Detailed slide-by-slide text content extracted from this presentation.
Slide 01
Learning & Memory.
- Vol. XII · Deck 08 · The Deck Catalog
- How human brains acquire information and retain it. Ebbinghaus to Anki; H.M. to the testing effect; consolidation to reconsolidation.
- FounderEbbinghaus 1885
- StoresSensory · STM · LTM
- Pages26
Slide 02
OpeningWhat memory is.
- LedeII
- A distinctionLearning: acquiring new information or skills. Memory: retaining and retrieving them. The two are the same machinery viewed at different time-scales.
- Memory is not a video recording. It is a reconstructive process that uses partial cues to assemble something that feels like a recording.
- The 20th century overturned the common-sense view of memory as a storage device. The contemporary view, supported by a hundred and forty years of research from Ebbinghaus through Bartlett through Loftus through Schacter, is that memory is reconstructive, fallible, and continuously edited by retrieval.
- This deck covers the history (Ebbinghaus to the multi-store model), the case studies that revealed memory's structure (H.M., K.C., the case of the missing forms), the major findings (forgetting curves, the testing effect, sleep consolidation), the seven sins (Schacter), and the contemporary picture.
- The Deck Catalog · Vol. XII— ii —
Slide 03
Chapter IThe forgetting curve.
- EbbinghausIII
- Hermann Ebbinghaus1850–1909. German. Über das Gedächtnis (1885) is the founding empirical study of human memory. Used himself as the only subject; memorised thousands of nonsense syllables; tested himself across delays.curve: R = e^(−t/S)
- Hermann Ebbinghaus's 1885 monograph established that memory could be studied scientifically. He designed nonsense syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams without prior associations: ZUF, BAK, NIM) to control for prior learning, memorised lists, and tested himself at intervals.
- The result: memory decay follows a predictable curve. Most forgetting happens in the first hour after learning; the rate of forgetting then slows. The curve is approximately exponential. After 24 hours, about 70% of newly learned material is gone if not rehearsed; after a week, around 80%. The retention curve flattens substantially after that — what remains tends to remain.
- Ebbinghaus also discovered the spacing effect: distributed practice (study sessions spread out) produces better long-term retention than massed practice (cramming). This is the empirical foundation of all subsequent spaced-repetition systems.
- Learning & Memory · Ebbinghaus— iii —
Slide 04
Chapter IISensory, short-term, long-term.
- Multi-store modelIV
- Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968Proposed three memory stores arranged serially: sensory → short-term → long-term. The framework dominated the 1970s; later research showed it was too neat.
- Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin's multi-store model proposed three memory stores:
- Sensory memory. Very brief (about 250 ms for visual; up to 4 seconds for auditory). Holds a high-fidelity, modality-specific record of incoming perception. George Sperling's 1960 partial-report experiments demonstrated iconic (visual) memory; subsequent work demonstrated echoic (auditory) memory.
- Short-term memory. Lasts ~15–30 seconds without rehearsal. Capacity famously limited — George Miller's 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" set the canonical figure, though later work suggests a smaller working capacity (3–4 items, in Cowan's revised estimate) when rehearsal is prevented. Chunking increases functional capacity: a chess master can remember a meaningful 25-piece board position because the pieces form a few high-level chunks rather than 25 individual items.
- Long-term memory. Lasts indefinitely. No known capacity limit. Subdivides into multiple systems (next page).
- Learning & Memory · Multi-store— iv —
Slide 05
Chapter IIIWorking memory.
- Working memoryV
- Baddeley & Hitch, 1974Replaced "short-term memory" with a multi-component working memory model: phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive (and later, the episodic buffer, added 2000).
- Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch (1974) argued that "short-term memory" was not a passive store but an active workspace with multiple specialised components. Their model:
- Phonological loop. Holds verbal and acoustic information through subvocal rehearsal (the inner voice repeating a phone number). Capacity bounded by how much can be rehearsed in about 2 seconds. Hence longer words are harder to remember (the word-length effect), and similar-sounding words interfere with each other (the phonological-similarity effect).
