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How to Write Great Flashcards so You Can Remember Anything You Want

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Computerized flashcard programs make memory a choice.

Photo by David Cassolato from Pexels

How often have you read something thinking, “I should remember this,” only to forget it a couple of hours later?

Don’t blame your memory. Forgetting is part of how our brains work.

And contrary to common belief, our brains work not too different from each other (hint: learning styles don’t exist).

Recent advances in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience reveal how humans learn.

Here’s what our brains have in common and how you can make the most of it.

How to prime your memory to remember anything

Memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation/retention, and retrieval. And you need to utilize all three stages to remember anything your want forever.

If you encode something, for example, through watching an online course but don’t practice retention and retrieval, you won’t be able to recall it when needed.

If you hear or read something just once, let’s say by reading a book or watching an online course, you’ll very likely forget it a couple of days later.

That’s the reason why most people can’t recall something from a book they read a while ago when they’d need it.

But you can hack your memory by interrupting your forgetting curve.

Forgetting Curves with and without spaced practice. (Source: Hannah Lenitz for Eva Keiffenheim).

Encoding knowledge into your memory works best when you reproduce the same piece of information from your mind over increasing time intervals.

And it’s easy. Brilliant minds have come up with software and workflows that help you interrupt your forgetting exactly when you should.

Computerized flashcard programs, such as Anki or Neuracache, help you learn anything by heart forever. In my TEDx talk on mastering learning, I talk about the power of these programs.

You apply the effective learning strategy of self-testing and the software manages your forgetting curve for maximum retention.

“One-shot learning is not enough. Routinization frees up our prefrontal and parietal circuits, allowing them to attend to other activities. The most effective strategy is to space out learning: a little bit every day.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

If you can answer a question correctly, the time interval between reviews gradually expands. So a one-day gap between reviews becomes two days, then six days, and so on. The idea is that the information is becoming more firmly embedded in your memory, and so requires less frequent review.

Soon you’ll only need to test yourself on information for a few seconds once every one and a half years. Scientist Michael Nielsen has used this system to memorize 20,000 cards and estimates he only needs about 5 minutes of total review time for one piece of information over the entire 20 years.

In essence: spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice.

But why would you want to remember something forever? There are use-cases that go way beyond exams.

Use cases for hacking your memory

You can learn and all countries of the world and impress your former geography teacher.

But you could also choose some of the following cases and make flashcards really useful for you.

Here’s what I currently use my memory system for:

  • Relationships, remembering birthdays, preferences, or experiences. When is Torben’s birthday? What’s Anna’s favourite meal?
  • Hobbies, memorizing anything that’s useful for you. What are the first three steps for beatmatching? What direction do my elbows point when doing barbell squats? What should I pay attention to in the cobra yoga pose?
  • Job-related information, for example from relevant papers, conferences, or conversations. What were my three biggest learnings from the Education Futures conference in Salzburg? What are the three actions for shifting power in education transformation?
  • Habit Stacking, anything you want to do after another habit. When do I practice Anki cards? Which mac command do I use when searching my browser history?
  • Random stuff such as favourite places or memory from a holiday, pokemon names, or reflections from your yearly review.

While there are many pre-written decks, you can now see why writing cards yourself is even more meaningful.

“Cards are fundamental building blocks of the mnemonic medium, and card-writing is better thought of as an open-ended skill. Do it poorly, and the mnemonic medium works poorly. Do it superbly well, and the mnemonic medium can work very well indeed. By developing the card-writing skill it’s possible to expand the possibilities of the medium.”

— Andy Matuschack and Michael Nielsen

Four rules for writing great flashcards

Creating the cards by yourself is an important part of understanding and committing.

Here are five rules you want to keep in mind when creating flashcards.

1) Decide whether it’s relevant

It’s tempting to memorize everything you read in books, but you really want to keep it relevant.

Create flashcards for anything that’s worth about five minutes of your lifetime. Because that’s the expected lifetime review time. Michael Nielsen has applied this system for four years and he says it takes < 5 minutes to learn something… forever.

The goal of remembering everything you want is not a self-serving purpose. You ultimately want to apply your knowledge in your day-to-day life; for your job, relationships, or decision-making.

If you try to learn something you don’t care about, you’ll soon stop learning altogether. So choose the stuff you really care about.

“Memorisation is really important, but you have to memorise the right things”

— Daisy Christodoulou
2) Keep the cards really simple.

