One of the lessons I learned from John Medina’s excellent book Brian Rules is that of elaborative rehearsal, which is (roughly) defined as remembering something more strongly by doing something with the new information, like giving a book report or relating that information back into something you already know. Example: Say you already know the geography of Central Asia, if you wanted to remember the story of Genghis Khan, you could relate Genghis’ story to the already known geography, and then giving an oral report on old Genghis.
Like most coders, I sometimes forget code syntax of functions I don’t use that often. I am now going to start writing up short expositions on the functions I have to look up in the hope that writing up the exposition will help transfer the function into long term memory.
This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog
