How to learn like a memory champion (BBC)

David Robson

For most of his 20s, Ed Cooke had been hovering around the top 10 of the World Memory Championships. His achievements included memorising 2,265 binary digits in 30 minutes and the order of 16 packs of playing cards in just an hour. But at the age of 26, he was getting restless, and wanted to help others to learn like him. "The memory techniques take a certain discipline," he says. "I wanted a tool that would just allow you to relax into learning."

The resulting brainchild was Memrise. Launched in 2010, the website and app is now helping more than 1.4 million users to learn foreign languages, history and science with the ease of Cooke's memory powers. It has been followed by similar apps that also take the pain out of learning – both for individuals, and in schools, with some teachers finding benefits that even Cooke couldn't have predicted.

“It's very powerful – it does all the spade work of learning,” says Dominic Traynor, who teaches Spanish at the St Cuthbert with St Matthias Primary School in London, UK. “I would say we've covered a year's worth of work in the first six months.”

As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind. For example, in one German language course, the word “abend” for evening, is illustrated with a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to a ghetto blaster, with the caption “Abe ends work in the evening”. It’s silly, but that’s the point – an absurd image is memorable.

To cultivate those memories, the app then sets you a series of carefully timed tests over the days, weeks and months that follow. Numerous experiments over the past few years have shown that the best way to build new neural pathways is to try and recall it afresh, helping subjects remember more than twice as much, over the long term, than just passively reading the material; self-testing also turns out to be more effective than creative techniques like drawing diagrams and mind maps.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140307-how-to-learn-like-a-memory-champ




This seems a little like an endorsement for a single company, but it's interesting enough that I'm posting it anyway. Choose your grain of salt.