how do you memorize vast amounts of data, if you don't have a good memory ?

[dunkthejunk]

if someone is good at understanding, but not memorizing, what techniques can they use to memorize vast amounts of data ?

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[Lya]

Spaced repetition, visualization, motivation on why you need to memorize, understanding in the integration of data, and make a rap out of data and you can sing it during a shower everyday until it sticks into your head.

 

[Being]

Look into spaced repetition programs like Supermemo and Anki. Biggest improvement to my learning process I've ever made. IMO Supermemo is much better than Anki, but it has a somewhat steep learning curve. Supermemo also costs $60 whereas Anki is free, but that's a small price to pay for how useful it is, especially if you use it for all of your classes and into med school.

Check out this video for an example of how powerful Anki is:

Go download Anki for free and play around with it to see if you think this is something that would be beneficial for you.

 

[knv2u]

Spaced repetition, visualization, motivation on why you need to memorize, understanding in the integration of data, and make a rap out of data and you can sing it during a shower everyday until it sticks into your head.

These are helpful for committing things to short term memory; however, for long term memory, I think more is needed. What I advise is to relate the things that are new and unfamiliar to things that are already familiar and known. That's why I think that is important to have a very strong foundation when going to college. Think of your previous knowledge as a cognitive scaffold upon which you can attach new ideas. Cognitive psychologists maintain that this is how people learn and it has worked for me. That's why I think synthesis of information throughout a course and with your previous course work is always useful. Concept mapping has helped some relate ideas in the past, but I tend to use this less personally.

 

[Dr. Biology]

learning and memorization comes from the "rewiring" of neurons in the brain from repetition and other methods, think of the first time you went to classes your freshman year, you had to carry your class list for the buildings and rooms, but now you can get to your classes faster and by the shortest routes.. its the same concept, you make the trip enough times you'll always remember how to get from A to B and so on

 

[Gauss44]

Find a way to organize the information so that it's no longer random.

Examples:

If someone just gives you a list of crap to remember like: desk, train, book, canoe, rabbit, water, truck..., you will probably have trouble remembering at first. Then, if you try to organize the information by making it into a mental picture say, a moving truck carrying 3 things: a desk with a book on it and a rabbit in a cage, a train going by and water off in the distance with a canoe sailing - all of the sudden, you will remember! Test it out on someone. First just ask them to try to recall your list. Then, with the added tip of making a mental picture, see how they much they remember.

Rather than memorize what each hormone does and where it comes from, learn how the process works. That process will help to organize ideas.

If you see a random looking cloud or patch of trees, decide what the outline looks like. It's easier to find the north star if you know to look for the big dipper.

 

[mehc012]

Look into spaced repetition programs like Supermemo and Anki. Biggest improvement to my learning process I've ever made. IMO Supermemo is much better than Anki, but it has a somewhat steep learning curve. Supermemo also costs $60 whereas Anki is free, but that's a small price to pay for how useful it is, especially if you use it for all of your classes and into med school.

Go download Anki for free and play around with it to see if you think this is something that would be beneficial for you.

So, as someone who has spent the past year training myself to study solely via Anki (and I'm loving it!) what are the advantages of Supermemo? Pros/cons vs Anki?

 

[funknewbious]

teaching others the material, whether conceptual or rote memorization, always helps for me....especially for long-term memory.

 

[NickNaylor]

I've become a pretty big fan of Anki. It takes a lot of work to make the cards themselves, but reviewing them is extremely simple, and the overall design of the program makes sense and is effective - at least for me.

Memorizing stuff is all about repetition. Whatever will allow you to look at the material one more time is what you should do. You then need to balance that with your time constraints. Reading a textbook a million times would obviously be a great way to learn all of the material, but it's not the most efficient and likely not feasible for your schedule. For undergrad, a decent strategy might be to: 1) read the primary text and take notes that summarize key points and briefly explain more specific details, followed by 2) time spent memorizing that distilled information using whatever method you like. Some people read notes aloud. Some people read them silently a million times. Some people convert them into flashcards.

Keep trying things until you come up with something that works well. It's all about trial and error since not everything works for every person.

 

[Being]

So, as someone who has spent the past year training myself to study solely via Anki (and I'm loving it!) what are the advantages of Supermemo? Pros/cons vs Anki?

I only used Anki for a few weeks before discovering Supermemo and switching over, so you can probably speak more intelligently about it than I can. Basically Anki introduced me to the concept of SR, and then I decided to explore what other options were available before committing heavily to one. After doing a bunch of research on all the programs that are out there, Supermemo seemed like clearly the best choice to me. Supermemo is a pain in the butt to learn but it's easy to use once you get the hang of it, and it feels like a much more powerful and effective program so I think it's worth the trouble in the end.

The biggest pro (to me) for Supermemo is that it uses a much more advanced algorithm than Anki (and every other SR program that I could find). Anki is using SM-2 algorithm which was designed in the 1980's... Supermemo is now on SM-15. The rigidity of Anki's algorithm was really off-putting for me. I hated looking at a card for Anki and seeing that all it was doing was rescheduling the card for 3, 4 or 5 days from now based on which option I picked. Supermemo feels much more responsive: it collects and uses data on your overall retention rate, response time, etc. I trust it more to make good scheduling decisions and to adapt to my performance.

I appreciate how Supermemo lets you actually see all the data it collects, and do things like adjust the forgetting index. You can sort of manually do the same thing Anki but it's awkward and I trust Supermemo to do a better job of it than I could do.


When it comes to making cards, I'm torn. I was a computer science major for a while during undergrad and I'm pretty good with HTML. I enjoy how Anki lets you separate things out into different fields and then dynamically create cards. Makes it easy to quickly put a bunch of info in and then make a ton of cards super fast. I've also seen people use the image occlusion addon and though I haven't played with it myself, it looks amazing for making a lot of cards quickly.

On the other hand, card creation is reasonably quick and easy in Supermemo as well once you get the hang of it. Templates save time, and card creation feels more flexible than Anki's. It took some fiddling at first but I figured out a good way to quickly do image occlusion in Supermemo that doesn't require downloading an addon or anything. Not as fast as Anki, but fast enough.
Copy/pasting images onto your supermemo cards is a lot easier than it is in Anki. I make a lot of my supermemo cards with the windows "snipping tool": just grab a piece of text or an image or whatever, click onto the supermemo component and control+v.


Supermemo is not pretty, is not user-friendly, and is slower in many ways. I'm a power user and the first two of those problems did not bother me at all. The third problem can be overcome somewhat once you figure out how to use the program efficiently. Fast card creation is also not my primary concern because I'm going to be studying these cards for a long time and then using them for MCAT review. I don't mind spending an extra 5 seconds per card when I'm going to be using them for the next 2+ years (and maybe beyond if I want to go back and review). Same goes for if/when I get to med school and am studying for boards - an extra few seconds spent creating a card isn't a big deal when you're going to be using those same cards for 2 years of studying.

My general impression is that Supermemo is simply a better program... if you're willing to put up with it (which most people aren't when alternatives are so easy to use) and aren't intimidated by it. If the creators would just hire somebody to make them a decent website, overhaul the UI and make a smart phone app, they'd be making millions I bet. (if you look at supermemo.net and supermemo.com, they have sort of done this... But the phone app doesn't really mesh well with the PC version and I haven't been able to figure it out. I just do my studying on a tablet running full version of supermemo and then sync databases between tablet and PC)

 

[AlbinoHawk DO]

These are helpful for committing things to short term memory; however, for long term memory, I think more is needed. What I advise is to relate the things that are new and unfamiliar to things that are already familiar and known. That's why I think that is important to have a very strong foundation when going to college. Think of your previous knowledge as a cognitive scaffold upon which you can attach new ideas. Cognitive psychologists maintain that this is how people learn and it has worked for me. That's why I think synthesis of information throughout a course and with your previous course work is always useful. Concept mapping has helped some relate ideas in the past, but I tend to use this less personally.