One of the biggest mistakes new flashcards writers make is creating too dense flashcards.

Simpler is better — stick to the minimum information required, instead of overloading a card.

Here’s an example:

Source: SuperMemo — Twenty rules of formulating knowledge

The simpler the easier it’s to remember it and the more flexible you are in its application. However, keep in mind to always add the basics before you dive into the specifics.

Name the main theories of learning (behaviorism, cognitive, constructivism, humanism, and connectivism) before you go into the details of them.

3) Add personal context

Remember the first memory stage? Encoding works best when you add personal context and meaning to it.

Use your own words to describe a concept rather than copy and come up with personal examples to make learning easier for you.

4) Include real-world retrieval cues

Remember the second and third memory stage? Sorry to do this, but you know you remember best when you recall something from your memory.

So consolidation/retention and retrieval are as crucial as encoding.

There’s a difference between the availability and accessibility of knowledge.

Even if a piece of information is encoded and consolidated, you might have trouble retrieving it (known as the tip of the tongue phenomena).

To memorize flashcards in a way that you can apply them in your life, you want to add retrieval cues.

You can do that by asking questions that are similar to your real-world situations.

For example, instead of asking, what’s the mac shortcut for retrieving your chrome search history, I asked “When researching an article I haven’t saved yet on my Mac, which chrome shortcut do I use to browse through my search history?”

In Conclusion

Spaced repetition memory systems, such as creating flashcards with Anki, make memory a choice. You can remember anything you want, forever.

The goal of fact-learning is not to learn just one random fact — it is to learn thousands, which taken together, form a schema that helps you solve problems, think critically, and make sense of the world.

“Anki isn’t just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It’s a tool for understanding almost anything.”

— Michael Nielson
Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

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How to Augment Your Long-Term Memory in 15 Minutes a Day

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Your personal memory system makes remembering a choice.

Source: Canva

What would change if you could remember any information you want forever?

Imagine all things that are useful for you would be stored in your long-term memory, giving you an edge in every conversation, brainstorming or deep work session.

Since 2012 I’ve been on a mission to uncover how and when we learn best. I’ve read everything I could find on the science of learning — a new domain that builds on cognitive psychology, neuroscience, brain research and social psychology.

One thing that’s become clear is the strong evidence for the efficiency of spaced repetition and active retrieval.

Encoding knowledge into your memory works best when you reproduce the same piece of information from your mind over increasing time intervals.

But even if you know what to do, it can be challenging to apply it in your daily life.

A month ago, I discovered an applicable method that can change everything. I haven’t felt so excited about something since RoamResearch.

In essence, the following strategy makes remembering a choice rather than coincidence.

It builds on the insight that your brain’s long-term memory capacity is unlimited. Knowledge begets knowledge. The more you learn, the more you can remember.

Here’s how you can expand your long-term memory and remember everything you want within a couple of minutes each day.

What You Need to Do to Remember Things Forever

It’s not your fault that you forget any facts, names, or ideas after some time.

Most people view forgetting as an error in an otherwise functional memory system.

But the opposite is true.

Forgetting isn’t your enemy; it’s essential for learning.

The forgetting curve visualizes how much you forget over time. It shows how your ability to recall things from memory naturally decreases over time.

Forgetting curve. R: probability of recall (retrievability of memory) d: strength of a memory trace (stability of memory) t — time. The forgetting curve varies for individuals and is factor-dependent see this 2015 study. (Source: SuperMemo research)

Here’s an important implication many people never realize: If you see information only once, you will very likely completely forget them after three months. However great a lecture, book, corporate training, or online course; you will forget most of the content unless you interrupt your forgetting curve.

To remember information forever, you need to interrupt your forgetting curve strategically.

Spaced repetition is the best way to do so. In essence, you test yourself on the same information across increasing intervals.

Notice how the forgetting curve flattens after each review. You can retain more, and you forget slower.

Source: Bo Ae Chun on Researchgate

So to remember information forever, you want to have a process that makes your recall a piece of information at the right time for optimizing retention.

But how can you do this? Handwriting flashcards and starting a manual review system?

Luckily, there are more efficient ways.

How to Augment Your Long-Term Memory in 15 Minutes a Day

Simple tools can make remembering a choice rather than a coincidence.

Anki and Neuracache resurface information at the optimal moment and interrupt your forgetting. (To understand the algorithm behind it, read this article by SuperMemo, this iteration from Anki or watch this 5-minute explainer.)

