video in SuperMemo:

1. open your favorite YouTube videos in Internet Explorer

2. choose YouTube import option to import videos to SuperMemo (e.g. Shift+Ctrl+Y)

3. use Learn to process individual videos

4. use Start and Stop buttons to mark interesting scenes

5. use Extract to generate new elements with scenes marked with Start and Stop

6. use learning tools in SuperMemo to prioritize, schedule, and organize videos and video extracts

Importing videos from YouTube

To import videos for incremental learning do the following:

1. open YouTube videos in Internet Explorer

2. choose one of the following:

- press Shift+Ctrl+Y

- Import YouTube videos on the learnbar (right-click over the Import articles button)

- Edit : Import web pages : YouTube from the main menu

3. optionally, set import options (e.g. which videos to import, video priority, name of the import node in the knowledge tree, etc.)

4. click Import

If you see a video embedded in a webpage choose Copy video URL on the YouTube video context menu (right click), and paste the video to SuperMemo with Ctrl+N (as you would paste anywebpage).

If you receive a video forward from SuperMemo, you can copy its code from the body of the mail and paste it to your collection with Ctrl+N (as you would paste any text or article).

Viewing YouTube videos

Use Learn in the same way as when learning with SuperMemo. The videos start automatically. When you get bored or need to watch other videos, press Start to mark the point from which you will resume the video next time you see it. If you find an important fragment that you would like to learn or view again, press Start at the beginning of the fragment, and Stop at the end of the fragment. Use Test to view the fragment again. Press Extract if you would like to create a new fragment that should take part in the learning process as a separate element.

You can use Mark and Resume to set a bookmark that will not affect the point from which video starts (e.g. when preparing an extract).

You can generate extracts without interrupting the viewing process. Extract elements are generated only when you move on to the next element or when you press Alt+X.

If you get the same videos over and over again, and you would like to get some variety independent of video priority, use Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria and increase Randomization (move the thumb from Prioritized topics towards Randomized topics, i.e. to the right).

If you are not sure how to handle the incremental learning process, incremental reading is a good introduction to understanding incremental video.

Forwarding video fragments to friends

If you forward a YouTube element in SuperMemo via e-mail to others, it will include the link and start:stop boundaries of the video. Forwarded videos can be viewed in a web browser or directly in SuperMemo with Start and Stop buttons set to make sure only the recommended fragment plays.

Your e-mail will look similar to this one:

Please have a look at this YouTube video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOzNAiOR7fY?rel=0&t=49&end=79See the fragment from 00:49 to 01:19.If you are using SuperMemo 15 or later you can also:(1) select this code (e.g. triple click):{SuperMemoYouTube:WOzNAiOR7fY,00:49,01:19,00:00}(2) copy the code to clipboard (e.g. Ctrl+C)(3) use Ctrl+N to paste the code to SuperMemo and play the recommended fragment.Sender ID: SuperMemo Research==================================================#Subject: Marissa Mayer: Why Google Maps is far ahead on Android#Author: Jean-Louis Nguyen#Date: Feb 27, 2013, Wed, 00:18 (updated: Feb 27, 2013, Wed, 00:18)#Source: YouTube#Comment: Uploaded 2012-09-27 (2669 views)#Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOzNAiOR7fY#Collection: YOUTUBE [Element=6667]#Generated: Aug 01, 2013, Thu, 12:13:00#Software: SuperMemo 16 (Build 16.0, Aug 01, 2013)

Exemplary YouTube videos

Incremental video is a video equivalent of incremental reading. However, there are many things you may wish to learn that are best mastered with video and cannot be substituted with reading. The list is truly endless. However, here are just a few examples taken from YouTube to give you the first sense of why incremental video is an important component of incremental learning:

- learn a foreign language with the help of movies, speeches, lectures, etc.

- learn recent history with archive footage

- explore the student’s video paradise: Khan Academy

- learn to play a musical instrument using video tutorial produced by experts or best artists

- learn to play along or sing along your favorite songs

- use Mike Phelps videos to learn how to swim butterfly

- recover from injuries by learning physiotherapeutic exercises

- watch movies incrementally
- listen to your favorite music
- watch historic sports events

- watch video lectures from reputable universities

- enjoy or learn the best jokes or comedy pieces by Leno, Connan, Jon Stewart, and others

- master speechmaking with videos of MLK, JFK, Reagan, or Obama

- seek motivation from Tony Robbins or other self-help gurus

- learn to cook

- relive memorable moments in the lives of your family and friends

- learn physiology, geology, physics, or history, wherever a video explanation is needed

- learn sign language, volleyball, soccer, etc.

Incremental video with video files: Outline

This is how you work with video files using incremental video in SuperMemo:

1. put your video files into a single empty folder

2. use File : Import : Files and folders to import the contents of that folder to SuperMemo

3. use Learn to process individual videos

4. use Start and End buttons to mark interesting scenes

5. use Extract to generate new elements with scenes marked with Start and End

6. use learning tools of SuperMemo to prioritize, schedule, and organize videos and video extracts

Video deletion

Incremental video is currently most suited for processing video or audio material passively with the most interesting portions extracted for passive review as topics. Currently you cannot “cloze delete” portions of video or audio files with a keystroke, however, you can, easily use video extracts as answers to text questions, or video questions. For that purpose, mark your sound or video components with the Answer attribute. You can also define templates that will make that process easier.

Viewing video files and learning

Use Learn in the same way as when learning with SuperMemo. The videos start automatically if you have AutoPlay checked on the element menu. When you get bored or need to watch other videos, press Start (on the Extractor panel). Start marks the point from which you will resume the video next time you see it. If you find an important fragment that you would like to learn or view again, pressStart at the beginning of the fragment, and End at the end of the fragment. Use Test to view the fragment again. Press Extract if you would like to create a new element with the extracted fragment that should take part in the learning process.

If you get the same videos over and over again, and you would like to get some variety (even though the videos might be of top priority), use Learn : Sorting : Sorting criteria and increase Randomization (move the thumb from Prioritized topics towards Randomized topics).

If you are not sure how to handle the incremental learning process, incremental reading is a good introduction to understanding incremental video.

Exemplary video files

For a list of exemplary videos that may be used in incremental learning see: Exemplary YouTube videos.

Note that not all video material may be learned with the help of YouTube. There might be copyright or privacy issues. There is also one pesky problem with YouTube that can ruin any long-term learning process: videos can be pulled at any minute (unless you upload them yourself for public viewing with full respect to copyright). Last but not least, the time resolution of local file incremental video is higher that that of YouTube-based video. You can set your starting point with millisecond precision (as opposed to 1 second resolution of YouTube videos).

Material that might work better with files on your local hard disk include:

- lectures or interviews that are available for download but not published at YouTube

- lectures or interviews that are available for download and you wish to keep local (e.g. to ensure speed, precision, persistence, or offline viewing)

- copyrighted material from iTunes
- movies
- home video
- language courses

- all other files that you want to learn but cannot upload to YouTube (or just you do not want to be bothered with the hassle)

Hints: Incremental video

Hints: Incremental video with YouTube

- Define “YouTube Extract” template to have it used for extracts from YouTube videos (as long as you use the “YouTube” template). Otherwise, “YouTube” template will be used with the background changed to yellow. The simplest approach is to save your “YouTube” template with the new name (“YouTube Extract“) and then redefine it (e.g. by changing the element color). Differentiating videos from their extracts (e.g. by color) is important for your strategies in optimizing the learning process.

- Incremental video is less incremental than incremental reading. Incremental video was designed on the assumption that, unlike in incremental reading, you go through the main body of the video linearly. This is because of multiple context problems when splitting videos into smaller portions and watching them in unpredictable order. This way, once you make an extract, the assumption is, you do not come back to the once viewed portion of the video as it is already part of the extract. When you return to process the video, you start from the last position extracted or marked with Start. In other words, as you do not extract without viewing, there should be little needed for sub-extracts

Hints: Incremental video with local files

- Define “Video Extract” template to have your template used for extracts. Otherwise, The “Video” template will be used with the background changed to yellow. The simplest approach is to save your “Video” template with the new name (“Video Extract“) and then redefine it (e.g. by changing the element color to the desired extract color). Color differentiation is important for optimizing the strategies in processing videos

- If you want your extracts to run in an infinite loop, make sure you check Continuous in your video extract template

- There isn’t much performance penalty for processing large video files. You can import whole DVDs too and process them incrementally

- Not all file formats are supported, however, most formats can easily be converted to MP4 (e.g. with XMedia Recode).

- Note that some MP4 files may not work correctly in SuperMemo. Please test a trial SuperMemo before you make a major commitment

Problems with YouTube-based incremental video

Here are some problems you may encounter when learning with YouTube-based incremental video:

- YouTube videos can be removed at any time. They can also have embedding disabled. This is a major problem for the present implementation of incremental video in SuperMemo. There are no API tools that could allow of legal localization of YouTube contents (at the moment of writing). However, the problem mostly affects copyrighted material that shows up on YouTube illegally (e.g. movies, music, etc.). Occasionally, video authors themselves remove content. This should never be a problem though if you use your own videos. Hopefully, there will be more and more persistent content uploaded for educational purposes.

- Alt+Left arrow shortcut is used by Internet Explorer to return to the previously visited page. As a result, it also works like an Undo for your Start:Stop setting. To return to the previous page in SuperMemo, use the Back button () on the navigation bar

- it may happen that your network is down or the Internet is slow when working with YouTube videos. You may therefore prefer to first experiment with a dedicated incremental video collection to learn how to handle videos and prevent interruptions to learning in cases of network problems. You can always stop working with your incremental video collection, return to your regular learning, and resume video learning when the network returns to normal functionality

- if you would like to use SuperMemo as your YouTube jukebox, you should also keep music videos in a single collection (or mark them all with a specific keyword for fast subset learning). You can later hide your jukebox collection in the system tray. Your jukebox will play only the selected fragments of individual videos in order of priority as specified in your sorting criteria. As in incremental reading, using intervals and priorities is a good remedy against getting bored with a given song or video

- videos cannot be played in SuperMemo if their embedding is blocked (you will see a message Embedding Disabled By Request). Those videos you can only watch on YouTube. This means that those videos are pretty useless in your incremental video learning; however, you can still use prioritization and scheduling tools to choose which videos should be played in which sequence and on which day. Note also that many of those videos are uploaded multiple times by various users, and you only need to search for an alternative that can be embedded

- for technical reasons, some videos (roughly one in a thousand) cannot be watched incrementally (they will ignore extracts and always play in their entirety); some can show large rounding errors for extract precision (around 10% of videos can only be watched in large increments). This problem seems to have largely been resolved after 2010.

- some videos may display loading errors on first entry. Right-click over the video and choose Refresh to reload (or use Alt+Left arrow followed by Alt+Right arrow to revisit the element). If the error reoccurs, use the link in references on the right to visit the original page at YouTube. This problem seems to have largely been resolved with the newer versions of YouTube API

- there are bugs in YouTube API, flash player, and Internet Explorer that can interfere with your work. Your script can use version=2 or version=3 of the player. Both have ups and downs. Version 2 tends to hang on very short video pieces that play over and over again (due to a memory leak in Flash software). Version 3 may hang for 10-20 seconds when loading videos preceded with advertising (without actually showing the advertising).

Your own incremental video script

Videos are handled with the help of YouTube Player API in HTML components using a small JavaScript program. When you first run SuperMemo, it writes this script into a file stored in the [BIN] subfolder of the folder in which you installed SuperMemo. The name of the file is yt.htm. If you know JavaScript, you can substitute your own incremental video script in that file (e.g. to change the layout, size of buttons, or even add new functions for processing videos). Here are the only components of the script that you need to preserve:

- the order of INPUT fields (these are used by SuperMemo to collect extract boundaries)

- SELECT and OPTION fields for generating extracts

- INPUT field with YouTube video ID substituted by SuperMemo (id=“videoid”)

- INPUT field that determines the position of video start and end (id=“startvideoat” and id=“stopvideoat”)(must be “0:00:00“)

The most important change you may wish to introduce is to decide between version=2 and version=3 of the player. Both have their bugs and disadvantages. For more see Player Version Issues. The version of the player you choose will be picked by default in all your YouTube elements. However, you can change the default with Player version from the context menu of the Edit file button on the learnbar.

If you would like to share your own script with others, you can upload it to SuperMemoPedia.

Incremental audio

Incremental audio is analogous to incremental video. You can use incremental video to process audio information from YouTube, or you can use a dedicated extractor bar in sound components to import and process sound files (e.g. MP3, WMA, WAV, etc.).

Incremental audio with sound files

Working with sound files is the same as working with video files. The only difference is that you will use sound components instead of video components. Those will be created for you automatically at import with File : Import : Files and folders (available from the main menu). For details see: Incremental video with video files: Outline.

Incremental audio with YouTube

See: Incremental video with YouTube: Outline to find out how to use YouTube material in incremental audio process.

Incremental mail processing

E-mail in SuperMemo: Introduction

SuperMemo makes it easy to resolve mail overload without neglecting the most important channels of communication.

In addition to prioritizing and managing the communication, SuperMemo helps you:

1. incorporate e-mail communication into your learning process (e.g. forwarding and discussing important pieces of knowledge)

2. incorporate learning into your e-mail communication (e.g. memorizing important facts related to your mail communication)

To fully use e-mail functionality in SuperMemo you will need Windows (Live) Mail (or any other e-mail client that support EML) or MS Outlook 2000 or later. At the very minimum, MAPI compatible mail would be needed for sending SuperMemo elements or objects via mail.

Here are the most important uses of e-mail in SuperMemo:

1. Sending learning data to others: If you encounter valuable information in incremental learning (or when processing mail), you can send it to your colleagues, friends, partners or family with a single click for inspiration or further discussion. For example, while reading an article about decoding human genome, you might find out that Craig Venter of Celera comes from a Mormon family and that his father was eventually excommunicated. You can send such a note (or the whole article) from SuperMemo to your Mormon friend with a click of a button.

2. Using incremental learning tools to process mail: Incremental reading is a powerful tool that helps you prioritize, schedule, and process mail. As a result, you may decide that instead of using your mail software, it is more convenient and rational to use SuperMemo to read and respond to your e-mail. Users of Windows (Live) Mail or MS Outlook can now import all their mail to SuperMemo with a keystroke. If you receive more mail than you are able to effectively process, you can prioritize it with incremental learning tools. You will immediately process only the most important pieces and proceed with others according to their priority in proportion of available time. As in the learning process, rescheduling and sorting happens in the background, so that you never lose sleep over delaying a reply or being slow with processing excess mail.

3. Using mail material in incremental learning: You may also incorporate snippets of mail in your learning process. You can treat most valuable pieces of e-mail as articles to read. If you receive highly inspirational messages, you may want to introduce it into incremental learning and memorize its portions to ensure long-term benefit. In other words, your mail may not only prompt action, but may also be used in learning to keep your memory up-to-date with things you care about. This way you can also learn from materials sent from others, esp. if those materials come in small portions extracted from an incremental learning process conducted by other people. You can also comment or respond to individual portions of the processed mail. You can do it while reading or when new ideas come to your mind upon review. You can use this process for the purpose of creativity (e.g. reviewing an inspiring idea or information in different contexts) or for the purpose of recall (e.g. trying to remember the university major of your cousin).

Sending learning data to others

To send an element via e-mail, click the E-mail button () on the navigation bar or press Shift+Ctrl+E. Element texts will be sent in the e-mail body (if you wish so), while formatted texts, pictures, and other files will be sent as attachments. You could also send texts without attachments by using E-mail : Texts or E-mail : Q&A on the element menu.

To send a selected fragment of an article via e-mail, right-click over the selection (to open the component menu) and choose Reading : E-mail (Shift+Ctrl+E). Alternatively, you can also click the E-mail button () on the Read toolbar. Note: SuperMemo sends only plain text mail, and formatted texts can only be sent as attachments.

To send a fragment of YouTube video, mark the fragment with Start and Stop buttons and click the E-mail button () on the navigation bar.

Importing mail to SuperMemo

Importing mail from Windows (Live) Mail

To import mail from Windows (Live) Mail, follow these steps:

1. (optionally) Preview mail in your Windows (Live) Mail Inbox:

- delete spam,

- process one-liners (mail that requires only short answers and is not worth archiving),

- categorize mail by moving it to separate folders (e.g. Business, Family, Pictures, Learning, etc.), forward mail that may be processed by others, etc.

2. (optionally) Move mail that is to be processed incrementally in a given collection to a dedicated import folder. Use a top level import folder as SuperMemo only lists top folders on the pick-list (e.g. Inbox, Sent items, Business as opposed to Inbox/Business). Nested folders need to be picked manually (with Change the import folder).

3. You can import mail from any folder by following these steps:

1. Choose Edit : Import mail (Shift+F4) on the main menu, or Import mail from the import context menu on the learnbar

2. (when importing for the first time) select Windows (Live) Mail as your mail application

3. (when importing for the first time) pick the account you want to import mail from

4. (when importing for the first time) SuperMemo will ask you to specify the folder with e-mails to import

Figure: A dialog with the list of top level folders to import mail from (displayed when importing mail for the first time)

5. Pressing OK will import all mail to SuperMemo. E-mail attachments will be imported as separate components of the appropriate type. Binary components will be used to import attachments in formats that are not supported by SuperMemo (e.g. PDF, URL, ZIP, MSG, MMP, XLS, DOC, MPA, WMA, etc.). Mail that has been imported previously will be skipped (as long as it is located in the same import folder as used in the prior import)

Figure: Progress bar displayed while importing mail to SuperMemo

Note that you will only repeat steps 2-4 when changing the e-mail client or the import folder.

Importing mail from MS Outlook

To import mail from MS Outlook, do what follows:

1. (optionally) Preview mail in the Outlook Inbox

2. (optionally) Move mail that is to be processed incrementally in a given collection to a dedicated import folder. A disadvantage of importing directly from Outlook Inbox is that new mail may arrive during the import process

3. You can import the content of your Inbox (or any other Outlook mail folder) by choosing Edit : Import mail (Shift+F4) on the main menu. Choose Import All to import all mail to SuperMemo and move it to an archive folder in MS Outlook (see the picture below). E-mail attachments will be imported as separate components of the appropriate type. Binary components will be used to import attachments in formats that are not supported by SuperMemo (e.g. PDF, URL, ZIP, MSG, MMP, XLS, DOC, MPA, etc.)

Importing mail from other applications

Importing mail from a folder

If your mail application keeps mail on a local disk in the EML format, you can import it by pointing to the folder from which the mail should be imported:

1. choose Edit : Import mail (Shift+F4) from the main menu

2. choose Change the mailing program (if you used other methods previously, answer with No to whatever confirmation SuperMemo demands)

3. choose Other applications

4. when SuperMemo asks “Please point to the folder where you keep the mail that you want to import“, point to the folder where EML files reside

Importing mail by copy&paste

If you do not use Windows (Live) Mail, nor MS Outlook, nor any other suitable application from where you can import mail, you can manually import individual pieces of mail.

To paste a piece of e-mail for incremental reading, select the text in the e-mail body, copy this text to the clipboard and choose E-Mail: Paste in the Commander (Ctrl+Enter, E). You can also use Edit : Add to category : E-mail from the main menu.

If you want to respond to the original sender while incrementally reading his or her e-mail, paste the e-mail along with its header information (date, return address, subject, etc.).

For example, in Thunderbird:

1. click Forward,

2. select the entire body of the message (e.g. with Ctrl+A),

3. copy the selected text to the clipboard (e.g. with Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Ins)

4. switch to SuperMemo, and choose E-Mail: Paste in the Commander. This will automatically convert your e-mail to plain text (to save space, remove read-only attributes, etc.). It will also format the header for you. If you want to retain some formatting, select the text and re-paste the formatted fragment

Reading mail incrementally

You can process e-mail incrementally in SuperMemo in a process analogous to incremental reading.

Here are the pros and the cons:

Advantages

1. recall of important facts: if you learn new things from e-mail sent by others, you can easily introduce the most valuable pieces into the learning process (via standard Extract or Alt+X). Those pieces will be reviewed as other pieces of knowledge in SuperMemo. If you decide to respond to a given inspirational fragment, the sender address will automatically be used when you click the E-mail button () on the navigation bar. Incremental processing will help you remember names, contexts, events, and facts far better than when using other methods. You will not experience mental chaos caused by an overcrowded Inbox

2. prioritization: if you get more e-mail material than you are able to process, you can use incremental learning tools for prioritizing mail and its fragments. One of the greatest strengths of incremental learning is its unique system for efficiently determining the priority of the reading material with the help of the priority queue. Remember to politely inform everyone about your e-mail processing system. Otherwise you may easily be accused of acting as an e-mail black hole

3. handling overflow: you can use Postpone and other rescheduling tools to resolve the excessive inflow of information without damage to your selected priority criteria. If you work in a team, it is a great idea to delegate some of your work; however, not all work can be delegated. Additionally, if you delegate, you do not learn from e-mail that you delegate. To answer the latter problem, you can choose a solution in the middle: delegate e-mail jobs and process inflowing pieces with the tools of incremental learning

Disadvantages

1. splintering e-mail: some people dislike splintered responses. They prefer to have their e-mail analyzed as a whole and responded to as a whole (preferrably within an hour :). As an act of kindness, try to remember people’s preferences and do not use incremental e-mail processing (too much) on those who do not like it

2. incremental approach is not transitive: incremental e-mail processing shows the greatest power for longer pieces of mail, article forwards, etc. For very short e-mail messages, incremental e-mail processing delivers less value per unit time. Because incremental mail processing leads to short communication bursts, it undermines its own power when used at both ends of the communication channel. However, even if you communicate in short sentences (i.e. without SuperMemo), keep the record of mail in your collection for Search and review

Incremental strategy for mail processing

Incremental learning can be employed in mail processing.

The strategy will be different when processing mail from family or friends. It will be different when processing business mail. It will also be different, and perhaps most effective, when brainstorming over e-mail.

This is an exemplary strategy that might be used in nearly all imaginable applications:

Review stage

1. (optionally) Preview mail in your Inbox: delete spam, process one-liners (mail that requires only short answers and is not worth archiving), categorize mail by moving it to separate folders (e.g. Business, Family, Pictures, Learning, Music, etc.), forward mail that may be processed by others, etc.

2. import mail from a selected import folder (e.g. with Shift+F4). You may import different categories of mail to different collections (e.g. business mail to Mail.kno, while family pictures to Photos.kno)

3. prioritize mail. Use Spread priorities to assign a range of priority to the imported subset of mail. Use Alt+P on most important pieces of mail to assign individual priorities. For example, import the bulk in the 3%..6% range, and pick 5-10 most important pieces for higher priorities

Processing stage

1. click Learn, and process mail using standard incremental reading tools (extract, re-prioritize, delay, etc.) combined with e-mail options (extract, send/reply, FAQ, article or picture forwards, etc.). As long as you use auto-sort and auto-postpone, your workload should be reasonable and you should always begin from top priority mail. If you have Learn : Sorting : Auto-sort repetitions checked, your mail will be sorted by priority at the beginning of the day. If have Learn : Postpone : Auto-postpone checked, all the mail that you fail to process today will be redistributed into the future

2. (optionally) once you run out of time, process some mail without responding to re-prioritize and reschedule the most important pieces manually (rather than leaving them to automatic rescheduling)

Naturally, as with incremental reading, the time you choose to progress through individual stages is important for efficiency. Processing stage should fall into time slots with best alertness and mental performance. Review stage can be done at other times, incl. while multi-tasking. This approach eliminates the instant nature of mail, but makes the entire process more reasonable, esp. if volumes are far beyond manageable. Although many pieces of mail will get substantially delayed (or perhaps even neglected), top-priority mail will be processed in the first order, and damage done by urgency will be less. The above strategy may introduce an inevitable delay of up to 4 days in replying (Day #1 arrival, #2 review, #3 prioritizing, #4 processing); however, in incremental reading, it is always the priority and quality that should come first ahead of speed and urgency. Those pieces that truly cannot wait can be handled at Review stage (if absolutely necessary).

