🧠 The collab between your real and your digital brain
Learn how to harness AI and psychology for turbocharged memory retention
Today, in 4 minutes or less, you will learn:
About the generation effect in learning;
Which method works best for enhancing memory retention;
Tools for AI-powered learning assistance.
With the summer ending, I switched out my early morning motorcycle rides to the office to warm and autumn-friendly car rides. Usually I like to blast some music in my car, but one random, in no way more special, morning I opted for a podcast. And here’s what I listened to:
Why am I telling you this?
Because David here said something that made my 🧠 gears turn.
Among many other insightful and great pieces of information, he said that quizzing yourself is one of the best ways to learn because it engages what's called the generation effect. It means that when you're forced to come up with an answer (even if it's wrong), it primes your brain to retain the correct answer once you learn it.
In fact, the more wrong you are, the more likely you are to remember the right answer later, thanks to something called the hypercorrection effect.
And then I thought, waiiit… 😏
This podcast has a lot of good stuff I want to remember. Usually, I just add these things to my Second Brain, but what if I took David’s advice and leveled it up a notch?
So I turned to our very well known friend - ChatGPT.
I gave it the transcript of the episode and wrote a super simple prompt:
Please quiz me on the following podcast transcript by asking one question at a time. Ask about key points, details, and important themes. After I answer each question, provide feedback or clarification if needed before moving on to the next question.
Obviously, since I’m loyal to Notion, after playing around with ChatGPT, I tried to have this conversation straight into my Second Brain using Notion AI, and I liked the flow of it better. The cool thing about Notion AI is that unless you Accept or Insert below the answer, it doesn’t save the conversation, so you’re not creating digital waste. And this way, if I decide to revisit this topic, I don’t have to switch between tools.
To upload a file to ChatGPT you need a subscription and, equally, Notion AI is subscription based, but you can do this with a third option for free. I recently discovered Google’s Notebook LM, which is an AI-powered research assistant. You can upload resources, like text documents, audio files, links to websites and videos, you can link to Google Drive and Slides and create a topic specific notebooks that you can, essentially, chat with. Cool stuff.
I don’t know how much time I spent on this, because (call me nerdy, I don’t care) this was really fun 👏
If you listen to a podcast together with someone, you can make a game out of this, quiz yourselves, keep a score and award yourselves with something of your liking.
Additionally, David emphasized that spaced repetition (reviewing the material at intervals) is a powerful way to reinforce learning over time.
This is useful to know if a certain topic is important to you or if you’re studying for a test/exam. You can automate this process and create a sophisticated learning system for yourself.
Quote of the week:
“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory. You have to go try something, see how it went, what was unexpected, and then learn from it.”
- David Epstein, author of the “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”