Our brain is limited. Not only that there exists a forgetting curve. We actually lose things we learn. But there is something even more troubling than knowledge retention…
Remembering – half of the story
If we take a look at the memory retention curve. It looks sad but it’s not the worst thing.
What can be worst than forgetting? Well, the key to increased memory retention is repetition, so we need to repeat what we’ve learned at certain intervals to improve our curve. But even then we’re only halfway.
Use it
Worst then forgetting is not knowing how to use what we’ve learned outside the context in which we’ve learned it. In the world of machine learning, it’s called cross-domain knowledge transfer. So how can we apply what we’ve learned and remembered to contexts other than the original one? How can we expand our understanding? How can we deepen it?
I will show you a tool that has been immensely helpful for my struggle with CDKT. I hope it will help you as well. It allowed me to see more, to understand more to create new usages for what I already know.
There’s always a tool
So what is that tool ? It’s simple: examples.
Ok, thank you for reading on, you are clearly one of those curious types. Good for you!
What do I mean by examples? I mean deliberate practice. I mean to imagine and list as many examples of the application of what we’ve learned as possible. For as many different contexts that we can possibly think of. This will force our brains to create new pathways. To decompose and reconstruct concepts in various ways, which in its very basic form is what understanding is all about.
In this blog I will provide a CDKT section for every new thing that we learn, it surely will help us not only design better systems but also be better students of day to day life.
Enjoy!
Here is the ever growing list of CDKT’s. Feel free to know more!