Super curious, bright, and a terrible student
Ever since high school I’ve been aware of the power of flashcards and spaced repetition systems to learn quickly and effectively. Never have I used it after high school however.
And I don’t think I was using it effectively during high school either.
I’ve always had a difficult time studying, I would describe myself as having an almost limitless amount of curiosity - even going as far to say that curiosity is one of my defining character traits - and a love for learning has always been a part of that.
Going into Wikipedia rabbit holes, watching long documentaries, reading tons upon tons of books, scouring obscure and old websites, taking things apart and fixing them (sometimes!).
Yet.. none of it ever stuck. I never got good grades either. And I never felt like I was capable of “learning” very well. If curiosity was my greatest strength, then focusing was my greatest weakness; especially for mathematics which I would go as far to describe as physically painful to study.
Being described as “really bright”, “super smart kid” and other such statements while barely being able to pass from one grade to the next made me feel stupid more than it made me feel smart.
Depending on the subject, I was able to get decent grades though! The trick is to derive everything you need to know on a grading paper from first principles… Easy, right? Yeah, this works amazingly for physics, chemistry and the humanities where reasoning can get you very far.. But as you can imagine, my grades for languages and math were beyond awful.
Because it involves this weird and fickle thing called a memory.
…A what?
Memory
“A what?!”
A Memory.
It’s that intangible thing that is completely uncontrollable and arbitrary. Like how I’m able to recite over 40 decimals of pi from the top of my head thanks to having this beautiful piece of art echoing in my mind, but have only learned the difference between the numerator and the denominator in fractions one week ago, at age 29, almost ten years after having graduated a computer science + electrical engineering bachelor program (said program included calculus!).
Sitting still to focus on even the simplest piece of mathematics often felt like having to stare right into the sun with my eyes wide open. It hurt. And I’d never get any further. What do any of these symbols even mean? Why are these names so complex? How do people even memorise all this stuff? All these symbols, abstract names, rules, equations?
After I graduated, I got myself evaluated for ADHD. Guess who got a diagnosis? Me! Yay!
Turns out ADHD makes memory complicated. It’s not that we’re unable to form memories, far from it! But there’s something about the memory of someone with ADHD that feels off, feels peculiar.
I have the feeling that if you have ADHD, it’s all or nothing. You are either fully immersed in something or not at all. If something is interesting? I’ll dive into a stormy sea of complex information and come out the other end having learned enough to write a non-fiction short story about it.
It’s as if I’m only able to remember something if it makes sense in its entirety. I cannot memorise something if I don’t understand the why. I find it incredibly difficult to memorise something outside of its context.
And that is where a topic like a language, mathematics and to an extent even biology falls apart altogether. Your ability to reason is important, but your capacity to perform relies on having learned all the building blocks for the given topic or challenge at hand. Especially within mathematics, where every topic builds on top of the next.
This information is dense, and if you can go years without ever memorising any of the basics because it will just not enter your mind no matter what? Then things get difficult.
And I felt that.
Memory is a choice!
Luckily, my curiosity has let me to many helpful places to really learn about how people actually learn. Some people are capable of things I’m not capable of… why? How can I be more like them? Why are the people I look up to capable of such amazing feats that I have always felt I couldn’t even hope to get close to?
After at least 20 productivity and self-help books, a dozen or so university courses on learning, memory and procrastination - this is not hyperbole - I stumbled upon an unassuming post by Andy Matuschak called How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding.
At their best, these systems feel like magic. Memory ceases to be a haphazard phenomenon, something you hope happens: spaced repetition systems make memory a choice.
What?!
Memory is a choice?
No way.
I’ll spare you the gory details of how it took me at least another three years to adopt the daily habit of using a spaced repetition system in my everyday life, but I can say it involved another one of those magic and fickle things - this one called internal motivation - but that’s a post at a later time.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m eyeing a master of biotechnology for various reasons, but one of them is that I’ve never felt truly intellectually challenged in a way that forced me to grow as a person - this is what eventually pushed me over the line to start making and practicing flashcards on a daily basis.
I’ve been using Anki at a nearly daily pace for a little over three months now and, holy shit. It works. It actually works. As the post by Andy Matuschak explains very well, writing good flashcards is a skill. About 500 flashcards into my Anki journey, I now know what a numerator and a denominator is; I can differentiate between cnidarians and ctenophores, I know what philosophers mean by cognitivism and non-cognitivism.
These little and somewhat complex terms may seem arbitrary, but to me they aren’t. Curiosity and depth is one of the guiding lights in my life. Learning about how viruses work in The machinery of life by David S. Goodsell helped me turn my existential fears into fascination. I chose to study computer science not because I wanted to work a particular job, but because I wanted to know how computers work. I read masses of non-fiction books because I am entirely fascinated by how the world works.
For me, curiosity is a way of life; I’ve always felt like a bystander on the fascinating world of “actually smart people” and me. Never understood what was wrong with me. ADHD was one piece of the puzzle, spaced repetition another. But as these pieces are coming together, I feel my life slowly coming together.
I study because I care, because I want to understand how things work, to be fascinated by the endless wonders of the natural world, to make things better; and hopefully to inspire others, young and old, to embrace the complexity of the real world.
And now, thanks to spaced repetition and the many amazing online resources of other people who care, memory is a choice.
A bystander no more.
Resources
Also interested in learning more about spaced repetition? These are some great resources to get started
- Nicky Case’s How to remember anything forever-ish
- Andy Matuschak’s aforementioned How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
- Michael Nielsen’s Augmenting Long-term Memory
- Michael Nielsen’s Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics