This site offers texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, problem solving, brain science, health, and education (1,522 pages, 18,213 edits)
- Problem of schooling: How schools make for unhappy lives for kids
- Pleasure of learning: Why pleasure is essential for high quality learning
- Natural creativity cycle: How cycles of attention, distraction and sleep lead to great discoveries
- Childhood amnesia: Why child's brain is totally different than adult's brain and how it affects early education
- Semantic aspects of childhood amnesia: Infantile amnesia is not entirely neurophysiological
- Speed reading: The trick to fast reading with comprehension is incremental reading
- Learn drive: Brains are equipped with detectors of valuable knowledge
- Toxic memory: Coerced learning is harmful
- Principles of spaced repetition: By computing the optimum time of review, we can forget about forgetting
- 20 rules of knowledge formulation: The way we formulate knowledge may decide if we forget or remember for decades
- Semantic learning: Comprehension affects durability of memories
- Learning and depression: Learning may be one of the simplest preventive tools in a fight against depression
- How to solve any problem? Simple tricks that great people use to solve problems
- Sleep and learning: Sleep has a powerful impact on learning (and vice versa)
- Creativity cycle: Sleep has a powerful impact on creativity (and vice versa)
- Confusing creativity with ADHD: Creative and unruly kids are often labelled as ADHD, esp. in the classroom
- Knowledge in creative problem solving: New learning must complement expertise to ensure lifelong creativity
- Are extroverts more creative? One of Big Five traits may appear not to be a genetic trait after all
- Simple formula for high intelligence: We should never be inhibited by the thought that genes underlie genius
- Genius checklist: 20+ things needed to maximize the brain power
- Optimizing the timing of brainwork: There are only two short windows of time each day when brain power is at its best
- IQ is a dismal measure of intelligence: Instead of serving humanity, many definitions of intelligence serve vanity
- Precocity paradox: Many who are first will be last, and the last first
- Science of sleep: Good sleep, good learning, good life
- Neural optimization in sleep: Sleep is like disk defragmentation that boosts fast thinking, problem solving, and more
- Sleep control system: Dozens of brain systems involved in the control of sleep
- Biphasic life: Humans are biphasic. Hence the invention of siesta
- Best time for napping: Naps should be taken within a 1-2 hour window in the middle of the day
- Power nap: How naps compensate for night sleep
- Curing DSPS and insomnia: DSPS and insomnia have reached epidemic proportions, but there are natural remedies at hand
- Baby sleep: Parents who understand how babies sleep are more likely to nurture healthy brains
- Sleep deprivation amplifies the harm of schooling: Learning in a sleepy state can ruin prior learning
- How do we fall asleep?: The cascade of events that lead to slumber
- Two components of sleep: Two components of sleep regulation determine when we fall asleep and how effective sleep is
- Problem of schooling: We need a Grand Reform in education to prevent further harm to children
- Mythology of schooling: the school system is a self-perpetuating moloch: its pawns have received the best schooling in obedient conformity
- Education counteracts evolution: Education systems around the world are designed in opposition to biologically natural ways of learning
- 10 mortal sins of schooling: Problem of schooling in a capsule
- Freedom of education: Freedom of education is as precious as freedom of speech
- Schools are useless in teaching English!: Years of foreign language learning at school bring little effect
- Learning history: school vs. self-directed learning: Most kids leave high school with negligible understanding of history
- How baby brain does not work: The myth of "perfect learning machines"
- Daycare misery: Most of praise for benefits of daycare comes from exculpatory needs of busy moms
- Ban on homeschooling: Those who ban homeschooling block the best options for free learning
- Why kids hate school? Kids hate school almost unanimously: this is why
- Learning to navigate uncertainty and complexity: Schools focus on deterministic learning. Minimization of uncertainty undermines future problem solving skills
- The grind is the glory: Why loving parents often ruin the pleasure of learning for their own kids
- Videogames are better than teachers: Videogames are not mindless. They are one of the best learning tools
- Bill Gates is wrong about education: Bill is great. Bill is good. Bill is wrong
- How schools can contribute to Alzheimer's disease: Knowledge prevents Alzheimer's, but schooling can also contribute to senile dementia
- PISA fuels the education arms race
- Can coercion cause dyslexia?: Dyslexia is not just about the brain and neurology
