(This is a work-in-progress! Please don't share yet.
Let me know your honest feedback, thanks!) In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus performed an act of scientific masochism. The German psychologist memorized thousands of nonsense words, recorded how much he forgot over time, and discovered... THE FORGETTING CURVE He found that you forget most of what you learn in the first 24 hours, then – if you don’t practice recall – your remaining memories decay exponentially. Since then, Ebbinghaus’s findings have been replicated again and again– –and grew into a whole new scientific field of memory! Here’s a playable simulation of the Forgetting Curve. Change the rate of memory decay. What happens to the curve? As you can see, the less the decay, the flatter the curve – that is, the longer the memory lasts. How fast a person’s memory decays depends on the person and the memory... But, in general, a memory’s “rate of decay” slows down each time you actively recall it. (although, when you stop practicing, it still decays.) Here’s the simulation again, with a single active recall session.
(grey line: what memory would've been without the recall)
Change the recall timing to see how it affects the curve: A single recall boosts memory for a bit... but in the long run, due to exponential decay of memory, a single recall changes nothing. Is there a better way to learn? There is! The trick to remembering... ...is to almost forget. To understand this, think about training your muscles. You’ll gain nothing with a weight that’s too easy... ...nor one that’s too hard. The same’s true of training your brain. You need desirable difficulty: the sweet spot of just-hard-enough. Therefore: to best learn something, you need to recall it... ...just as you’re about to forget it. Same simulation as before, but now it shows the sweet spot – where you’ve forgotten just a little bit. Put the recall in the middle of the sweet spot. What happens? See? If you time a recall so that it's right in the sweet spot, you can slow the decay by a lot! Now, what about multiple recalls? Let’s say you’re lazy time-efficient, so you’re only doing 4 recall sessions. Question: what’s the best way to spread out your recalls? Should you have evenly spaced gaps? Gaps of increasing length? Gaps of decreasing length? Or make it unpredictable, to keep you on your toes? Give it your best guess, then when you’re ready, flip the card over ↓ Which is very counter-intuitive! You can prove to yourself this is true, by playing with the sim below. Get all recalls into the middle of the sweet spot. What spacing do you get? (To prove this isn't a fluke, here’s a sim where you can change the initial memory decay & sweet spot. Note how, in all but the extreme cases, the best schedule is still “increasing gaps”!) Why must the gaps increase? Because: each time you do a recall at the sweet spot of forgetting, the memory’s decay slows down... ...meaning it’ll take longer to hit the sweet spot next time! But you know what’s sweeter? This also means if you time your recalls just right... ...you can easily keep any number of things in your long-term memory, FOREVER. And speaking of doing active recall in order to learn, let's do some active recall on what we just learnt: Anyway, this all sounds great, but finding the optimal schedule must be impossible, right? Au contraire! It’s so simple, you can even create your own automatic scheduler... ...using a shoebox. [END OF PROTOTYPE]

Sorry for the cliffhanger! The rest of this comic would show you how to make a Leitner Box, tell you about other digital spaced repetition systems like Anki, and finally, help you get started using spaced repetition today!

(And every once in a while, it'll use flashcards to get you to actively recall what you just learnt. I'll use spaced repetition to teach you about spaced repetition!)

Anyway, please let me know your honest feedback so far! Early feedback helps me a lot. Many thanks in advance!

<3,
~ Nicky