- Visuospatial sketchpad. Holds visual and spatial information. Independent of the phonological loop — you can do a verbal task and a spatial task simultaneously without much interference.
- Central executive. Allocates attention; coordinates the slave systems; switches between tasks. Heavily implicated in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
- Episodic buffer (added in 2000). Integrates information from the slave systems and from long-term memory into multimodal episodes.
- Learning & Memory · Working Memory— v —
Slide 06
Chapter IVH.M.
- The case of H.M.VI
- Henry Molaison1926–2008. The most-studied patient in the history of memory research. Brain donated to The Brain Observatory; 2,401 anatomical slices; 3D reconstruction completed 2014.
- In 1953, surgeon William Beecher Scoville performed a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy on a 27-year-old man with intractable epilepsy. The seizures improved. Henry Molaison was also left with profound anterograde amnesia — he could not form new long-term explicit memories. His IQ remained normal. His personality was preserved. He could carry on a conversation but would not remember it minutes later.
- Brenda Milner and Suzanne Corkin studied H.M. for 55 years (Milner from 1955; Corkin from 1962). The findings reorganised the field.
- What H.M. revealed
- 1. Memory is dissociable from intelligence and personality. A person with amnesia is not generally impaired.
- 2. The medial temporal lobes are necessary for new explicit memory. H.M.'s remaining short-term memory and long-term memories from before surgery were intact; only new long-term explicit memory formation was impaired.
- 3. Procedural memory is dissociable from declarative memory. H.M. could learn new motor skills (mirror tracing) without remembering having practised them. The dissociation revealed multiple memory systems.
- Learning & Memory · H.M.— vi —
Slide 07
Chapter VMultiple memory systems.
- Memory systemsVII
- Tulving, 1972Endel Tulving's distinction: episodic memory (memory for specific events with time-and-place context) vs semantic memory (general world knowledge). Both are declarative (explicit) memory.
- The contemporary taxonomy of long-term memory:
- Declarative (explicit) memory — consciously accessible:
- Episodic: specific events. "Where I was when I heard about the news on Tuesday."
- Semantic: general world knowledge. "Paris is the capital of France."
- Non-declarative (implicit) memory — not consciously accessible but expressed in performance:
- Procedural: motor and cognitive skills. Riding a bicycle.
- Priming: prior exposure facilitates later processing of related stimuli.
- Classical conditioning: learned associations.
- Habituation and sensitization: simple non-associative learning.
- The case of K.C. (Kent Cochrane), studied by Tulving, demonstrated the dissociability of episodic and semantic memory: K.C. retained semantic knowledge after a motorcycle accident but lost the ability to recall any specific personal events from his life. Other patients show the reverse dissociation (loss of semantic memory with preserved episodic).
- Learning & Memory · Systems— vii —
Slide 08
Chapter VIEncoding depth.
- Levels of processingVIII
- Craik & Lockhart 1972Proposed an alternative to the multi-store model. What matters for retention is not which "store" the information is in, but how deeply it was processed.
- Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart (1972) argued the multi-store model had the wrong primary variable. What predicts long-term retention is not how long material spent in short-term memory but how deeply it was processed.
- Shallow processing: focus on perceptual features (Is the word in capital letters?). Phonemic processing: focus on sound (Does the word rhyme with cat?). Semantic processing: focus on meaning (Is this word a type of animal? Could it apply to me?).
- The classic Craik & Tulving (1975) finding: words processed semantically are remembered far better than words processed phonemically, which are remembered better than words processed perceptually — even when processing time is held constant.
- The self-reference effect
- Even deeper than semantic: information processed in relation to oneself ("Does this adjective describe me?") shows the strongest retention of any encoding strategy. Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker (1977). The effect is a useful study tip: ask how new material relates to your own experience.
- Learning & Memory · Levels— viii —
Slide 09
Chapter VIIContext matters.
- Encoding specificityIX
- Tulving & Thomson 1973Memory retrieval depends on the match between encoding context and retrieval context. The cues present at encoding are the cues that work at retrieval.