Mail processing tips

1. Create a separate collection for e-mail processing (unless you plan to combine e-mail work with standard repetitions)

2. Import mail to your e-mail collection with Shift+F4

3. Use the priority queue (Alt+P) to prioritize mail

4. Use Auto-sort and Auto-postone to resolve overload and prioritize mail automatically

5. You can delay individual pieces of mail with Ctrl+Shift+R or Ctrl+J, and change their priority with Alt+P. Use Ctrl+Shift+R on first reading to determine when you want to reply to an e-mail

6. SuperMemo picks the earliest [mailto: tag from your e-mail text as the default response addressee. If you would like to send pieces of an article to a selected person, put this tag with the address anywhere in the text. For example: [mailto:johndoe@hotmail.com] (note the square brackets around the tag and the missing space between mailto: and the address). You can specify multiple recipients by separating their names with a semicolon. For example: [mailto:miko;alex] where miko and alex must be defined in your mail program’s address book (e.g. Windows Live Mail address book). Adding the [mailto: tag is useful when you want to ask many questions or forward many pieces of a single mail to a single person whose address is complex and is not defined in your address book

7. Optionally, add a degree of randomization in your Sorting criteria to prevent “tunnel vision” in processing. For example, we all suffer from a recency bias where recently arrived mail is ranked higher in priority than mail that arrived earlier. Randomization helps to counteract this and similar biases

8. In the e-mail review process (initiated with Learn), do the following:

- respond to the most important fragments with E-mail button ()(on the navigation bar)

- schedule less important fragments with Schedule extract (on the Read toolbar)

- pass or delete unimportant fragments, or mark them with Ignore (on the Read toolbar)

- if you jump to the next e-mail element before completing the reading, select the current read-point with Ctrl+F7 (Set read-point)

- if you jump to the next e-mail before completing the reading, optionally, set the new interval with Shift+Ctrl+R

- if mail can be answered later, use Alt+P to reduce its priority

- use Next repetition or Learn to move on to the next piece of mail

- if you complete reading/processing a piece of e-mail, dismiss it with Ctrl+D. You can also use Done on the element menu (Shift+Ctrl+Enter) if you do not plan to archive a given piece of mail

9. To change the addressee, paste the new address in place of the old one in the [mailto: ] field. You can use short names (e.g. [mailto:john]) if you have the name in your Address Book. Unfortunately, you will have to paste the address to all splinter fragments generated in incremental reading. You could use Search and Replace (Ctrl+R) for that purpose.

10. You can sort mail by interval, date, and more. See: You can sort mail by interval, priority or other criteria

11. You can safely remove texts that SuperMemo adds at the end of mail sent

You can sort mail by interval, priority or other criteria

You can sort mail by the length of the interval using the following method:

1. choose View : Outstanding

2. click Intrv twice at the top of the browser window (to sort from the lowest to the highest intervals)

3. choose Tools : Save repetitions (on the browser menu)

You can use this method in e-mail processing in the same way as in the learning process. You can also use this method to sort mail by priority, last review date, etc. It is most convenient to use auto-sort and auto-postpone when processing mail. This way you can be sure that mail of highest priority is scheduled at the beginning of the outstanding queue.

Responding with FAQs

When processing e-mail, you can choose to reply to a question with an FAQ (i.e. a question-answer pair), which can then be stored in your FAQ database. Responding via FAQ is the best way to retain the context of the question, even if you reply with substantial delay.

Use Reading : E-mail FAQ on the component menu or click the FAQ icon on the Read toolbar. After providing the answer, click OK. Optionally, you can reword the question, change the addressee, or the title of the question. You can also have your FAQ saved in HTML or Wiki format for publishing on the web. Note that SuperMemo FAQs are generated with SuperMemo itself. This way, many users can benefit from a reply to a question asked by a single individual.

If you would like to publish your FAQs and change their formatting, modify the following files:

- HTML: [SuperMemo folder]\bin\FAQ_template.htm

- Wiki: [SuperMemo folder]\bin\FAQ_wiki.txt

If you would like to use rich formatting in your FAQs that will be saved to a selected HTML file, toggle the Rich formatting button above the top right corner of the Question text area. You can recognize if the formatting is enabled by blue borders of the Question and Answer fields. You will then be able to use standard keyboard shortcuts for basic formatting (e.g. Ctrl+B to make the currently selected text bold, Ctrl+I to italicize the selected text, etc.)

You can edit your FAQs in the HTML component. Use Split: Insert splitmark in the Commander to separate question from answer with a splitmark (you can use Reading : Split : Insert splitmark on the component menu). You can also use horizontal lines instead of splitmarks (Shift+Alt+H). Once the FAQ is largely complete, select both the question and the answer, and choose Reading : E-mail FAQ from the component menu to polish its HTML, preview it in the WYSIWYG mode, and send it. The FAQ will be sent as a reply, and stored in FAQ files (as HTML and/or Wiki).

Incremental learning in creativity

Incremental learning promotes creativity by association of remote ideas coming in proximate sequences during the learning process. This characteristic of incremental learning can be used for all sorts of creative processes that need a boost from extra knowledge or better recall. The most useful cases of creativity enhanced with incremental learning are:

Incremental problem solving

Incremental learning can assist you in problem solving. It will be particularly useful for the classes of problems with the following properties:

- problems that require processing large amouts of information

- problems that are complex and involve rich branching of the thought process

- problems where working memory becomes a bottleneck

Exemplary problems to solve

- How to fix a pesky problem with a computer?

- How to get rid of a health problem?

- How to move to another country?

- How to get a PhD?

- How to find a culprit in a crime?

- How to answer a difficult question in science?

Many technical issues and bugs in SuperMemo have been solved with incremental problem solving methods. Incremental approach is most suited for complex problems with multiple reasoning paths or requiring rich input of new information. Some bugs in SuperMemo would be particularly intractable due to their complex technical background or difficulty in reproducing the problem. In most severe cases, it makes sense to set up a separate collection for working on a single issue. That collection can later be integrated with larger bodies of knowledge (incl. problem solving knowledge).

How does incremental problem solving work?

Incremental problem solving works as follows:

- collect all information about the problem from all sources available

- write down your own ideas and comments as separate topics

- process all that information with incremental learning techniques

- document all new ideas and new sub-problems that need to be tackled

- import all relevant supplementary material that expands on core ideas

Advantages of incremental problem solving

- always focusing on a small sub-problem that requires further testing or gathering further information

- never missing a single idea in a jungle of criss-crossing inspiration

- never drowning in excess information

- using random association of ideas that boosts creativity

- never getting frustrated by lack of progress in solving the problem. There is always progress in incremental learning, which is reassuring

- never being limited by time constraints. Breaks taken from the work over the problem are not a problem and may actually improve one’s chances of coming up with an original idea or the solution. This is due to:

1. the spacing effect,

2. the novelty effect produced by forgetting, and

3. the creative power of memory optimization in sleep

Incremental writing

Incremental writing: Introduction

SuperMemo can be used in the process of creative writing, which combines two processes:

1. writing texts and

2. creative review and elaboration.

Both processes are based on incremental reading. By analogy to incremental reading, this process is called incremental writing.

The technique of incremental writing was used to compile some of the materials at supermemo.com. Most notably, Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012), and the present Incremental learning (2013) article.

The main difference between traditional writing and incremental writing is that the writer is free to re-organize the material and review it with incremental reading tools.

The main difference between incremental reading and incremental writing is that the “big picture” of the article is built primarily within the collection, and to a lesser extent in the writer’s mind. This is suitable for large fact-packed material that is difficult to organize sequentially. In addition, one’s own writing may be the source of most input, as opposed to external electronic sources. Incremental writing is also suitable in a compilation of a large body of prior writing, esp. of materials that are repetitive, fact-rich, and often loosely connected. Incremental writing is less useful for texts with a linear line of thought.

Incremental article writing is an open-ended process that can be interrupted at any stage for the article to be exported to as a single document for text-flow rewrites.

Articles written using incremental writing may be particularly suitable for incremental reading. They can be compared to Wikipedia. Crowdsourced Wikipedia is an excellent source for incremental reading due to its incremental growth and solid local context. For the exactly same reasons, materials compiled with incremental writing are highly suitable for incremental reading. They may be bloated and repetitive, however, with incremental reading, they can be prioritized in a rational way. Incremental writing leaves the texts highly granular and the flow of thought is jagged, however, in incremental reading, this is an advantage as all individual articles and subarticles carry sufficient local context to be read independently.

Incremental writing algorithm

The incremental writing algorithm involves the steps presented below. Note, however, that these steps are not executed one after another. All steps are executed incrementally and interleaved in unpredictable sequences that assist the creative process. Unpredictable association of text component is also useful in:

1. the development of the logical structure of the text,

2. the elimination of contradictions, and

3. deleting/reconciling the repetitive material.

The steps involved in incremental writing:

1. import all the relevant sources, supplementary material, and supporting knowledge to a single SuperMemo collection

2. build a knowledge tree branch at the root of the collection with the desired structure of the article (e.g. name this branch ARTICLE)

3. keep all the supplementary material in a separate branch (e.g. TO DO)

4. review the ARTICLE branch incrementally, rewrite, improve, and rebuild the tree structure to organize a logical entirety

5. add figures, citations, links, etc.

6. review the TO DO branch incrementally, copy and paste, or move incrementally processed texts from the TO DO branch to the ARTICLE branch in the tree. Attach snippets to the right branches in the tree. Reschedule and re-prioritize less relevant texts. Delete texts that will be of no use in the final article

7. use incremental learning. This implies that you will see articles from ARTICLE and TO DO branches interleaved in unpredictable sequences moderated only by material priority. Always work on the topic that comes next. Do as little as necessary or as much as you like it. You can finish the processed topic in one go, or you can just pass a single sentence and reschedule

8. use ‘Mercy to re-distribute the excess of the material in manageable portions

9. use templates to visually indicate the status of individual portions of the article (e.g. “to write”, “to expand”, “to rewrite”, “to review”, “finished”, etc.)

10. branches that bloat beyond manageability can be treated in the same way as the entire article with subset review, tree reorganization, topic extraction and merging, etc.

11. once the job is largely completed, or a deadline looms, export the article branch with Export : Document (on the contents menu), which also automatically adds a table of contents

Incremental writing example #1

Let us consider Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012) as an example. The source material for the article included its decade-old original version, several articles related to sleep and published at supermemo.com, as well as a great deal of basic knowledge taken from various scholarly sources involved in sleep research. Those materials were supplemented with the review of knowledge of sleep from a general knowledge collection compiled by the author. The whole process started from a massive review of the entire material with incremental learning. The construction of a rough outline of the structure of the article proceeded in parallel (in the Contents window). Supplementary materials were imported to fill in or complement individual pieces of knowledge. Figures, annotations, links, and literature citations were also processed incrementally in order of priority. This process quickly resulted in an article bloat, however, this was a bloat of valuable information rather than a bloat of excess writing. Towards the end of the process, individual topics from SuperMemo were imported to a single-page wiki. Some manual wikification was necessary at that step. Alternatively, multi-page wikis, blogs, or plain-HTML sites could have been used as the target of exports from SuperMemo.

Incremental writing example #2

The presented article: Incremental learning (2013) has been compiled from a number of older articles on incremental reading, priority queue, incremental video, visual learning, as well as older articles such as Devouring knowledge, Flow of knowledge in SuperMemo, FAQ pages, SuperMemopedia, etc.

Advantages of incremental writing

The most tangible advantages of incremental writing in SuperMemo are:

- Incremental approach provides for a better focus on a task at hand

- Incremental approach is great for resolving writer’s block

- Incremental approach makes it possible to compile new texts from old texts that need resolution of duplicates (e.g. converting two or more versions of older texts into a newer reconciled text)

- Priorities can be used to start from the most important portions of the text. In the end, lowest priority material may never be processed and left neglected or relegated to future versions of the text

- Working with the knowledge tree as opposed to a linear text helps to see the big picture of the entire article, and organize its logic

- Search returns chapters instead of portions of the text. This helps you locate portions of the text that include a keyword that is too frequent to make it useful in ordinary searches (e.g. as in MS Word)

- Search&review is great for minor edits, comparisons, reprioritization, safe search&replace, and more

- Analysis : Use graphs and Workload can be used to chart the progress through the writing material

- Outstanding topics can be sorted by priority to match the circadian cycle (high priorities for high alertness times, low priorities for less productive hours of the day)

- Add to outstanding (or other tools) can be used if a subset of texts needs to be processed more than once in a single day

- Open-ended writing and a “never-ending writing” are easy and natural

- Writing in SuperMemo is fun. It is not just more fun than writing. It is an order of magnitude more fun than traditional writing! Naturally, a high degree of fluency in using SuperMemo toolkit is necessary to experience the fun factor

Fun of writing boosts efficiency

When the fun of writing is gone, the writer’s block can ensue. SuperMemo makes writing fun as compared to traditional methods (e.g. writing in a word processor). If you are in no mood to write about one topic today, you might be more inclined to try something else. If you are in no mood for writing anything, tackle some minor clean up jobs. Very often, once you start writing, you get sucked into the effort and the mood returns. A piece of information can trigger new ideas. If it happens in your writing slot, you can instantly write down new ideas. You can write them rough and short. But you need to write them instantly. If you keep waiting, the memory of the inspiration whittles down to just the need to write about a subject! This is how forgetting affects your own ideas! Strike the iron while it’s hot. Process inspiration incrementally, and pick the pieces that raise most enthusiasm at any given moment. Those pieces will generate most new creative value.

Creative explosion vs. deadlines

Excess creativity and wish to include valuable information or ideas may cause an unstoppable bloat of writing materials and a never-ending writing loop. It is vital to keep all ideas well prioritized in a TO-DO branch, while the article grows independently in the ARTICLE branch.

Separating TO-DO from ARTICLE is the best solution that makes it easy to cut off the writing process at any stage depending on the writing goals, opportunity costs, and/or deadlines. Whatever is left in the TO-DO branch can be processed later or not at all. As long as strict priorities are applied, loss of value to the main article should be minimized.

Disadvantages of incremental writing

Incremental writing will always be superior over linear writing for a class of non-fiction texts, however, the toolkit is difficult to master, and the strategies are not obvious. This is a new set of techniques that requires a high degree of innovative thinking on the part of the author. This is why we do not expect any significant degree of adoption at the moment. Incremental writing should primarily be considered by authors who are already masters of incremental reading.

Incremental brainstorming

If you combine incremental learning with incremental problem solving and plain old brainstorming, you will arrive at incremental brainstorming. The brainstorming part may be executed face-to-face or over e-mail.

Incremental brainstorming sounds like an oxymoron. Incremental brainstorming has very little to do with “storming”, but it makes a very good use of the brain’s capacity to build creative associations in fertile knowledge-rich conditions. Incremental brainstorming might be slow, but it can deliver more than plain face-to-face brainstorming. At worst, the outcome will be different, and in creative work, this is always a desirable complementary effect.

In face-to-face brainstorming, two or more brains, preferably with different strengths, specializations, and biases, engage into a fast exchange of ideas, where Idea X from Brain A might generate ideas Y and Z from Brain B, which in turn may cause a chain reaction of creative inspiration in other participating brains. Moreover, brainstorming requires a degree of mental discipline that may be missing in brainstorming with oneself (in one’s mind, i.e. without incremental learning). Converting thoughts to speech slows down the thinking, but increases the discipline and may dramatically enhance creative outcomes.

In incremental brainstorming, this process is taken a few steps further. Incremental learning is a form of brainstorming with oneself, as mentioned in the Creativity section, however, it can also be used in remote brainstorming via e-mail. The main tools of remote incremental brainstorming are:

1. incremental learning (for processing knowledge),

2. incremental mail processing (for processing exchanged ideas), and

3. e-mail communication (which may be supplemented by live video).

Incremental brainstorming may be slow, and yet it adds an additional degree of discipline with an archive of written communications. Most of all, it adds more sources of inspiration to the mix. In addition to the participating brains, incremental brainstorming adds inspiration from external sources of knowledge (with non-participating authors providing further inspiration). It also adds from the history of the communication. Due to forgetting, incremental brainstorming makes it possible to brainstorm with one’s past self. In other words, the participants of incremental brainstorming include:

1. participating brains,

2. past versions of participating brains, and

3. non-participating authors from the past and the present.

Advantages of incremental brainstorming

The main advantages of incremental brainstorming are:

- wider knowledge: involvement of incremental learning in expanding upon the discussed ideas substantially extends the knowledge used in the creative process. This is a way of adding non-participating brains to the mix

- spacing effect: when brainstorming is slowed down, fading memory traces evoke the spacing effect that may:

1. provide for better long-term consolidation of ideas, and

2. evoke new creative reasoning pathways in cases where the fading signal needs to be rebuilt via new pathway searches.

This is particularly valuable for hard-to-solve problems that may require the involvement of long-term memory and all its advantages (incl. problem modelling)

- circadian synchronization: participating brains do not need to synchronize their peek performance hours (e.g. when working over different times zones)

- sleep: few people realize the monumental role of sleep in creativity. Neural optimization of memories in sleep works like an automatic creative thinker that is autonomous from the conscious brain even though it feeds on creative processes that occur in waking. Sleep is an organizer of memories and can convert results of brainstorming into new quality. Incremental brainstorming is slower, it may span weeks or months. As such, it employs sleep mechanisms as new autonomous brains in the creative process. Sleep converts the chaos of data into abstract models that yield higher quality reasoning

- balancing attention and creativity: in all creative pursuits, striking the ideal balance between creativity and attention is vital for the ultimate success. Our multitasking society is pretty good at stimulating creativity, however, the same factors that boost creativity have a destructive impact on attention. Incremental brainstorming helps you strike a balance between focused individual work and pulling the team brains together. You can brainstorm without ever interrupting each other

- free from reliance on the coincidence of interests: face-to-face brainstorming often fails due to differing levels of interests or motivations in the participating parties. Moderating face-to-face and adding a bigger dose of incremental brainstorming may be an easy solution. In those cases, most of the workload may shift to a single brain, while still capitalizing on the contribution of the less involved brains

Disadvantages of incremental brainstorming

The main disadvantage of incremental brainstorming is its snail’s speed. Naturally, it won’t be of much value right before a project’s deadline. However, despite the hype speed receives in the media in reference to technological progress, the hardest problems are always solved by collective efforts of multiple brains working over generations. Incremental brainstorming might be less useful in hurrying a new iPad model, but it would be handy in slowly developing or slowly adopting theories like those of Darwin, Mendel, Wegener, and the like.

Future of brainstorming

Incremental brainstorming is not intended to replace face-to-face interactive collaboration. However, it should serve as its rich supplement. It carries all the advantages of incremental learning: creativity, attention, prioritization, meticulousness, consolidation, long-term sustainability based on long-term memories, and more. It requires a lot of training before it brings fruits. Therefore, if problem solving or creative work are vital for your progress, you might consider mastering the following progression of skills: classical SuperMemo (for better memory), incremental reading (for processing text), incremental learning (for overall learning), incremental problem solving (for employing knowledge in solving problems), to finally arrive at incremental brainstorming, i.e. combining incremental learning with classical brainstorming.

User’s take: Creative elaboration

Incremental learning myths

SuperMemo always had to struggle with myths slowing down its popularization. Preventing the reappearance of myths appears to be a never-ending battle. The knowledge about SuperMemo has grown to a substantial volume. Not all users can afford reading dozens of articles. Many users are bound to arrive to the same wrong conclusions independently of others. Some of these myths are rooted in general myths of memory. Others seem to spring from the common sense thinking about learning. Here are some most damaging myths related to spaced repetition, SuperMemo, and incremental learning.

Myth: Many people are successful without using SuperMemo, hence its importance is secondary

Myth: Many people are successful without using SuperMemo, hence its importance is secondary.
Fact: Neither Darwin nor Newton had access to computers, yet computer illiteracy may make today’s scientist entirely impotent. Similarly, with a growing importance of knowledge, neglecting the competitive advantage of a wider and stable knowledge will increasingly limit your chances of successful career in science, engineering, medicine, politics, etc. You can live without SuperMemo, but it can definitely raise your learning to a new level.

Myth: Natural mechanisms for selecting important memories are good enough. We do not need a crutch

Myth: Natural mechanisms for selecting important memories are good enough. We do not need a crutch. The evolution produced an effective forgetting mechanism that frees our memory from space-consuming and perhaps irrelevant garbage. This mechanism proved efficient enough to build the amazing human civilization. Consequently, many believe that there cannot be much room for improvement.
Fact: The forgetting mechanism was built in abstraction from our wishes and decisions. It only spares memories that are used frequently enough. Nowadays, we are smart enough to decide on our own which knowledge is vital and which is not. A single peek into a dictionary may often take more time than the lifetime time cost of refreshing the same word in SuperMemo. This is just the least spectacular example. Human history is rich in monumental errors coming from ignorance. NASA’s confusion of imperial and metric units cost a lost Mars probe. Confusion of comma with a dot in Fortran, cost a Venus probe. Errors in English communication caused many aerial and maritime catastrophes. A piece of knowledge in surgeon’s mind may be worth the life of his patient. Forgetting is too precarious to leave mission-critical knowledge to your brain’s own devices. SuperMemo puts you in the driver’s seat. You can decide what your remember and what you forget. For more see: Memorization is not needed and Memory has an excellent ability to retain important information

Myth: We cannot improve memory by training

Myth: We cannot improve memory by training. Infinite memory is a popular optimist’s myth. A pessimist’s myth is that we cannot improve our memory via training. Even William James in his genius book The Principles of Psychology (1890) wrote with certainty that memory does not change unless for the worse (e.g. as a result of aging or disease).
Fact: If considered at a very low synaptic level, memory is indeed quite resistant to improvement. Not only does it seem to change little in the course of healthy life. It is also very similar in its properties across the human population. At the very basic level, synapses of a low-IQ individual are as trainable as that of a genius. They are also not much different from those of a mollusk Aplysia or a fly Drosophila. However, there is more to memory and learning than just a single synapse. The main difference between poor students and geniuses is in their skill to represent information for learning. A genius quickly dismembers information and forms simple models that make thinking easy. Simple models of reality help understand it, process it, and remember it. What William James failed to mention is that a week-long course in mnemonic techniques dramatically increases learning skills for many people. Their molecular or synaptic memory may not improve. What improves is their skill to handle knowledge. Consequently, they can remember more and for longer. Learning is a self-accelerating and self-amplifying process. As such it often leads to miraculous results.

Myth: SuperMemo repetitions take too much time to make it worthwhile

Myth: SuperMemo repetitions take too much time to make it worthwhile. Many users struggle with an increasing load of repetitions and may conclude that the effort is not worth the outcome.
Fact: Just 3 well-selected items memorized per day may produce a better effect than a hundred crammed facts. This means that even a minute per day will make a world of difference, as long as you pay a close attention to what you learn. Not all knowledge is worth the effort of 99% retention. High retention should be reserved only for mission-critical facts and rules. Last but not least: knowledge formulating skills may cut the learning time for beginners by a wide margin. For more see: High retention results in slow learning

Myth: As you add more material to SuperMemo, your repetition loads mount beyond being manageable

Myth: As you add more material to SuperMemo, your repetition loads mount beyond being manageable. No item added to SuperMemo is considered “memorized for good”. For that reasons, all items are subject to review sooner or later. There must therefore be an inevitable increase in the cost of repetitions.
Fact: It is true that a large number of outstanding repetitions is the primary excuse for SuperMemo drop-outs. However, computer simulations as well as real-life measurements show that, with the constant daily learning time, the acquisition of new knowledge does not visibly slow down in time except for the very first couple of months. In other words, from a long-term perspective, the acquisition of new knowledge is nearly linear. Older items are repeated less and less frequently leaving room for new material. The exponential nature of this “fading” explains why we can continue with a heavy inflow of new material for decades.

Myth: People differ in the speed of learning, but they all forget at the same speed

Myth: People differ in the speed of learning, but they all forget at the same speed.
Fact: Although there are mutations that might affect the forgetting rate, at the synaptic level, the rate of forgetting is indeed basically the same (independent of how smart you are). However, the same thing that makes people learn faster, helps them forget slower. The key to learning and slow forgetting is representation (i.e. the way knowledge is formulated). If you learn with SuperMemo, you will know that items can be very difficult or very easy. The difficult ones are forgotten much faster and require shorter intervals between repetitions. The key to making items easy is to formulate them well. Moreover, good students will show better performance on the exactly same material. This is because the ultimate test on the formulation of knowledge is not in how it is structured in your learning material, but in the way it is stored in your mind. With massive learning effort, you will gradually improve the way you absorb and represent knowledge in your mind. The fastest student is the one who can instinctively visualize and store knowledge in his mind using imagery that provide minimum-information and maximum-connectivity.