Unlocking the power of these tools works in three steps:

  1. Create digital flashcards. You enter a question and a corresponding answer.
  2. Retrieve information from your memory. When the program shows you a card, you actively recall the answer from your memory. Look at the answer afterwards.
  3. Self-assess. The software asks whether you knew the answer or not. Based on your self-assessment, the software manages the review schedule for you.

If you got the answer right, more time would pass until you see the card again. A one-day gap between reviews become a week, a month, and so on.

This seems trivial, but showing you flashcards based on your forgetting curve is incredibly efficient.

What Will Happen When You Apply This

Within a few minutes of learning a day, you can memorize thousands of facts, ideas, rules, or words.

Michael Nielsen, a scientist who has used this system for four years, explains in his essay how much time it can save you:

“On average, it takes me about 8 seconds to review a card. Suppose I was using conventional flashcards, and reviewing them (say) once a week. If I wanted to remember something for the next 20 years, I’d need 20 years times 52 weeks per year times 8 seconds per card. That works out to a total review time of just over 2 hours for each card.

By contrast, Anki’s ever-expanding review intervals quickly rise past a month and then out past a year. Indeed, for my personal set of Anki cards the average interval between reviews is currently 1.2 years, and rising. In an appendix below I estimate that for an average card, I’ll only need 4 to 7 minutes of total review time over the entire 20 years. Those estimates allow for occasional failed reviews, resetting the time interval. That’s a factor of more than 20 in savings over the more than 2 hours required with conventional flashcards.”

Let me rephrase this because it’s revolutionary: within 4 to 7 minutes of total review spread over 20 years, you can remember anything you want.

Based on the spaced repetition algorithms, you can decrease your time spent studying while increasing the amount you learn and remember.

Michael Nielson started in 2018. I asked him this week whether he still sticks to the process. Here’s his reply:

Imagine how your life would change if you encoded 20,000 useful bits of information. Yes, you can google almost anything but processing fluency matters.

You can only hold a handful of items in your short-term memory. When you encode information into your long-term memory, you will have the edge over many other people because you atomize and retain valuable insights directly from your brain.

The benefit of memorizing information is not in the knowledge itself, but in the way you can deploy it. Through memorization you build a mental structure that helps you develop new thoughts and knowledge.

“Long-term memory is capable of storing thousands of facts, and when we have memorised thousands of facts on a specific topic, these facts together form what is known as a schema. When we think about that topic, we use that schema. When we meet new facts about that topic, we assimilate them into that schema — and if we already have a lot of facts in that particular schema, it is much easier for us to learn new facts about that topic.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

What do You Want to Remember forever?

Michael Nielsen’s rule of thumb is as follows:

“If memorizing something will likely save you five minutes in the future, write a flashcard. Because the expected lifetime review time is less than five minutes, i.e., it takes < 5 minutes to learn something… forever.”

There’s a ton of things you can remember forever with Anki or Neuracache, such as:

  • Findings of books and papers important in your area of expertise
  • A line of commands for a programming language
  • Vocabulary from a foreign language
  • Birthdays and wedding days from your close friends and family
  • Academic material such as periodic tables and geography
  • Quotes or poems you want to be able to recite
  • Names and faces
  • Reflections or life lessons from your work or hobbies
  • Favourite places from a holiday or best dishes in a restaurant
DIgital flashcard examples. Source: Neuracache

While there are many pre-written decks, writing cards yourself is even more meaningful.

Creating flashcards is a learning process in itself. Learning scientists call this elaborative encoding — you explain and describe an idea in your own words.

Final Thoughts

Knowing that many valuable facts and ideas will vanish from our memories has made me feel frustrated for a long time.

My digital note-taking system keeps growing, and it’s been very beneficial. But working memory capacity is limited and even with my second digital brain, I can only hold a specific number of things in my head.

The above method changes everything.

Applying spaced repetition and active recall for 15-minutes a day is a bullet-proof way to embed new knowledge in your long-term memory.

My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.

I Analyzed 13 TED Talks on Improving Your Memory— Here’s the Quintessence

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How you can make the most out of your brain.

Created by the author on Canva.

Meta-learning is one of the most powerful tools you can acquire.

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning effectively — you’ll need less time and energy to master any topic you want.

I spent the last years exploring the intersections between neuroscience, brain research, and cognitive psychology. I’ve shared my book recommendations on learning how to learn and how-to guides for applying the strategies to writing, reading, online courses, EdTech software and knowledge management.