- The encoding specificity principle: what is retrieved depends on what was encoded, including the context. The most famous demonstration is Godden & Baddeley's 1975 scuba-divers study. Divers learned word lists either underwater or on a beach; later they were tested either underwater or on a beach. Recall was best when the encoding and retrieval contexts matched. Words learned underwater were recalled better underwater.
- State-dependent learning
- The same effect for internal states. Material learned while moderately intoxicated is better recalled while moderately intoxicated than while sober (the opposite is also true; the literature is robust). Mood-congruent recall: depressed individuals recall more depressing memories than positive ones; the bias compounds the disorder.
- Practical use
- Studying in conditions similar to those of the eventual test improves performance. The original experiments are decades-old; the principle has been replicated repeatedly.
- Learning & Memory · Encoding— ix —
Slide 10
Chapter VIIIMemory is reconstructive.
- ReconstructionX
- Bartlett 1932Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Sir Frederic Bartlett showed that participants asked to recall the Native American folk tale "The War of the Ghosts" reshaped it in culturally familiar ways across successive retellings.
- Frederic Bartlett's 1932 work demonstrated that memory is not a high-fidelity recording. Participants asked to retell a Native American folk tale (The War of the Ghosts) systematically distorted the story across successive retellings — adding rationalising detail, removing supernatural elements, smoothing the unfamiliar to fit Western narrative conventions. Bartlett called the underlying mental templates schemas.
- The reconstructive view has been extensively confirmed. Memory uses general schemas (what restaurants are like, how arguments unfold, how meetings are structured) to fill in details that were never specifically encoded. This is highly efficient and often correct, but it produces predictable errors.
- The misinformation effect
- Elizabeth Loftus's (1974) classic demonstration: showing participants a video of a car accident, then asking different questions about it. Asked "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" they reported higher speeds than asked the same question with hit; a week later they reported seeing broken glass that wasn't in the video. Memory had been edited by the questioning.
- Learning & Memory · Reconstruction— x —
Slide 11
Chapter IXLoftus.
- Loftus & false memoryXI
- Lost in the mallLoftus & Pickrell 1995. Convinced about 25% of subjects, through suggestion and confederate corroboration, that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child. The technique implants whole false memories.
- Elizabeth Loftus is the central figure in the contemporary scientific understanding of false memory. Her programme of research demonstrated that memories can be:
- 1. Distorted by post-event information (the misinformation effect).
- 2. Implanted wholesale through suggestion ("Lost in the Mall," 1995). Subsequent variations have implanted memories of meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (impossible — Bugs is Warner Bros.), of being attacked by an animal, of nearly drowning.
- 3. Held with high confidence even when objectively false. Confidence is not a reliable marker of accuracy.
- Implications
- The legal-system implication is enormous. Eyewitness testimony — long considered the most reliable form of evidence — is in fact one of the least reliable. The Innocence Project's exoneration database (DNA evidence overturning convictions) shows that 70% of overturned cases involved mistaken eyewitness identification.
- Loftus's role in the 1990s "memory wars" — particularly her testimony against the recovered-memory movement around alleged childhood sexual abuse — was scientifically vindicated and personally costly.
- Learning & Memory · Loftus— xi —
Slide 12
Chapter XThe seven sins.
- Schacter's seven sinsXII
- Daniel Schacter, 2001The Seven Sins of Memory. Categorised the predictable failures of memory into a useful taxonomy. Updated 2021 with implications for the digital age.
- Daniel Schacter's taxonomy of memory's predictable failures. Schacter's argument is that the failures are not bugs but features — side effects of an otherwise efficient adaptive system.
- 1. Transience. Memory fades over time. (Ebbinghaus's curve.)
- 2. Absent-mindedness. Failures of attention. The keys are forgotten because attention was elsewhere when they were put down.
- 3. Blocking. Tip-of-the-tongue states; temporary inability to retrieve a known fact.
- 4. Misattribution. Recalling a fact correctly but misattributing its source. (Source-monitoring failures.)
- 5. Suggestibility. Vulnerability to misleading post-event information. (Loftus.)