- Do children need boundaries to feel safe?: Children are often disciplined under the guise of making them feel "secure"
- Experts do not understand Khan Academy: why one man's revolution is another man's blasphemy
- Forgetting curve: How fast we forget after learning
- History of spaced repetition: How we dramatically advanced the science of learning in the last three decades
- Learn drive: The power behind curiosity and learning
- Grandmother cells: How a joke idea turns out to underlie human intelligence
- Two component model of memory: How long-term memory works
- Two component model of memory stability: What affects memory stability
- Spaced repetition: How to eliminate the problem of forgetting
- Error of Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: How SuperMemo added to Hermann Ebbinghaus reputation
- How are false memories born?: How faulty memory contributes to human intelligence
- On the superiority of a rat over a schooled human: Why rats learn smarter than kids in a classroom
- Neurostatistical Model of Memory: New model that attempts to describe memory in learning
- Stress resilience: Chronic stress is a brain destroyer in early childhood
- Using stress valves to prevent chronic stress: Natural anti-stress weapons
- Baby management: Instead of providing room for growth, we try to push kids into a box of directed development
- Daycare infections: Daycare centers are germ factories that steal from valuable learning time
- Preventing infections: It is possible to build resistance to cold and flu viruses
- Reward diversity in preventing addictions: Parents and schools drive kids to addictions
- I have ADHD and I love it: One man's creativity is another man's mental health issue
- ADHD: ADHD is subject to over-diagnosis
- War of the networks: Defying human nature is a root cause of the whole host of human problems
- You cannot catch a cold from cold: One of the most popular and highly detrimental myths about health
- Planning productive days: The power of the habit in maximizing productivity
- Myths: rich mythology related to memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and more
- Myths are easy to swallow and hard to kill: how memory models help us tackle false beliefs
- The morbid myth of Digital Dementia
- History of spaced repetition
- SuperMemo does not work for kids
- Hating SuperMemo
- Advantages of incremental reading
- Advantages of incremental writing
- Incremental reading step by step
- Why is incremental reading not popular?
- Harm of incremental reading
- Who is SuperMemo Guru?
- Roots of creativity and genius (2001)
- Incremental reading (2002-2016)
- Decade of speed reading (incrementally) (2014)
- Can too much learning cause Alzheimer's? (2002)
- Myth collection: memory, learning, creativity and sleep (1999-2012)
- Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
- How memory works? (1994)
- Decade of SuperMemo (interview) (1999)
- Goodness of knowledge (2002)
- SuperMemo as a tool for a programmer (1993)
- FAQs: your questions
- Summary: summary of the most important claims presented on this site
Important notes: the most important ideas are marked in yellow. Those are snippets I want you to remember most from my texts. If you do not have time for reading, reviewing those notes will tell you roughly what I want to say. If you disagree, you can dig deeper in the text to figure out my reasoning
Excerpts: mark the most remarkable or influential words taken from other authors. At times, putting things in my own words would not do justice to the original
Personal anecdotes: if you have an impression that my opinions about education are distorted by my own experience, you are right. I have spent all my professional life on self-directed learning, while my 22 years of formal schooling remained a distant memory. With each improvement to my own learning, I recall those early years with less and less respect to the old ways of learning. My personal notes are marked with this colored template. You can skip them without losing on the message, or dig into my own recall to see how my opinions have been shaped or biased
Anecdotes: some stories from lives of great and/or ordinary people
Motto: some witty idea or quote from a wise man, usually from ages ago. A quote that sets the theme for a chapter. Those witticisms often help us realize that we are re-learning history over and over again. The ancients knew things many people fail to see today
Metaphors: some ideas are best presented in a metaphoric pop-science fashion. If you fully understand the text, skip metaphors. If you don't or if you are skeptical, see if metaphoric approach is more convincing. Metaphors help you build models that facilitate reasoning
SuperMemo notes: are relevant only to those who care about SuperMemo. You can skip those inserts without missing main points
Frequently asked questions (FAQs): Interesting questions you might have about memory, learning, creativity, sleep, etc.
Archive: Archive materials are presented for historic reasons. They may intentionally include wrong hypotheses or models, e.g. to illustrate the progression of thought