In the last week, I watched and summarized 13 TED talks on memory, brain enhancement, and learning how to learn. The most insightful made it into this article.

By reading, you will learn how to best use your brain to get the result you want. You can read the article in one go or jump to the sections that are most interesting for you.

Here are the best ones I watched and the key messages so you can apply them to your life.

You’ll understand how neuroplasticity works (1), how you can actually change your brain (2), and acquire skills rapidly (3). You will then learn how specific strategies can improve (4) and increase (5) your memory function (4) and techniques to triple your memory (6) so you can remember everything you want with ease (7).

Table of Contents
1) After Reading This Your Brain Will Not Be the Same
2) Learn How to Learn From Somebody Who Has Transformed Her Brain
3) How to Learn Anything Fast in 20 Hours (Rapid Skill Akquisition)
4) Techniques to Improve Your Memory Function
5) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Brain Function
6) Here’s How You Can Triple Your Memory
7) Supercharge Your Learning Practice With This Technique

1) After Reading This Your Brain Will Not Be the Same

How does your brain change throughout life based on what you think, do, and experience?

In her talk, brain researcher and professor Lara Boyds explains what science currently knows about neuroplasticity. In essence, your brain can change in three ways.

Change 1 — Increase chemical signalling

Your brain works by sending chemicals signals from cell to cell, so-called neurons. This transfer triggers actions and reactions. To support learning your brain can increase the concentration of these signals between your neurons. Chemical signalling is related to your short-term memory.

Change 2 — Alter the physical structure

During learning, the connections between neurons change. In the first change, your brain’s structure stays the same. Here, your brain’s physical structure changes — which takes more time. That’s why altering the physical structure influences your long-term memory.

For example, research shows that London taxi cab drivers who actually have to memorize a map of London to get their taxicab license have larger brain regions devoted to spatial or mapping memories.

Change 3 — Alter brain function

This one is crucial (and will also be mentioned in the following talks). When you use a brain region, it becomes more and more accessible. Whenever you access a specific memory, it becomes easier and easier to use again.

But Boyd’s talk doesn’t stop here. She further explores what limits or facilitates neuroplasticity. She researches how people can recover from brain damages such as a stroke and developed therapies that prime or prepare the brain to learn — including simulation, exercise and robotics.

Her research is also helpful for healthy brains — here are the two most important lessons:

The primary driver of change in your brain is your behaviour.

Repeated practice is the most effective way to reprogram your mind.

In line with other research on a concept called the desired difficulty, her research has shown that increased struggle during practice leads to both more learning and greater structural change in the brain.

This is counterintuitive yet super powerful, so let me rephrase it: Learning works best when it feels hard. You want to struggle while learning.

The opposite the “fluency illusion” while, e.g. rereading material, can give you a false illusion of competence. A helpful antidote is self-testing.

There is no one size fits all approach to learning.

The 10,000-hour rule is overly simplified. No single intervention is going to work for all of us in the same way. Lara Boyd makes a call for personalized learning.

She then continues with something I don’t agree with: “The uniqueness of your brain will affect you both as a learner and also as a teacher. And now this idea helps us to understand why some children can thrive in traditional education settings and others don’t.”

It’s not your brain’s uniqueness that determines whether you thrive or barely survive in traditional education settings.

She neglects socio-economical factors such as emotional support or a family’s income level. Moreover, there are actually evidence-based techniques that seem to work for almost all of our brains, see (2), (5), and (7).

The most powerful lesson to remember from her talk is the following: You’re never too old to stop learning. Because of neuroplasticity, you can build the brain you want.

2) Learn How to Learn From Somebody Who Has Transformed Her Brain

It hadn’t always been clear that Barbara Oakley would become a professor of engineering. She fell off the “math bandwagon” early on and flunked her way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science.

At age 26, during her military job, calculus and physics looked like hieroglyphics to her. But she didn’t settle with the status quo. She asked herself:

“What if I could get those ideas? What if I could learn that weird math language?”

So she set on a journey to change her brain — a journey that would ultimately influence many other learners as well.

Dr Oakley reached out to top neuroscience and cognitive psychology professors around the world. She asked them:

“How did you learn? And how do you teach, so others could learn?”

One of the key answers she got was the distinction between two brain modes: the focused and the diffused mode.

For optimal learning, you need the focused and the diffused mode.