- 6. Bias. Current beliefs and feelings reshape memory of past events. People remember opinions they held in the past as more similar to their current ones than they actually were.
- 7. Persistence. Unwanted memories that won't go away. The traumatic flashback; the embarrassing intrusive memory.
- Learning & Memory · Seven Sins— xii —
Slide 13
Chapter XIRetrieval practice.
- Testing effectXIII
- Roediger & Karpicke 2006"Test-Enhanced Learning". Showed that retrieval practice produces dramatically better long-term retention than re-reading, even when the re-reading group felt they had learned more.
- The most important applied finding in memory research. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke's 2006 paper compared three study conditions for college students reading prose passages:
- (a) Read the passage four times.
- (b) Read the passage three times, then write down everything they could recall.
- (c) Read the passage once, then write down everything they could recall, three times.
- On a test five minutes later, condition (a) performed best. The students preferred condition (a). On a test one week later, condition (c) performed best by a substantial margin. The students who had spent the least time studying and the most time testing themselves remembered the most.
- The effect is robust, large, and counterintuitive. Active retrieval — even from a source you have not yet "fully learned" — strengthens memory more than additional encoding. The implication for studying: stop re-reading; start testing yourself.
- Why students don't do this
- Re-reading feels productive (the material gets easier). Self-testing feels unproductive (it surfaces what you don't know). The metacognitive judgment is wrong; the actual learning gain is in the discomfort.
- Learning & Memory · Testing Effect— xiii —
Slide 14
Chapter XIISpacing.
- Spaced repetitionXIV
- From Ebbinghaus to AnkiThe spacing effect was discovered in 1885. The first practical spaced-repetition algorithm was Sebastian Leitner's 1972 box system. Piotr Wozniak's SuperMemo (1985) was the first software implementation. Anki (2007) and Quizlet (2005) brought it to mass use.
- The spacing effect: distributed practice produces more durable learning than massed practice. The effect is one of the most robust and replicated findings in memory research; it has been shown across age groups, content domains, and time-scales from minutes to years.
- Optimal spacing
- Cepeda et al. (2008) — the meta-analysis. The optimal gap between practice sessions depends on the desired retention interval. As a rough rule: the optimal gap is about 10–20% of the retention interval. To remember something for a year, study it again about every 30–60 days.
- Implementation: spaced-repetition systems
- Software like Anki and SuperMemo automate the scheduling. The user creates flashcards; the algorithm schedules each card for review at increasing intervals based on past success. Successful retrievals push the next review further out; failures bring it closer. The algorithms (SM-2 in Anki, more sophisticated FSRS variants now) approximate optimal spacing for each individual card.
- Medical students, language learners, and Wikipedia editors have made Anki near-standard. The empirical case for spaced retrieval as a study tool is essentially settled.
- Learning & Memory · Spacing— xiv —
Slide 15
Chapter XIIIInterleaved practice.
- InterleavingXV
- Bjork's "desirable difficulties"Robert Bjork's framework: study techniques that make learning feel harder in the short term often produce better long-term retention. Spacing, testing, and interleaving are the key examples.
- When practising multiple types of problem (e.g., volume calculations for cylinders, cones, spheres), interleaved practice — mixing the types within each session — produces better retention than blocked practice — doing all the cylinders, then all the cones.
- Rohrer & Taylor (2007); Kornell & Bjork (2008) provide the empirical foundation. The effect transfers across many domains: math, motor skills, art-style identification.
- Why it works: interleaving forces the learner to retrieve and select the appropriate procedure for each problem, which improves discrimination between procedures. Blocked practice lets the learner apply the same procedure repeatedly, which feels efficient but produces shallower learning.
- The metacognitive trap
- Like the testing effect, interleaving feels worse during practice (fewer correct answers, more confusion) and produces better outcomes. Students reliably prefer blocked practice and judge themselves as having learned more from it. They are wrong, by the test that matters.
- Learning & Memory · Interleaving— xv —
Slide 16
Chapter XIVSleep consolidates memory.
