Learning

Remembering What you Read

https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/remembering-what-you-read-zettelkasten-vs-para/

With progressive summarization you don’t bother summarizing what you’re learning, at least not at first. Instead you take the passages you found most interesting and copy them into your notes. If you ever reread those notes in the future then you can start highlighting the phrases that really spoke to you and if you reread them again, only then will you do the work to summarize the ideas in your own words.

  • It’s not that summarizing your notes from the beginning is bad, but if you procrastinate on it while still expecting yourself to do it then you’re setting yourself up for failure. Progressive summarization offers you a way to delay summarization while still retaining value.

  • This method provides a low entry barrier to writing notes — just copy and paste

  • Plus, summarizing later when you reference it means

    • You’ll be more excited about it

    • The noise you no longer care about can be trashed

With P.A.R.A. you organize all your notes by purpose, not by category. Let’s say you’re trying to build an app. You’ll have a folder called ‘app’ for all notes about it. Now if you study databases in order to build it, you’ll file any notes you take inside the ‘app’ folder, not in a separate ‘databases’ folder.

Notes

  • Neuroplasticity: the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization

  • To increase neuroplasticity:

    • Sleep

    • Non-Sleep Deep Rest (meditation, yoga, yoga nidra, hypnosis)

  • Ultradian, 90min cycles optimized for learning

    • Transition into focus mode early in the cycle when it's hard to focus (optimizes learning)

    • Very hard to focus at the end of the 90min

  • Study showed that Non-Sleep Deep Rest immediately after a learning bout accelerated learning

    • Both amount of info learned, and retention of it

  • Failure is good for learning -- it heightens alertness, and therefore increases the chance that you will learn it when you hear the correct answer (source: Huberman goals podcast)

    • Study found that the ideal success rate when learning is 85% (fail rate of 15%) (source: Huberman goals podcast)

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