Learn by not Trying

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Take Smart Notes

Take notes in slip-box and make new connections will give us a chance to refind the forgotten ideas.

Transferring ideas into the external memory also allows us to forget them.

抱怨会加深对抱怨之事的印象, 还是会减弱?

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right "cues" trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

Useful Learning is to connect a piece of information to as many meaningful contexts as possible, which is what we do when we connect our notes in the slip-box with other notes. Making these connections deliberately means building up a self-supporting network of interconnected ideas and facts that work reciprocally as cues for each other.

Learned right, which means understanding, which means connecting in a meaningful way to previous knowledge, information almost cannot be forgotten anymore and will be reliably retrieved if triggered by the right cues.

The slip-box forces us to ask numerous elaborating questions: What does it mean? How does it connect to … ? What is the difference between … ? What is it similar to?

举一反三。

Elaborating on the differences and similarities of notes instead of sorting them by topic not only facilitates learning, but facilitates the ability to categorise and create sensible classifications.