Spaced repetition
Med student + developer here. As one that has to memorize insane quantities of information in a limited amount of time, I&#x27;ll offer some thoughts on my experiences with various memorization strategies mentioned (or not mentioned) in the article.<p>1. Understanding the &quot;big picture.&quot; The idea is, if you understand the mechanism underlying X, you can reason out Y. This works great for physiology-type where things work in predictable ways. Do I need to memorize pulmonary function test results? No. Because I can reason my way through the consequences of different pulmonary diseases. However, this simply does not work for things like anatomy or pharmacology where there are thousands of names of things to memorize (many of which don&#x27;t provide any clue in the name itself). Yesterday I heard from a friend that worked in a related industry that pharm companies typically pick from a list of randomly generated syllables to choose a name for the generic of their drug. There is incentive to pick an unsavory, unmemorable amalgam of syllables to discourage people from buying the name brand once their patent runs out.<p>2. Acronyms are sometimes helpful but mostly overused. There are acronyms for literally everything in medicine, to the point where each new acronym runs the risk of being noise. The most helpful ones usually have to do with ascribing the order to things. &quot;Some lovers try positions that they can&#x27;t handle&quot; for wrist bones or &quot;Oh, Oh, Oh, to, touch and feel very good velvet AH&quot; for the order of cranial nerves. A great example of a worthless acronym is the TORCH infections, which stands for &quot;Toxoplasmosis, Other, Rubella, CMV, and HSV.&quot;  That &quot;Other&quot; stands for the following: Coxsackievirus, VSV, Chlamydia, HIV, HTLV, Syphilis, Zika. Super helpful... :P<p>3. Method of loci. My first block of medical school, some two weeks before exams, I bought that oft-touted &quot;Moonwalking with Einstein&quot; book. It was a bit of an act of desperation. I had previously heard the author speak at Railsconf and figured I&#x27;d give the whole memory palace a try. I read the book (well, the pertinent parts) and spent a couple days figuring out how to encode chemical names into a person-action-object system. Then I translated the steps of carbohydrate metabolism into a walk around my college campus. Results? It worked! However, it took WAY too long. I could&#x27;ve done the same thing in less time by simply drawing the steps out on a sheet of paper over and over again.<p>4. The testing effect. Way back in high school, my AP psychology professor gave us reading quizzes before every class based on the studies that showed testing improved recall more than homework assignments. To this day, I remember more from that class than any other class I&#x27;ve taken, even those in college. I wish more professors used this strategy, but it takes more time and prep on their end. My particular medical program only tests at the end of each block in the form giant (8-hour) cumulative exams. On one hand, it&#x27;s nice to not have to worry about balancing midterms or tests from multiple classes the middle of our eight week blocks. On the other hand, there is no way to benefit from the testing effect.<p>5. Spaced repetition. I agree with much of what the author has to say about spaced repetition. Yes, it works. But there are two large issues with it. The first one is having the discipline to regularly rehearse the information. Pounding flashcards everyday gets monotonous (and sometimes discouraging). The author argues that spaced repetition prevents you from having to review too much at a time. But that depends on you keeping a pretty strict schedule. Miss a day, and you have double the cards to look at. Miss a couple of days and the amount of cards you have to drill to catch up becomes psychologically prohibitive.<p>The second issue is that flash card creation is the absolute rate limiting step. Every flash card program that I&#x27;ve looked into (Anki, Quizlet, among others) has a terrible UI. Frustrated by this, I actually spent ~100 or so hours of my first med school block developing my own SRS program. Even with some improvements made to the interface, flash card entry was still too slow, to the point that I stopped using after that first block. A year later, I dusted off my program and I added a feature that allows me to import questions from Workflowy notes taken during lectures. This proved invaluable in studying for my most recent exams (currently using it now). I can keep question-like notes in a readable format on Workflowy, then do a massive import to build my cards.<p>Another minor issue is that there is no way to value one fact over another. There should be a way to mark something as high-yield so that it appears more often. Sometimes I am faced with a decision of, &quot;Well, I am running out of time... I can drill these cards, or I can open my notes and try to pick out the highest yeild information.&quot;<p>I have a lot of thoughts about improving upon these prohibitive issues with SRS. I&#x27;m hoping to roll out a more comprehensive solution next year when I have more time to code.<p>FWIW here&#x27;s a screenshot of my current software: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;sVTlMvP.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;sVTlMvP.png</a>