Prereq Yo’ Self Before You Wreck Yo’ Self

by Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) on

If you hammer prerequisite concepts/skills into your long-term memory, get it really solid and easy to retrieve, then you can lessen the load on your working memory, keep it below capacity, avoid getting "broken," and keep up with the game.

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This is exactly the reason why so many students get “broken” by math:

“imagine trying to learn … without having the intuition behind [prerequisite] concepts … maybe some people can bulldoze through it but it’d probably be a backbreaker for many”

image x.com/sumitdotml/status/1864841189595414690

When you skip prereqs or otherwise don’t master them, you can’t automate cognitive work via long-term memory, so all the work gets piled on your working memory to handle “manually.”

But your working memory has severely limited capacity, and you can’t learn if you blow that capacity. It’s like trying to get stronger by lifting a weight you can’t even pick up off the ground. Doesn’t work, you don’t adapt.

The hard-to-swallow pill is that different people have different working memory capacities and there’s a lack of research support that you can even increase that working memory capacity through training. It’s like math is a game of basketball and working memory capacity is the intellectual equivalent of height.

But if you hammer prerequisite concepts/skills into your long-term memory, get it really solid and easy to retrieve, then you can lessen the load on your working memory, keep it below capacity, avoid getting “broken,” and keep up with the game.

TLDR: Prereq yo’ self before you wreck yo’ self.

(By the way, the “working memory capacity as height” analogy runs deep: by building up prerequisite knowledge bottom-up, you create a cognitive “stepstool” that allows you to reach what you need even if you wouldn’t be tall enough to reach it otherwise. This doesn’t happen when you try to build up the knowledge top-down.)


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