Scott Young

doctors give worse medical care the longer they have worked, as their stored knowledge from medical school is gradually forgotten, despite their working in the profession full-time.

four mechanisms: spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, or mnemonics

if you care about long-term retention, don’t cram

Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run.

most skills proceed through stages—starting declarative but ending up procedural as you practice more.

procedural knowledge is quite robust and tends to be retained much longer than declarative knowledge.

overlearning can extend the durability of the skill.

moving up a level to a more advanced skill enabled the earlier skill to be overlearned, thus preventing some forgetting.

mnemonics can act as a bridge for difficult-to-remember information, but it’s usually not the final step in creating memories that will endure forever.

found them useful for language learning and terminology, and, paired with SRS, they can form an effective bridge from feeling as though there’s no way you can possibly remember everything to remembering it so deeply that you can’t possibly forget.