Active recall
I'm currently reading What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami (thanks for the recommendation, Rishi) and a line stuck out to me:
Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing.
This line resonated with me because I've also found that the best way for me to understand a concept or idea is for me to write about it. Reading only gets me so far. The act of articulating what is stored in my brain into something legible and understandable is thinking and understanding.
I worry about the education system, which has had the entire concept of writing as a form of study upended by AI, and universities have seen their first decline in literacy and comprehension ever recorded. But this isn't what this post is about, this post is about remembering things.
I have often received complements from friends and strangers alike on how good my memory is. This tends to be complimenting what is generally considered a static attribute, since most people think of memory as being an immutable characteristic of a person. I can say with certainty that this isn't the case. The reason I remember things and confidently convey them is usually because I've written about them at some point.
This isn't relegated to ideas and concepts, but events in my own life, since I keep a daily journal and have for over a decade now. I've written more about this here, here, and here.
There's a study with the mouthful of a title Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping by Karpike and Blunt (2011) that I read this morning where they had college students read short educational texts, then study them in different ways: rereading, building concept maps while looking at the text, and free recall (reading once, then writing down everything they could remember on a blank page without looking at the source material). On a delayed test about a week later they found that free recall produced better information retention than rereading or creating a concept map.
There's an extra detail emphasised that's the real kicker: in one version of the experiment, the final test itself was to produce a concept map — yet the students who had studied by free recall still outperformed the ones who had studied by making concept maps. So even when the practice method (free recall) didn't match the test format (concept mapping), the act of retrieving from memory beat the more elaborate, intuitively "deeper" study technique.
I realise that, inadvertently, this is exactly what I've been doing the entire time with my blog, notes, and journal. The reason I can recall information so well is because I have read, watched, experienced, or discussed a concept or idea, then wrote about it on my blog, or in my notes or journal. I was practising free-recall this whole time and managed to trick people around me into thinking I'm just unnaturally good at remembering things.
This concept isn't new. The process of studying has historically always involved some form of note-taking and active recall. I wasn't a good student (at all) and never learnt how to study. The structure of school (and government school in South Africa, no less) was not set up in a way that allowed knowledge to stick. I feel like one minor tweak to the school system should be a course dedicated to how to study and effective note-taking. It's a pity I didn't have these skills in school because it would have made it a lot more pleasant. There's nothing quite as frustrating as having to learn something and despite many late nights studying, it refusing to lodge itself in my brain.
To come full circle, there's nothing particularly special about the way that I take notes, write, or journal. It is the act of doing it which is important. I tend to journal about my yesterday each morning before getting into work. As for notes, whenever there's something interesting I'd like to remember I write it in my notes.txt file, which is a large file full or random scribbles. As for writing on my blog, I don't have a schedule or explicit plan, I just write when there's something I've been thinking about that I believe is interesting.
The interesting part is that I don't really read my notes or journal. The act of writing is the important bit.
In a nutshell: I write for you all, but I guess I also write for me.