Myth: Hypertext can substitute for memory

Myth: Hypertext can substitute for memory. An amazingly large proportion of the population holds memorization in contempt. Terms “rote memorization“, “recitatory rehearsal“, “mindless repetition” are used to label any form of memorization or repetition as unintelligent. Seeing the “big picture“, “reasoning” and leaving the job of remembering to external hypertext sources are supposed to be viable substitutes.
Fact: Knowledge stored in human memory is associative in nature. In other words, we are able to suddenly combine two known ideas to produce a new quality: an invention. Hypertext references are a poor substitute for associative memory. Two facts stored in human memory can instantly be put together and bring a new idea to life. The same facts stored on the Internet will remain useless until they are pieced together inside a creative mind. A mind rich in knowledge, can produce rich associations upon encountering new information. An empty mind is as useful as a toddler given the power of the Internet in search of a solution. Biological neural networks work in such a way that knowledge is retained in memory only if it is refreshed/reviewed. Learning and repetition are therefore still vital for the progress of mankind. This humorous text explains the importance of memory: It is not just memorizing

Myth: We do not need SuperMemo, all we need is to build an index to knowledge sources

Myth: We do not need SuperMemo, all we need is to build an index to knowledge sources. With multiple on-line sources of knowledge, some people are tempted to believe that all we are supposed to learn is a sort of index to these external sources of knowledge.
Fact: Even “index to knowledge” is subject to forgetting and needs to be maintained via repetition or review. All creative geniuses need knowledge to form new concepts. The extent of this knowledge will vary, but the creative output does depend on the volume of knowledge, its associative nature, and its abstractness (i.e. its relevance in building models).

Index to knowledge

A less extreme version of “memorization is not needed” myth, is that “we only need to remember an index to knowledge”. It is true that abstract knowledge and general concepts are most useful. However, this type of knowledge is also subject to forgetting. Moreover, not all knowledge is inferential. To reason about Antarctica, we often need to know that it is cold. We might derive the temperature conclusion from the position of Antarctica on the map, but we need the knowledge of the map, the knowledge of the climate, and the knowledge of the earth’s position in reference to the sun. Any kid will admit that it is simpler to just remember that Antarctica is white and cold. In this case, rules are more useful, but facts are easier to remember.

A mere mortal will usually be aware that doughnuts are foods that should better be avoided by people who fear a heart disease. The fact “Doughnuts ain’t good for heart” contributes to an average man’s knowledge about health. This fact probably does not need SuperMemo. After all, most of us will refresh the knowledge about doughnuts and the heart each time we see a tasty doughnut. The Doughnut Fact contributes also to our index to knowledge. It is enough to jump to Google and type +doughnut +heart to make a good use of this particular entry in our index. The search will help us recover more knowledge about the relationship between doughnuts and the heart.

If we want to enhance our ability to think and conclude about doughnuts and the heart, we might try to remember the following:

1. Fact 1: Doughnuts are high in trans fatty acids

2. Rule 1: Trans fatty acids in foods tend to lower HDLs (high-density lipoproteins)

3. Rule 2: Lower blood HDLs are a major risk factor in cardiovascular disorders (e.g. arteriosclerosis)

There is an advantage to knowing the above facts and rules: upon finding out that French fries are high in trans fatty acids, we will be able to use Rule 1 and Rule 2 to derive a new fact: French fries ain’t good for the heart. The awareness of the above rules will increase our reasoning ability. In the terminology of knowledge engineering, we will be able to derive new facts and rules from the existing set of facts and rules. In plain language, we will know more than we have actually learned. We will be able to conclude more. We will become more intelligent (if intelligence was defined as the inferential ability of the human mind).

Yet there is a downside to remembering the trans fat rules. They are not as plain as the Doughnut Fact, and they may not effectively be refreshed upon a sight of a doughnut. Consequently, we may simply forget the link between doughnuts, trans fat, and the heart. This is where SuperMemo comes to play a role. It will help you refresh the trans fat rules. It will minimize the number of reviews in lifetime. In other words, it will help you keep the trans fat rules in your forgetful memory. Thus SuperMemo makes sure that your “index to knowledge” remains intact in your mind.

Myth: In incremental reading, you spend mere seconds reading a topic

Myth: In incremental reading, you spend mere seconds reading a topic.
Fact: The time devoted to a topic depends on your needs. It may be a few seconds (e.g. for a low priority boring subject), or it can be an entire day (e.g. before an exam, or when doing research, or just when following your passions).

Myth: Memorization is not needed

Myth: Memorization is not needed.
Fact: If all students followed the suggestion that memorization is not needed, we would live in a different world. Here is a humorous take on how this world might look like.

- If memorization was not needed, we could travel around the world without learning languages. After all, finding out words in a dictionary takes mere seconds

- If memorization was not needed, students of medicine would not need to cram details of human anatomy and physiology. Instead they would learn to use state-of-the-art expert systems with all answers built in. If you asked: What’s up doc? You will hear: I have no idea but wait … I will check it out on my computer

- If memorization was not needed, all exams such as SAT, GRE, TEOFL, FCE, GCSE, USMLE, etc. would be a great waste of human time and resources. Students should rather come to exams with their link to the web and figure out answers ad hoc. Or they would just read out relevant paragraphs from a textbook

- If memorization was not needed, nobody should poke fun at George Bush Jr. for his lack of knowledge of the heads of state of Chechnya, Taiwan, or Pakistan. After all, he can find those names in seconds on his smartphone. If using external storage was permissible, nobody should blame George W. for mixing up Slovakia with Slovenia, or refer to Kosovars as Kosovarians, East Timorese as East Timorians, or Greeks as Grecians (NB: the word Grecians is considered correct too)

- If memorization was not needed, you could be a rocket scientist at NASA tomorrow! After all, rocket scientists follow well-known rules written in well-known manuals organized in a very well-known manner. If you need to plot the trajectory for Galileo to beam images of Europa back to Earth… no problem… take the Advanced Calculus textbook, figure it out, and send your billion dollar mission on course

The advantage of keeping knowledge in your head as compared to keeping it in external sources can metaphorically be compared to the advantage of going from primary through secondary to university education as opposed to getting a week-long course on digging info from external sources. Nearly all parents seem to prefer to choose the former for their kids.

Myth: High retention results in slow learning

Myth: High retention results in slow learning.
Fact: You need to understand a clear distinction between the two extremes of learning:

- high-retention-low-volume learning (as in early versions of SuperMemo) - in which you make sure you remember 95 or more percent of the studied material

- low-retention-high-volume learning (as in traditional forms of learning) - in which you quickly process large chunks of the material while having to struggle with massive forgetting

Reading books belongs to the low-retention category, while memorizing 10-20 items per day with SuperMemo belongs to the high-retention category. The optimum reading strategy will find the golden mean between these two. You should not give up traditional reading. Neither should you expect to put all your study material into SuperMemo. You should choose a middle-ground strategy. For example, if you consistently spend 90% of your time on reading and 10% of your time on adding most important findings to SuperMemo, your reading speed will actually decline only by some 10%, while the retention of the most important pieces will be as high as programmed in SuperMemo (i.e. usually 95%).

Incremental reading provides you with a precise tool for finding the optimum balance between speed and retention. You will ensure high-retention of the most important pieces of text, while a large proportion of time will be spent reading at speeds comparable or higher than those typical of traditional book reading.

It is worth noting that the learning speed limit in high-retention learning is imposed by your memory. If “memorizing” one-book-per-year sounds like a major disappointment, the roots of this lay in human memory. Our current knowledge of psychophysiology and pharmacology does not provide any means that could allow of breaking beyond those limits. We are left with the choice between high-speed and high-retention. Incremental reading gives you a full hands-on control over finding the optimum balance.

Myth: We are good at remembering important things

Myth: We are good at remembering important things.
Fact: The evolution of the brain proceeds too slowly to have helped us adapt its structures to abstract thinking. What was excellent for survival 200,000 years ago does not suffice to process modern abstract knowledge. Simple computational tasks such as multiplication or division proceed in a shamefully inefficient way in the human mind. After all, early humans did not need to multiply (explicitly and a lot). At the same time, for long, computers found it hard to compete with the visual cortex in pattern recognition and processing. Recognizing the enemy or prey was critical not only for Homo sapiens but also for birds, reptiles, fish or even insects. The only measure of the importance of knowledge our brain synapses have at hand is the pattern of repetition, levels of circulating hormones at the time of exposure, and a limited impact of conscious attentive labeling of information as important at the moment of encoding. Forgetting is needed to optimize knowledge storage; hence we have to forget less important things. Repeated use of the memorized knowledge is a good but far from perfect measure of importance (see: We remember useful things because we use them)

Modern life has changed the hierarchy of value and importance of knowledge. The link between importance and repeated use has been severed. A flashy lingerie billboard we see every morning is not likely to be more important than dozens of volatile facts pertaining to our professional life. Regrettably, there is no circuit in our brain that would let us consciously etch important memories: This is important! I must not forget it! All we can do is to use the trick of reverberation or mnemonic techniques which… still will usually not last long unless we apply spaced repetition as in SuperMemo.

If memory had an excellent ability to retain important information:

1. you would not tremble before an exam and confusingly run through the notes to be sure that at the zero hour you won’t suffer from a blackout. At the same time, you could easily recall details of a Schwarzenegger movie seen last evening or even weeks before the exam. Clearly, Arnie beats the ups and downs of the Ottoman Empire. And if you think the Ottoman Empire had much greater an impact on humanity than the island shootout in Commando, you are still likely to remember the muscle and the machine gun far better than the timeline of the sultans

2. you would never have problems with recalling the date of your mother-in-law’s birthday. This is a piece of data that is critical to your marital harmony!

3. you should instantly forget the Olympic champions in football in Atlanta 1996 or Munich 1972. After all this might be a classic case of unimportant knowledge. Yet few Africans would forget how Nigeria beat Argentina 4:3 in 1996. Similarly, few Poles would forget the most memorable moment in the history of Polish football: Olympic championship in Munich.

The truth is that we excellently remember only things that are both easy to remember and repeated frequently enough. The brain does not have an internal measure of importance (other than limited volitional control or control via repeated exposure)! Your memory storage ruthlessly deletes your career-critical knowledge with the same ease as it ravages the traces of last year’s golf scores or contributing names listed at the end of a boring soap opera. SuperMemo will ensure you remember your mission critical data. What is in, stays in your memory. What is out, is free to go.

Myth: We remember useful things because we use them

Myth: We remember useful things because we use them.
Fact: Not only are we limited in our ability to remember things that we consider important. We cannot even rely on the fact that frequently used memories are remembered better. There are two main reason why frequency of use is not sufficient:

- spacing effect (frequently used memories may be very volatile): if you use things often, e.g. a credit card’s pin code, you may surprised by a sudden unexpected lapse of memory! The facts that are used too often or are too obvious, do not challenge the memory system well enough. They are remembered superficially. Any break from use, stress, change of context, or innocent interference from other memories may cause a sudden inability to recall a fact from memory. Even SuperMemo may not help in those cases. Those easy items often grow their intervals fast and cannot prevent the spacing effect.

- tunnel vision: when we rely on frequently used memories, we are slow at expanding our horizons. With spaced repetition, you can quickly grow stable and coherent knowledge into new areas. This expansion is not easy or even possible when relying on frequent use. A conscious intervention is necessary. In an extreme case, you might ask a cat why it does not master mathematics. In a cat’s tunnel vision, simple goals lead to a narrow set of factual knowledge that is needed and remembered. A cat will never fly to Mars (on its own).

Opponents of SuperMemo often say: “Whatever knowledge I need, I use often. If I use it often, I do not forget“. This is a false conviction. Spacing effect and forgetting are unpredictable. The whole world of useful things escapes your brain on a daily basis. You may say that if need to fly to Mars, you can just read about math tools that you find useful. However, the tool that is useless today might be useful in 5 years, or tomorrow, when you tackle a different problem. You need the whole toolset ready in your mind. The associative power of the extra knowledge just makes you a better problem solver and a stronger thinker.

Tunnel vision effect may be counteracted with extensive reading, however, there is no better way of reading than incremental reading.

History of incremental learning

Incremental learning might be as important to SuperMemo as the original repetition spacing idea. Incremental learning eliminates a number of bottlenecks that limit various stages of knowledge acquisition.

The name incremental reading first appeared in SuperMemo 2000. However, the concept is not new. It originated from combining our natural reading habits with the demands of spaced repetition (SuperMemo). We rarely pick up a book and read it cover-to-cover in one go. At school we often dig through a number textbooks used for different courses. At home we stop reading a book to read a newspaper and then stop reading the newspaper to watch TV. A combination of needs and interests determines how far we go with the reading of an individual text. SuperMemo drives this concept to an extreme by letting you read just one sentence from one chapter from one book and then go on to reading extracts from a thousand books and/or articles. SuperMemo’s contribution here is only the management of this multi-source reading process. As for the creative aspect of incremental reading, Niels Bohr is known to have used the power ofintermitted reading and intermitted thinking to maximize his creative output. He would keep dozens of shelves with outlines of ideas. He would return to individual shelves from time to time, esp. if he was inspired by a conversation, thinking, experiment, or reading. He would then keep reading a single shelf, think and ponder, add new notes, etc. Many of those shelves ended up as scientific publications. In that sense, Niels Bohr employed rudimentary incremental reading in his creative work.

The approach used in incremental reading is widely employed by many creative individuals. Even if it is far less formal that incremental reading or even Bohr‘s approach. Dr Michael Gazzaniga puts it this way: “I think the creative process is directly related to the amount of time one spends mulling something over. I come back and revisit ideas, data, thoughts, all the time. I think this keeps key semantic networks active and then “bingo” an inconsistency or consistency suddenly presents itself to consciousness and the beginnings of a new idea appear“.

Here is a brief history of incremental reading:

- Before SuperMemo (1980): The author of SuperMemo and co-author of this incrementally written text, Piotr Wozniak, in his student years, used his own “cross-the-notebook” method of learning. He would go through his paper notes and cross out those he was sure he would remember for the exam. He would read his notes over and over again until all the notes have been crossed out. Each pass was faster as there was less and less to read. That method was nearly a guarantee of excellent exam results. All his lecture notes were covered with crossed out shapes that surrounded pictures and portions of text. This “granular treatment” with “processing attributes” can be thought of as an early inspiration for future incremental reading

- SuperMemo algorithm (1984-1985) - The first ever attempt to measure optimum intervals in learning resulted in the formulation of the SuperMemo method in 1985

- SuperMemo 1.0 (1987) - The birth of SuperMemo is also the birth of computational spaced repetition, i.e. the use of computers in computing optimum intervals in learning

- SuperMemo 2 - SuperMemo 98 (1987-1998) - In the years 1987-1998, users of SuperMemo had only two alternatives in the area of collecting learning material for learning with SuperMemo:

1. type it in and formulate it manually, or

2. obtain ready-made learning material from a colleague, SuperMemo Library, etc.

The only way SuperMemo supported learning from electronic sources was via Copy and Paste.

SuperMemo 99 (1999) made the first step towards efficient reading of electronic articles by introducing reading lists and the first primitive reading tools: Extract and Cloze. Reading lists were prioritized lists of articles to read. Extracts made it possible to split larger articles into smaller portions. Clozes made it possible to convert short sentences into question-answer format by means of cloze deletions (i.e. fill-in-the-blank questions)

SuperMemo 2000 greatly increased the efficiency of reading by introducing the concept of incremental reading. Incremental reading makes it possible to simultaneously read dozens of articles. Each article is read in small increments fully controlled and prioritized by the user and/or the default learning process. Components of incremental reading introduced in SuperMemo 2000: new A-Factor-based topic repetition scheme (i.e. the learning algorithm), read points, formatting in extracts and in clozes (SuperMemo 99 would ignore formatting), text highlights, source article link, reading toolbar, subset learning, subset postpone, and support for longer articles (SuperMemo 99 was limited to 64K articles)

SuperMemo 2002 brought incremental reading to a new level. In SuperMemo 2002, incremental reading became the primary learning mode for middle-level and advanced students. SuperMemo 2002 introduced HTML-based incremental reading. For the first time, the user would see little difference between the material in his web browser and in SuperMemo. Other new features introduced by SuperMemo 2002: automatic learning material import from Internet Explorer, mid-interval repetitions that make it possible to review portions of material without damage to the learning process, e.g. before an exam (Algorithm SM-11), search-based learning (i.e. subset learning in which the subset is defined by advanced search tools), dynamically modified A-Factors that fine-tune the priorities without user intervention, postpone wizard that makes reading lists obsolete, separate topic/item statistics and new incremental reading progress statistics, reference labeling, and more.

SuperMemo 2004 was developed solely with the view to perfecting the tools of incremental reading. The data collected from months of actual incremental reading was instrumental in enhancing the algorithm and the tools. Fine tuning of the modification of topic A-Factors enhanced the optimization of new material review in a heavily overloaded process. New tools included: rich statistics for monitoring and optimizing the learning process, tools for handling excessive delays in review, browsing sources of extracts and clozes, one-key reference labeling, proliferating remote images, easy integration of remote images, and more.

SuperMemo 2006 made a major step in rationalizing the material overload in incremental learning by introducing the priority queue. SuperMemo 2006 made it easier to import articles from the Internet (esp. from Wikipedia). Material overload could be handled with auto-postpone and auto-sort tools. SuperMemo 2006 simplified importing, arranging, compressing, converting, zooming, and trimming pictures. SuperMemo 2006 could pick any folder on the user’s disk and convert all the file archives into material that can be processed incrementally (e.g. article archives, picture archives, family albums, movie clips, documentation files, or assorted archives). SuperMemo 2006 also made it simple to do one-key searches and import of auxiliary learning material on the web with customizable tools (e.g. Google, encyclopedias, dictionaries, picture archives, etc.).

SuperMemo 2008 extended incremental learning into the areas of pictures, sounds and video with visual learning and YouTube-based incremental video. Imports from the web, esp. Wikipedia and YouTube became simpler with set priorities, references, categories, etc. SuperMemo 2008 also simplified and automated the process of creating source material references.

SuperMemo 15 (2011) improved web imports (e.g. eliminating article duplicates), splitting articles (e.g. automatic splitting of Wikipedia articles into separate topics), handling references, and more. As SuperMemo 15 provided a full Unicode support, incremental reading in languages other than English became easier.

SuperMemo 16 (2013) consolidated all incremental learning technologies with the last two missing links: incremental audio and incremental video with video files. It added more tools for Wikipedia imports (e.g. downloading full resolution pictures intead of thumbs, etc.), and visual learning (e.g. global paste). It also made it possible to separate extracts from source articles in child browsers. Dozens of improvements to incremental learning process convert quantity into new quality. For example, SuperMemo 16 added import from Windows (Live) Mail, or a trivial, but extremely useful incremental reading function: Delete before cursor. For a detailed list see: What’s new in SuperMemo 16?

The Tyra Banks approach to writing

Word count: 632 words

Reading time: about 2.5 minutes

Do you have a supermodel you can consult with? Headline notwithstanding, I don’t mean Claudia Schiffer, Naomi

Campbell or even that inimitable diva, Tyra Banks. (I call this column the Tyra Banks approach because I’m Canadian and irony is in my nature.)

What I’m talking about today is having a writing model — that is, a clear example of the kind of text you want to emulate.

This sticky issue came up in a teleclass I hosted last week. One of the participants described submitting a piece of writing to a European publication. Although her field is highly technical (forestry sustainability), she worked hard to ensure her text was easy to understand and readable. Both commendable goals.

Trouble is, the client wasn’t totally pleased and asked for rewrites going in the opposite direction. In other words, the client wanted text that was a bit more sophisticated even if it was less easy to understand. “What did I do wrong?” the writer lamented.

I haven’t seen either the original text or the revised text, but I answered from my gut, based on 30 years in the business. “You didn’t have an example — a model — of what they were looking for,” I guessed. (This turned out to be true.)

It’s important to remember that while there is “good” writing and “bad” writing, there is also “right” writing — that is, writing that the client wants. Models are so crucially important to achieving this goal that you should always ask your clients for some samples before you start any writing project. Why? Three main reasons:

1) Models help you understand exactly what the client wants. As the old joke in the newspaper business goes: editors are people who don’t know what they want until they see it. Clients are pretty much the same. They are usually imprecise, often vague, and always impatient. Asking them to provide several example of writing they like is an excellent way to prevent miscommunication.

2) Models give you a precise measuring stick. With a model you have something specific to analyze. “Keep it simple,” orders the client. But one person’s simple is another person’s complicated. With a model in hand, you can run readability stats (available free in MS Word) and see the precise grade level the client is aiming for. You can also look at more subtle measurements such as use of metaphor, concrete versus abstract language and “voice” (first, second or third person). This knowledge is power.

3) Models make it possible for you, the writer, to gain “instant understanding.” You know the old saying “a photo is worth a thousand words”? Well sometimes a thousand words can be like a photo. When you read a piece, put it down and ask yourself “What did I really think of that?” You’re having what I all a “snapshot reaction.” You’re considering the ineffables: tone, feeling and mood. You’re noticing the forest instead of the trees.

All of this raises an interesting question. What do you do if the client has bad taste? It happens. Sometimes clients just seem to love icky writing — passive voice, lots of jargon, long sentences. While this is never welcome news, it’s always good to know what you’re up against. You can then decide if you want to work for that client — or whether you prefer to walk away.

Of course this can be a tougher choice if you’re in a regular job and it’s your boss who has the bad taste. But even then models may be able to help. You can bring your boss some published writing samples (ones that display “good” writing) and try to show him or her why they’re effective.

Selling the concrete is always easier than selling the theoretical. Just another reason why supermodels rule.

Mindmapping that works vs TMI

Word count: 719 words

Reading time: About 3 minutes

Today I  answer a question from a reader who is struggling with the demands of academic writing. My response hinges on mindmapping Read on to learn more….

A reader named Autumn Alexander submitted the following question to the Publication Coach:

“I’ve trained as a journalist and have worked as a feature writer and columnist in print media throughout my nine lives. But a shift into thesis mode and scholarly composition has left me swatting at TMI, Too Much Information. Mindmapping seems futile in this case, for the digressions soon accumulate into crowding clouds. The net effect? Confusion, obfuscation, and despair. Do you have any ideas for efficiency when projects demand writing — uncomfortably — outside preferred genres?”

Autumn, thank you for your question, which gives me the chance to beat the drum for mindmapping yet again. My teenage children like to joke that if they ask me about any problem, I will always suggest mindmapping as the answer. Not true, kids! I’ll only suggest it for writing problems.

For you, Autumn, I do indeed counsel mindmapping. (See the e-booklet you should have received when you signed up for this newsletter.) If mindmapping has been futile in the past, you may have been making one of the five mistakes commonly committed by those new to the practice. Please check to see if any of these errors apply to you:

1) Are you treating your mindmap like an outline? The whole point of mindmapping is to avoid the pitfalls of outlining (mainly, thinking in a linear, non-creative way), so be sure to keep your mindmap nice and loosey goosey. Don’t be overly concerned about which circles link with which. Don’t worry about the order in which you write things down. This may sound a bit gross, but I like to describe mindmapping as “vomiting onto the page.” A mindmap gives you the chance to empty your brain, not organize it. The purpose? Inspiration!

2) Are you doing only one mindmap for a very large project? While you can start with one mindmap for a large project like a book or thesis I recommend doing many additional mindmaps — perhaps as many as several a day. Again, the purpose is not to organize, it’s to provoke the aha! experience that really makes you feel like writing. If you have an overall concept of what you are writing each time you sit down to write, then that should help you swat away the tendrils of TMI and keep you focused.

3) Are you thinking your writing is “too short” for a mindmap? I used to produce a series of 150-word articles for a client. Did I mindmap them? Sadly, no. But, then one day I was foiled after spending 90 frustrating minutes trying to write one of these difficult little pieces. Desperate, I decided to mindmap it. Creating the mindmap took me less than a minute. I then wrote the article in less than five. The time-success ratio convinced me that there’s no such thing as an article too short for mindmapping!

4) Are you spending too much time staring into space, not knowing what to write? Don’t mindmap too early. Instead, make sure you have done most, if not all, of your research and, even more importantly, ensure you’ve given yourself time to think about your findings. I like to go for a walk before mindmapping — it gives my brain a chance to wander, along with my legs.

5) Are you limiting yourself to just the “facts”? The words and phrases you write down should also include feelings, anecdotes, images and metaphors that occur to you. These will help make your writing more interesting, colourful and lively — and will help inspire you to want to write.

Thank you, Autumn, for submitting your question to Ask the Pubcoach. (I realize this name makes it sound as though I should serve drinks on the side, but I’m using it because it’s shorter, snappier and it’s also my Twitter handle — @pubcoach.)

Your two kinds of memory

A young doctor-in-training examines a new patient. Should she draw information for the diagnosis from her “E-memory”—electronic memory, the kind that’s available on a computer? Or should she dip into her “O-memory”—organic memory, the old-fashioned sort that resides in the brain?

Research shows that apprentice doctors are increasingly relying on E-memory, often in the form of a digital resource called UpToDate. This is an electronic reference tool, accessible on physicians’ laptops or mobile phones; tap in the patient’s symptoms, and up comes a potential diagnosis and a recommended course of treatment. A recent study found that 89 percent of medical residents regard UpToDate as their first choice for answering clinical questions.

