on learning and remembering things with Anki
a little electronic help pt. 1/4
Motivation
Our brains are incredible machines, and as long as you are awake and unimpaired, your brain is on, collecting, analyzing, and categorizing information. At every moment, your sensory organs are collecting an enormous amount of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch data. The majority of this data is brutally filtered without ever entering your conscious experience. Take a moment to feel your clothes against you skin or see your nose in your peripheral vision, and you will have two immediate examples of this filtering.
Most of the time, your brain is deciding what you get to experience. Usually, the brain does a pretty good job of "showing you" the important bits, and filtering extraneous material, like when it filters the background noise in a crowded restaurant, or blocks that nose from your vision (you don't really want to see that all day, do you?). However, sometimes things pass you by that you really would rather have noticed.
What's more, your brain decides what parts of your experience you get to remember. Not only does your brain decide what you experience in the present moment, but your brain decides what you remember about the past. It usually prioritizes novel experiences, like exciting or terrifying ones. Your brain is especially interested in remembering material that may be essential to survival later on, so you tend to remember painful, negative experiences really well, in order to avoid them in the future. Of course, the brain also remembers the good times, and most of us have a litany of meaningful memories, both good and bad. But again, some things fall out of our memory that we really would prefer to keep.
The brain was not optimized for a 21st century life, and what is important to notice and remember is not always what the brain decides to notice and remember. Too often, the content we consume goes in one ear and out the other. This is true for books and movies that we have read or watched but can no longer recall. This is true for physics lectures that we understood once but now forget. This is true for people we once knew but now can't recognize. Sadly, this is even true for the everyday life experiences that we valued in the moment but now have lost to the foggy past. Our brain makes precious few memories, and even those that it does make fade over time.
The good news is that we can receive help. A teacher can help us focus and learn certain information. A friend can jog our memory about a past event that we'd otherwise forget. A secretary can remind us of our tasks for the day. The bad news is that you won't always have a teacher, friend, or secretary to help you out. That's why I've called in a little electronic help.
The Help
I have adopted a three-prong approach to this problem of information collection and memory. The first prong is to store facts in my actual brain (using Anki). The second prong is to collect and organize information in an external "second brain" to support my own (using Obsidian and Goodnotes). The third prong is to keep tracks of tasks and schedules (using Todoist and Apple calendar). In the next few articles, I will outline the system I have built over the past few years that I have found tremendously helpful. I am motivated to outline the system both for my own reference and the reference of others.
The remainder of this article deals with the first prong of the approach.
The first prong - optimizing what I got
For the first prong, I force my brain to remember the things I want it to remember, and make sure my brain doesn't forget these things over time. I accomplish this with spaced repetition flash cards using the Anki software. I add cards for anything I want to remember, from people's birthdays to poetry to physics equations. Then, Anki provides designated flashcards every day, which I make sure to get done daily.
The key is how Anki decides which cards to assign for each day. Anki operates using spaced repetition:
If you get a card right, you will see it less often.
If you get a card wrong, you will see it more often.
This very simple set-up leads to very powerful results. If you repeatedly get a card right, it will be shown to you at longer and longer intervals, for you have demonstrated that you know the material very well. In some cases, you need not practice that card for years! However, if you get a card wrong, even if you’ve gotten it many times before, you’ll have to practice it regularly in order to build your memory back up.
With this strategy, you can have 1000s of flashcards in circulation, but only study ~50 a day. With a moderate time commitment each day, you can guarantee that all of these bits of information are learned and kept fresh in your memory.
Anki is incredibly easy to use, with a litany of keyboard shortcuts in its desktop version (i.e. "a" to add, "command+enter" to submit card, "b" to browse, "/" to study, "y" to sync, “spacebar” to answer, “1” for wrong, “4” for right, “Command + M, M” for Latex, etc.). You can enter audio, images, or equations into your cards. Anki also has a synced mobile version, and I commonly enter new cards from my phone whenever I think of something that I'd like to remember. As long as I keep my habit of daily flashcards, entering something into my Anki is basically a guarantee of entering it into my long-term memory.
While taking notes in class, or reading a book, if I don't want to interrupt the flow of what I am doing to enter cards, I highlight important material with a green highlighter. Then, after the fact, I enter each green highlight as a flashcard into Anki. Once I have gone through my notes and entered all the green highlights, I draw a horizontal line in yellow highlighter to mark that the previous section has been entered into Anki. This way, nothing falls through the cracks.
Since the Anki cards update across devices, I can use my phone to study my daily cards. In situations where I might otherwise meaninglessly scroll the internet, I have found great joy and results from pulling out my Anki instead. The most important thing is that I stay consistent in doing my flash cards each day. I ensure this by tracking my commitment in Obsidian (part of my second prong) and setting myself reminders in Todoist (part of my third prong). More on these apps later.
The second prong - an external brain
Of course, there is a lot of information that may be important to keep, but doesn’t make sense to memorize in Anki. Examples of this include book annotations, daily journal entries, workout logs, short essays, fleeting thoughts, and lecture notes. These notes should live somewhere, lest they be lost, but if they aren't to be memorized, then they must be stored in a separate "second brain." How I use Obsidian to collect and organize these types of notes will be the topic of future articles which will be linked below when published:
The third prong - a to-do list
Even if I had all the information in the world, it would (arguably) be meaningless unless I accomplished some tasks with it. Also, tasks are a form of information, vulnerable to the same sorts of memory slips as anything else. To make sure I am executing tasks and not forgetting any, I use Todoist. An article on my set-up will be linked below when published.
((finding something to do with todoist)) - TBD