Tyler Boright

Incremental Learning

During my school years I forgot how to learn. I lost the ability to teach myself.

Each year, I felt I was on an obsessive treadmill. During the school year, I looked forward to the weekend or vacation. When on vacation, I binged on video games or television until boredom set in. Once bored, I looked forward to learning or exploring.

By the time I entered this stage, my vacation was over and I went back on a school schedule, having forgotten most of what I learned the prior year.

There was no way out.

Have you ever felt a sense of creeping dread about your future? A feeling you forgot to do something important or that you don't have any skills to succeed in the world? I spent many a plan-less Friday night grappling with a mixed cocktail of anxiety with a dash of desire to go wild with my friends at the weekend party.

The whole world was passing me by and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

A New Problem

After high school I joined the military to learn Chinese. I wanted to learn a long-term skill, and spent nearly every waking moment focusing on the subject.

As I progressed, I encountered another problem. No matter how often I studied, I would forget fundamentals I had previously learned. I was shocked even further when a substitute Chinese teacher complained that after studying for decades, there were some characters she "just couldn't remember".

The realization that people who had been learning Chinese for much longer than me continued to feel the same memory anxiety ate at me. I was investing a large portion of my life learning. If the knowledge I gained would disappear after a few years of disuse, what was the point?

As an aside, there is a Buddhist principle hidden in my experience. Everything is ephemeral. There is no use in trying to keep things the same. All you can do is accept the inevitable change. Although this principle is true, I find something poetic in fighting nature to achieve a human goal. It probably has something to do with the feeling of accomplishing the impossible and reading Michael Jordan's autobiography too many times as a kid. I'm not sure.

I fought nature often during those first years of obsessive study. Because of that fight, I was able to understand the power of incremental learning when I encountered it.

The anxiety I felt stemmed from an issue that is prevalent in subjects that require a large proportion of declarative knowledge. The human brain does not remember declarative knowledge as well as other forms of knowledge. And without sufficient review, declarative knowledge we have learned in the past will be subject to forgetting at a faster rate than its counterpart Procedural knowledge.

The phenomenon of quick forgetting of declarative knowledge is why most classes in school require review at the beginning of each new semester. It is also why many people feel they didn't learn anything in high school (myself included). Fortunately, in the past 150 years, a few people have researched how the brain forgets declarative knowledge and discovered that it is predictable.

In the 80s, a couple of Polish Computer Science graduate students had the idea to write a computer program to schedule the intervals at which to review this information. This would enable users to add information they want to learn and let the computer figure out when the information should be reviewed. Remembering which piece of information should be reviewed at which time is tedious, and they posited that computers could remove the tedium from the learning process. The first version of their program became the first Spaced Repetition System (or SRS).

The invention of the SRS bred new techniques and research that works together to make up a core component of incremental learning. Using this method, you optimize learning towards your target goals while enjoying the process.

What is Incremental Learning?

Incremental Learning is a method of learning that helps a student convert learning material into durable memories. Taking advantage of Spaced Repetition and the testing effect, a student is reminded of specific pieces of information at the next point of time when that is most beneficial to consolidation of long-term memory. Each time a card is presented, the student can make a decision as to how important this information is to their future goals and processes accordingly. Information is incrementally whittled into a testable format, either a question and answer pair or a cloze deletion.

The full process of incremental learning from article to processed cards occurs in a few steps:

• 1. Inserting full articles into your spaced repetition application of choice.

• 2. Taking an action each time the article is presented

  An action can be deleting text you deem not important for your long-term memory, saving an important section of a text into a separate card, or immediately creating a testable card.

• 3. Whittling the pieces of text down to simple, active recall-based memories

  Once a card is only comprised of one active recall-based memory, you can transform it into a format that requires testing yourself in order to pass the card.

Note that at any time during the process if certain facts can easily determined to be important, you can immediately convert them to an active recall card. For more in-depth information about creating formulating knowledge in your cards, refer to the 20 rules of knowledge formulation. The author also happens to be one of the inventors of SRS and gives more high-level and detailed information about how to process information through an SRS.

It might not sound like much, but there is incredible benefit to learning on a spaced schedule. Even if the action you take on a card is to incrementally break down an article, since you are reading the material on an optimal interval, deeper impressions of the material are carved into your brain. Eventually, familiarity with a text will enable you to condense your understanding into active recall cards to seal them into memory long-term.