Like many of us, doctors are shifting their stores of knowledge from O-memory to E-memory. That’s not to say that they, or we, are doing so consciously. Electronic memory tools are now so convenient and omnipresent that we often aren’t even aware that we’re using them as extensions of our organic memory. But some thinkers — including Robert W. Clowes, a philosopher from the New University of Lisbon in Portugal who proposed the E and O terminology—argue that it’s important to recognize the two types of memory, and the differences between them.

Making this distinction leads to several useful insights. The first is exemplified by young doctors’ use of UpToDate: E-memory is suited for targeted searches, while O-memory is best for building a broad, deep base of knowledge.

As even their critics acknowledge, E-memory resources like UpToDate are remarkably efficient tools. Like Google and the other search engines the rest of us use, they offer instant access to the bits and pieces of information we need in the moment. That’s their value to novice doctors—and that’s what has some more senior doctors and medical professors concerned. They lament that this kind of “just-in-time,” “just-enough” learning is shallow and fragmented. Medical residents are, or should be, in the process of becoming experts, and that process involves building a rich and interconnected database of knowledge in one’s own mind. Research in cognitive science and psychology demonstrates that the ability to make quick and accurate judgments depends on the possession of extensive factual knowledge stored in memory — in internal, organic memory, that is, and not in a device.

Such mental databases used to take shape as a byproduct of reading through medical journals, notes Jerome P. Kassirer, a professor of medicine at Tufts University. It was exactly the un-directedness of that kind of reading that led to an important kind of incidental learning. In medicine, writes Kassirer in an essay in the British Medical Journal, “we don’t always know what we need to know, and searches that are constrained to information we need at a given moment may not generate information that may be critically useful later.” Precisely because they only return the results we ask for, search tools don’t introduce us to a wide, unfiltered array of information. For that, says Kassirer, we need to browse. Browsing, as another physician put it in a commentary on Kassirer’s essay, is “an open-ended exploratory strategy that is driven by curiosity and creates the conditions needed for serendipity.”

Kassirer offers an example from his own experience: “From the beginning of my third year at medical school I subscribed to two general medical journals, and I scoured each issue. Then, during my first week of internship, I was asked to examine a patient with hypotension, flushing, diarrhea, and hepatomegaly. About a year earlier a report on the carcinoid syndrome had caught my eye in one of the journals because of its unique metabolic characteristics. I correctly made the diagnosis because the article I had found in browsing had evoked the diagnosis.” When they rely on what Kassirer calls “quick and dirty summaries,” medical residents no longer give themselves opportunities to enrich their memories with unlooked-for facts.

The second insight that emerges from a close look at electronic and organic memory is that E-memory is good for invariant storage, while O-memory is good for elaborated connections. If we make note of an upcoming appointment in our smartphone, its digital calendar won’t misremember the date or time, as our all-too-fallible brains are apt to do. On the other hand, if we enter the germ of an idea in our phone’s note-taking app, we won’t return after a busy weekend or a good night’s sleep to find that the idea has grown new connections and layers of meaning, as an idea planted in our organic memory is likely to do. (Although, as Clowes points out, even E-memory repositories “increasingly transform and augment what they hold”; with the growing sophistication of tagging, indexing and A.I. systems, Clowes writes, “we can expect E-memory systems to not merely store and re-present information, but restructure it.”)

The third insight into E-memory and O-memory is that electronic memory is useful for checking the accuracy of our impressions, while organic memory is valuable for the self-knowledge it can foster. Think of the life-blogging and quantified-self data-keeping that many of us now engage in—from snapping cell phone pictures of the meals we eat, to tracking the number of steps we take each day with a Fitbit monitor. We employ these forms of E-memory as a check on the distortions endemic to organic memory; soon after our vacation is over, the details of what we dined on may have grown fuzzy, while it’s all too easy to “remember” having been more active than we actually were. E-memory acts as a check on O-memory. But only O-memory endows recollections with meaning. Food photos and step counts matter only insofar as they complement our sense of ourselves, our past experiences and our future goals, and these things are the province of the organic kind of memory.

With our computers, we can search, store, and check. With our minds, we can browse, elaborate and reflect. The intelligent user of memory in our connected world—what the philosopher Andy Clark calls a “canny cognizer”—combines the best of E-memory and O-memory, and knows what she’s up to as she does it.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.

Brilliant readers, what do you think? Are you aware of when you’re using your electronic memory, and when you’re using your organic memory? Please share your thoughts on my blog.

I love to hear from readers. Please email me at annie@anniemurphypaul.com. You can also visit my website, follow me on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!

All my best,

Annie

This Week’s Brilliant Quote

“Today we live on the screen, where technology has unraveled books, newspapers, magazines and other traditional means for transmitting knowledge. We are adrift in what John Updike called a ‘huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship.’ The many voices of the Internet have altered the sociology of knowledge. They have eroded the authority, which for centuries has bestowed credibility upon much of what we learn. A host of variously qualified and largely self appointed experts now guide us through this liberating, confusing, even stupefying maze of information, ideas, opinions and beliefs. Eager for ready information and quick answers to questions, we depend on their reviews, summaries, critiques and ratings to lift the weight of uncertainty and to resolve complex problems, taking their advice with little concern for how they know what they are telling us. We take pride in the multitasking that enables us to learn what we need to know just when we need to know it. But what do we need to know? In many cases the answer seems to be just enough—the least amount of knowledge believed necessary for the task at hand.”—G. Anthony Gorry, “Technology, Knowing and Learning”

Why I insist on blathering about mindmapping

Word count: 644 words

Reading time: About 2.5 minutes

Have you ever heard me talk about mindmapping and wondered what all the fuss was about? Here’s an explanation…

I bribed my daughter last week.

When she asked for help with an essay I looked her squarely in the eye and said, “Have you done a mindmap yet?” When, as I expected, she answered no, I agreed to help only if she did a mindmap first.

But why do I insist on blathering on about mindmapping she wanted to know, for about the 100 millionth time.

Over the years, as I’ve engaged in my not-so-subtle proselytizing about mindmapping with family, friends and subscribers, I’ve discovered the world divides rather neatly into four camps. They are:

The uninitiated: People who’ve never heard of mindmapping. They wouldn’t recognize a mindmap if they fell into one.

The unlucky: People who’ve been taught how to mindmap for strategic planning or party organizing but who’ve never been told it’s the single best way to turbo-charge their writing.

The uncomfortable: People who’ve tried mindmapping, found it doesn’t work for them and truly don’t understand what the fuss is all about.

The unmerciful zealots: These are unabashed fans, like me, who’ve found that mindmapping dissolves writer’s block and makes a formerly dreaded task faster and far more pleasurable.

Why do I like mindmapping so much?

1) It’s easy. In fact, I knew how to do it for at least a dozen years before I started using it for writing. Ironically, it had seemed too simple. Too much time in school had taught me that something had to be difficult for it work. The plain truth is, the world doesn’t hand out rules like that. Some things in life are difficult and some are just easy.

Here’s how to do it: Take a piece of blank paper and turn it landscape fashion so you feel the freedom of lots of space. Write your central idea in the middle of the page and draw a circle around it. Then start brainstorming. Write down everything that springs into your brain — no editing, no censoring! (See graphic, above.) Embellish with pictures if you like.

2) It’s inexpensive. While you can buy some software to help you mindmap, you don’t need to. Most frequently, I use a pencil and a piece of paper. My latest innovation in the paper department is an artist’s booklet on a ringed binder. (Not that you need this –- but it’s pretty and it keeps my mindmaps organized and in one place.)

3) It works. Mindmapping makes writing more fun. It gives you access to your deep unconscious where all your best ideas are hiding. It helps you escape the tyranny of just the facts, ma’am and envelopes you into the warm world of stories and metaphors. Mindmaps INSPIRE writing. Outlines almost never do this for reasons I’ve explained before.

If you’re one of the uncomfortables, please know that your irritation likely means you’re doing something wrong. I understand this makes me sound fervent but I hate for you to have to suffer from writer’s block.

Here’s where you may have gone astray: You’re trying to be overly organized (stop fussing about which thought links with which!) You’re staring into space too much (keep your hand moving all the time even if you’re drawing or doodling!) And, finally, you’re not writing the best idea in the centre of the page. To fix this last problem, take your idea for a walk before you start your mindmap and ensure you have anangle rather than just a topic. (I’ll write more about this soon, in a future column.)

If you’re one of the uninitiated or the unlucky you might want to re-read the 17-page electronic booklet on mindmapping I sent you when you subscribed to this newsletter.

And, finally, if you’re one of the unmerciful zealots, well, stop reading and go do a mindmap right now! (By the way, my daughter completed her mindmap in less than fives minutes and had no difficulty writing after that.)

About the Study Hacks Blog

What is Study Hacks?

Study Hacks was launched in the summer 2007 by me (aka., Cal Newport). At the time I was a computer science Ph.D. candidate at MIT. Now I’m an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University.

I’m interested in why some people end up leading successful and meaningful lives, while so many others do not. Being a geek, I’m not satisfied with simplistic slogans (e.g., “follow your passion!”) or conventional wisdom (e.g., “student success requires stress!”). Instead, I dive deeper, looking to decode underlying patterns of success.

When I started this project, I was a student. Therefore, much of my early writing concerns the patterns of success followed by remarkable students. I reject the idea that doing well in school requires stressful overwork, and instead promote a philosophy of simplicity: do less, but do what you do much better.

During this period I also wrote three books on my student philosophy: How to Be a High School Superstar (Random House, 2010), How to Become a Straight-A Student (Random House, 2006) and How to Win at College (Random House, 2005).

As I’ve moved beyond my student years, I’ve turned my attention toward decoding patterns of success in the working world.  In September 2012, I published my first book on this topic, So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Grand Central, 2012). This book lays out my case for why “follow your passion” is a dangerous suggestion and then chronicles my quest to figure out what works instead (spoiler: start by getting good at something valuable; the passion will follow).

Since that book, I’ve turned more of my attention to the benefits of living deeply in a distracted world. I’m increasingly convinced that cultivating the ability to concentrate on hard things without distraction is a skill that’s becoming increasingly rare at the same time that it’s becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.

If You’re New, Start Here

Here is a collection of popular posts on patterns of success for the working world (last updated on Oct. 2013):

Here is a collection of popular posts on patterns of success for students (last updated on Oct. 2013):

Why you should copy (a modest proposal)

Word count: 563 words

Reading time: Just over 2 minutes

The idea of copying another writer may seem distasteful to you, but, trust me, you can learn a lot from the practice…

I didn’t cheat on exams when I was in high school. I restricted myself to reading novels tucked inside of textbooks.

But once, in Grade 8, I was caught playing cards with a friend in Latin class. The teacher marched over to our desks, grabbed the cards from our hands and threw them out the window. Because our classroom was on the second floor, I regarded this gesture as highly melodramatic. Imagine: 52-card pick-up, on a sidewalk.

Instead of card games, if only I had learned the skill of copying in school. I know this might sound bad — peeking at another person’s test, or copying phrases you’ve written on your arm. But, really, the practice of copying is not the least bit deceitful as long as you never attempt to pass off another person’s words as your own. (That’s plagiarism.) Instead, the purpose of copying is deeply personal.

What do I mean when I say copy? I intend it literally. You should take a published work — written by an author you respect and admire — and copy part of it word for word. You don’t have to do it in your own handwriting, although some will argue that you’ll feel a deeper connection with the writer if you do. Me? I use my computer. I aim to copy about 1,000 words at a time. I should probably make the effort to do this once a week but right now I manage several times a year. (Hmmm, I feel a writing resolution looming!)

Your objective in copying is to learn about the voice of another author. When you copy the writing of a writer you respect and admire, you absorb that person’s sentence structure, cadence and rhythm. All of these aspects of that person’s writing voice will become more deeply imbued in your own consciousness.

Still feel nervous about the idea? You should know that Benjamin Franklin was a big advocate of the practice and, in fact, taught himself to write this way. But the question remains: whom should you copy? I suggest you look at your own bookshelves or perhaps go to a bookstore or a library and search for authors whose work you find deeply engaging.

A friend of mine has copied the work of E.B. White; I have copied William Zinsser. The choice is up to you. But try to look for someone who is strong in an area in which you are weak. Looking to become better at description? Try Charles Dickens. Looking to become more conversational and personal? Consider Anne Lamott. Wanting to write short, concrete sentences? Ernest Hemingway is your man.

Of course, you can simply READ the work of these writers. But if you take the trouble to copy their writing you will increase the chances that your own writing will benefit. Part of what I like about this suggestion is that it’s so easy.

OK, I’ve now convinced myself. I’m going to start copying weekly. I just glanced at my bookshelves and grabbed Arthur Plotnik’s book Spunk and Bite. Here goes:

Sometimes when I’m digging for the right word, I long for a terrier-like acuity, a canine’s sensory gifts applied to language. Imagine if dogs ever figured out how to write – how to put that spunkiness and bite of theirs into literature. Think of those olfactory superpowers attuned to sniffing out metaphors or….

Deep Habits: When the Going Gets Tough, Build a Temporary Plan

The Temporary Plan

As I’ve revealed in recent blog posts, there are two types of planning I swear by. The first is daily planning, in which I give every hour of my day a job. The second is weekly planning, where I figure out how to extract the most work from each week.

These are the only two levels of planning that I consistently deploy.

But there’s a third level that I turn to maybe two or three times a year, during periods where multiple deadlines crowd into the same short period. I call it (somewhat blandly, I now realize) a temporary plan.

A temporary plan is a plan that operates on the scale of weeks. That is, a single plan of this type might describe my objectives for a collection of many weeks.

When a lot of deadlines loom, I find it’s necessary to retreat to this scale to ensure things get started early enough that I can coast up to the due dates with the needed pieces falling easily into place. If I instead planned each week as it arose, there is too much risk that I would find myself suddenly facing a lot of uncompleted work all due in the next few days!

Logistically speaking, I typically e-mail myself the temporary plan and leave it in my inbox. My general rule is that if a temporary plan is in my inbox while I’m building my weekly plan, I read it first to make sure my weekly plan aligns with the bigger picture vision.

A Temporary Plan Case Study

To help make this strategy more concrete, let’s consider a temporary plan I developed last spring to make sure that the papers I was working on for a May deadline would come together in time while I still made progress on some other efforts that also had looming deadlines. I replicated this plan below. (I added my commentary in square brackets):

DISC abstract registration is May 9th. Final submission is May 14th. Here is my plan until then…

[Note from Cal: “DISC” is the name of the conference I wanted to submit my papers to. (This is a good time to remind the reader that in computer science most publication activity happens at competitive peer-review conferences with submission deadlines.) I put the deadlines at the top of this plan so I wouldn’t forget where I was relative to them.]

April 21 – April 27

Finish full technical draft of Radio Networks (including related work); double check relevant details with <peer>.

Big push on full technical draft of Unreliable Links paper.

Talk to <colleague at Georgetown> about SDN paper.

[Note from Cal: “Radio Networks” and “Unreliable Links” were two papers I was working on for DISC. The “SDN” paper was not for DISC, but I wanted to keep it active.]

April 28 to May 4

Finish full technical draft of Unreliable Links paper.

Resubmit Wireless Survey as soon as that is done

Make PODC CR plan

[Note from Cal: These last two elements have nothing to do with DISC. But I needed to address them.]

May 5 to May 11

Go back and forth between polishing DISC papers and PODC CR work

[Note from Cal: “PODC CR” refers to the fact that I had to submit camera-ready versions of papers for another conference called PODC. It was bad luck that this deadline fell so near the DISC deadline. Most people would probably just leave the PODC CR work until the last minute, but my fixed schedule productivity commitment requires me to be more thoughtful about such efforts to avoid late nights.]

May 12 to Deadline on May 14th

Final polishes.

This is the place to really <polish the intro writing>. Also a time to add  any <extra technical results I know and have space to include.>

Notice, the plan is informal and concise. I just include a few sentences for each week, but a few sentences was enough to guide me through that month of work in an efficient and effective manner. I ended up making it to the relevant deadlines above without spending a single late night working and ended up with a nice result for these carefully scheduled efforts.

A Tool of Last Resort

I call this type of plan “temporary” because I want to emphasize that they’re short-lived and used only when the circumstances absolutely require them. To plan at this level regularly would be, in my opinion, overkill.

But when the going gets tough, I’ve found this bigger picture view to be an immense advantage.

P.S. I’ve been calling these “temporary plans” for years, but I do recognize that this is a terrible name. Let me know in the comments if you have a better term for them.

#####

My friend Chris Guillebeau’s new big deal book, The Happiness of Pursuit, comes out today. I’ve known Chris since the beginning of his blogging days and have always been impressed by his thinking. This book is no exception. His main thesis is that the pursuit of grand goals generates great satisfaction somewhat independent of the content of the goals. This is an idea I toyed with in Rule 4 of SO GOOD, but Chris takes it somewhere more concrete and compelling. He also lived it with his personal quest to visit every country in the world. Check it out…

Why Iâm (Still) Not Going to Join Facebook: Four Arguments that Failed to Convince Me

Why I Never Joined Facebook

Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about why I never joined Facebook. For those who are new to this discussion, here’s the short summary:

I have limited time and attention. I try to devote as much of it as possible to creating valuable things and spending time with my family and close friends. For a new tool to claim some of my time and attention from these activities it has to offer me a lot of value in return. Facebook falls well short of this threshold.

This post generated a lively debate in its comment thread. To be honest, this comments discussion is probably more valuable than the original post, as it covers a lot more ground, often quite eloquently.

A natural follow-up question, however, is whether this discussion changed my mind on the issue. The short answer: No. Not at all.

To provide a longer answer, I summarize below the four most common arguments in favor of Facebook that I received in reaction to my post (both publicly and privately), as well as my explanation for why the arguments didn’t move me closer to clicking “join.”

Argument #1: Facebook makes it possible to maintain lightweight, high-frequency contact with a large number of people spread around the world.

Facebook essentially invented this new type of social connection. Some people enjoy it. Some even use it as a replacement for a normal, in-person social life (usually, to their detriment). I have no interest in it. I’m close to my family and have good friends. I’d rather keep my time and attention focused on interacting deeply with them instead of pinging a thousand “friends” with exclamation-point laden wall posts.

Argument #2: Facebook might offer you personal or professional benefits that you don’t even know about. You cannot reject this service until you have tried it for a while.

I hear this argument a lot. I find it to be an incoherent approach to managing the tools in your life. If I had to test every potentially useful tool before deciding not to use it, I would end up spending the bulk of my life testing. My time and attention is valuable. If some company wants to make money off me using their service, they better have a compelling pitch for why it’s worth me taking away time and attention from my work, family and friends — even if just temporarily.

Argument #3: Facebook will not take your time and attention away from things you currently find important because you can access it on your phone during times, like waiting in line, that would otherwise be wasted.

This vision of Facebook use terrifies me. Facebook, like most social media, is addictive, because it offers, at all points, the possibility of finding out something that someone is saying about you. Once you get into the habit of seeking this distraction when temporarily bored, your ability to concentrate during other times will be reduced. If I start checking Facebook during my downtime, in other words, I’m convinced that the overall quality and quantity of time I can spend doing hard things — like writing or solving proofs — will, rather quickly, begin to decrease.

Furthermore, the idea that you can restrict your access to this addictive service to only downtime is naive. Think about the behavior of people you know: Facebook checking soon pervades all areas of your life, including those times when, in a pre-Facebook era, you would be interacting with family or friends. “You can access Facebook anywhere!”, in other words, is not the right way to persuade me.

Argument #4: Your general philosophy of only adopting a tool if it provides a clear and valuable benefit will deprive you of serendipity — think about all the interesting things you might be missing out on.

My careful approach to tool adoption almost definitely means I’m missing out on opportunities, trends, connections, and entertainment.

This doesn’t bother me.

As a consequence of my approach to tools, I have few electronic inboxes to monitor or online services to fiddle with. This means I spend a surprising fraction of my work day actually doing hard work, leading to a professional life that is fulfilling and, to date, pretty successful (knock on wood). It also means that when I arrive home in the evening, I don’t touch a computer until the next morning — allowing me to spend my time focused on my family and friends, and giving my full attention to any number of things I already enjoy, like reading. (I read a lot.) I would be a fool to dilute this to chase the possibility of something “new.”

Fear of missing out, in other words, is not a valid argument for trashing what you already have.

#####

On an unrelated note: My friend Todd Henry (of The Accidental Creative fame) recently published a new book, Die Empty. Here’s the blurb I wrote for the jacket: “Die Empty looks past simple slogans to highlight detailed strategies for building a meaningful life; a must-read for anyone interested in moving from inspiration to action.” If you’re interested in these questions of work, meaning, and legacy, I encourage you to find out more…

Donât Fight Distraction. Make It Irrelevant.

The War on Attention

My friend Dale (whose Ancient Wisdom Project blog you really should read) recently pointed me toward an interesting David Brooks column. In it, Brooks addresses the difficulty of maintaining focus in a distracted age:

And, like everyone else, I’ve nodded along with the prohibition sermons imploring me to limit my information diet. Stop multitasking! Turn off the devices at least once a week! And, like everyone else, these sermons have had no effect.

What’s interesting about this column is Brooks’ solution, which articulates a point that I firmly believe:

The lesson…then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

This rings true with my research on deep work. Those who are best at this skill are without exception obsessed with something that demands sustained attention, be it chess playing, writing, or theoretical physics. These deep workers rarely seem worried about distraction because it’s simply not an issue for them.

A New Focus on Focus

Distraction, from this perspective, is not the cause of problems in your work life, it’s a side effect. The real issue comes down to a question more important than whether or not you use Facebook too much: Are you striving to do something useful and do it so well that you cannot be ignored?

David Brooks would wager (and I would tend to agree) that once you can get to a positive answer to this question, you’ll find your worries about distraction rendered irrelevant.

###

I took the picture above in the woods near Georgetown where I like to go to churn on particularly knotty problems. As an interesting case study in the patience required for deep thinking, I originally posted the image back in January, where I talked about starting to work through an interesting but hard problem. Five months of persistent thought later, I finally finished the result. The deep life, it seems, is not a good fit for those who like immediate gratification!

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

Time Blocking

The image above shows my plan for a random Wednesday earlier this month. My plan was captured on a single sheet of 24 pound paper in a Black n’ Red twin wire notebook. This page is divided into two columns. In the left column, I dedicated two lines to each hour of the day and then divided that time into blocks labeled with specific assignments. In the right column, I add explanatory notes for these blocks where needed.

Notice that I leave some extra room next to my time blocks. This allows me to make corrections as needed if the day unfolds in an unexpected way:

I call this planning method time blocking. I take time blocking seriously, dedicating ten to twenty minutes every evening to building my schedule for the next day. During this planning process I consult my task lists and calendars, as well as my weekly and quarterly planning notes. My goal is to make sure progress is being made on the right things at the right  pace for the relevant deadlines.

This type of planning, to me, is like a chess game, with blocks of work getting spread and sorted in such a way that projects big and small all seem to click into completion with (just enough) time to spare.

Three Concerns

Sometimes people ask why I bother with such a detailed level of planning. My answer is simple: it generates a massive amount of productivity. A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

Sometimes people ask how time blocking can work for reactive work, where you cannot tell in advance what obligations will enter your life on a given day. My answer is again simple: periods of open-ended reactivity can be blocked off like any other type of obligation. Even if you’re blocking most of your day for reactive work, for example, the fact that you are controlling your schedule will allow you to dedicate some small blocks (perhaps at the schedule periphery) to deeper pursuits.

(Another smart strategy in this context is to give open-ended reactive blocks secondary purposes: e.g., “process client requests; if I have downtime during this block, work on project X.”)

Sometimes people ask if controlling time will stifle creativity. I understand this concern, but it’s fundamentally misguided. If you control your schedule: (1) you can ensure that you consistently dedicate time to the deep efforts that matter for creative pursuits; and (2) the stress relief that comes from this sense of organization allows you to go deeper in your creative blocks and produce more value.

If you’re still worried, read Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: very few of the world-famous creatives he profiled adopted a “I’ll work when I feel inspired” attitude — they instead controlled their day so they could control their art.

Conclusion

In the context of work, uncontrolled time makes me uncomfortable. If you’re serious about working deeply and producing high-end value, it should probably make you uncomfortable as well. Using your inbox to drive your daily schedule might be fine for the entry-level or those content with a career of cubicle-dwelling mediocrity, but the best knowledge workers view their time like the best investors view their capital, as a resource to wield for maximum returns.

Deep Habits: Plan Your Week in Advance

A Planning Habit

On Monday mornings I plan the upcoming work week. I capture this plan in an e-mail and send it to myself so that I will be sure to see it and have access to it daily. (See the snapshot above of some recent plans in my inbox.)

