The Vicious Cycle of Forgetting

To transfer information into long-term memory, you need to practice retrieving it without assistance.

Forgetting is frustrating. After putting forth the effort to learn something, who wants to waste time re-learning it later?

To mitigate the effects of forgetting, it might feel helpful to solve problems alongside reference material.

But there’s an issue: when you continually look back at a reference, the information doesn’t stay in your brain. You hold the information in short-term memory, but only temporarily – it dissipates after you use it.

The reference material becomes a crutch, and you’re lost without it. You miss out on making connections and understanding things deeply. You learn slower, and forget faster, until eventually you grind to a halt.

You might think it’s because you’re not doing enough review problems, when it’s really because you’re not doing those review problems properly, pulling information from memory.

Even people who are serious about their learning sometimes fall into this vicious cycle of forgetting. They might take great notes and then refer back to those notes all the time instead of trying to pull the information from memory.

So, how do you break the cycle?

To transfer information into long-term memory, you need to practice retrieving it without assistance. Each time you successfully recall a fuzzy memory, it stays intact longer before getting fuzzy again.

If you can’t recall something after trying, it’s okay to check reference material, but only as a last resort. Peek once, then solve the problem without looking again.

Challenging yourself to remember may be tough initially, but it pays off in the long run.