Using Technology to Enhance the Human Brain
In my Red Queen Race paper I detailed how we should make as much of our activities technology driven as we possibly could. The rationale is to gain the benefits of Moore’s Law for free. That is, our economy’s capacity for producing wealth would increase without requiring work or capital.
It seems that while many sectors of the economy are benefiting from this, there are two sizeable ones that aren’t: Health, and Education.
The way we teach and learn things, in school and out, has not changed significantly since the inception of universities. A teacher speaks, students listen and take notes, than an exam evaluates progress. You could argue that some universities use podcasts and other multimedia technologies; and while it does broaden the potential audience, and increase convenience by having the teaching / recording asynchronous with the learning / playback, it does not increase the productivity of the individual.
If it took an hour to learn something a hundred years ago, it probably still takes an hour to learn today. Such a shame.
I found an open source project called Mnemosyne that helps in memorization. From their explanation page:
When you have memorised something, you need to review that material, otherwise you will forget it. However, as you probably know from experience, it is much more effective to space out these revisions over the course over several days, rather than cramming all the revisions in a single session. This is what is called the spacing effect.
During the past 120 years, there has been considerable research into these aspects of human memory (by e.g. Ebbinghaus, Mace, Leitner and Wozniak). Based on the work of these people, it was shown that in order to get the best results, the intervals between revisions of the same card should gradually increase. This allows you to focus on things you still haven’t mastered, while not wasting time on cards you remember very well.
It is clear that a computer program can be very valuable in assisting you in this process, by keeping track of how difficult you find an card and by doing the scheduling of the revisions. Let’s see how this works in practice in the Mnemosyne program.
It turns out the best time to revise something is when you are about to forget it. Mnemosyne traces a graph of your capacity to remember, and schedules items at that time.
I’ve been testing this for a month now, and I find it very efficient for vocabulary (I use AWAD). Less so for complex concepts, though that could be due to the way I write my cards.
Anyway, I recommend that you try it out. You may download it from SourceForge.