This planning can take a long time; almost always longer than an hour. But the return on investment is phenomenal. To visualize your whole week at once allows you to spread out, batch, and prioritize work in a manner that significantly increases what you accomplish and goes a long way toward eliminating work pile-ups and late nights (the latter being crucial if you practice fixed-schedule productivity).

There is no best format for creating a weekly plan. In fact, I’ve found it’s crucial to embrace flexibility. The style or format of your plan should match the challenges of the specific week ahead. (Indeed, attempting to force some format to your plan can reduce the probability you maintain the habit.)

To illustrate this point, I will show you two recent weekly plans I used (with the content scrubbed where needed for privacy reasons).

Weekly Plan #1

Monday

After weekly planning do a focused task block to get out ahead of the small things on my lists for the week. Be sure in this block to finish <specific 20-minute task that is time sensititve>

Prepare a lecture for <my fall class>

End the work day with a 1 – 2 hour writing block.

Tuesday

Today is a research day: head in the office right away to dig into <research project>.

End day with 1.5 hours in <a favorite secluded spot on campus>, where the first hour is writing and the last thirty minutes is a batched attack on tasks.

Wednesday

I have a training seminar to attend in the morning and a meeting with my student in the later afternoon. Between these two events focus on prepping another lecture.

Depending on the length of my afternoon meeting, I may be able fit in a task block before coming home.

Thursday

First thing in the morning do budget and take care of <related annoying financial task>. The goal is to finish before <doctor’s appointment near where I live>

After the doctor’s appointment find a quiet place to work deeply on <research project>.

End day somewhat early for <yard work project>

Friday

Write. Deep work on research until mental burn out. Shutdown for weekend. Finish <yard work project>

The above weekly plan represents the most common format I use: sketching my goals for each day of the week. Notice, I’m not simply listing things I want to get done each day, but instead am trying to match work to the time that actually seems available on those days. A big part of the weekly planning process is working backwards from your calendar to fill in the open time effectively. Fortunately, because this plan is for a summer week, I had lots of open time to work with.

Now consider another plan that I used a few weeks after the above example…

Weekly Plan #2

Research

Carve out three hours of deep work every day for the below research tasks. This is the core of each day’s schedule.

This week is do or die for getting to a final result for <a research project with an upcoming deadline.>

During downtime on this project (while waiting for responses from co-authors), see if I can push through <the final details of a different proof I’m working on.>

Dedicate one day’s deep work for finishing <a journal paper review>

Georgetown Teaching/Misc

Each day, outside of the deep work hours assigned above, make progress on the below non-deep tasks.

Once my new textbook arrives, I need to decide on my syllabus for <class I’m teaching this fall> and post online.

The following small tasks are time sensitive this week: (1) pick up new parking pass; (2) send back visa letter for <a researcher I know>; (3) respond to <a colleague’s> recent questions.

Writing

Use the morning block <[note: I sometimes work for an hour at home in the morning to allow traffic to die down]> and commute to plan and gather the sources I need to start writing next week.

Over weekend, write a blog post where I <reminder of post topic>

This plan adopts a different format. Because this was a summer week with no major appointments, meetings, or other scheduled obligations to break up my days (so rare, yet so wonderful), I could base my schedule around some simple heuristics: three hours a day on deep work for research, and a list of small things to schedule each day into the time that remains.

I would never get away with this approach during the height of the school year, but for a lazy week in July, it worked perfectly.

The bigger message here, however, is that I always decide in advance what I am going to do with my week. These decisions look different at different times of year, but what matters is that when it comes to my schedule, I’m in charge.

Deep Habits: Using Milestones to Get Unstuck

In Search of Productive Simplicity

Last week, I described a kink in my project productivity systems. I was oscillating, somewhat haphazardly, between two different strategies, tracking hours (e.g., when the work is open-ended), and pursuing milestones (when the work is known and I need to hustle).

This felt too complicated, so I asked for your thoughts and you responded with over thirty suggestions.

A lot of your advice seemed to fall into the category of “different work requires different tools, switch as needed.”

This is probably good counsel.

But it still nagged at my preference for simplicity in such matters (which, as a theoretical computer scientist, I of course measure in terms of Kolmogorov complexity).

Then I got an e-mail from an academic in a field that also requires proof-style work (e.g., problems for which the process to completion is unknown in advance). He explained how he approaches projects:

Milestones for me. In [my field] I hit roadblocks and dead ends which force me to start over or take off in a different direction.

After asking him some clarifying questions, I filled in the details. When working on a complex problem, he would set a key milestone and attack it. If he failed to reach the milestone, he would then ask “why?”, and react accordingly:

- If his answer is “I didn’t spend much time on it,” then he knows the next step is to put aside more time in the near future to work deeply.

- If his answer is, instead, “I did spend enough time on it, but I didn’t get anywhere,” then he’s forced to either: (a) identify a brand new approach and tackle the same milestone again with this new approach; or (b) move on to an unrelated milestone.

To summarize, this approach focuses on milestones of the form “accomplish X by Y” (not hour tracking), but when a milestone is missed, it generates an immediate postmortem to figure out what comes next.

Once I understood these details, the full simplicity and power of this approach resonated with me. This academic was reacting to an important truth that I was overlooking: the difficulty of hard-to-predict processes — like solving proofs — is not just making sure you put in the time, but also making sure you don’t waste time stuck in a cul-de-sac (to borrow a Seth Godin term).

Stated more concretely: it’s likely way more productive to spend five hours each on three different approaches to a problem then to spend fifteen hours stuck on one approach.

This milestone-centric strategy is inspired by this reality. There are two reasons why it appeals to me:

First, I love the simplicity of using a single tool to unify how I approach the various important projects in my life.

Second, it resonates with my experience: if I fail to prove something with a given approach after, say, 5 – 6 hours, I’m likely never going to succeed with this approach. I either need to try something new, read something new, talk to someone, or move on to a new problem, keeping this one in the back of my mind in case I later come across a relevant new tool (a common trick of Richard Feynman).

I need to try this approach more extensively before declaring it successful. And it likely does not apply to many fields outside my own. But I thought it might be interesting to offer some insight into the meta-thinking that supports a lot of what I do.

More importantly, it’s a good excuse to bring up Kolmogorov.

Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do

The Great Career

Laura loves what she does. To many people, myself included (I’ve known her for the past five years), she represents the Platonic ideal of  a great career.

Laura  is a database whiz. Companies hire her to wrangle their most gnarly data into streamlined structures. If you’re lucky enough to engage Laura, she’ll assemble a handpicked team of programmers and descend on your office for up to six months. She’ll then take your generous check back to her charming Jamaica Plain bungalow and set about finding novel ways to spend it.

She allows months to pass between projects — the paydays being ample enough to buy her as much downtime as she wants. She has used this time, among other pursuits, to earn a pilots license, learn to scuba dive, and travel through Asia.

In several earlier posts, I argued that mastering a rare and valuable skill is the key to generating a remarkable life — much more important than following your “passions” or matching your career (or academic major) to your personality.  It occurred to me, however, that to continue this discussion, we need to better understand our goal; that is, we need to figure out what exactly makes a remarkable life remarkable.

In this post, I’m going to tackle this question, using Laura as our running example of someone who has achieved the end result we have in mind…

The Introspection Principle

If you want to quickly assess how Americans think about the search for the “right” job, spend a few minutes browsing the career guide bestseller list at Amazon.com. For example, when I last checked…

- The number two bestselling guide was a book titled Career Fitness Program. The first step of its three step program was a “personal assessment.”

- The number three bestselling guide was Nicholas Lore’s Pathfinder, which “leads readers though the process of deciding exactly what they want to do for a living and finding a way to make it happen.”

- The book in the number five slot, Career Match, notes in its description that those “whose careers fit their passions and personalities” find them to be a “source of great satisfaction and success.”

Sense a pattern?

These bestsellers are founded on the belief that matching your work to personality traits and interests is the key to finding a job you love. I call this the introspection principle because it elevates the act of self-reflection to be the important for making big life decisions.

This principle extends beyond career issues. It’s also at the core of popular advice for new college students. For example:

- The description for Patrick Combs’ ubiquitous Major in Success (he’s sold over 120,000 copies) emphasizes that students should choose a major that “suits their interests.”

- The cover of Lind Andrew’s canonical How to Choose a College Major instructs students to “use your own interests and talents to find the perfect major.”

The introspection principle is so ingrained that we forget to think of it as a hypothesis that needs to be tested. If you’ll indulge my heretical-side, however, I think it’s worth taking this idea out for a spin.

My question is simple: when we study people like Laura who love what they do, is an introspection-driven match between their work and their personality the explanation for their happiness? And if it’s not, what is?

To answer this question, we can turn to 30 years of cutting-edge scientific research…

The Surprising Science of Human Motivation

As Dan Pink recounts in the introduction to Drive, his new book about workplace motivation, our understanding of what compels people to action was upended in the late 1940s. Before this point, conventional wisdom said that we’re motivated by rewards (think B.F. Skinner and his rats). The more we are rewarded, the more fired up we get about our work.

Then Harry Harlow, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, began giving puzzles to the rhesus monkeys in his primate laboratory.  He noticed a curious effect: when he rewarded the monkeys for solving the puzzle, they became slower at the task.

Twenty years later, Edward Deci, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, tested this effect in humans, and found a similar result: the presence of cash made them worse at solving creative puzzles.

This kicked off three decades of intense research into the sources of human motivation.

Eventually, Deci, working with his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan, corralled the diversity of (sometimes contradictory) research on the topic into a single, over-arching model called Self-Determination Theory (SDT). This model has been extensively validated and summarizes, to the best of our current understanding, what can make someone love what they do. (See this 2000 paper by Ryan and Deci, from the journal Psychological Inquiry, for a good overview).

At a high level, SDT makes a simple claim:

To be happy, your work must fulfill three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

In more detail…

- Autonomy refers to control over how you fill your time. As Deci puts it, if you have a high degree of autonomy, then “you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection.”

- Competence refers to mastering unambiguously useful things. As the psychologist Robert White opines, in the wonderfully formal speak of the 1950s academic, humans have a “propensity to have an effect on the environment as well as to attain valued outcomes within it.”

- Relatedness refers to a feeling of connection to others. As Deci pithily summarizes: “to love and care, and to be loved and cared for.”

SDT explains why Laura’s career resonates with us. She clearly has autonomy (she handpicks projects and runs them on her own schedule) and competence (she’s highly regarded and compensated for her expert ability). She also has relatedness, both from her close-knit teams and her ability to build a schedule that dedicates extended amounts of time to friends and family.

Falsifying the Introspection Principle

SDT answers our original question: Is the introspection principle correct? They key feature of the three SDT need are their universality — they span both differing career fields and cultures. Put another way: three decades of research has shown that the traits that make us happy with our work have little to do with our personality or so-called “passions.”

Similar conclusions apply to related decisions, such as choosing your college major. Forget trying to divine some perfect match, and instead choose a major for your own reasons — not pressure from your parents or a misguided view on what’s “practical” — and then strive to become excellent at it. As I argued before, your love of the subject will grow with your sense of autonomy and competence.

For those who sweat this style of decision, this research should provide relief. There’s no reason to lose sleep over whether you’re “passionate” about your major, or if your job is what you really want to be doing with your life. Working right trumps finding the right work.

It’s to this new goal, “working right,” that we turn our attention next…

Working Right

Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:

1. Master a skill that is rare and valuable.

2. Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards.

The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.

It’s important, however, that you cash in this capital, once accumulated, for the right rewards. The word “right,” in this context, is defined by the traits of SDT. In other words, once you have something valuable to offer, use it to gain as much autonomy, competence, and relatedness as you can possibly cram into your life.

This explains, for example, why there are so many CEOs in the world who are excellent at what they do, but also stressed, anxious, and unhappy. They generated career capital by becoming excellent at management, but instead of cashing it in to satisfy the needs that we know would make them happy, they instead bartered for increased prestige and income. The strict demands of the job sap their felling of autonomy, while their sense of relatedness dissipates with the late night work binges.

When we return to Laura, we see that she’s a perfect example of the Study Hacks system in action. In the 1990s, she started working for a major technology company. She noticed that the giant databases at the core of the company’s business were increasingly crucial to its success. She focused on mastering these systems. As the technology boom continued, her skill became increasingly rare and valuable. Instead of cashing in the capital this generated to become an overworked VP, she instead exchanged it for her freelance venture — an approach designed to maximize the autonomy, competence, and relatedness in her life.

Back to the Grandmasters

Now that we’ve established how a rare and valuable skill can be used to generate a remarkable life, we can return, in the next articles in this series, to the topic promised at the end of my recent post on deliberate practice: the details of building this mastery.

Stay tuned…

(Photo by dio5)

How Double Majors Can Ruin Your Life: Two Arguments for Doing Less

The Overwork Ethic

I recently received an e-mail from a freshman at the Illinois Institute of Technology. It began: “I’m trying to follow your advice and avoid killer semesters, but it seems kind of hard.”

He then detailed his crowded course schedule, which included electrical engineering, physics, computer science, and an organic chemistry class, the last of which he described as “hellish,” because it included a time-consuming lab in addition to regular problem sets.

“I know that on your site and stuff it says avoid doing shit like this,” he admitted, “but I’m not really sure what to do.”

This last line confused me.

If a student says he “doesn’t know what to do” about a tough course schedule, you might expect he needs the courses to complete his major and graduate on time, or perhaps to meet the requirements of a graduate program. Clearly, however, physics, computer science, and organic chemistry can’t all be part of the same major or program prerequisites. Furthermore, this student was in the first semester of his freshman year: how could he possibly be feeling credit pressure already?

When I dug deeper, it turned out that he had no particular reason to be taking those classes. In fact, as he later admitted, he arrived at college with a ton of AP credits, and could, if he so decided, coast to graduation early without ever taking a hard semester.

The real reason for his killer course load was that he was considering transferring schools, and felt, with an unquestioned certainty, that doing more was important for standing out. “I guess that having a schedule like this looks more impressive on my transfer apps,” he said

The idea that killer schedules are necessary to be impressive was so deeply ingrained in this student that the idea of simplifying his course load never crossed his mind as an option.

This mindset is a problem that we must solve before we can make progress with the Romantic Scholar approach to student life, as it’s near impossible to find fulfillment in your school work when you’re constantly struggling to keep up with an overwhelming load.

To convince you to do less, however, I must first convince you that doing more is not a reasonable alternative…

The Standard Model of Student Impressiveness

Here’s the model of impressiveness that most students believe to be true:

Difficult Course/Activity Load ==> Impressiveness ==> Interesting Job and Grad School Opportunities ==> Enjoyable Life

Let’s call this the standard model of student impressiveness. Here’s why it’s important: A survey conducted last year by the American College Health Association reports that 39 percent of college students felt hopeless during the school year, 25 percent felt depressed, and 47 percent experienced overwhelming anxiety. (See David Leibow’s recent Huffington Post article for more details on the study.)

The standard model of impressiveness explains these statistics. It leads students to a point where their course load is too much to handle, yet they believe that anything less cripples their chances of a good life. This is the type of conundrum that can drive a 19-year-old into some dangerous mental waters.

The good news is that the standard model is flawed. I want to present two arguments that support this claim — each attacking a different link in the standard model’s chain of implication.

Argument #1: Hard Schedules Do Not Generate More Impressiveness

The first implication in the standard model says that hard schedules, both academic and extracurricular, make you more impressive to the outside world. As I’ve been arguing for years here on Study Hacks, this idea is a myth. (Indeed, my most recent book, How to Be a High School Superstar, can be read an extended argument for why doing more is a terrible strategy for college admissions.)

If you’re unfamiliar with my past writing, here’s the main thesis: people are more impressed by your ability to be a star at one thing than they are by your ability to juggle lots of hard things. Ability rules. No one cares about your diligence.

Here are some previous articles that detail this argument:

Argument #2: Deferring Happiness is an Addictive Habit

Let’s now consider the final implication in the standard model, which says that landing an interesting job or graduate school opportunity will lead to an enjoyable life. This is the most important link in the chain, as, ultimately, the point of all this suffering now is so you can live a better life later (otherwise, what’s the point of any of this?).

Here’s where things get tricky. As I described in my recent open letter to students, the habit of deferring happiness can be hard to shake. If you adopt this approach as a student, it becomes significantly more difficult to drop it once you’ve entered the working world and the pressures of recognition mount. In a previous article, I called this the competence trap, and I argued it’s one of the most dangerous obstacles between many ambitious young people and a remarkable life.

The most effective way to bypass this danger is to start practicing, before you enter the working world, a mindset that says: My happiness and satisfaction with life is a non-negotiable requirement; everything else I do must work backwards from this conviction. The easiest way to practice this mindset is to reject the school as a trial to survive mindset while still a student: take on a sustainable course load, and practice standing out while still preserving a sense of autonomy and time affluence.

Put another way: If tacking on a time-consuming extra major, or leading six clubs, is at the core of your strategy for being impressive, find a different strategy. Notice, I’m not arguing that you should give up on being impressive — on the contrary, I’m arguing that you should man (or woman) up about what strategies you’ll tolerate for achieving this goal. This is what separates the remarkable from the accomplished.

If you master this mindset while in high school, college, or graduate school, you won’t just be more happy during these student years, but you’ll likely significantly increase the total amount of happiness you experience over your entire life.

In other words, doing less is not just about impressing employers, or avoiding a sophomore slump, it can be the foundation of a life well-lived. This is why our exploration of the Romantic Scholar approach to student life starts with this basic concept: it’s the foundation on which everything else will be built.

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This post is the second in my series on the Romantic Scholar approach to student life, which details a collection of strategies to transform school from a trial to survive into the foundation of a life well-lived. Roughly every other post on Study Hacks in the near future will be dedicated to this series.

Past articles:

(Photo by JSmith Photo)

The Danger of Deep Procrastination

The Mysterious Burnout Epidemic

Our friend Leena once told me a sad story. It was about an old high school classmate. This guy was a certified math whiz: he took college-level courses while still in high school, then, after arriving at Stanford, jumped into upper-level subjects and advanced research. Somewhere around his junior year, however, his drive began to falter. As Leena recalls, his energy for math mysteriously faded away. He told her, at one point during this period, that he looked forward to surviving until graduation so he could go find a job in banking and make some money.

He wasn’t overworked: he could easily handle his classes. And he wasn’t lonely: he had plenty of friends. Something inside him just petered out.

Leena’s friend burnt out, and he’s not alone. An increasing number of students suffer from this mysterious affliction, which is marked by a sudden, unexpected drop in enthusiasm and academic performance in a once promising student.

In this article, I want to talk about a common cause of burnouts — a cause I call deep procrastination — and provide some understanding for why it happens and how to prevent it.

The Danger of Deep Procrastination

Deep procrastination is not the standard urge to goof off that afflicts every college student. It’s much more powerful. A student suffering from deep procrastination will delay important work to an excessive degree. He won’t start studying until late the night before or will delay paper writing until the sun is about the rise. After a while, he might begin to chronically miss deadlines, and find himself constantly negotiating with professors about extensions. Sometimes it gets so bad that he misses the extended deadlines — failing courses instead of completing the required assignment. No matter how dire the stakes, starting work becomes an insurmountable prospect.

I’ve advised numerous students suffering from deep procrastination of various levels of severity. In all cases, the causes were basically the same:

- A major and/or post-graduation job aspiration that doesn’t match the student’s real interests,

- combined with a difficult (though not necessarily unmanageable) workload.

Many students, of course, have difficult workloads. But when the hard work is motivated by a goal that’s misaligned with their real interests, students can develop resentment toward the work. They begin to see the effort required to keep up with their double major or crazy activity load as an intrusion from an outside entity — almost a literal attack on their happiness. Eventually a deep psychic aversion to the work develops, and they find themselves mired in deep procrastination.

This might be what happened to Leena’s friend at Stanford. His entire life, he had been told that he was a math whiz. But at some point, he began to resent the work required to live up to other people’s expectations. Eventually, the resentment boiled over: he was through with math.

Avoiding Deep Procrastination

My advice for side-stepping this problem is both easy to understand and hard to put into practice: figure out what you really want to accomplish at college, then choose your path based on an honest answer to this question.

To help you ponder this prompt, keep the following cautions in mind:

- Don’t major in chemical engineering to please your dad. As I’ve discussed before, allowing other people to influence your choice of major can sap your motivation.

- Don’t take on ridiculous course and extracurricular loads because you feel like impressing people with the hardness of your schedule is what makes you special. It’s not. It’s just diligence. And in the end, people don’t care that much about diligence, so you might as well use your weekends to nurse hangovers with friends.

- Don’t major in business because you think it’s “practical.” Your theories about the importance of various majors are probably wrong, so your best bet is to excel in something you like.

There’s a lot more to be said on this topic. For example, it’s important that you don’t mistake serious mental issues, such as depression or anxiety disorder, for deep procrastination. With this in mind, if you find yourself unable to work, always talk to one of your college’s counselors as part of your recovery effort, just to be sure that something else isn’t lurking. (It’s not a big deal, they don’t bite, and they love when students come in to chat.)

But the most important advice here is to avoid this mess altogether by taking the time to answer, on your own, the important questions about what you’re really trying to accomplish with your college career. After that, do your best to keep your choices consistent with this answer.

It’s an obvious idea. But trust me, it can prevent some serious problems.

How to Cure Deep Procrastination

The Deep Procrastination Crisis

Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice that there are close to 60 such messages. If I include blog comments in the search, the number jumps into the hundreds.

Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on.

As evidenced by my inbox, this issue is surprisingly common, especially at elite colleges. Yet it’s also almost entirely off the radar of traditional student counseling, which is why I dedicate time to it here.

In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue.

The Question of “Why”

Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says “no more!”

An evolutionary perspective on procrastination helps explain this reaction. The student is asking his or her brain to expend lots of energy (from a biological perspective, studying for an orgo exam is an expensive thing to do). One way to see this process is that there’s an ancient part of our brain that has evolved to evaluate any such plans — a filter, of sorts, to prevent the wasting of precious energy.

“Why are we going to expend so much precious energy?”, it asks.

The more modern, abstract-reasoning, rational part of the student’s brain is quick to respond: “Because we need to expend this energy to pass the test which we need to earn our degree!”

“What the hell is a ‘degree’ and why do we need one?”, the ancient brain counters.

“Because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the rational brain responds.

And this is where the problem occurs.

The rational part of the brain is promoting an abstract societal value. It knows that for a middle class American, earning a college degree is an expected milestone on your path to integration into the middle class economy

But the ancient brain doesn’t do well with abstract societal values, which are a recent addition to humankind on the scale of evolutionary time. One way to understand deep procrastination, therefore, is as a rejection of an ambiguous, abstract answer to the key question of why you’re going through the mental strain required by the college experience.

(As in my previous post, I’m using an evolutionary explanation metaphorically — as a way to help explain a concrete phenomenon I’ve observed in my research and writing on this topic. Whether the evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon is strictly true is somewhat beside the point and beyond my expertise.)

The good news is that this understanding provides a clear strategy for combating this scourge: form a more concrete and personal answer to the question of “why.”

Combating Deep Procrastination

From my experience, an effective answer to this question of why you’re at college can be constructed through the following process:

- First, devise a (tentative) answer to the following question: What makes a good life good? This is the foundation on which everything else in your life will be built. Your goal is not the identify the “right” answer, but to instead identify a working hypothesis. This answer will evolve along with your life experience, so this is not a time for perfectionism. If you’re religious, your starting point for finding this answer is obvious. If you’re not religious, you could jump into philosophy — as this question has been at the core of human thinking since the time of the Greeks — but I’ve found it’s more approachable to start with biographies of people whose life you admire, looking for evidence of their own responses to this prompt.

- Second, decide how your experience at college can best be leveraged to support this vision of a good life. If, for example, you decide the key to a good life is to master something useful to the world, this might lead to you to see college as an opportunity to master a hard skill while exposing yourself to examples of people applying this skill in useful ways.

- Third, identify the set of specific student tactics that will help you succeed in this leveraging. In our above example, this thinking might lead you to the concrete strategies I espoused in my romantic scholar series.

This process provides a more personal and concrete answer to the fundamental question being posed by your ancient brain.

“Why should I expend all this difficult energy?”, it asks once again.

“Because it’s part of a well-thought through plan for leading a good life,” you now respond.

“Sounds good,” it agrees while you head to the library.

As I noted in an earlier post on this subject, this self-reflection is not an easy process. But college really is a fantastic time to face these basic questions. Deep procrastination, once you understand its source, doesn’t have to a Jobian affliction. It can instead be seen as the prompt you need to get your internal shop in order.

If you’ve had success combating deep procrastination with answers to these basic questions, please share your experience. Concrete examples help deep procrastinators commit to a way out.

