Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

and waited 15 years
. Luria then
took out the list, found Shereshevskii, and asked him to repeat the formula.
Without hesitation, he reproduced the list on the spot, again without error.
Shereshevskii’s memory of everything he encountered was so clear, so
detailed, so 
unending
, he lost the ability to organize it into meaningful
patterns. Like living in a permanent snowstorm, he saw much of his life as
blinding flakes of unrelated sensory information. He couldn’t see the “big
picture,” meaning he couldn’t focus on the ways two things might be
related, look for commonalities, and discover larger patterns. Poems,
carrying their typical heavy load of metaphor and simile, were
incomprehensible to him. Shereshevskii couldn’t forget, and it affected the
way he functioned.
We have many types of forgetting, categories cleverly enumerated by
researcher Dan Schacter in his book 
The Seven Sins of Memory
. Tip-of-the-
tongue lapses, absentmindedness, blocking habits, misattribution, biases,
suggestibility—the list doesn’t sound good. But they all have one thing in
common. They allow us to drop pieces of information in favor of others. In
so doing, forgetting helped us to conquer the Earth.

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More ideas
Thinking and talking a lot about information soon after we encounter it
(elaborate rehearsal) helps commit it to memory. Allowing time between
repetitions is better than cramming. Unfortunately, we can’t say exactly
how much talking or exactly how much time produces the best result.
You’ll have to experiment.
I have some ideas about how we could systemically apply the concept
of repetition in schools and companies.
Teaching in cycles
The day of a typical high-school student is segmented into five or six
50-minute periods, consisting of unrelenting, unrepeated streams of
information. Here’s my fantasy: In the school of the future, lessons are
divided into 25-minute modules, cyclically repeated throughout the day.
Subject A is taught for 25 minutes. Ninety minutes later, the 25-minute
content of Subject A is repeated, and then a third time. 
All
classes are
segmented and interleaved in such a fashion.
Every third or fourth day would be reserved for quickly reviewing the
facts delivered in the previous 72 to 96 hours. Students would inspect their
notes, comparing them with what the teacher was saying in the review. This
would result in a greater elaboration of the information and an opportunity
to confirm facts. Because teachers wouldn’t be able to address as much
information, the school year would extend into the summer. Homework
would be unnecessary, because students would already be repeating content
during the day.
As I said, it’s just a fantasy. Deliberately spaced repetitions have not
been tested rigorously in the real world, so there are lots of questions. Do
you really need three repetitions per subject per day to see a positive
outcome? Do all subjects need such repetition? Would constant repetitions
begin to interfere with one another as the day wore on? Do you even need
the review sessions? We don’t know.
Repetition over many years

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Beyond doing well on the year-end test, our education system doesn’t
seem to care whether students actually remember what they learned. Given
that system consolidation can take 
years
, perhaps critical information
should be repeated on a yearly or semiyearly basis.
In my fantasy class, this is exactly what happens. Take math.
Repetitions begin with a review of multiplication tables, fractions, and
decimals. Starting in the third grade, six-month and yearly review sessions
occur through sixth grade. As students’ competency grows, the review
content becomes more sophisticated. But the cycles are still in place. I can
imagine enormous benefits for every academic subject, especially foreign
languages.
For businesses, I would extend the bachelor’s degree into the
workplace. You’ve probably heard that many corporations, especially in
technical fields, are disappointed by the quality of the American
undergraduates they hire. They have to spend money retraining many of
their newest employees in basic skills that should have been covered in
college.
I would turn your company into a learning and leadership factory,
offering a full range of classes that would review every subject important to
a new employee’s job. Research would establish the optimal spacing of the
repetition. More experienced employees might even begin attending these
refresher courses, inadvertently rubbing shoulders with younger
generations. The old guard would be surprised by how much they have
forgotten, and how much the experience aids their own job performance.
I wish I could tell you this all would work. Instead, all I can say is that
memory is not fixed at the moment of learning, and repetition provides the
fixative.