Cool SW for a better memory mgmt (not the one in your computer) Spaced Repetition Software

Gary Wolf a contributing editor at Wired wrote  an excellent article last year about spaced repetition software (SRS) in particular SuperMemo.  Not only is the piece colorfully set with some ice cold Baltic sea swimming scenes but it has a good amount of background on the inventor of SuperMemo, Piotr Wozniak.

On a first reading the concepts of conceptualization, internalization, memory store and memory access seem a bit hard to organize so I thought I would try my hand at diagramming these concepts (Click on the diagram Below) in the way I understand them. 

Considering what we know from functional MRI which is that the brain actively prunes unused neurons and strengthens neurons that are related to positive or pleasurable activities we might find some hints from the diagram above about concepts and memory refresh patterns to retain information.

One of the most important techniques in learning is to use as many of the senses as possible.   This helps create more refresh points or bridges which cascadingly form more connections.   By using refresh points we can see how pure memorization is helped.  Concepts on the other hand are continually being refreshed as we relate or eliminate relationships to them.  Since they are in continual use they are always easily accessible.  On the other hand the process of conceptualization is of course more complex.

The article is especially delightful because it brings out the potential of online education.  Taken together with the ambitious projects like MIT open courseware project which puts all of its course seminars and lectures online it can lead to an even faster democratization of knowledge and hence reduction of friction in a knowledge based economy.

Being a Wired magazine article maybe it is missing some links to Open Source initiatives in the spaced recollection software of which I have found at least one called mnemosyne.

Mnemosyne has a huge amount of free learning kits for everything from notriously difficult Swedish Road Signs, Spanish, Human Anatomy,  Greek phrases for English tourists and even the Bill of Rights.