Comfortable Fluency in Consumption is Not a Proxy for Learning

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Comfortable fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning. This perception of learning unreliable – what you perceive is information sitting in your working memory, which is fleeting, not your long-term memory.

If you want to test whether information is in your long-term memory (i.e., whether you’ve actually retained it), you have to actively attempt to retrieve it when it’s not already at the front of your mind. You have to put yourself in the position where it’s not already in your working memory, and the only way to pull it out of your brain is from long-term memory.

Moreover, active problem-solving is not just where you test your learning, it’s where the learning actually happens. It’s the very act of retrieving information from memory that transfers the information to long-term memory. Each time you successfully recall a fuzzy memory, it stays intact longer before getting fuzzy again.

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