The Patriot

The May issue of Wired magazine carries a story entitled The Memory Master. The article portrays Piotr Wozniak as radically self-absorbed man obsessed with memorization, hardly a role model for classical education. However, Wozniak has discovered some principles that ring true and have empirical support.

One of Wozniak’s principles is that the optimal time to review something is just as you are about to forget it. (Reviewing something while it’s fresh on your mind is not as effective in committing that item to long-term memory. And once you’ve forgotten something, you’re starting over.) It follows that review sessions should not be evenly spaced. After each review, the item is more firmly in your memory, and so it will take longer to reach the next point of nearly forgetting it. After a few such cycles, the item is committed to memory.

A related principle is that the struggle to recall something causes that item to be strengthened in your memory. Reviews that come too quickly and too easily build confidence but do not accomplish as much as exercises that are more challenging. The optimal strategy for memorization does not feel optimal.

See a related article on confusion.