Is there much known about how to recall information you’ve memorised at the right time / in the right context? I can memorise pieces of knowledge just fine with Anki, and if someone asks me a question about that piece of information I can tell them the answer no problem. However, recalling in the right situation that a piece of information exists and using it—that I’m finding much more of a challenge. I’ve been trying to find information on instilling information in such a way as to recall it in the right context for the last few days, but none of the avenues of inquiry I’ve searched have yielded anything on the level I’m wanting. Most articles I’ve found are talking about specific good habits, or memory, rather than their mechanisms and how to engage them.
I would try imagining being in the given situation, and then doing the thing. Then hopefully in the real situation the information would jump into my mind.
To do it Anki-style, perhaps the question card could contain a specific instruction to imagine something. So the pattern is not just “read the question, say answer, verify answer”, but “read the question, imagine the situation, say answer, imagine the answer, verify answer”, or something like this.
Without imagining the situation, I believe the connection will not be made in the real time. Unless...
Maybe there is another way. Install a generic habit of asking “what things and I supposed to remember in a situation X?” for some specific values of X. Then you have two parts. The first part is to use imagination to teach yourself asking this question in the situation X. The second part is to prepare the lists for each situations, and memorize them doing Anki. The advantage is that if you change the list later, you don’t have to retrain the whole habit.
Only somewhat relatedly… something I found useful when recovering from brain damage was developing the habit of: a) telling myself explicitly, out loud, what I was about to do, why I was about to do it, and what I needed to do next, and b) when I found myself suddenly lost and confused, explicitly asking myself, out loud, what I was doing, why I was doing it, what I needed to do next.
I found that the explicit verbal scaffolding often helped me remember things that the more implicit mechanisms that were damaged by the injury (I had a lot of deficits to attention, short-term memory, that sort of thing) could no longer do.
It also got me a lot of strange looks, which I somewhat perversely came to appreciate.
Is there much known about how to recall information you’ve memorised at the right time / in the right context? I can memorise pieces of knowledge just fine with Anki, and if someone asks me a question about that piece of information I can tell them the answer no problem. However, recalling in the right situation that a piece of information exists and using it—that I’m finding much more of a challenge. I’ve been trying to find information on instilling information in such a way as to recall it in the right context for the last few days, but none of the avenues of inquiry I’ve searched have yielded anything on the level I’m wanting. Most articles I’ve found are talking about specific good habits, or memory, rather than their mechanisms and how to engage them.
I would try imagining being in the given situation, and then doing the thing. Then hopefully in the real situation the information would jump into my mind.
To do it Anki-style, perhaps the question card could contain a specific instruction to imagine something. So the pattern is not just “read the question, say answer, verify answer”, but “read the question, imagine the situation, say answer, imagine the answer, verify answer”, or something like this.
Without imagining the situation, I believe the connection will not be made in the real time. Unless...
Maybe there is another way. Install a generic habit of asking “what things and I supposed to remember in a situation X?” for some specific values of X. Then you have two parts. The first part is to use imagination to teach yourself asking this question in the situation X. The second part is to prepare the lists for each situations, and memorize them doing Anki. The advantage is that if you change the list later, you don’t have to retrain the whole habit.
Note: I never tried any of this.
Only somewhat relatedly… something I found useful when recovering from brain damage was developing the habit of:
a) telling myself explicitly, out loud, what I was about to do, why I was about to do it, and what I needed to do next, and
b) when I found myself suddenly lost and confused, explicitly asking myself, out loud, what I was doing, why I was doing it, what I needed to do next.
I found that the explicit verbal scaffolding often helped me remember things that the more implicit mechanisms that were damaged by the injury (I had a lot of deficits to attention, short-term memory, that sort of thing) could no longer do.
It also got me a lot of strange looks, which I somewhat perversely came to appreciate.