In focused mode, you think based on prior knowledge and rely on often used neural connections associated with problem-solving on familiar tasks.

The diffused mode, on the other hand, feels like daydreaming and enables unpredictable, new neural connections.

When you let your mind wander without actively thinking about the problem, you likely come up with a solution you hadn’t thought about. It’s the state where creativity flows freely.

To learn, you need both.

Many people optimize their days for focused mode thinking — through deep work, flow states, and other work sessions. Learning can happen during focused attention.

But the diffused mode is equally important. Diffused thinking only occurs when our minds can wander, for example, during a shower or while going for a walk. While this feels like taking a brain break, our mind continues to work for us.

A famous example for this is Dali’s and Edison’s napping time, as Dr Oakley shares in her TED talk. To access their diffused thinking mode, they looked at a problem and took a nap to come up with a solution.

To integrate the two thinking modes into your daily schedule (and to beat procrastination), you can use the Pomodoro technique — focusing for 25 minutes and giving yourself a pleasurable 5-minute brain break afterwards.

How to learn most effectively

Lastly, she gives a couple of applicable knowledge nuggets on how to learn most effectively.

  1. Exercise can increase your ability to both learn and to remember (also see 5).
  2. Testing yourself, e.g. through flashcards, until the solution flows like a song from your mind.
  3. Instead of rereading and highlighting, recall something from your memory. Look at a page, look away, and see what you can remember from the top of your mind.
  4. Understanding is not enough to build mastery of new material. Instead, you want to combine it with practice and repetition in different circumstances.

Now let’s look at a concrete example of how you can acquire new skills rapidly.

3) How to Learn Anything Fast in 20 Hours

What if you’d only need 45 minutes a day for a month to get decently good at skills such as language learning, coding, or arts?

Out of necessity (his newborn child minimized his free time), Josh Kaufman explored how to learn new things really fast. As a result, he developed the most efficient practice method.

The 4-step process to learn any skill fast

The 10,000-hour rule is a myth — instead, there are four steps neccessary for rapid skill acquisition:

  1. Deconstruct a skill by breaking it down into smaller pieces. The more you can break it apart, the better you can learn. For example, learning to write online becomes idea-collection, headline practice, introduction writing, editing, and distribution.
  2. Learn just enough to self-correct. Books, courses, etc. are often a way to procrastinate on the practice itself. Use resources to learn enough to know when you make a mistake. Then practice.
  3. Remove any distractions that keep you from practising. This aligns with what many smart people such as Clear or Thaler preach. Self-control and self-discipline depend much more on your environment than on your willpower. Ban your phone and TV from your practice.
  4. Really practice for the full 20 hours. You have to do the work and overcome initial frustration barriers. The greatest barrier to learning something is emotional, not intellectual. So, push through the initial “feeling stupid” phase and learn for 20 hours before your stop.

4) Techniques to Improve Your Memory Function

Memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval.

Nancy Chiaravalotti’s research focuses on the first part — remembering new information such as names of people you meet or items from your to-do list.

To enhance how you encode two very effective techniques:

Use imagery

Attach an image or picture to visualize the information. For example, if you want to remember the word ‘house’, picture your house. Thereby, you encode new information in two ways (verbal and visual), which increases brain activity.

A very effective way to remember things better is to combine unrelated ideas into a single image. The best image for any given word, is the one you associate with the strongest memory.

For example, “mum at the beach” for you would look completely different from me (because your picture would be your mum and a beach would be the most vivid beach you can bring to your mind).

Make it even more robust through context

What comes before or after a word by providing more semantic meaning. For example, instead of just a house, you can say the old house on the hill. Invent a mini-story around new information.

The best way is to combine both techniques. Chiaravalloti tested this with people who have memory injuries and found significant improvements after ten sessions.

Increased brain function through imagery and context practice. Source: Nancy Chiaravalotti.

You are able to change your brain. Start to visualize things and add a story to better remember what you want to learn.

5) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Brain Function

Neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki used to sit, read, and study for hours. She published well-respected articles and was on her way to becoming a renowned memory researcher.

Still, she felt something was off. It wasn’t until she started regular exercise that she felt better.

“After every sweat-inducing workout that I tried, I had this great mood boost and this great energy boost. And that’s what kept me going back to the gym,” she says in her TED talk. “I was able to focus and maintain my attention for longer than I had before. “

Because of the benefits she felt, Dr Suzuki did something unusual for researchers. She changed her research field — from memory pioneer to exercise explorer.