Short term memory is about half a minute, so no, anki and other methods are not meant for that or help with it.

 

[mehc012]

I only used Anki for a few weeks before discovering Supermemo and switching over, so you can probably speak more intelligently about it than I can. Basically Anki introduced me to the concept of SR, and then I decided to explore what other options were available before committing heavily to one. After doing a bunch of research on all the programs that are out there, Supermemo seemed like clearly the best choice to me. Supermemo is a pain in the butt to learn but it's easy to use once you get the hang of it, and it feels like a much more powerful and effective program so I think it's worth the trouble in the end.

The biggest pro (to me) for Supermemo is that it uses a much more advanced algorithm than Anki (and every other SR program that I could find). Anki is using SM-2 algorithm which was designed in the 1980's... Supermemo is now on SM-15. The rigidity of Anki's algorithm was really off-putting for me. I hated looking at a card for Anki and seeing that all it was doing was rescheduling the card for 3, 4 or 5 days from now based on which option I picked. Supermemo feels much more responsive: it collects and uses data on your overall retention rate, response time, etc. I trust it more to make good scheduling decisions and to adapt to my performance.

I appreciate how Supermemo lets you actually see all the data it collects, and do things like adjust the forgetting index. You can sort of manually do the same thing Anki but it's awkward and I trust Supermemo to do a better job of it than I could do.


When it comes to making cards, I'm torn. I was a computer science major for a while during undergrad and I'm pretty good with HTML. I enjoy how Anki lets you separate things out into different fields and then dynamically create cards. Makes it easy to quickly put a bunch of info in and then make a ton of cards super fast. I've also seen people use the image occlusion addon and though I haven't played with it myself, it looks amazing for making a lot of cards quickly.

On the other hand, card creation is reasonably quick and easy in Supermemo as well once you get the hang of it. Templates save time, and card creation feels more flexible than Anki's. It took some fiddling at first but I figured out a good way to quickly do image occlusion in Supermemo that doesn't require downloading an addon or anything. Not as fast as Anki, but fast enough.
Copy/pasting images onto your supermemo cards is a lot easier than it is in Anki. I make a lot of my supermemo cards with the windows "snipping tool": just grab a piece of text or an image or whatever, click onto the supermemo component and control+v.


Supermemo is not pretty, is not user-friendly, and is slower in many ways. I'm a power user and the first two of those problems did not bother me at all. The third problem can be overcome somewhat once you figure out how to use the program efficiently. Fast card creation is also not my primary concern because I'm going to be studying these cards for a long time and then using them for MCAT review. I don't mind spending an extra 5 seconds per card when I'm going to be using them for the next 2+ years (and maybe beyond if I want to go back and review). Same goes for if/when I get to med school and am studying for boards - an extra few seconds spent creating a card isn't a big deal when you're going to be using those same cards for 2 years of studying.

My general impression is that Supermemo is simply a better program... if you're willing to put up with it (which most people aren't when alternatives are so easy to use) and aren't intimidated by it. If the creators would just hire somebody to make them a decent website, overhaul the UI and make a smart phone app, they'd be making millions I bet. (if you look at supermemo.net and supermemo.com, they have sort of done this... But the phone app doesn't really mesh well with the PC version and I haven't been able to figure it out. I just do my studying on a tablet running full version of supermemo and then sync databases between tablet and PC)

Hmmm...when was the last time you used Anki? Because a lot of the features you mention ARE present in its current incarnation. For example, Ctrl+v works fine for pictures (I use the snipping tool for that too), there's a stats window which shows your response time, times (and percent) answered correctly for new, young, and mature cards, you can adjust the Ease and learning intervals (similar to your 'forgetting index?', etc.

