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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @c590b1622e 23 Dec 2023 freebie \ on: How do you learn new things? Education
Learning is creating memories via sensory inputs.
As far as math learning goes, which I know also is @needcreations_ specialty, we do not exactly engage our senses of smell or taste very often, leaving us with sight, sound, and touch, which we refer to as "The Big 3". We tend to have stronger retention of memories in which more of our sensory inputs are engaged. Family feasts are a great example of this. All 5 senses are engaged at such an occasion and those occasions are often easier to recall in vivid detail.
There are multiple reasons I enjoy the aphorism "there's a fine line between crazy and genius", but the one that is applicable here is 'talking to yourself'. Certainly the crazy person who talks to the sky every day on 8th and Madison near his cardboard box campsite is talking to himself and is crazy. Is the genius who mutters to himself as he works crazy or is he merely utilizing his cognitive capacity in every way that he can imagine to improve his ability to operate, to research, to problem solve, to engineer, what have you?
I typically encourage students to not only speak aloud when they work (quietly, to themselves), I stress the importance of speaking their work properly, i.e. "seven tenths", not "zero point seven" or "seven over ten".
It also helps to engage the sense of touch when possible with any learning experience.
Short term memories "dump" into long term memory when we go through sleep cycles at night or even if we get a full sleep cycle nap in during the day.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve suggests that, without daily refreshers on a concept, we rapidly lose concept retention, percentage point by percentage point. Refreshing a concept back to 100% right before making a short term memory deposit into your long term memory makes a lot of sense. Before going to sleep at night, thinking about every moment of your day, as best as you can muster, will create stronger memories of that day in your mind.
Likewise, it may be a memory hack to take a nap every day as well. It would need to be a full sleep cycle, and, just like above, it would be ideal to refresh your memory right before your nap of all waking moments since you last slept.