- Sleep & consolidationXVI
- Two systemsSlow-wave sleep (SWS, mostly first half of night) seems most important for declarative memory consolidation. REM sleep (mostly second half) more important for procedural and emotional memory.
- Memory consolidation — the process by which new memories are stabilised and integrated with existing knowledge — depends substantially on sleep. The mechanism is now relatively well-understood at the level of neurophysiology.
- During slow-wave sleep, hippocampal neuron firing patterns from waking hours are replayed at faster speed, in a coordinated dialogue with the neocortex. Bruce McNaughton, Matt Wilson, and others demonstrated this in rats in the 1990s; the technique has been extended to humans.
- Behaviourally: Robert Stickgold and Matthew Walker's programmes have repeatedly shown that sleep after learning improves retention more than equivalent waking periods. A nap can produce the consolidation benefit. Sleep deprivation impairs both the encoding of new memories the next day and the consolidation of memories formed before the sleep loss.
- Targeted memory reactivation
- An emerging technique: presenting a sound or smell during learning, then re-presenting it during slow-wave sleep, selectively strengthens the associated memories. The effect is small but real and has been replicated across multiple labs.
- Learning & Memory · Sleep— xvi —
Slide 17
Chapter XVReconsolidation.
- ReconsolidationXVII
- Karim Nader, 2000Showed in rats that retrieving a previously consolidated memory makes it temporarily labile and requires re-consolidation. Memories are not permanent recordings; they are re-written each retrieval.
- The traditional view: a memory, once consolidated, is stable. Karim Nader and colleagues' 2000 paper in Nature overturned this. They showed that retrieving a fear memory in rats made it temporarily susceptible to disruption — protein-synthesis inhibitors administered immediately after retrieval prevented the memory from being re-stored.
- Each retrieval of a memory, in the contemporary view, opens a window during which the memory can be modified, weakened, or strengthened. The process is called reconsolidation. It explains how memory can be reconstructive (each retrieval slightly changes the memory) and provides a possible therapeutic target.
- Therapeutic implications
- If retrieval makes a fear memory temporarily labile, then administering a treatment during the reconsolidation window (within roughly 6 hours) could weaken the memory. Two clinical applications have been investigated: propranolol (beta-blocker) administered after PTSD memory retrieval; extinction learning during the reconsolidation window. Results are mixed; the basic phenomenon is robust, the clinical translation has been harder than initially hoped.
- Learning & Memory · Reconsolidation— xvii —
Slide 18
Chapter XVIThe repressed-memory controversy.
- The repressed-memory warsXVIII
- A 1990s episodeThe clinical "recovered-memory" movement (some Freudian-influenced therapists "recovering" alleged repressed childhood abuse memories) collided with experimental memory research. Many lawsuits, much harm. Loftus's experimental work was central in showing that the techniques used could create false memories.
- In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of adults, mostly women in therapy, came to believe they had been sexually abused as children — memories that had supposedly been repressed for decades and "recovered" through hypnosis, guided imagery, and suggestive questioning. Many entered lawsuits and criminal accusations against family members.
- Experimental memory research — Loftus's work, Ofshe and Watters's Making Monsters (1994), Pendergrast's Victims of Memory — established that the therapeutic techniques used could induce false memories indistinguishable from real ones. The American Psychological Association's working group (1996) acknowledged that recovered memories could not be reliably distinguished from confabulation without external corroboration.
- The episode left lasting damage to families and clinical practice. The current consensus: real childhood trauma is rarely fully forgotten and later "recovered" — the clinical pattern is usually one of partial memory of well-remembered abuse. The strong-form repressed-memory model is not supported.
- Trauma can certainly affect memory in many ways (van der Kolk's work, the Clinical deck). But the specific 1990s recovered-memory framework, as practised, has not held up.
- Learning & Memory · Memory Wars— xviii —
Slide 19
Chapter XVIIMemory techniques.
- Mnemonic devicesXIX
- Method of LociUsed by ancient Greek and Roman orators (Cicero, Quintilian); revived in the Renaissance by Giordano Bruno; the basis of modern memory-championship technique.