I happen to use the 'Fields' system very extensively. I like to spend a while making the perfect template, then just go down the table in my textbook entering it into the fields. After my initial studying (which includes screenshotting certain things), it takes me 10min to create 60-100 cards on, say, "Arm muscles", complete with tagging. These cards are consistent, which is important, because if they differ at ALL, my brain ends up remembering "oh, the one with the comma in the question stem is the xyz", instead of bothering to remember the actual question I'm trying to ask.
For example, to make my Muscle cards, I used my dissection program to take a screenshot of each muscle (the program highlights them for you one by one). I then watched Acland's and screenshot whenever he showed the origin/insertion of the muscles (which he does for almost all). Then I just flipped to that page in the textbook, which shows the OIAI of each muscle, and went down the list. Took me ~30s to make a Note for each muscle, complete with Name, Origin, Insertion, Action, Innervation, Picture, OIpicture. Each note makes 7 cards formatted exactly how I want them. The table in the book separates them into groups which I use for tagging them.

I also use the phone app a TON for on-the-go studying.

Anyway, Supermemo sounds cool on the scheduling front; I did have to go through several iterations with Anki where I was trying out different intervals, Ease, etc. before I found a setup that works for me. And hey, maybe this one won't work longterm. We'll see. Thanks for the info!

 

[knv2u]

Short term memory is about half a minute, so no, anki and other methods are not meant for that or help with it.

You're right, I used the term in artfully. I meant for optimum retention for longer periods of time (which is not the same as saying that it is short term memory - you're absolutely right).

 

[mehc012]

You're right, I used the term in artfully. I meant for optimum retention for longer periods of time (which is not the same as saying that it is short term memory - you're absolutely right).

Spaced repetition is all about the longer retention!
It's been a year since my anatomy class and I remember a shockingly high amount of mind-numbing detail.

 

[Being]

Hmmm...when was the last time you used Anki? Because a lot of the features you mention ARE present in its current incarnation...

Sounds like you are making really good use of Anki.

I guess my main gripe is that while it's a joy to create cards with Anki and the phone app automatically syncing is amazing, I feel that it just doesn't do as good a job when it comes to actually LEARNING the info, which is the whole reason we're using SR in the first place. I don't want to manually fiddle with intervals, and I don't think a system as simple as "it was hard? See again in 2 days. It was easy? See again in 5 days" can be anything close to optimal especially for retention of info over longer periods of time (ie MCAT and USMLE studying). If you're cramming for a test a week from now it probably doesn't make any difference which program you use.

On the other hand, maybe I will appreciate Anki's usability more when I'm in med school making 1000 cards per day... It could also potentially be really beneficial to be able to share cards with classmates. You could theoretically do this pretty easily with Supermemo, but the process is infinitely more streamlined for Anki.

Side note:
I don't really see variation in cards and remembering something based on the way a card looked as a problem. In fact, when I used paper flashcards, I did this on purpose. I used different colored cards and laid them out differently to help distinguish them and make them easier to remember. When I would see the term/concept/whatever in context, I would see the corresponding card in my head. This association ("oh, that's the pink card!") helps me, but everybody is different of course. As long as you can remember the question that goes with the answer, I guess!

 

[mehc012]

Sounds like you are making really good use of Anki.

I guess my main gripe is that while it's a joy to create cards with Anki and the phone app automatically syncing is amazing, I feel that it just doesn't do as good a job when it comes to actually LEARNING the info, which is the whole reason we're using SR in the first place. I don't want to manually fiddle with intervals, and I don't think a system as simple as "it was hard? See again in 2 days. It was easy? See again in 5 days" can be anything close to optimal especially for retention of info over longer periods of time (ie MCAT and USMLE studying). If you're cramming for a test a week from now it probably doesn't make any difference which program you use.

On the other hand it works fo, maybe I will appreciate Anki's usability more when I'm in med school making 1000 cards per day... It could also potentially be really beneficial to be able to share cards with classmates. You could theoretically do this pretty easily with Supermemo, but the process is infinitely more streamlined for Anki.