As much effort as to tap a beach ballâŚ

Reading time: About 1 minute

I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about two similes from Lizzie Widdicombe…

Call me naive, but I had never before heard of what’s called a Tough Mudder, which is a 10-to-12-mile obstacle race including fire pits, tightly enclosed spaces, mud baths and vats of ice water that  make the ice-bath challenge sound like a walk in the park.

Not my idea of a good time — I’d much rather read a book, thank you very much — but I enjoyed being introduced to the concept by New Yorker writer Lizzie Widdicombe in her Jan. 27/14 feature headlined, “In Cold Mud.”

The relatively recent explosion of obstacle races is riveting. Some 50,000 people took part in them in 2010. But last year, the number was 3.5 million. (Where do these people come from?) Tough Mudder alone brought in a $115 million in revenue.

Widdicombe, who was a good enough sport to participate in a real live Tough Mudder event in Tahoe, has a particularly good ear for similes. Here are two of my favourites from her story:

Walking around the base camp was like being in the Bahamas during spring break—but all the unhinged high jinks were in the name of health, not of getting wasted
and,

Dean and I clambered over the wall (actually, a nice, muscular man behind us pushed me over it with about as much effort as it would have taken to tap a beach ball), and found ourselves with a group of very young, very tough-looking individuals.

I admire Widdicome for having the guts to take on this challenge. Better her than me.

5 Productivity Strategies from the Mind of Richard Feynman

In the book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, relates a story about an ant he found near his bathtub.

Instead of squishing the bug, Feynman put some sugar out for his visitor and used a colored pencil to track the ant’s march back to its nest. When another ant emerged to collect more sugar, Feynman tracked its movements as well. Feynman soon discovered that the ants used each other’s trails to find the pile of sugar he’d left out. He also learned that the ants continually improved the route from the sugar to the nest over time.

Tracking ants all day with colored pencils doesn’t exactly seem like a productive exercise. But for Feynman, that was never a consideration. He let his curiosity guide him. He was always ready to tackle questions that interested him with focus and care.

For Feynman, productivity was less about work and more about exploring problems that intrigued him.

Leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone who strives to do more can learn from Feynman’s unique way of working.

1. Don’t worry about what others are thinking

Feynman was an eccentric within the scientific community. He frequented strip clubs, drank heavily for a spell, and taught himself to paint. He never let the judgment of others get under his skin or unnerve him. He was content to follow his own course and do as he pleased.

He wrote, “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

By adopting this attitude you free yourself from paralyzing second guesses, doubts, and uncertainty. Work in your own way and don’t let other people’s criticisms delay you.

2. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do

Feynman did his best work when his curiosity, interest, and wonder were piqued.

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it!” Feynman advised. “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”

If you do what you want to do, everything else will fall into place. If you undertake tasks you want to do first, your enjoyment will increase your productivity and enhance your focus.

3. Stop trying to be a know-it-all

Feynman accepted that he didn’t know everything and that most of the world was one big mystery. He didn’t bother trying to solve the mystery of the universe or being the smartest person. In fact, he liked not knowing things. Ignorance, and not having all the evidence, made him excited.

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong,” Feynman said during an interview. He once commented in a lecture, “We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.”

Embrace your ignorance and let it propel you to new, interesting discoveries. Try to prove yourself wrong and don’t be afraid to fail.

4. Get off the computer

Feynman was able to follow ants around with colored pencils, learn samba in Brazil, and discover how to crack a safe because he enjoyed learning things that interested him. However, he avoided computers because they were distractions that dulled his ability to investigate the world.

“There is a computer disease,” Feynman tells us. “Anybody who works with computers knows about [it]. It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you ‘play’ with them!”

Obviously, computers are crucial to today’s world of work. However, it’s advisable to free yourself from them whenever possible. They can distract and limit your productivity and perhaps your creativity.

5. Have a sense of humor and talk honestly

Feynman was never one to dress up his sentences with fancy words and complex phrases. He tried to explain things clearly and with a touch of humor.

He lived by a simple rule: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The phrase speaks to Feynman’s enduring modesty and acceptance that he was no better than anyone else. His most urgent goal was to learn about the world and as such he did it with astonishing precision and productivity.

Don’t pretend to be better than others and don’t fool yourself into thinking you have all the answers. Like Feynman, be humble and talk directly and honesty.

How to Increase Your Ability to Focus

This is the first day in a one-week, free, rapid-learning bootcamp. Every day, for the next seven days, I’m going to be sending a new email with a strategy you can use to learn more effectively.

However, this first email is the only one I’m making publicly available on the blog. What’s more, once the bootcamp is over, there will be no archive of the content, and you have to wait until next year, when I do a new one.

If you’re interested in getting the free bootcamp emails, sign up for the newsletter. If you’re already on my newsletter, you don’t have to do anything to get the emails, you’ll get them automatically.

After the week is over, I’m going to temporarily reopen Learning on Steroids for new students. Learning on Steroids is a program I run with the goal of teaching you new learning skills and changing your studying habits permanently, so you can do better in school, advance in your career and train yourself to be smarter.

I could do a lengthy sales pitch, but that would be boring. Instead, I prefer to give away some of the best ideas from the program, so you can try them out yourself. That way, even if you don’t sign up when the week is over, hopefully you’ll have some new tools you can experiment with.

Now, back to the strategy I mentioned for increasing your focus…

The Book That Changed My Thinking about Productivity

The origin of this idea comes from a book that flipped my thinking about productivity. The book is called The Power of Full Engagement, by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. In it, the authors explain why people have difficulty focusing.

The answer, surprisingly, is time management.

No, not poor time management, but the fact that people prioritize managing their time at all. Let me explain.

People often complain that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. That they have too many things to do, and not enough time to complete all of the work. The proposed solution is better time management: organize the hours in your day better and you’ll get more done.

On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with this advice. But, why then, is it so hard to implement? Why do we incessantly procrastinate and waste time? Why do so many time management attempts burn out after only a few weeks?

The failed idea here, according to Schwartz and Loehr, is that we’re managing the wrong resource. Time isn’t what’s limited in the day (otherwise you wouldn’t waste so much of it) but your energy is. Energy runs out faster than time, which is why it’s easy to procrastinate, even when you have a lot of work to do.

This theory explains personal productivity much better than time management. If time were the limited resource, procrastination wouldn’t be an issue, only scheduling would be. It also explains why many new productivity systems work for a couple weeks and then fail. You can burn your energy reserves intensely for some time before they get used up and you slide back to a lower operating efficiency.

This also explains why focusing is so difficult. Focus requires a lot of energy to be used in a short burst. Learning is tough mental work, just as sprinting is tough physical work. Just as you can only sprint so long before needing to stop, or slow to a light jog, you can only learn intensely for a short period before you start getting distracted.

What Does This Mean for Improving Your Focus?

Well, once again, comparing focusing to sprinting is a good analogy. Nobody can focus indefinitely; you need breaks. You can improve your ability to focus through progressive training. Time spent relaxing isn’t wasteful; it improves your focus long-term, just as resting your legs helps the muscles build after a sprint.

Let’s consider each idea in turn, and then I’ll end with some specific actions for improving your focus both in the short and long-term.

First, just as sprinting non-stop is impossible, sustaining a truly deep focus perpetually is also impossible. You need to take breaks. However, how you take breaks can make a huge difference in your overall efficiency.

Good breaks are short, mentally disengaging and boring. Going for a walk, sitting quietly and drinking a glass of water or even a 15-minute nap are good breaks. Going onto Facebook, checking text messages or watching television are not.

Breaks are not substitutes for time off studying and work. During the MIT Challenge, even when I had to complete a class in as little as five days, I always made sure I never studied on the weekend or evenings. This wasn’t to preserve life balance, but out of necessity. Had I not allowed myself large chunks of time away from studying (not just procrastinating, but genuine, guilt-free relaxation) I would have burned myself out by the first month.

Improve Focus through Progressive Training

Second, focus can be improved through progressive training. That means your current ability to focus can be built up, in the same way that a bodybuilder gets bigger biceps.

When I was learning Chinese, I would often study for around 4-5 hours straight, without breaks. That’s not something I would advise, because the studying session would quickly devolve into a haze of distractions for most people.

But I haven’t always been able to focus like this. It’s something trained through years of practice. I started with a lot more procrastination and distraction, and I pushed myself to focus harder through tackling progressively harder increments.

A good starting point is doing twenty minutes of hard focus. The Pomodoro technique, is a good starting point: set a timer for twenty minutes and commit to working for only that length of time. Afterwards, take a short break and relax a bit before attempting another one.

To improve your focus, you can try adding more “weight”. Pick tasks of harder mental difficulty, which require increased focus to succeed. Alternatively, you can slightly increase the amount of time you’ll need to focus for: go for 25 minutes instead of 20.

There is a limit to focus, just as there’s a limit to muscular growth, that may differ for each person. I don’t believe the goal is to sustain 12-hour studying sessions without breaks. Depending on the type of learning involved, studying four hours a day, divided into 20-minute chunks with 10-minute rest periods, may be the optimum for you. Particularly if the quality of focus is quite high.

However, if you currently feel your ability to focus is underdeveloped, it can be improved through training, in exactly this method.

Rest is Just as Important as Focus

Finally, time spent not focusing is equally important as time spent focusing. Muscles need downtime in order to repair and grow stronger. Your mind needs downtime too, in order to maintain high quality focus for the next day.

If you’re studying full-time, I recommend establishing a policy of not doing any studying on one weekend day and on evenings, after a certain hour. If you’re juggling a job and learning, I recommend picking specific hours to learn, in advance, and don’t study outside of them. Many people I’ve spoken with have found early morning most efficient, since they’re not exhausted from the day’s work yet.

Learning, when done well, is like a series of sprints, not a marathon. That means you have bursts of focus, followed by periods of rest. Both are essential.

Take Action!

Okay, so you understand the idea, now it’s time to actually take action on it.

In this bootcamp, as in Learning on Steroids, I’m not going to just give you ideas. I’m going to give you specific homework to start making use of it. If you don’t take action immediately on this idea, then it won’t result in behavior change. No behavior change, no results.

I’ll keep it real simple, so you’ll have no excuse not to try it:

For right now…

Open your calendar or scheduler and write down exactly which hours you’ll use for studying in the next day. Don’t be ambitious. Pick an amount that makes you slightly anxious you might not get all of your work done. If you don’t feel that anxiety, you’re trying to do too much.

Example 1: I’m a law student, with a lot of reading. I’ve picked 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm to work on it tomorrow. Outside of that time tomorrow, I can’t pick up the textbook.

Example 2: I’m working full-time and preparing for professional exam. I’ve decided to wake up an hour earlier and put in 60 minutes of studying in the morning and another 30 minutes during my lunch break. No studying after work finishes.

Example 3: I’m studying Japanese at home. I’ve decided to put in 4pm-7pm to spend on active studying of the kanji. Outside of that time, I can do passive learning (watching television, socializing in Japanese), but no studying.

For the next time you work…

Begin your working time with a Pomodoro. That means set a timer for twenty minutes and focus exclusively for that time, followed by a mandatory break. When you take a break, take a helpful one: drink a glass of water, sit quietly, go for a walk, do some pushups, meditate, take a short nap. Don’t watch television, use your phone or go on reddit.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about how you should be investing these structured periods of focus in order to learn far more effectively. That way, even if you’re studying half as much, you can still learn more than you do right now.

As mentioned, this was the first in a series of seven free lessons designed to help you learn more efficiently and effectively. If you want to get the rest, you have to join the newsletter.

The Feeling of Learning

Human tutors—teachers who work closely with students, one on one—are unrivaled in their ability to promote deep and lasting learning. Education researchers have known this for more than 30 years, but until recently they haven’t paid much attention to one important reason why tutoring is so effective: the management of emotion. Studies show that tutors spend about half their time dealing with pupils’ feelings about what and how they’re learning.

Now the designers of computerized tutoring systems are beginning to make sensing and responding to emotions a key part of the process, and they’re finding that users learn more as a result. At the same time, researchers are using the data generated by these programs to make new discoveries about emotion and its central role in learning.

One such discovery is that the feelings that dominate psychology’s conventional theories of emotion—such as psychologist Paul Ekman’s six “basic emotions” of anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise—are not, by and large, the feelings that are involved in learning. In educational settings, it’s the “academic emotions” that occur most frequently: curiosity, delight, flow, engagement, confusion, frustration and boredom.

Researchers have found ingenious ways to identify these emotions in students; for example, the Posture Analysis Seat. This is a chair equipped with pressure sensors on its seat and back, allowing it to monitor the way learners are arranging their bodies. A student leaning forward is likely exhibiting interest and engagement; a student lolling back is apt to be bored or disengaged.

Then there’s the Pressure Mouse, a computer mouse that can detect how much pressure a user applies when clicking. Researchers have manipulated the level of frustration users feel (by employing a “a frustration-inducing online application form,” of course) and have found that the more vexed users become, the greater the pressure they exert on the mouse.

Wireless skin conductance sensors collect another type of information about emotion. These small devices attach to the learner’s hand or arm and monitor nervous system arousal, which can be positive (excitement and curiosity) or negative (anxiety and frustration).

Cameras, too, may be trained on students as they learn on computers. One type of camera records and analyzes facial expressions: eyes opening wide in expectation or squinting in close attention, eyebrows knitting in concentration or rising in surprise. Another kind of camera can track head movements, following students’ gaze on the screen and noting any head shakes or nods. An eye tracker can monitor pupillary response (pupils dilate and grow larger when learners feel interested), and a microphone can permit an analysis of the pitch and amplitude of learner’s voices.

An “affect-sensitive” computer program might use several of these sensors to collect information about the learner’s emotional state; an algorithm then sorts through the data flowing in from each channel and offers its best guess about whether the learner is feeling interested, bored, confused or frustrated. One computerized tutoring program uses “mind-reader software” to identify 22 facial feature points, 12 facial expressions and six mental states.

But accurately detecting the learners’ feelings is only the first step. The computer then has to respond to such feelings in a way that promotes learning. A computerized tutoring program called Wayang Outpost, developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, features an onscreen avatar that subtly mirrors the emotions the learner is feeling. When the learner smiles, the avatar smiles too, making the learner feel understood and supported. When the learners express negative feelings, the avatar mirrors their facial expression of, say, frustration, and offers verbal reassurance: “Sometimes I get frustrated when solving these math problems.” Then—in a shift that researchers have found to be essential—the avatar pivots toward the positive. “On the other hand,” the avatar might add, “more important than getting the problem right is putting in the effort and keeping in mind that we can all do math if we try.”

Researchers carefully consider the wording of these messages—using them, for example, to promote a “growth mindset,” or the notion that ability is not fixed and can expand with effort. The messages delivered by the Affective AutoTutor, a computerized tutor developed by Sidney D’Mello of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues, always attribute the source of the learners’ emotions to the material being studied, not to a deficiency in the learners themselves. If the learner seems bored, for example, the AutoTutor might respond with the comment, “This stuff can be kind of dull sometimes, so I’m gonna try and help you get through it. Let’s go.” If the AutoTutor senses that the learner is confused, it might advise, “Some of this material can be confusing. Just keep going and I am sure you will get it.”

The many learning sessions scientists have run in their laboratories (and the lab is where most of this emerging technology still resides) have produced reams of data that can be analyzed for clues about the role emotion plays in learning—evidence that may then be integrated with findings collected from more conventional studies. Researchers working with affect-sensitive computers have confirmed that negative emotions like anxiety and frustration can consume cognitive resources, leaving fewer resources to devote to the learning task. Positive emotions like curiosity and surprise, by contrast, tend to improve performance on the learning task.

Positive emotions promote the adoption of “mastery goals”—wanting to learn information for its own sake—while negative emotions promote the adoption of “performance goals”—wanting simply to get a good grade or test score. Positive feelings lead to flexible, creative and holistic ways of solving problems, while negative feelings lead to focused, detail-oriented and analytical ways of thinking.

Notwithstanding the cognitive benefits of positive emotion, researchers in affective computing also find that deep learning must always involve a fair amount of negative emotion, concentrated in the phase in which students are struggling mightily to grasp new ways of thinking. In fact, students show the lowest levels of enjoyment during learning under the conditions in which they learn the most, and the feeling of confusion turns out to be the best predictor of learning.

Patterns of negative and positive feelings tend to follow a predictable progression, in which students feel worst when they’re in the throes of “cognitive disequilibrium,” or a state of unresolved confusion, and then start to feel better as the material becomes more comprehensible. For learners who experience repeated failures to make headway, however, confusion transitions into frustration, which in turn results in disengagement and boredom (and ultimately, minimal learning).

Skilled human tutors likely arrived at these insights some time ago. Our computers are just now catching up to what good teachers have done forever: make students’ feelings part of the lesson.

This story was produced by , a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.

Brilliant readers, what do you think? Can computers ever hope to effectively sense and respond to students’ feelings? Please share your thoughts below.

Dangerous Ideas: Getting Started is Overrated

The (Dangerous) Art of the Start

Attend any talk given by an entrepreneur and you’ll hear some variation of the following:

The most important thing you can do is to get started!

This advice has percolated from its origin in business self-help to the wider productivity blogging community. You’ve heard it before: Do you want to become a writer? Start writing! Do you want to become fit? Join a gym today! Do you want to become a big-time blogger? Start posting ASAP! If you don’t start, you’re weak! You’re afraid of success!

Here’s the problem: I completely disagree with this common advice. I think an instinct for getting started cripples your chance at long-term success. And I suggest that, on the contrary, you should develop rigorous thresholds that any pursuit must overcome before it can induce action.

Allow me to explain why…

The Origin of the Cult of the Start

If you talk to an accomplished speaker, especially one with a focus on entrepreneurship, he’ll tell you his “get started” message is crucial. Indeed, one of the biggest frustrations faced by speakers in this circuit is how often they meet young people who are psyched to start a business, but then allow, over time, for their enthusiasm to fade without ever taking action.

These speakers counter this effect by drilling the importance of starting. “Do anything!”, they yell. “Send one e-mail, check out one book, register one domain name!” The theory is that even the smallest action can overcome some mythical initial resistance, and help build an inescapable momentum toward business nirvana.

But is getting started right away always the best option?

Survivor Bias

In his convention-busting book, Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb preaches the danger of survivor bias — a common fallacy in which we emulate people who succeeded without considering those who used similar techniques but failed. Taleb uses the example of The Millionaire Next Door, a popular finance guide in which the authors interviewed a large group of millionaires. As Taleb points out, the habits of these millionaires — accumulating wealth through spartan living and aggressive investments — should not be emulated unless one can determine how many more people followed a similar strategy but failed to hit it big.

Perhaps a more poignant example would be to find and interview the 10 people in the country who had the biggest and fastest overall increase to their finances in the last year. Guess who would dominate this list? Lottery winners. Ignoring the survivor bias, one could conclude: the people who get richest fastest all invested heavily in lottery tickets, so that’s what I should do too!

The same, of course, can be applied to an entrepreneur, or anyone, really, who had success in a glamorous pursuit. To the winner, their path seems straightforward. It was just a matter of putting in the time and the results followed. To someone in this position, it can be incredibly frustrating to watch people denying themselves similar success simply because they’re afraid to get started.

But the survivor bias lurks…

For every successful entrepreneur, or writer, or blogger, or actor, there are dozens of others who did get started but then flamed out. Some people lack the right talents. For many more, the pursuit, once past that initial stage of generic, heady enthusiasm, simply lost its attraction and their interest waned.

The Saturation Method

I have observed many people who have had long-term success in an impressive pursuit. I have also observed many people who went after such successes yet failed. I hope by combining both outcomes — success and failure — I can identify a predictor of the former that will remain free of the taint of survivor bias.

In short, I’ve noticed that people who succeed in an impressive pursuit are those who:

- Established, over time, a deep emotional conviction that they want to follow that pursuit.

- Have built an exhaustive understanding of the relevant world, why some succeed and others don’t, and exactly what type of action is required.

This takes time. Often it requires a long period of saturation, in which the person returns again and again to the world, meeting people and reading about it and trying little experiments to get a feel for its reality. This period will be at least a month. It might last years.

Steve Martin’s Diligence

Steve Martin noted that the key to becoming really good at something (so good that they can’t ignore you), is diligence, which he defines as effort over time to the exclusion of other pursuits. This is why people who ultimately succeed in a pursuit go through such a long period of vetting before they begin — if you’re not 100% convinced and ready to tackle something, potentially for years, to the exclusions of the hundreds of interesting new ideas that will pop up along the way, you’ll probably fizzle out well before reaping any reward.

The Art of Not Starting

This reality brings me back to my original point: try not to get started. If you translate every burst of enthusiasm into action, you’re going to waste time. More dangerous, you’re going to hobble your chances of succeeding in any pursuit, as the constant influx of new activity prevents you from achieving a Steve Martin-style diligence.

My advice: resist starting. Spend lots of time learning about different pursuits, but put off action until an idea begins to haunt your daydreams and refuses to be dislodged from your aspirational psyche. Then, and only then, should you reluctantly take that first step, one of what’s sure to be many, many more before you get to where you want.

Monday Master Class: The Biggest Source of Stress that Most Students Ignore

Academic Hell

I recently met a student whom I’ll call Amy. She’s a rising junior in the pre-med honors program at a top state university. After a strong freshman year, Amy kicked off her first semester as a sophomore with a schedule bearing four “very difficult” courses.

“As soon as the semester started, I sensed that this schedule would not work,” she recalls. “But for some reason, I kept all of it, thinking: ‘Hey, I’m smart, I can make it through this.’”

“Big Mistake!”

“I found myself learning exam material, for the first time, three days before the test and living day to day, always fearing what was to come…it was academic hell!”

When the grades were returned, Amy was not happy. To make things worse, she was drained. As she explains, by the end of the semester, she had begun to “loathe” her classes; a source of devastating deep procrastination.

The Turnaround

The following semester, which ended this past June, was a different story. Amy scored much higher grades. Her performance in the undergraduate research lab where she worked improved significantly, earning her the honor of a solo project — something that will play a big role in her med school applications. And she no longer loathed her classes.

What changed? Something simple. Something that no employer, professional school or graduate school would ever notice. But still something that made all the difference in the world for this one student. It’s a stress reduction technique that is tragically ignored by too many students.

In this article, I give it the attention it deserves…

The Biggest Avoidable Source of Student Stress

Between the first and second semester of her sophomore year, Amy changed her course load. She went from four very difficult courses to a much more reasonable 14 credit hours. She was also careful about the balance of courses. She had only one lab course, and selected the others to fall between 9 and 12, leaving her afternoons free to study.

“I felt like something was wrong; like I shouldn’t have this much free time,” recalls Amy. “With fewer classes, however, I could actually focus during my study time and make progress.”

Here’s the important point: Though this change drastically improved Amy’s life, the medical schools to which she plans on applying won’t even notice. In other words, the “academic hell” Amy suffered through during her first sophomore semester was entirely unnecessary.

The Hardcore Myth

Many students believe that taking a punishing course load will somehow indicate a higher ability; making it easier to land jobs or post-graduate positions. Here’s the reality: it won’t.

Employers and professional schools will notice your GPA, where you went to school, and your major. They don’t care about about how many credit hours you jammed into each semester or how hard your schedule was compared to others in the same major. The same goes for graduate schools. Though it’s true that specific professors on the admissions committee might look at your grades in the classes relevant to their specialty, they don’t care about the general hardness of your particular schedule.

The implication: once you’ve chosen your major, it’s in your best interest to construct the most reasonable, balanced, low-stress course load possible. Jamming in an unnecessary number of heart-attack courses serves no purpose other than to make your life hell. It won’t make you more impressive to the outside world.

Some practical advice for using your schedule to dramatically reduce your stress:

1. Don’t double major. Even if you “like” both majors. Even if you think that the particular job or graduate program you’re interested in demands both. (They don’t.) Neither are good reasons. A double major will force you to have hard semesters and offers little extra reward in return.

2. Select your major early. A big source of terrible semester are students who decide, late in their academic career, to tack on a new major or change their major — requiring a large number of hard pre-reqs to be knocked off in a short amount of time. Your major is less important than you think. Settle on something sophomore year and stick with it.

3. Make a long-term course schedule. Don’t live semester by semester with your course planning. Instead, map out what courses you need for your college’s core requirements and your major’s requirements, and then make a long-term schedule to avoid pile-ups.

If I was only allowed to offer you one piece of advice to make your college years easier, it might be this simple rule. Nothing seems to have as profound an effect on student stress than a killer course load (though a killer extracurricular load runs a close second). What pains me is that this stress is so unnecessary. Get the credit hours required to graduate. Take the courses required for your major. That’s all that matters. Don’t make you life much more difficult than it needs to be.

As Amy says: “I realized that the pseudo-life I had been living that past semester was something I never wanted to do again.”

You should consider making a similar pledge.

