Sublime

We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956). Information cannot be saved in short-term memory like on a memory stick. Rather, it kind of floats around in our heads, seeks our attention and occupies valuable mental resources until it is either forgotten, replaced by something more important (accor

Retrieval ties the knot for memory. Repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast.

It is a confounding paradox, then, that the changeable nature of our memory not only can skew our perceptions but also is essential to our ability to learn.

After a few days, we can still remember the name of the president, without having the slightest memory of where or when we first heard it: from episodic, the memory has now become semantic. What was initially just a single episode was transformed into long-lasting knowledge,

more than once but leaving considerable time between practice

(using memory methods), and then review to keep it ready in your mind for new learning.

Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems.

Though you can't increase working memory capacity, you can cheat this limitation. In Chapter 2 I discussed at length how to keep more information in working memory by compressing the information. In a process called chunking, you treat several separate things as a single unit. Instead of maintaining the letters c, o, g, n, i, t, i, o, and n in work

A little forgetting between practice sessions can be a good thing, if it leads to more effort in practice, but you do not want so much forgetting that retrieval essentially involves relearning the material.