In another project spaced repetition project I used Anki to learn to distinguish color that he didn’t distinguish beforehand.
I think I managed to do this when learning flags, with Chad and Romania. It seemed like I got to the point where I could reliably distinguish their flags on my phone, whereas when I started, I did no better than chance. I did consciously explain this to somebody else as something interesting, but now that I think about it, I failed to find it as interesting as I should have, because the idea that seeing a card a few times on Anki can increase my phenomenal granularity or decrease the amount of phenomenal data that my brain throws away, is pretty amazing.
A while ago I also learned country flags via Anki. While the flags in Wikipedia are different I’m not sure that the flags of Chad and Romania are different in reality. German law for example simple says that the colors of the flag are red, gold and black. It doesn’t specify the exact shade of red and different flag producers might produce slightly different shades of red.
Having phenomenal granularity for distinguishing different flags is also not that useful in real life. I think the key question is: “What are areas where having more phenomenal granularity actually matters?”
Examples that I have found are:
Audio: Phonemes, pitch of musical notes, duration of musical notes
Visual: Colors, Speed Reading
Kinesthetic: A lot of interesting stuff in somatics. Apart from that heartrate, breathing rate and things that are more difficult to label. Emotions are very important because noticing your emotions affect your reasoning, whether or not you are aware of them.
Taste: Recognise different spices. Tim Ferriss writes about training that skill in 4-Hour Body.
I think I managed to do this when learning flags, with Chad and Romania. It seemed like I got to the point where I could reliably distinguish their flags on my phone, whereas when I started, I did no better than chance. I did consciously explain this to somebody else as something interesting, but now that I think about it, I failed to find it as interesting as I should have, because the idea that seeing a card a few times on Anki can increase my phenomenal granularity or decrease the amount of phenomenal data that my brain throws away, is pretty amazing.
A while ago I also learned country flags via Anki. While the flags in Wikipedia are different I’m not sure that the flags of Chad and Romania are different in reality. German law for example simple says that the colors of the flag are red, gold and black. It doesn’t specify the exact shade of red and different flag producers might produce slightly different shades of red.
Having phenomenal granularity for distinguishing different flags is also not that useful in real life. I think the key question is: “What are areas where having more phenomenal granularity actually matters?”
Examples that I have found are:
Audio: Phonemes, pitch of musical notes, duration of musical notes
Visual: Colors, Speed Reading
Kinesthetic: A lot of interesting stuff in somatics. Apart from that heartrate, breathing rate and things that are more difficult to label. Emotions are very important because noticing your emotions affect your reasoning, whether or not you are aware of them.
Taste: Recognise different spices. Tim Ferriss writes about training that skill in 4-Hour Body.
Mental: Credence, time intervals