(Photo by Joe Lanman)

The Notebook Method: How Pen and Paper Can Transform You Into a Star Student

From Good to Great

Unlike many hacks you read here, the strategy I want to describe today is not designed to reduce your study time (though I don’t think it will add much to your schedule either). Instead, its purpose is to help you transform from a good student into an exceptional student.

It starts with the simplest possible tools…pen and paper.

The Notebook Method

This method applies to the following academic situations, among others…

- Writing an essay or paper.

- Working on a problem set or technical take home exam.

- Tackling a difficult book or reading assignment.

- Designing a project for a computer science or engineering class.

The idea is simple…

1. Buy a sturdy college-ruled notebook dedicated to the relevant class. (I use the 100 page, 1 subject, college-ruled Stasher by Roaring Spring, but many people also swear by the Black n’ Red.)

2. Buy a good pen. (Nothing beats a black uniball micro 0.5mm.)

3. Take your notebook and pen and go to the most relaxing, meditative, non-distracting place possible. The deep stacks of the library is okay. Hiking 30 minutes into the woods or onto the dunes overlooking a windswept springtime beach is even better.

4. Spend 1 – 3 hours working out your thinking on the task at hand in the notebook. Spend the last 20 minutes carefully summarizing your results on a clean page that you mark with the date and a title.

For example, here is a snapshot from a page of my PhD thesis notebook:

Preceding this summary page in the notebook is another few pages of rougher notes, also from today, on which I was trying to work through the tricky details of these same ideas. This final page details the polished result of this thinking. I needed to get this right, and a long afternoon with my notebook was the only way I could coax what I needed from my mind.

Inside the Method

In an age of distraction, the notebook method produces a rare commodity: high-quality thinking — the type of thinking that can make a student into a star.

Its power sources from the following truths…

1. Writing down your thoughts forces you to clarify what you’re thinking and confront ambiguities or inconsistencies. It’s hard work! You’ll probably feel painful resistance the first few times you try this method, but you must persevere. Eventually you gain familiarity with the novel sensation of deep thinking.

2. You can’t check e-mail using a spiral-bound notebook. You also can’t update your Facebook profile or tweet about your YouTube channel. If you’re high up in the library stacks, or, better yet, in the woods or on the beach, it’s just you and your notebook. Eventually your urge toward distraction will give way.

3. Paper facilitates creative thinking. You can draw arrows, and circle concepts, and sketch structures. Something about a good ballpoint scraping across a thick-grained paper stock unlocks areas of your mind that tend to hibernate when you’re slumped over your laptop in a crowded study lounge.

This method applies anywhere that requires deep creative thinking. Use it to figure out your argument for an English course, or to master organic chemistry equations, or to deduce why, exactly, that Nietzsche book frustrated you so much on your first read through.

Regardless of how you apply this method, its result will be the same. It takes you out of student survival mode and helps you down the path toward mastering the increasingly lost art of good, hard, deep thinking.

Have We Lost Our Tolerance For a Little Boredom?

Boredom Matters

Earlier this week I listened to a radio interview with New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman. He was discussing his new book Food Matters, which describes practical advice for eating consciously and healthy. One quote, in particular, caught my attention. He mentioned that a factor behind American obesity is that “we’ve lost our tolerance for a little hunger.” As soon as the slightest pang arises in our stomach, we dash off to the nearest source of calories, which is often processed and terrible for us. Bittman notes that it’s okay to be a little hungry during the day.

(Having once lived a famished month in France, I know that other countries certainly concur with this concept.)

This idea got me thinking about a completely different topic: hard work. Inspired by Bittman’s formulation, I found myself asking: have American students lost their tolerance for a little boredom?

I should clarify: I’m not talking about big picture boredom with your life. I’m referring, instead, to the short term malaise that arises when we lack a ready source of novel stimulation — the pressure behind your eyes that builds twenty minutes into writing a paper or reading a tricky article.

The more I advise students, the more I notice a growing lack of tolerance for this sensation. At the first sign of boredom, we reach for e-mail or refresh a Facebook feed. A shockingly large amount of schoolwork gets done in a last minute frenzy, fueled by the adrenaline of an impending deadline, and proceeding in a confusing, inefficient slurry of short work bursts constantly interrupted by quick hits of boredom-busting stimulation.

This reality worries me.

Exceptional things — be it ideas, writing, mathematics, or art — require hard work. This, in turn, requires boring stretches during which you ignore a mind pleading with you to seek novel stimuli — “Maybe there’s an e-mail waiting that holds some exciting news! Go check!”.

This all brings me back to that unavoidable, meddlesome question fueling this entire line of inquiry: If our generation loses its tolerance for boredom, will we lose our ability to produce things of exceptional quality? Have we lost the art of serious self-education and self-inquiry? Have I lost these abilities?

These questions worry me, especially when, after just a few minutes of pondering their truth, I find myself tempted to see what’s on TV.

The Straight-A Method: How to Ace College Courses

Last year I introduced The Straight-A Method: a general framework for all of the tactical studying advice that appears in the red book and on this blog. A lot has changed since then, so in this post I describe a new and improved version of this key piece of the Study Hacks canon.

The Straight-A Method

The Straight-A Method is supported by four pillars: capture, control, plan, and evolve. Each pillar is associated with a high-level goal you should strive to achieve as a student. Here’s the promise: If you can satisfy these four goals — regardless of what specific strategies or systems you use — you will ace your courses. All of the study advice presented on this blog (i.e., any article in one of the tips categories) and in the red book support one or more of these four pillars.

Below I describe each pillar, and provide some sample advice to get you started on the road toward satisfying their goals.

Pillar #1: Capture

You must capture, organize, and regularly review all of your obligations as a student. This includes both the academic (e.g., test dates and assignment schedules) and the administrative (e.g., application deadlines and demands from extracurricular involvements).

Taking stock of everything that’s on your plate can be scary, but it’s also crucial for maintaining control over your life. It provides the foundation needed to build intelligent plans and it eliminates the toxic stress generated by disorganization.

Sample advice for accomplishing this goal:

Pillar #2: Control

Control your work schedule. In the short-term: plan each day what hours you’ll dedicate to work and what you will accomplish in these hours. In the long-term: break up large projects into smaller pieces and identify on what days you will work on each. Do not allow any work to exist outside of a carefully considered schedule.

There are two types of college students. Those who are battered around by their workload, always jumping from one looming deadline to the next, and those who manhandle their work into smart schedules that allow them to get things done on their own terms. For the sake of your sanity, strive to be one of the latter.

Sample advice for accomplishing this goal:

Pillar #3: Plan

Never “study.” The word is ambiguous and tied up with too many emotional connotations driven by guilt and what you think school work should feel like (e.g., tiring, boring, painful). While you’re at it, never “write a paper” or “do a problem set” or “read an assignment.” These phrases are all too vague!

Instead, always follow a concrete plan built around specific actions. When you complete the actions according to the plan you’re done. No more late nights reading and re-reading your notes until you feel like you’ve paid your academic dues. Get specific. Then get it done.

Reducing your academic work to a concrete plan made up of concrete actions allows you to streamline and gain efficiency, while avoiding pseudowork and guilt.

Sample advice for accomplishing this goal:

Pillar #4: Evolve

No one gets it right the first time. Even the most carefully calibrated set of study habits can quickly strain under the unexpected reality of student life. Embrace this. Constantly reevaluate and tweak your strategies. Keep what works. Throw out what doesn’t. Try something new where an answer is still lacking. After every test, every paper, every major problem set, ask yourself: what worked and what could I do to be better (and faster) the next time around?

This Darwinian approach is the structure that makes it all work. In a surprisingly small amount of time you’ll evolve your habits to a place that fits the particular demands of your situation and your personality. This process of evaluation and repair is the only way to arrive at your perfect system.

Sample advice for accomplishing this goal:

Monday Master Class: The Study Hacks Guide to Note-Taking

Monday Master Class: How to Take Notes on Power Point Slides

The Rise of Power Point

It’s increasingly common for professors to lecture with the help of Power Point slides. Whether or not this is a good development is an argument for another time. What is clear, however, is that the modern student needs to know how to best take notes on this style of lecture.

In this post, I describe simple rules for taking effective notes in a Power Point lecture. I also describe how to later use these notes to study as efficiently as possible.

Don’t Print the Slides Before Lecture

Professors will often post their Power Point slides before the lecture. Many students assume they should print the slides and bring them with them to class.

Don’t do this…

Instead, load the files on your laptop. While the professor lectures, follow along with the slides on your laptop. Take notes in the notes window that appears at the bottom of your screen in Power Point. This is demonstrated in the following screen shot:

When the class is over, you can then print out your slides in notes view — which will show, on each page, the slide along with the notes you recorded. The notes view can be selected from the print menu as shown below:

If You Don’t Have the Slides in Advance, Mark the Page Numbers

Sometimes the professor makes the slides available only after the lecture. In this case, take notes in a word processor on your laptop as usual. This time, however, whenever the professor changes the slides mark the new page number in your notes.

Later, when you get your hands on the slide files, load them up in Power Point. Use the page numbers in your notes to copy and paste the text right into Power Point in the notes window under the appropriate slides. You can now print out the two together in notes view as before.

Studying Power Point Slides

The alert reader will remark that some professors use a huge number of slides. The thought of having to review every single slide presented during the semester is enough to drive many to despair. In this case, you might considering cleaning up your notes in Power Point before printing them for review. Even after you’ve done some cleaning, it’s still not obvious how best to study from this material. Here are some tips to help you out:

1. Throw Out Unnecessary Slides. Some slides don’t really add much to the content of lecture — maybe they represent a minor tweak on a different slide, a digression, or some administrative details — erase these from the slide show file. The less slides you print, the quicker you’ll be able to study later on.

2. Consolidate notes for sequences of slides. If a several slides in a row expand on the same basic point, consolidate your notes onto the first of these slides. This reduces the number of pages of notes you have to review even if you can’t throw out all the slides.

3. Study by Replicating the Lecture. Print the slides in notes view. Go through the printouts one by one. For each page, start by covering over the notes section so you can’t cheat. Try to lecture, as if talking to an imaginary class, about what’s important about the slides. Check the notes to see if you hit the high points. If not, mark it to return to in the next pass (this is classic Quiz-and-Recall studying.)

Conclusion

Think of Power Point slides as a handy visual aid to augment your studying. They might make the lectures stilted, but having slides printed along with your notes will make your life easier when it comes time to review.

The power of being the best

I’m back from vacation. During a layover in Houston, I came across,
in an airport Borders, the latest title by marketing guru Seth Godin.
It’s called “The Dip.” I was struck by how closely some of Godin’s
points connect to our ongoing discussion of the Paradox of the Relaxed
Rhodes Scholar. Today, I want to discuss one of these ideas in
particular.

IDEA #1 : Being “the best” is significantly better than any other position.

We give people at the top of a category disproportionately more
rewards than those who are slightly below them. In academia, there
exist obvious examples of this idea. Being valedictorian, for
instance, provides much more value than graduating with high honors –
even though the difference is slight (maybe just a handful of A’s).

I think, however, that this idea performs even more useful work if we
apply it to non-academic activities. Remember, for a moment, our
sample Rhodes Scholar, Daniel, from the previous post. Instead of
doing well in a broad category (or numerous broad categories), Daniel
constructed his own narrow niche in which he could be the best.
Specifically, his niche was non-profit work related to sustainable
development. Searching through the resources available at his college,
he was able to cobble together a collection of summer internships,
awards, grants, and events (i.e., the conference he organized), that
allowed him to really stand out. What’s important to note, however, is
that unlike a valedictorian, there were not many other students at
Amherst struggling to be even more impressive in the category of
sustainable development. Daniel was alone in his niche, and this
simplified his climb to the top. Daniel, in essence, used his time as
the seed capital in the leveraged buyout of a more powerful resume.

Some other examples where we could apply this idea:

(1) If you’re an economics major interested in banking, don’t just
get good grades and join the investment club; start your own student
fund, focused, perhaps, on youth ventures, and construct an advisory
board of professors. No one else is doing this, so you immediately
become “the best” student fund manager.

(2) If you want to be a novelist, don’t just take creative writing
courses; start a new literary journal on your campus. If there already
exists one, focus yours on a specific niche, maybe genre fiction. Sure
it’s not Hemmingway, but it’s much easier to break into, and once
there, you’re free to write great, interesting prose. This will make
you “the best” fiction magnate at your school; the person editors
interested in young voices will want to talk to.

(3) If you want to be a top surgeon, deconstruct your pre-med courses.
Find out exactly what to expect from the teachers, talk to former
students, find outside sources, begin your studying absurdly early,
and experiment aggressively in streamlining your study techniques. To
be the top in this category your grades need to blow away everyone
else taking this class. Doing very well is just not the same as being
“the best” student in this grade-centric program.

Where in your life do you have an opportunity to carve out a niche in
which you could be the best?

The Career Craftsman Manifesto

On Foundational Philosophies

In 2008, I introduced the Zen Valedictorian philosophy, which argued that it’s possible to lead a student life that’s successful and impressive at the same time that it’s low-stress and enjoyable. All my student advice comes back to achieving this goal.

It came to my attention recently that I don’t have a similar clarifying vision for my career advice. If the Zen Valedictorian is the epitome of what I think student life should be, what’s my equivalent abstraction for maximizing life after graduation?

The need for this answer led me to develop the newest entrant to the Study Hacks canon: the Career Craftsman. I introduce this philosophy below in a pithy manifesto format. These ideas are a work in progress, and the propositions that follow mark the start of my exploration of this new direction in my thinking.

A Career Manifesto

Career advice has fallen into a terribly simplistic rut. Figure out what you’re passionate about, then follow that passion: this idea provides the foundation for just about every guide to improving your working life.

The Career Craftsman rejects this reductionist drivel.

The Career Craftsman understands that “follow your passion and all will be happy” is a children’s tale. Most people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be unearthed. Happiness requires more than solving a simple matching problem.

The Career Craftsman knows there’s no magical “right job” waiting out there for you. Any number of pursuits can provide the foundation for an engaging life.

The Career Craftsman believes that compelling careers are not courageously pursued or serendipitously discovered, but are instead systematically crafted.

The Career Craftsman believes this process of career crafting always begins with the mastery of something rare and valuable. The traits that define great work (autonomy, creativity, impact, recognition) are rare and valuable themselves, and you need something to offer in return. Put another way: no one owes you a fulfilling job; you have to earn it.

The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfulling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.

The Career Craftsman thinks the idea that “societal expectations” are trying to hold you down in a safe but boring career path is a boogeyman invented to sell eBooks. You don’t need courage to create a cool life. You need the type of valuable skills that let you write your own ticket.

The Career Craftsman never expects to love an entry level job (or to stay in that job long before moving up).

The Career Craftsman thinks “is this my calling?” is a stupid question.

The Career Craftsman is data-driven. Admire someone’s career? Work out exactly how they made it happen. The answers you’ll find will be less romantic but more actionable than you might expect.

The Career Craftsman believes the color of your parachute is irrelevant if you take the time to get good at flying the damn plane in the first place.

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Here are some past articles that can help you adopt the Career Craftsman philosophy in your own working life. Expect many more to come:

(Photo by dio5)

The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life

Becoming a Grandmaster

How do great chess players become great? If you read Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, you probably have an answer: the 10,000 hour rule. This concept, which was first introduced in academic circles in the early 1970s, was popularized by Gladwell in his 2008 book.

Here’s how he summarized it in a recent interview:

When we look at any kind of cognitively complex field — for example, playing chess, writing fiction or being a neurosurgeon — we find that you are unlikely to master it unless you have practiced for 10,000 hours. That’s 20 hours a week for 10 years.

There seems to be no escape from this work. As Flordia State University Psychology Professor Anders Ericsson reminds us: “even the chess prodigy Bobby Fisher needed a preparation period of nine years.”

The full story, however, is more complex.  Gladwell is right when he notes that the 10,000 hour rule keeps appearing as a necessary condition for exceptional performance in many fields. But it’s not sufficient. As Ericsson, along with his colleague Andreas Lehmann, noted in an exceptional overview of this topic,   “the mere number of years of experience with relevant activities in a domain is typically only weakly related to performance.”

Put another way, you need to put in a lot of hours to become exceptional, but raw hours alone doesn’t cut it.

To understand what else is necessary, I’ll turn your attention to a fascinating 2005 study on chess players, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. After interviewing two large samples of chess players of varied skill, the paper’s authors found that “serious study”  — the arduous task of reviewing past games of better players, trying to predict each move in advance — was the strongest predictor of chess skill.

In more detail:

…chess players at the highest skill level (i.e. grandmasters) expended about 5000 hours on serious study alone during their first decade of serious chess play – nearly five times the average amount reported by intermediate-level players.

Similar findings have been replicated in a variety of fields. To become exceptional you have to put in a lot of hours, but of equal importance, these hours have to be dedicated to the right type of work. A decade of serious chess playing will earn you an intermediate tournament ranking. But a decade of serious study of chess games can make you a grandmaster.

I’m summarizing this research here because I want to make a provocative claim: understanding this “right type of work” is perhaps the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life…

Deliberate Practice

Anders Ericsson, the psychology professor quoted above, coined the term deliberate practice (DP) to describe this special type of work. In a nice overview he posted on his web site, he summarizes DP as:

[A]ctivities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.

Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune Magazine who wrote an entire book about this idea, surveyed the research literature, and expanded the DP definition to include the following six traits (which I’ve condensed slightly from his original eight):

1. It’s designed to improve performance. “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.”

2. It’s repeated a lot. “High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.”

3. Feedback on results is continuously available. “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.”

4. It’s highly demanding mentally. “Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it ‘deliberate,’ as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.”

5. It’s hard. “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”

6. It requires (good) goals. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”

If you’re in a field that has clear rules and objective measures of success — like playing chess, golf, or the violin — you can’t escape thousands of hours of DP if you want to be a star. But what if you’re in a field without these clear structures, such as knowledge work, writing, or growing a student club?

It’s here that things start to get interesting…

Deliberate Practice for the Rest of Us

Colvin, being a business reporter, points out that this sophisticated understanding of performance is lacking in the workplace.

“At most companies,” he argues, “the fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.”

He then adds the obvious corollary: “Of course that means the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.”

It’s this advantage that intrigues me.  To become a grandmaster requires 5000 hours of DP. But to become a highly sought-after CRM database whiz, or to run a money-making blog, or to grow a campus organization into national recognition, would probably require much, much less.

Why? Because when it comes to DP in these latter field, your competition is sorely lacking.

Unless you’re a professional athlete or musician, your peers are likely spending zero hours on DP. Instead, they’re putting in their time, trying to accomplish the tasks handed to them in a competent and efficient fashion. Perhaps if they’re ambitious, they’ll try to come in earlier and leave later in a bid to outwork their peers.

But as with the intermediate-level chess players, this elbow-grease method can only get you so far.

As Ericsson describes it, most active professionals will get better with experience until they reach an “acceptable level,” but beyond this point continued “experience in [their field] is a poor predictor of attained performance.”

It seems, then, that if you integrate any amount of DP into your regular schedule, you’ll be able to punch through the acceptable-level plateau holding back your peers. And breaking through this plateau is exactly what is required to train an ability that’s both rare and valuable (which, as I’ve argued, is the key to building a remarkable life).

This motivates a crucial question: What does DP look like for fields that don’t have a tradition of performance-optimization, such as knowledge work, freelance writing, entrepreneurship, or, of course, college?

Let me use myself, in my role as a theoretical computer scientist, as an example.  There are certain mathematical techniques that are increasingly seen as useful for the types of proofs I typically work on. What if I put aside one hour a day to systematically stretch my ability with these techniques? Taking a page out of the chess world, I might identify a series of relevant papers of increasing complexity, and try to replicate the steps of their key theorem proofs without reading them in advance. When stuck, I might peek ahead for just enough hints to keep making progress (e.g., reading an induction hypothesis, but not the details of their inductive step).

The DP research tells me that this approach would likely generate large gains in my expertise. After a year of such deliberate study, I might even evolve into one of the experts on the topic in my community — a position that could yield tremendous benefits.

Why am I not doing this?

What would such strategies look like in other aspects of my life, like non-fiction writing or blogging?

What about for other similar fields?

These are the type of questions I want to explore this winter here on Study Hacks.

The answers aren’t obvious. But that’s what makes this endeavor exciting. By piecing together a systematic approach to building a DP strategy for unconventional fields, I hope to identify an efficient path to the type of excellence that can be cashed in for remarkable rewards. Or, perhaps I’ll discover that such a quest is quixotic.

Either way, it should be fun…

(Photo by World Economic Forum)

Improving Studentsâ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

Abstract

Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension.

We attempted to provide thorough reviews for each technique, so this monograph is rather lengthy. However, we also wrote the monograph in a modular fashion, so it is easy to use. In particular, each review is divided into the following sections:

The review for each technique can be read independently of the others, and particular variables of interest can be easily compared across techniques.

To foreshadow our final recommendations, the techniques vary widely with respect to their generalizability and promise for improving student learning. Practice testing and distributed practice received high utility assessments because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown to boost students’ performance across many criterion tasks and even in educational contexts. Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice received moderate utility assessments. The benefits of these techniques do generalize across some variables, yet despite their promise, they fell short of a high utility assessment because the evidence for their efficacy is limited. For instance, elaborative interrogation and self-explanation have not been adequately evaluated in educational contexts, and the benefits of interleaving have just begun to be systematically explored, so the ultimate effectiveness of these techniques is currently unknown. Nevertheless, the techniques that received moderate-utility ratings show enough promise for us to recommend their use in appropriate situations, which we describe in detail within the review of each technique.

Five techniques received a low utility assessment: summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, and rereading. These techniques were rated as low utility for numerous reasons. Summarization and imagery use for text learning have been shown to help some students on some criterion tasks, yet the conditions under which these techniques produce benefits are limited, and much research is still needed to fully explore their overall effectiveness. The keyword mnemonic is difficult to implement in some contexts, and it appears to benefit students for a limited number of materials and for short retention intervals. Most students report rereading and highlighting, yet these techniques do not consistently boost students’ performance, so other techniques should be used in their place (e.g., practice testing instead of rereading).

Our hope is that this monograph will foster improvements in student learning, not only by showcasing which learning techniques are likely to have the most generalizable effects but also by encouraging researchers to continue investigating the most promising techniques. Accordingly, in our closing remarks, we discuss some issues for how these techniques could be implemented by teachers and students, and we highlight directions for future research.

Article Notes

- Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

- Funding This research was supported by a Bridging Brain, Mind and Behavior Collaborative Award through the James S. McDonnell Foundation’s 21st Century Science Initiative.

Knowledge structuring for learning

Let us consider the shortcomings of competitive markets such as unequal distribution of income, imposition of production costs on the public, development of socially undesirable products, product proliferation, etc. The minimum information principles says that the question “What are the shortcomings of competitive markets?” cannot be accepted because of the complexity of the answer. In such situations, solution comes from narrowing the focus of the question; the approach which often requires additional terminology and knowledge structuring, and is generally more demanding for the database developer. A typical question with a narrower focus might sound as follows:

Q: What problem with distribution of income appears on a competitive market?

A: income is concentrated in the hands of few
or,

Q: What is an example of imposing production costs on people who do not consume in competitive markets?

A: environmental pollution

The set of specific questions as those presented above produce a very high level of knowledge retention; however, the question arises if it is equivalent with the student’s being able to pinpoint the most important shortcomings of competitive markets. The experience shows that a number of items that would glue the above granules in a coherent entirety is necessary. This can conveniently be accomplished by means of Cloze deletions discussed later in the chapter. For example:

Q: The main shortcomings of competitive markets are:

- redistribution of income (the haves & have-nots)

- imposition of production costs (pollution)

- … (illicit drugs)

- product proliferation (standardization issues)

A: socially undesirable products

The examples associated with particular shortcomings of competitive markets presented above serve as a vivid enhancement and comprehension booster, but their main function is to make it easier to track the missing clause. After all, as it will be shown later, enumerations are one of the trickiest obstacles to overcome in complying with the minimum information principle. The presented Cloze deletion serves as: (1) tool for mastering the terminology related to the discussed shortcomings, while the conceptual answer is indeed strongly suggested by examples accompanying the enumerations, (2) graphic skeleton for hooking up pieces of knowledge acquired by narrow-focus questions as presented earlier.

A yet more complex knowledge structure appears in the analysis of tax revenues in an attempt to plot the Laffer curve for European countries in the years 1975-1982. Upon the analysis, on the two ends of the spectrum, notable examples of two countries are worth considering: Sweden and Spain. The former, with the average tax rate of 49% showed 12% decline in tax revenue, while the latter with the average tax rate of 23% experienced a remarkable increase in tax revenues of 60%. Naturally, a single item cramming all the above facts has little chance of passing the minimum information criterion. Consider then the following items intended to ensure the student’s recall the facts related to tax rate vs tax revenue relationship:

Q: What was the average tax rate in Spain 1975-1982?