- Methods that exploit the brain's stronger memory for spatial and visual material:
- Method of Loci (Memory Palace). Imagine a familiar location (your childhood home, a route through your city). Mentally place the items you want to remember at specific locations. To recall, mentally walk the route. Used by Roman orators to memorise speeches; used by every modern memory champion.
- Major System / Phonetic Number System. Convert digits into consonants by a fixed mapping; add vowels to make memorable words. Used to memorise long numbers (digits of pi, phone numbers).
- Peg System. Pre-memorise a list of pegs (one-bun, two-shoe, ...) then attach new items to the pegs through vivid imagery.
- Chunking. Group disconnected items into meaningful units. A phone number is easier as 555-867-5309 than as 5558675309.
- Joshua Foer
- Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) is the readable trade book on memory-championship technique. Foer trained for one year and won the 2006 USA Memory Championship. The techniques work; they require sustained practice; they do not generalise to other types of memory.
- Learning & Memory · Mnemonics— xix —
Slide 20
Chapter XVIIILearning styles do not work.
- The learning-styles mythXX
- Pashler et al., 2008"Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence." A comprehensive review concluding that, despite widespread belief and policy adoption, there is no empirical evidence that matching teaching style to "learner style" improves outcomes.
- The widespread educational belief that students have characteristic "learning styles" (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) and that teaching matched to those styles improves learning is not supported by evidence.
- Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork's 2008 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest examined the empirical literature and concluded: there is no rigorous evidence that the learning-styles approach improves learning outcomes; the studies that purport to show it use weak designs; and the educational resources spent on learning-styles-based curriculum redesign are likely wasted.
- What does work: matching teaching to content rather than to learner. Visual material is best taught visually; verbal material is best taught verbally. The optimal modality is content-driven, not student-driven. Most learners benefit from multimodal presentation, not single-modality matched to a self-reported preference.
- The myth persists. About 90% of teachers across multiple international surveys still report believing in learning styles. The gap between research and practice in this domain is one of the largest in education.
- Learning & Memory · Styles Myth— xx —
Slide 21
Chapter XIXWhat changes, what doesn't.
- Aging and memoryXXI
- A patternEpisodic memory and processing speed decline with age. Semantic memory, vocabulary, and procedural memory remain stable or improve.
- Age-related memory change is selective rather than uniform. Episodic memory (specific events) shows the steepest decline starting in the 60s; working memory and processing speed decline gradually from the 30s onward. Source memory (where you learned something) declines faster than item memory (the fact itself).
- What stays robust: semantic memory, vocabulary, procedural memory, autobiographical memories from early adulthood (the "reminiscence bump" — disproportionate vivid memory for events from age 10–30, robust across cultures).
- Mild cognitive impairment vs dementia
- About 15–20% of adults over 65 meet criteria for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) — measurable cognitive decline that does not yet significantly impair daily functioning. About 10% of MCI cases progress to dementia per year, though many remain stable or revert.
- Alzheimer's disease — the most common dementia — typically presents first with progressive episodic-memory loss, eventually progressing to global cognitive decline. The 2023–24 disease-modifying drugs (lecanemab, donanemab) are the first treatments to slow progression, though modestly.
- Learning & Memory · Aging— xxi —
Slide 22
Chapter XXTwenty-five works.
- Reading ListXXII
- 1885Über das GedächtnisEbbinghaus
- 1932RememberingBartlett
- 1956"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"Miller
- 1957"Loss of Recent Memory After Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions"Scoville & Milner
- 1968"Human Memory: A Proposed System"Atkinson & Shiffrin
- 1972"Levels of Processing"Craik & Lockhart
- 1972"Episodic and Semantic Memory"Tulving
- 1974"Working Memory"Baddeley & Hitch
- 1974"Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction"Loftus & Palmer
- 1985Elements of Episodic MemoryTulving
- 1995"The Formation of False Memories"Loftus & Pickrell
- 2000"Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation"Nader, Schafe, LeDoux
- 2001The Seven Sins of MemorySchacter
- 2005Memory: A Very Short IntroductionFoster
- 2006"Test-Enhanced Learning"Roediger & Karpicke
- 2008"Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence"Pashler et al.
