2. the opportunity to create memories. I know the first rule doesn't work, and no one (well, very few people) can really stick to it. So there is a second opportunity to create memories of existing knowledge. Specifically, it is through:
(1) Always discuss or tell others. Always discuss and communicate with friends and talk about what you have summed up over a period of time, so that others can learn new things, and you can also learn new things from others, and each other will strengthen their memory and understanding in the process of expression. This is a win-win situation. Besides face-to-face communication, a good mailing list and BBS are also good ways. (For a detailed explanation, please refer to "Teaching is the Best Learning" in the third section of the blog [1].)
(2) Organize your notes. Organize your notes regularly-if you haven't taken notes yet, start now-to consolidate faded memories and give you a chance to re-examine your knowledge. I often find that the first memory of knowledge is often biased, or I only see one aspect, or I only focus on one point. Looking back after a period of time can often combine some new thinking and knowledge since this time to get more things. If you pay attention, you will find that memory is actually a very fragile thing, and our initial understanding of things is almost certainly not profound. Tip: I know you are lazy (so am I), so in order to create a better opportunity to organize your notes, you can use an electronic note-taking software that is difficult to retrieve without organizing. Although it seems a little troublesome at first glance, it forces you to reread your knowledge and classify it every once in a while-so does your memory: well-classified information is easier to extract.
(3) writing. The knowledge learned in a period of time is systematically "strung together" according to a theme, which greatly enriches the relationship between knowledge and increases countless extraction clues. I often do this, and almost all the articles on my blog are like this. For example, I have been paying attention to a theme: what are the sciences related to learning thinking (cognitive science, psychology, behavioral economics, etc.)? ) can help us make better judgments, decisions, study, memory and life. I divide this big theme into some small themes, such as "Get out of your Shawshank", which mainly summarizes the blind spots in thinking and how to avoid them. The series "Thinking Change Life" summarizes some knowledge related to thinking according to small themes. The purpose is still how to become a better independent thinker and make a more rational judgment on things. These small themes all boil down to the big theme of "thinking changes life". For a detailed explanation of the benefits of writing, please refer to Writing is a Better Thinking [2].
3. Put yourself in the "virtual experience" that others have experienced. Our autobiographical memory seems to have a separate storage mechanism. One evidence is that some guys with so-called "genius syndrome" due to other genetic defects have super autobiographical memory (note that it is not super general memory, but autobiographical memory). In addition, we also know from our daily experience that we can clearly distinguish our own personality or way of doing things from those of our friends. We can very quickly guess "what so-and-so will think in this situation" (this is called the theory of mind) in different scenarios, but we will not confuse it with "what I will think", which proves that in our memory, knowledge about ourselves and knowledge about others are distinct.
For the study of empirical knowledge, it is not enough to just watch others do or listen to others, and often you can't remember it when you get to yourself. In this way, although you have learned knowledge, you will not jump out of your brain at the right time, which belongs to "dead" knowledge. There are many possible reasons for this. One of the key reasons may be that "other people's things" and "own things" are handled differently in the brain. You may not only feel pain when others hit the wall, but also gloat and grin when you scratch your skin. Other people's bad things never seem to happen to themselves. So it is always difficult for us to learn from other people's experience. One way to make up for it is to try to imagine yourself as someone else's situation, to experience what others have experienced, to feel them, and to connect them with your emotional memory (the emotions given to us by evolution are excellent clues to extract and the best catalyst to strengthen memory). Although it is still not as profound as personal experience, it seems to be the best way we can do. Because we really imagine ourselves in these scenes, we are the first-person perspective in our own imaginary scenes, so it is easier to recall our feelings when we encounter similar scenes in the future.
Of course, another method that is often needed is practice. Compared with the "virtual practice" just mentioned, the impression of actual practice is naturally much deeper. However, not all practices are necessary or possible. For example, you don't need to go bankrupt once to understand what is the correct risk control in the financial market-you just need to work it out on paper. There is evidence that a fish in Africa can even use simple reasoning instead of actual experience. For example, it clashed with fish B and failed. If it observes that fish B clashed with fish C and fish B failed, it can directly realize that it is no match for fish C, thus avoiding the so-called "direct experience" and possible disastrous consequences (the evolutionary value here is obvious).
In addition, many times you can't really traverse every life trajectory to see what will happen. You don't have such time resources. But only through other people's "alternative experience" and their own "virtual experience" to get as much information as possible.
4. Abstraction and generalization. If one thing is one thing, then we will never learn "future" knowledge. The result is that every wall has to be hit by itself to test its hardness. One of the most outstanding abilities of human brain is powerful inductive reasoning, or what we often say: generalization, generalization, analogy and abstraction. The meaning is almost the same, it is to generalize the laws obtained in special circumstances to general situations. Previous experiments on laser killing tumors fully demonstrated the value of abstraction. Without abstraction, knowledge will always be linked to irrelevant details, and it will be confined to a narrow concrete scene and cannot be spread. Abstraction makes it rise one or more levels on the knowledge tree (for non-geeks: imagine an inverted tree with roots), so it can be applied to more branches. Similarly, when you encounter a specific problem, don't forget to abstract the problem, eliminate irrelevant details, and abstract the problem from a specific branch, so as to conform to the previous summary conclusion.
The above introduction itself is a bit abstract. For example, we get a law with a wide range of application from a large number of economic decisions-economic decisions can be abstracted as considering the input/return ratio. This is the abstraction of knowledge acquisition stage; In the problem-solving stage, when we encounter a decision-making problem, we can consider it from the input/return dimension, instead of looking at it like a headless fly and suddenly thinking that it is right to look at that option. If you don't know the essence of the problem (such as economic decision-making), it is difficult to use the conclusions derived before (such as input/return, risk estimation, etc.). ), but will be controlled by some predictable irrationality of our primitive brain (such as conformity, authority, and even the most terrible behavior trap-"delaying decision-making") and become a normal fool.
-The Dark Ages of Liu Weipeng.