A: 23%
and

Q: What was the change in the tax revenue in Spain 1975-1982?

A: 60% increase

Unfortunately, similar questions asked for Sweden do not form a coherent memory image that would allow the student recall the entire collection of information pieces that make up the understanding of the relationship illustrated by the Laffer curve. Naturally, the understanding does not need examples. The theoretical implications of marginal tax revenue might be considered as a sufficient element of understanding; however, the usefulness of facts illustrating the theory has long been appreciated in education; I will therefore present for consideration an exemplary set of items acting as an associative glue for the discussed tax revenue case:

Q: In the years 1975-1982, the average tax rate and the tax revenue in Spain and Sweden were as follows:

Spain: …% and 60% (respectively)

Sweden: 49% and -12% (respectively)

A: 23
and in a similar way:

Q: In the years 1975-1982, the average tax rate and the tax revenue in Spain and Sweden were as follows:

…: 23% and 60% (respectively)

Sweden: 49% and -12% (respectively)

A: Spain, etc., etc.

Items formulated in the above way appeared to produce very coherent memory engrams that showed above average retention rate despite the inherent intractability of numeric responses (as in the first of the two presented examples).

Organize your life with Centrallo

Introduction

I have had the great fortune to be a beta tester for a service new to Android, Centrallo. Centrallo is a cross platform organization app focused on productivity. You are given a space in which you can create lists within lists within lists. You can have an unlimited number of lists within lists to organize what matters to you.

I have used Centrallo for the past few weeks to organize what I am expected to do for various organizations. It has helped me keep my projects separate and made sure that I completed them on time.

Centrallo is a great solution for a number of different problems. It can help you take those quick notes about things that you are likely to forget, you can organize projects, and you can organize your life. Now let’s look into where Centrallo shines and where it falls short. Here is a look into why Centrallo will remain installed on all of my devices after this review is finished.

Positives

I am as scatterbrained as they come. I can forget things two seconds after they occur. With Centrallo, I can quickly type up notes about things that need to be remembered. It works great as a note taking app.

While it takes a while to get it set up, after you have a few entries under your belt, note taking becomes quick and simple. The quick add feature is perfect for this type of usage. It allows you to make a text entry, set a reminder, save a photo, make a voice note and more! Great for the forgetful types such as myself.

The app is also great for project management. I have multiple different obligations that fall under multiple different organizations. The lists in lists feature allows me to keep everything separate in an orderly fashion.

Probably the best feature a developer can provide for their app is support. In the time that I first reviewed their beta to their initial public release, a lot of additional features have been added and a lot of my gripes have been fixed. You will notice update tags after a lot of the points that I make in this post. Those are all things that the development team at Centrallo added or fixed after the initial review after they were brought to their attention.

Upcoming Features

The dark theme can be a bit much. It is dark and I personally feel it slightly depressing. At the time of this review, there is an option in the settings to change the background color, but you can’t actually change the color just yet. Centrallo has assured me that there will be additional themes added into the app, so that is something to look forward to.

Update: A lighter theme has been added in the settings. It looks just as clean as the dark theme, but with a white background base.

While the app is running great on my Moto X, I could not install it on my Nexus 7. The reason for this is that I am running the Android L developer preview. The current beta that I am using does not support Android L currently, but I was told that Android L support will be coming shortly and will definitely be ready when Android L hits full release.

Update: Android L is now supported, however, my untrained eye did not see any material design elements just yet. Hopefully those are still to come!

Negatives

There are many good things to look forward to in the Centrallo app release, but there are also some things that could be improved. It is a long list, but they are very minor inconveniences that are quickly remedied.

Tips are too bloated. While it is great for starting off, there is just too much to go through. It shows off the lists in lists feature quite nicely, but it takes too much time to go through them all. It would be better if they were to just create a tutorial that pops up in the first running of the app along with an option to run through the tutorial again in the settings if it is required. This would make learning how to use the app less of a pain and get users off to a quicker start.

This leads into my next quarrel. Storage restrictions. The initial restriction makes sense. 100MB for a lightweight user free with an option to purchase more storage space for about $5 a month. However, the premium subscription only gets you 1GB of storage. There is no option for unlimited storage. Even though that I have not used even 1MB of my 100, this still doesn’t make sense to me. There will always be that heavy user that uses way more space then one would ever think possible. The premium subscription should get you unlimited storage. If I can’t touch my 100MB, then it is doubtful Centrallo will lose much by letting people have unlimited storage verses the 1GB limit.

My last bone to pick is with the user interface. The ui is clean and works well after you have played with it for a good amount of time. It takes a bit of fiddling to figure out how everything works and during that learning process, I lost a good number of my lists. Again, this is where a tutorial in the first boot up of the app would come in handy.

Lacking Features

The app has its faults, but I believe that it can be made perfect (for my usage) with a few additional features. In my opinion, these features should be already implemented. Keep in mind that I am using a beta release, so that these features might actually be in development and could be present in the final release.

Hyperlinks. Centrallo has added a very helpful feature where you can share links from your web browser to Centrallo to save the link as a listing in the app. A quick note to remember a site that will be useful later on, but not enough to bookmark it. The only thing missing is hyperlinks. You can’t just tap the link to open up your web browser. You have to manually copy the link and paste it into your browser of choice. This is an unneeded annoyance and time waster.

Update: Hyperlinks are now supported!

Another issue is the sharing feature. While you can share individual items, the recipient has to have a Centrallo account or will have to create one to receive the shared item. There should be a function where you can share whatever is saved in that particular note through text, email or social networking. An additional feature that would be great is if you could send an entire list of lists instead of the individual item through the same manner.

Update: Lists can now be shared

Conclusion

Centrallo is a great concept and a great app. It is important to remember that I am using a beta release, so it is not a completed product just yet. The app and service has great potential and will be a great benefit to users who need something to organize their lives. The world is a busy place and I plan on using Centrallo to help me manage my workings in this busy world.

The post Organize your life with Centrallo appeared first on AndroidGuys.

Grit, Grinds, and Living the Low Stress Life

I’ve returned from California and am once again online. (The picture below is of the trip; I’m the guy in the back.) I have 30 – 40 e-mails from readers, built up during my absence, that might take me a while to work through, so excuse the delay in my responses. I will eventually get back to everyone.

In Praise of Grittiness

While on vacation, I read two books. The first was Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which has been causing an idealistic stir among the usually cynical intelligentsia. The second was Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Both intrigued me, though I’ll admit that I’m still processing the ideas. You’ll probably hear more about them from me at some point in the future.

Today, however, I want to briefly mention one piece of social psychology research, described by Gallagher in Rapt, that resonates well with our conversation here at Study Hacks.

Gallagher cites the research of Angela Duckworth, a psychologist from Penn. Since 2005, Duckworth has been studying a trait called “grit,” which she describes as follows:

Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon…

She maintains that grit is “essential to high achievement.”

Quoted by Gallagher, Duckworth also notes: “We don’t give enough attention to the ‘effort’ and ‘duration’ pieces of accomplishment…Life is relatively short, so don’t labor under the delusion that you can keep switching your focus from goal to goal and get anywhere.”

But what if you’re not sure what goal is right for you?

“[Eventually] perhaps you should settle down with the best thing you’ve found, and focus on it,” she concludes.

As usual, there’s also a nice selection of peer-reviewed research to back up these ideas. In a 2007 paper, for example, titled Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, Duckworth, along with collaborators from the University of Michigan and West Point, demonstrate that grit plays an important role in achievements spanning from becoming spelling bee champion, to Ivy League GPA, to overall educational attainment in life.

Grit vs. Grind

The idea of grit is not new to Study Hacks readers. With sufficient squinting of the eyes, it can be found at the core of the Steve Martin Method, my pleas for more boredom tolerance, the A* strategy, and, most recently, my coronation of hard focus, just to name the most obvious examples. In short, I’ve informally observed this trait to be important for achievement for quite a while. It’s only now, however, that I’ve learned that (at least some) researchers agree.

That being said, I must admit that reading Duckworth’s articles, with their straightforward praise of gutting it out (“his or her advantage is stamina,” she said, describing a gritty personality), inspired a tinge of doubt: What separates the lauding of grit from the lauding of the grind lifestyle? This question is crucial to our mission here, as, of course, being happy and low-stressed is one of the key pillars of my philosophy.

After some thought, I arrived at an answer:

- The grind lifestyle involves filling most days with an unhealthily large amount of work. It treats the overwork itself as the goal, not its results. This chronic overwork, in turn, generates stress and deep procrastination.

- Grit, on the other hand, is about persistently accomplishing a reasonable amount of hard work. For example, consider my book writing. I spend 1 – 3 hours a day, most days, on this task. I’ve been doing this off and on for six years now. These are hard hours, requiring real hard focus. But they’re not many hours — so they’re not a source of overwork or stress in my life.

A Familiar Mantra

This distinction highlights the central message of the grit philosophy: maintain a small number of things that you return to, and do hard work on, again and again, over a long period of time. Choose things that actually interest you, but don’t obsess over choosing the perfect things — as perfect goals, like perfect majors, probably don’t exist. Keep this hard work quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day, and harness the rest of the time to recharge, relax, and, in general, enjoy life. Or, to put it in a more familar wording: Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Sounds about right to me…

Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours

My Schedule Should Be Terrible…

I should have an overwhelming, Malox-guzzling, stress-saturated schedule. Here’s why: I’m a graduate student in a demanding program. I’m working on several research papers while also attempting to nail down some key ideas for my dissertation. I’m TA’ing and taking courses. I maintain this blog. I’m a staff writer for Flak Magazine. And to keep things interesting, I’m working on background research for a potential new book project.

You would be reasonable to assume that I must get, on average, 7 – 8 minutes of sleep a night. But you would also be wrong. Let me explain…

For Some Reason It’s Not…

Here is my actual schedule. I work:

- From 9 to 5 on weekdays.

- In the morning on Sunday.

That’s it. Unless I’m bored, I have no need to even turn on a computer after 5 during the week or any time on Saturday. I fill these times, instead, doing, well, whatever I want.

How do I balance an ambitious work load with an ambitiously sparse schedule? It’s a simple idea I call fixed-schedule productivity.

Fixed-Schedule Productivity

The system work as follows:

1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.

2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But think about it for a moment. Satisfying rule 2 is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here’s a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

- Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.

- Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.

- Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.

- Stop procrastinating.

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal — “I do not want to work past 5 on week days!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let’s look at an example…

Case Study: My Schedule

My schedule provides a good case study. To reach my relatively small work hour limit, I have to be careful with how I go about my day. I see enough bleary-eyed insomniacs around here to know how easy it is to slip into a noon to 3 am routine (the infamous “MIT cycle.”) Here are some of the techniques I regularly use to remain within the confines of my fixed schedule:

- I serialize my projects. I keep two project queues — one from my student projects and one for my writing projects. At any one moment I’m only working on the top project from each queue. When I finish, I move on to the next. This focus lets me churn out quality results without the wasted time of constantly dancing back and forth between multiple efforts. (As also discussed here and here.)

- I’m ultra-clear about when to expect results from me. And it’s not always soon. If someone slips something onto my queue, I make an honest evaluation of when it will percolate to the top. I communicate this date. Then I make it happen when the time comes. You can get away with telling people to expect a result a long time in the future, if — and this is a big if — you actually deliver when promised.

- I refuse. If my queue is too crowded for a potential project to get done in time, I turn it down.

- I drop projects and quit. If a project gets out of control, and starts to sap too much time from my schedule: I drop it. If something demonstrably more important comes along, and it conflicts with something else in my queue, I drop the less important project. If an obligation is taking up too much time: I quit. Here’s a secret: no one really cares what you do on the small scale. In the end you’re judged on your large-scale list of important completions.

- I’m not available. I often work in hidden nooks of the various libraries on campus. I check and respond to work e-mail only a few times a day. People have to wait for responses from me. It’s often hard to find me. Sometimes they get upset at first. But they don’t really need immediate access. And I will always respond within a reasonable timeframe and get them what they need. So they adjust. And I get things done.

- I batch and habitatize. Any regularly occurring work gets turned into a habit — something I do at a fixed time on a fixed date. For example, I write blog posts on Sunday morning. I do reading for my seminar on Friday and Monday mornings. Etc. Habit-based schedules for the regular work makes it easier to tackle the non-regular projects. It also prevents schedule-busting pile-ups.

- I start early. Sometimes real early. On certain projects that I know are important, I don’t tolerate procrastination. It doesn’t interest me. If I need to start something 2 or 3 weeks in advance so that my queue proceeds as needed, I do so.

Why This Works

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and “crucial” web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I’m going to face it. If you don’t do this, you let the never-ending stream of work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules. And you’ll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can’t make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don’t compromise. No one really cares about your schedule except for yourself. So make it right.

Monday Master Class: How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer

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The Pain of Writing

Students hate paper writing. It’s not the writing itself that’s horrible, but instead, being forced to write when you don’t want to. Is there any worse feeling than staring at a half-completed term paper at 2 AM?

The solution is simple. Schedule your writing better. But the specifics can be tricky. What’s the best way to schedule writing? Clear out a full day? Do it a little bit at a time? Work at night once you’ve finished all of your other work? I could give you some answers that sound right, but (for now) forget about me. Let’s see what the pros have to say…

How Professional Writers Write

Professional writers spend most days of their adult lives writing. For those among them who specialize on long form non-fiction, their writing is not that different from the types of research papers that plague college students. Assuming that these writers do not want to spend most of the days of their adult lives hating what they are doing, it stands to reason that, over time, they have figured the least painful possible way to schedule a large amount of writing.

With this in mind, I dug up interviews with the following masters of long form non-fiction:

- Ted Conover
- Richard Ben Cramer,
- Jonathan Harr
- Jon Krakauer
- Michael Lewis
- Susan Orlean
- Richard Preston
- Eric Schlosser
- Gay Talese
- Calvin Trillin.

I went through each interview extracting any discussions about the writer’s habits. I’ve aggregated and analyzed this data to provide you with a snapshot of how professional writers schedule their writing. At the end of this post I will discuss how to apply these observations to your own student writing assignments. Notice this advice is applicable beyond just students. Anyone who has to regularly churn out writing — be it a blogger or a part-time freelancer — can benefit from the habits of the pros.

When During the Day Do Professional Writers Write?

Nine out of ten writers discussed when during the day they write. All nine worked in the morning. Four also worked during the afternoon. Three worked during night. Only one worked in all three times. Several writers described the afternoon as a mental dead time useful only for exercising and, maybe, editing.

At What Time Do Professional Writers Start Writing?

Five out of the ten writers provided a specific start time. The latest was 8:30 am. Four other writers who didn’t give a specific time said, in so many words, “in the morning.” No writer described starting their work in the afternoon or evening. Several did mention that they might also be efficient working very late at night (and sleeping through the day), but that this seems incompatible with being a productive member of society.

Where Do Professional Writers Write?

Six out of the ten writers answered this question. All six described a silent, isolated location, free of distractions. Specifically, they provided the following answers:

- Office in the garage with no window
- An old tenant farmer’s house
- A 9×9 cubicle in the basement

- A small redwood cabin, 100 yards from the main house

- A bare office

- A home office with no phone or Internet

It should be noted, however, that the magazine writers among our sample admitted to being able to write in almost any environment — a trait learned from crashing deadlines on the road. Jon Krakauer also mentioned that his dream was to write in the morning in an isolated cabin, and then spend the afternoon’s climbing. He is yet to realize this dream.

Observations…

The most striking observations from this study:

1. The writers work in the morning. They often start very early in the morning.

2. Five out of ten of the writers described a little ritual before starting their morning writing. A surprising number of these rituals focused on The New York Times.

3. The writers drink coffee. Lots of coffee.

4. The writers write in isolation. If they didn’t have families they would push this even farther. Many discussed having no e-mail or phone in their workspace. One purposefully used a “shitty old laptop” to avoid temptations like solitaire. Gay Talese rigged his home office so it could only be entered through a separate outside door.

How to Apply this Advice

If you are a student — or an amateur writer or blogger — here are some simple rules for emulating the habits of the professionals:

1. Spread out work on an assignment over several days. Coming at it fresh increases its quality.

2. During these days, get up early. Probably earlier than you are used to. Say, around 7 or 8 am. (This means these days will be weekdays, probably early in the week so you can avoid temptations to party the night before).

3. Have a mini-ritual to jump start the day. It should probably involve coffee. Breakfast. Maybe the morning paper. Don’t take too long.

4. Go to the most isolated place possible.

5. To get your mind ready to think, review the last pages you wrote.

6. Work for two or three hours. Then stop.

7. Follow this habit regularly. Don’t write during other times. Don’t write in public places. Don’t start writing the day before.

Interestingly, without knowing it, I stumbled across many of these same scheduling habits during the fall of my senior year at Dartmouth. At the time, I was balancing my normal student responsibilities with the writing of the manuscript for my first book. The method I used: I got at 8 AM, every weekday morning, brewed a cup of coffee and wrote for 1.5 hours at my desk — all without leaving my room. After I was done, my real day could begin. It worked beautifully.

What writing habits work for you? What habits do you need to abandon?

What If My Dream Major Turns Into a Nightmare?

Deep Trouble

I recently received an e-mail from our friend Tyler. As you may recall, he found peace last year by swapping a premed major that never interested him for a classics major that did. He went on to pare down his schedule and then focus on becoming an A* student. In short, he was a perfect example of the study hacks philosophy: do less; do better; know why.

Then things got bad again.

“I know you keep saying ‘pick a  major and stick to it.’” Tyler told me in his e-mail. “But the only thing saving me from academic oblivion is the fear of failing.  My major recently has only been sucking up my time and causing me major stress.” He then proposed that he should switch majors; even though he is only 2 – 3 classes away from a classics degree. He didn’t know what else to do.

Tyler is not alone. His e-mail is probably the 5th or 6th I’ve received this spring that offers some variation on the same common conundrum: what do I do if my dream major is turning into a nightmare? In this post I tackle this issue with a series of observations on the lost art of cultivating a healthy relationship with your academic concentration.

Observation #1: There’s no such thing as the right major for you.

The idea that some students just love everything about their major, and are always excited by the work it generates, is a popular belief. I’ll let you in on a secret: such students don’t exist. So don’t get freaked out that your schoolwork annoys you. There is no right major for you. There are only right motivations.

The logic is simple: If your major was the product of someone else’s interests, or expectations, or similar external pressures, then you should be wary. Why? Because when the work gets really hard — and all majors eventually get really hard — you’ll feel like this pain is a punishment inflicted by someone else. This builds resentment, which, in turn, can fester into deep procrastination.

On the other hand, if you choose the major solely because you thought it would an interesting thing to master, then you won’t blame the eventual hard work on some outside force. It remains simply the hard work required to get a degree. This is more tolerable.

It’s tough to give up on the idea that there’s some perfect major waiting out there to sing in perfect harmony with your natural talents. But it’s simply not true. There are majors that seem forced on you and those that don’t. Sure, if you’re already good at something like math or writing, then you might get a head start in a matching major, but even this advantage degrades after a few semesters. In the end, a lot more is possible than you think. You just need your motivations in the right place.

Observation #2: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but college is hard.

A new major is like a new boyfriend. At first, it’s all excitement and possibility. Then you find out his feet stink. For a major, this metaphorical foot odor comes in the form of decreasing novelty and increasing amounts of hard work. It’s like a one-two punch to your motivation: at the same time that subject loses its freshness (because you’ve been studying it for a while) it ramps up the intensity of the work it demands (because upper level courses are harder than intro courses). This shift is unavoidable. Don’t mistake it for a shift in your fundamental feelings toward the subject.

The key thing to remember is that nobody loves a subject during the process of mastering it. Have you ever seen Rocky 4, where Stallone has to retreat to the mountains of Russia to prepare to fight Drago? He drags carts, and rolls boulders up a hill, and, in one of the most subtlety-crafted moments in cinematic history, he does inverted sit-ups in a barn while Pauly hits him in the stomach with a stick.

This sucked for Rocky. But it doesn’t mean that he didn’t respect the art of boxing or the dedication required for mastery. It’s just that the process of mastery itself is not consistently pleasant. This is probably the first time anyone in the history of education has ever said this, but your junior and senior year of college are a little bit like Rocky 4.

In other words, your upper level courses are going to require lots of work, and sometimes it will feel like Pauly is whaling on you with a big ‘ole stick. It’s not going to be terrible — especially if you follow my style of efficient studying and time management advice — but it’s not going to be a cakewalk either. Don’t freak out.  If it were easy, everyone would read the classics in the original Greek. (Chicks dig Homer.)

Observation #3: You can, however, prepare for the difficulty of these final years.

I’m assuming that you already follow the straight-A method, have memorized the red book, and crafted a focused, zen schedule. On top of these basics, there are still things you can do to prepare for your major’s inevitable descent into hardness. I have two suggestions:

1. Start paring down your schedule in preparation for your final few semesters. This is exactly what I did when I saw my senior thesis and tough senior level courses on my horizon. I had been editor of the humor magazine, but I handed over the reins my senior fall. At the same time, I took advantage of Dartmouth’s policies to lighten my non-major course load without losing credits. One semester I added an independent study course dedicated to my thesis research. Another semester I took a “thesis writing course” to the same effect. The goal was to minimize everything but my major so I could finish my A* attack without losing my zen balance.

2. Focus your remaining extracurricular energy on an activity that connects you to your major. For example, during my senior year I ramped up my independent computer science research. It helped transform my upper level courses into more than just a source of grades. This is a crucial point. It’s not enough that you were once interested in your major, you have to keep renewing this interest if you want it to persist.

Back to Tyler

My observations from above can be condensed into the simple idea that students often mistake their schoolwork becoming harder for some fundamental rift with their major. The reality is that if your major was your choice, it’s probably fine. Instead of obsessing whether some other major is a slightly better fit, you just have to prepare yourself — both mentally and tactically — to handle the increased difficulty when it inevitably arises. If you’re an efficient student, and reduce your schedule, and keep yourself connected to your field of study outside of the classroom, these final years are not so bad.

(On the other hand, if you were pressured into your major, then you might be facing deep procrastination which may require a fundamental change.)

Returning now to our friend Tyler, my advice is straightforward: finish the classics major. To make things easier, follow my advice from above. (Imagine, for example, if Tyler started a campus publication dedicated to helping students use the classics to find meaning in their life. That’s the type of thing that can keep you from freaking out and becoming an accounting major when faced with another long week of memorizing Greek adverbs.)

Once Tyler has his degree and A* recommendations, the opportunities available to him will be vast and interesting. So if you’re freaking out about your major, take a step back, relax, and then, most importantly of all, watch Rocky 4.

Table of Contents

Pocket

All articles

ממשלת ארצות הברית מממנת מחקרים ליצירת פרותזה מוחית

הניסוי שהוכיח טלפתיה!

RTFM 0day in iOS apps: G+, Gmail, FB Messenger, etc.

How to use Deliberate Practice when writing – part 1

A Student’s Guide to Using the Kindle for Research

הד החינוך - קונסט…

Completing an MIT Physics Class in 4.5 Days?

Change Your Relationship with Time to Manage It More Effectively

Incremental learning (Full)

The Tyra Banks approach to writing

Mindmapping that works vs TMI

Your two kinds of memory

Why I insist on blathering about mindmapping

About the Study Hacks Blog

Why you should copy (a modest proposal)

Deep Habits: When the Going Gets Tough, Build a Temporary Plan

Why I’m (Still) Not Going to Join Facebook: Four Arguments that Failed to Convince Me

Don’t Fight Distraction. Make It Irrelevant.

Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day

Deep Habits: Plan Your Week in Advance

Deep Habits: Using Milestones to Get Unstuck

Beyond Passion: The Science of Loving What You Do

How Double Majors Can Ruin Your Life: Two Arguments for Doing Less

The Danger of Deep Procrastination

How to Cure Deep Procrastination

As much effort as to tap a beach ball…

5 Productivity Strategies from the Mind of Richard Feynman

How to Increase Your Ability to Focus

The Feeling of Learning

Dangerous Ideas: Getting Started is Overrated

Monday Master Class: The Biggest Source of Stress that Most Students Ignore

The Notebook Method: How Pen and Paper Can Transform You Into a Star Student

Have We Lost Our Tolerance For a Little Boredom?

The Straight-A Method: How to Ace College Courses

Monday Master Class: The Study Hacks Guide to Note-Taking

The power of being the best

The Career Craftsman Manifesto

The Grandmaster in the Corner Office: What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us about Building a Remarkable Life

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

Knowledge structuring for learning

Organize your life with Centrallo

Grit, Grinds, and Living the Low Stress Life

Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours

Monday Master Class: How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer

What If My Dream Major Turns Into a Nightmare?