Side note:
I don't really see variation in cards and remembering something based on the way a card looked as a problem. In fact, when I used paper flashcards, I did this on purpose. I used different colored cards and laid them out differently to help distinguish them and make them easier to remember. When I would see the term/concept/whatever in context, I would see the corresponding card in my head. This association ("oh, that's the pink card!") helps me, but everybody is different of course. As long as you can remember the question that goes with the answer, I guess!

Yeah, I found Anki's default intervals really annoying. I like the program a lot more now that I've put in the time to adjust the intervals to suit me. I suppose that's the advantage of Supermemo.
I actually don't use it for cramming...my 'cramming' is making the cards in the first place. I use it solely for long-term retention, and right now I'm sitting at 87% for learning cards (again, my real learning comes from the making of the things), 97% for young cards (less than 1mo interval, I have 800 of these) and 99% for my mature ones (I have 1200 of these). Of course, these numbers will drop eventually, as all of my 'mature' cards are actually pretty young. I recently reset all 4000 of my cards and am learning again from scratch (and adding new from my current classes) because the intervals were screwed up after trying 3 different setups (Decks, deck options, and learning intervals) and taking a 3mo break from Anki, so this is a 'young' version. Prior to the restart I was sitting more around 90% correct answers for mature cards.


Sidenote: My brain is just freakishly good at remembering those irrelevant triggers. I always figure that if I train myself to get from 'pink' to the answer, I'm not training myself to get from the question to the answer, which is really the whole point. Once I see the trigger, I don't even bother reading the question.

 

[orangeman25]

Look into spaced repetition programs like Supermemo and Anki. Biggest improvement to my learning process I've ever made. IMO Supermemo is much better than Anki, but it has a somewhat steep learning curve. Supermemo also costs $60 whereas Anki is free, but that's a small price to pay for how useful it is, especially if you use it for all of your classes and into med school.

Check out this video for an example of how powerful Anki is:

Go download Anki for free and play around with it to see if you think this is something that would be beneficial for you.

Great video!

 

[mehc012]

Great video!

I am a terrible SDNer...I rarely, if ever, watch embedded videos. I don't like watching videos if other people are in the room (which they always are), and I'm too lazy to get my headphones (and would feel too antisocial wearing them.) Maybe I should give it a shot, though...

 

[orangeman25]

Srsly?

Yeah I definitely posted without reading your earlier post. Then caught it.

 

[Dr.Forssmann]

2 words = memory palace. Google it.

 

[CollegeGirl94]

I might just be weird, but I use associations to memorize and eventually with some repetition, I never forget it and no longer need to use the association. It got me through memorization-based classes like Psychology which I felt like was all terms.
So, for example, you need to memorize that Canberra is the capital of Australia. I would memorize by "Koala bear in a can". So weird, but it works for me lol.

 

[Mr Roboto]

Almost everyone memorizes vast amounts of data, the difference is in the types of data they're memorizing.

Lyrics to "Timber" ? Memorized after hearing the song twice.
Order in which ossification centers calcify? .... yeah that took a bit longer for me to get down.

Unless you truly don't have a good memory, regularly forget friends' names, can't figure out where you're driving to, and don't know your own telephone number. Then you're screwed.

 

[snemo]

Hopefully this may still interest folks. I got into memory palaces initially via competitions (I've won the last two World Memory Championships). A little shameless self-promotion here: I run a site (MullenMemory.com) along with my wife, Cathy, where we explore memory palaces as learning tools, predominantly for use in medical school. We're both currently M3s. There are plenty of tutorials out there that will tell you what a memory palace is, but we look at how to actually implement them for medical school. It took some experimenting, but we've found the techniques to work exceptionally well for medical school when used properly (here are a few of our primary tips for those already familiar with memory palaces). We've got content about pharmacology, anatomy, and pathology, as well as lots of general tips for using memory palaces for heavy subjects like medicine. Best of luck!