By this time, the active recall card you create will be lodged in your long-term memory. The time allotted between reviews will slowly increase until the interval surpasses your expected lifetime.

The Power of Small Decisions

While using the program, each time you encounter specific articles on a topic you can make a decision on how important this text is to your overall knowledge. This affords you granular control of your knowledge base during each step of the study process. As you process articles that are full of unfamiliar information, you can also add supplementary material on prerequisite vocabulary or concepts and build up the depth of knowledge on a topic one article at a time.

Oftentimes a failure to understand an article you are presented with occurs due to a lack of prerequisite knowledge or the way in which an author writes about the topic. With incremental learning, we can add many different articles on the same topic and benefit from many explanations of the same phenomenon. The interruption of the reading process allows us to make decisions on what information we need to add or what topics are unclear each step of the way.

Reading materials from multiple authors generalizes our mental models on a topic and deepens our understanding.

These advantages of Incremental Learning and more are discussed elsewhere. But before I start to sound too much like an incremental zealot, lets also discuss some of the challenges of integrating incremental learning into your life.

The Challenge of Prioritization

For the longest time, I tried to remember everything with Incremental Learning, from ancient Chinese to Chinese poems to some Japanese.

While these topics are beneficial to a Chinese Literature researcher or a foreign cultural expert, they did not serve my goals in life. After clarifying my direction in life, I mass deleted articles, cards, and notes that were no longer relevant.

Investing in Incremental learning enables you to not worry about missing a piece of information or forgetting an important fact. Since you are able to consciously choose the information you remember, prioritization becomes key. As long as you show up, prioritize, and add relevant materials, your understanding of a subject will gradually deepen under your conscious control.

The growth of understanding is inevitable. However, the usefulness of the knowledge depends on your individual needs and what you select to study. If you fill up your knowledge with facts that don't improve your ability in a particular domain, SRS might be a giant waste of time. However, if you learn important material that is valuable to your own needs, the tool can prove to afford you breadth and depth of knowledge on a subject that others will find difficult to match.

If you don't know what your goals are yet, don't worry. Massive learning with SRS enables you to be more aware of what happens in your life. Learning broadly can solidify your interests and goals in life. As you learn more about the world, your interests will begin to crystallize and what you enjoy will become clear with time.

My journey to maturity has been a slow one and involved changing fields multiple times. With enough time and pleasurable learning, you will find yourself moving in a direction of greater fulfillment and productivity.

A Large Investment

Most people quit using Incremental Learning due to the consistency requirements. Like opening up your day planner after summer break to find out you forgot to do all of your summer homework, opening up your favorite SRS after a couple of days to see a pile of cards due feels like a massive soul crush.

Using Incremental Learning to power your studying requires acquiring a new habit. To obtain maximum benefits, you must do your cards daily. You don't need to always finish, but the method works best if you make it a habit you perform every single day.

There are ways to minimize the amount of times you are overwhelmed by an untouched deck. When many people start on the journey, they add tons of cards to their collections. They try to mimic the hare in that famous tortoise story and force themselves to adjust from spending no time studying to studying hours a day. Like the hare, It is easy to burn out when you try to change all at one time. It is much better to start putting a few cards into your collection and slowly increase the amount you do each day.

Most Spaced Repetition programs have a method to limit the amount of reviews you see daily. If you find yourself drowning, it is best to limit reviews to a number that is manageable in your schedule. Small pushes daily lead to great gains overall. Eventually, you will adapt to a certain load and will feel the need to push harder in order to attain the same sense of exertion.

Using Incremental Learning daily will supercharge your life, work, and interest in knowledge. The tradeoff is that the process takes time to be effective.

Remember

The best learning in life comes with a sense of pleasure. This sense of reward is provided by the brain itself and is the ultimate indication of healthy, sustainable learning. If you feel like you are struggling or not enjoying your studying, take some time to discover why. You might be learning too many topics you think you SHOULD know and not what you want to know. You might be spending too much time learning on your limited schedule.

Perhaps the material you are learning seems unimportant or unrelated to your goals. You might even not be sleeping enough or might not be resolving stress in a healthy way.

Regardless, look to resolve these issues one at a time and make sure you are enjoying the learning process. Learning for fun won't happen all at once. But when you can learn with pleasure, you will be amazed at the knowledge you can learn.

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