Exercise changes your brain in three main ways

And that’s how she came to the hypothesis that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do to your brain: “Moving your body has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain. And that can last for the rest of your life.”

Immediate attention increase. A single workout will immediately increase your levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. This, in turn, improves your ability to shift and focus attention for at least two hours following your workout.

Memory enhancement. Long-term exercise changes the hippocampus (critical for your capability to form and absorb new long-term memories). You produce new brain cells that improve your long-term memory.

Protective brain effects. Your brain is like a muscle. The more you’re exercising, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (critical for attention, decision-making, and focus) gets. The two areas will grow and slow down the effects of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer and dementia.

A single researcher’s team discoveries aren’t enough to confirm her hypothesis. But there’s a canon of research that attests to the brain-altering effects of exercise.

Researchers from Harvard have shown that exercise boosts verbal memory, thinking and learning. Plus, moving your body supports your ability to learn a new language by enhancing your ability to remember, recall and understand new vocabulary.​

You don’t need to become a marathon runner to unlock the benefits of exercise. As a rule of thumb, you want to exercise three to four times a week for at least 30 minutes.

6) Here’s How You Can Triple Your Memory

What’s the best way to memorize things?

Ricardo Lieuw On, the founder of remind learning, walks the audience through a memory palace to make them remember the first ten presidents of the United States.

He makes the case why creating bizarre images in a place you know helps you memorize things in order.

Yet, he doesn’t mention how to build a memory palace. Here’s my brief explanation if you want to learn the so-called “method of loci”:

How to develop your personal memory palace

There are five steps you can use to create your personal memory place.

  1. Pick a place. Choose a space you remember vividly, e.g., your childhood home or your workplace. Close your eyes and picture the floor plan. Now take a mental walk inside the location.​
  2. Identify specific features. Remember distinctive features about your space. If you use your childhood bedroom, for example, you can include your bed, shelf, closet, lamp, window, door, and carpet. These features will serve as memory slots.​
  3. Repeat the walk. ​Once you’ve identified a couple of objects, repeat the mental walk three times. Always use the same direction. Visualization can feel tough first, but it’ll become easier with practice. ​​
  4. Fill the spots with things you want to remember. ​Once you’ve established your memory palace, you can imprint it. Say you’re trying to memorize the planets in their distance to earth. All you need to do is take the known object (e.g. your bed), and visually place Mercury on it. You continue with the other planets on your other memory slots.​
  5. Revisit your memory palace from time to time. Repetition strengthens your neural representations. That’s why you want to visit your memory places once in a while. You can build as many places as you like because your brain capacity is unlimited.
How to build a memory palace (Source: WikiHow licensed under CC 2.0).

7) Supercharge Your Learning Practice With This Technique

Brain athletes can memorize a card deck within 12 seconds — TEDx speaker Boris Nikolai Konrad can do it in 30.

Boris also completed two master studies (physics and computer science) in the time of one and holds a PhD in psychology. He is fluent in English and Dutch and speaks decent Mandarin and Spanish.

Yet, he wasn’t born with a better brain than yours.

Building better memory is a skill you can learn.

These people (including Boris’s) don’t have a better memory than you do. Brains of memory athletes do not look different from yours.

In his talk, he shares a manual on how to develop a superbrain.

Just as Lieuw On (6) made his audience memorize 10 presidents, Konrad made his audience remember physics through a visual story.

And on top of these two memory experts, Jonathan Levi explores the same accelerated learning technique in his talk.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words.

In quintessence, all three share the idea that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Instead of remembering verbal facts, your brain is more likely to remember the information if you picture it (this is also in line with (4)).

Let’s say you want to remember China’s 14 neighbouring countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam.

Instead of rereading the list, again and again, a much more effective technique is to visualize an image for each of the countries. Here’s his example — but remember that yours can look completely different (as its dependent on your strongest association with a word).

Source: Jonathan Lewi’s TED TALK

In Conclusion

Some themes reoccur in all talks, such as your innate ability to change your brain whenever you want, the power of visualization, and adding context and stories to remember new information better.

Once you get better at the process of learning, you can apply it anywhere to your life — hobbies, jobs, or relationships. In Dr Oakley words:

“Learning how to learn is the most powerful tool you can ever grasp. Don’t follow your passions, but broaden your passions and your life will be enriched beyond measure.”

May you enjoy your learning journey.

My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.