- 2008"Spacing Effects in Learning" meta-analysisCepeda et al.
- 2011Moonwalking with EinsteinFoer
- 2013Permanent Present TenseCorkin (on H.M.)
- 2014Make It StickBrown, Roediger, McDaniel
- 2017Why We SleepWalker
- 2018"Targeted Memory Reactivation in Sleep" reviewHu, Cheng, Chiu, Paller
- 2021The Seven Sins of Memory (updated)Schacter
- 2024Lecanemab and donanemab trial reportsMultiple
- 2025Memory and AI / mem-augmentation literatureMixed
- Learning & Memory · Reading List— xxii —
Slide 23
Chapter XXIWatch & read.
- Watch & ReadXXIII
- ↑ Elizabeth Loftus · How reliable is your memory?
- More on YouTube
- Watch · Bringing new life to "Patient H.M."
- Watch · The forgetting curve explained
- Read
- Brown, Roediger & McDaniel's Make It Stick (2014) — applied memory science for studying. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory (2001/2021). Suzanne Corkin's Permanent Present Tense (2013) — the H.M. story by his lifelong researcher. Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) for the memory-techniques side. For practice: install Anki and stick with it for thirty days.
- Learning & Memory · Watch & Read— xxiii —
Slide 24
Chapter XXIIWhat this means for studying.
- Practical synthesisXXIV
- The applied science of memory has produced a short list of robustly supported study practices.
- 1. Self-test rather than re-read. Active retrieval beats passive review every time, even when it feels less productive.
- 2. Space your practice. Five 30-minute sessions across a week beat one 2.5-hour session the night before. Optimal gap is roughly 10–20% of your target retention window.
- 3. Interleave related topics. Mix problem types within a session rather than blocking them. Feels harder; works better.
- 4. Sleep after learning. Memory is consolidated during sleep. An all-nighter is worse than a half-night plus four hours of sleep.
- 5. Connect new material to what you already know. The deeper the encoding, the more durable the memory. The self-reference effect, the elaboration effect, dual coding (verbal + visual).
- 6. Don't trust the feeling of fluency. Reading something a second time feels easier than the first; that feeling is not a reliable indicator of long-term retention.
- None of these are recent discoveries. The empirical case for each has been settled for decades. The gap between what works and what students do is one of the longer-running educational scandals.
- Learning & Memory · Practical— xxiv —
Slide 25
Chapter XXIIIWhat we still don't know.
- Open frontiersXXV
- Three frontiers in 2026.
- Memory and AI
- External memory systems (Google, Wikipedia, large language models) are increasingly woven into how humans think. The cognitive consequences of offloading retrieval are not yet well-understood. The 2011 "Google effect" finding (Sparrow et al., showing reduced retention of facts when subjects believed the information would be available later) has had mixed replication. The broader question — what changes in the structure of human memory when external retrieval is constant — is one of the major open questions of cognitive science.
- Memory and trauma
- The trauma turn has reorganised much of clinical practice. The underlying mechanisms — particularly the role of amygdala-mediated emotional memory in PTSD, and the possibility of pharmacological reconsolidation interventions — are active areas of research.
- Disease-modifying treatments
- Lecanemab (2023) and donanemab (2024) are the first FDA-approved Alzheimer's treatments shown to slow cognitive decline by clearing amyloid plaques. Their effect sizes are modest; their cost and side-effect profiles are substantial. The next decade will determine whether the next-generation treatments produce clinically meaningful slowing of dementia at scale.
- Learning & Memory · Frontiers— xxv —
Slide 26
The end of the deck.
- ColophonXXVI
- Learning & Memory — Volume XII, Deck 08 of The Deck Catalog. Set in Inter and Tiempos Text on a graph-paper grid. Off-white #f3f3ee; rule and accent in academic blue and vermilion.
- Twenty-four leaves on what cognitive science has learned about how brains acquire and keep information. Most of the practical findings are settled. Most students still don't apply them.
- FINIS
- ↑ Vol. XII · Psy. · Deck 08 / 10
