Learning & Mind · Foundation

Memory

How to Learn Anything taught memory as something you build: retrieval, spacing, interleaving. This course is about the other half, which is memory as something that is reconstructed every time you use it, and which is therefore wrong in particular ways that can be measured. It covers what forgetting actually looks like when somebody plots it, what retrieving one thing does to the things next to it, how a memory can be changed by a question, what the evidence says about confidence and accuracy, and what the memory techniques people sell actually do. It is the fourth course of the term on running yourself.

What you'll learn

• Describe what a forgetting curve measures and what it does not, with what it was measured on
• Explain what retrieving one thing costs its neighbours, and what the pooled figure depends on
• State what has been measured about the relationship between confidence in a memory and its accuracy
• Identify, in a described case, how a question or a later account could have altered a memory
• Say what a mnemonic technique does and does not do, and where its evidence comes from
• Read a claim about memory and say what would have had to be measured to support it