LEARN Logs

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork's term for a study condition that feels slower and harder in the moment but IMPROVES long-term retention and transfer. The Bjorks, memory researchers at UCLA, noticed a recurring paradox: the practice conditions that make you feel most fluent and confid...

Quiz: LEARN / Desirable Difficulties | updated: Jul 30, 2026

It helps for RELATED, confusable material — mixing totally unrelated subjects is just distracting context-switching. And build basic competence in a skill first, THEN interleave. Interleaving works by training discrimination between things that could be mistaken for one another....

Quiz: LEARN / Desirable Difficulties | updated: Jul 30, 2026

It operationalises self-explanation + retrieval practice + learning-by-teaching in one routine. The Feynman technique is best understood as a branded package of ingredients that are each independently supported. Explaining in your own words is self-explanation. Doing it from memo...

Quiz: LEARN / Desirable Difficulties | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Because scrolling social media is task-switching, not recovery — it keeps your attention loaded instead of releasing it. The point of a break is to let sustained attention recover. A break spent rapidly switching between posts, messages, and videos keeps the attentional system bu...

Quiz: LEARN / Focus, Sleep & Systems | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Split the page into a narrow left "cue" column, a wide right "notes" column, and a bottom "summary" — it works because it bakes in retrieval and summarisation. In class, notes go in the wide right column. Afterward, you write questions and keywords in the narrow left cue column a...

Quiz: LEARN / Focus, Sleep & Systems | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Decay (traces fade with time) and interference (competing memories crowd each other out) — and sometimes the memory is still there but unreachable. Forgetting isn't a single process: Decay — a memory trace weakens simply as time passes without use. Interference — other, similar...

Quiz: LEARN / How Memory Works | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Not necessarily — forgetting is frequently retrieval failure, where the trace persists but is momentarily inaccessible. The everyday experience of a name on the "tip of your tongue," or of instantly relearning something you thought you'd lost, shows that "forgotten" and "erased"...

Quiz: LEARN / How Memory Works | updated: Jul 30, 2026

The mistake of treating ease of processing as evidence of knowing — smooth, familiar-feeling material feels learned even when it isn't. When text reads easily and the words feel familiar, your brain registers that fluency and quietly converts it into confidence. But familiarity i...

Quiz: LEARN / Metacognition & Myths | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Retention roughly DOUBLED when learners processed both words and imagery — for ALL participants, regardless of whether they called themselves "visual" or "auditory" learners. Cuevas & Dawson (2018) compared learning with a single mode against learning that combined verbal and vis...

Quiz: LEARN / Metacognition & Myths | updated: Jul 30, 2026

DEBUNKED — and it's exactly backwards for the best techniques. Interleaving and testing FEEL harder and get judged worse, yet objectively win. Effective techniques often introduce desirable difficulties: retrieval, spacing, and interleaving all feel effortful and slow, and learne...

Quiz: LEARN / Metacognition & Myths | updated: Jul 30, 2026