How to Learn Once and Remember Forever

In this video, I'm going to teach you how to learn something once and remember it forever. And I'll do this by introducing a framework I call the memory ladder. This framework is built on some neuroscience research that has found that when certain conditions are met, it allows memories to be stored essentially permanently. As a learning coach, I've taught this to a diverse range of clients across ages and industries, and it's been getting great results, so it should work for you, too. By the end of this video, you should know how to improve your memory and save potentially hundreds of hours by not constantly relearning everything you forget. Now, the best place to start to understand this idea of essentially permanent memories is to look at childhood memories. We all have childhood memories that feel like they've stayed with us for life. It might be your first day at school, the first time you rode a bike, even just a moment where some new concept clicked for you for the very first time. And usually there is no conscious attempt to try and keep and hold on to these memories. But yet they stay with us for what seems like forever. But when we look at the research on childhood memory, one of the many interesting aspects you find is that there are also memories that we don't really have conscious awareness of, yet they still shape who we are as an adult. For example, stressful experiences in childhood can influence the way that we manage stress as an adult. Likewise, uh the way that we manage our relationships are often influenced by the way that we saw our parents manage their own relationships. But those early experiences are often not things that we can easily recall. And so this is actually one of the paradoxes of memory, which is how can a memory potentially shape us for life affecting our behavior on a day-to-day basis when we can't even remember it? Could it be that even when we forget a memory, it isn't actually lost, we just can't access it anymore, but it's still stored somewhere? This is the question that a group of researchers in 2015 try to uncover. Neuroscience researchers out of the incredible Susumu Tony research group did an experiment on memory that seems like it's ripped straight out of science fiction. They got a group of mice, placed them in a new environment, and gave them a very light foot shock just enough so that these mice were able to associate that new environment with danger. This created a fear memory, and researchers were able to observe this because when the mice went back into the environment, they would freeze. They then labeled the specific neurons that were involved in that fear memory. And the technique that they used to label those neurons also made those neurons sensitive to light. This becomes really important later. They then tried to erase this memory by blocking protein synthesis in these mice. Why does blocking protein synthesis erase a memory? It's because uh we know from research that uh protein synthesis is required to consolidate long-term memory immediately after learning something. And so after learning this fear memory by having their protein synthesis blocked, that memory shouldn't be able to consolidate and it will just sort of fade away and they will forget it. This worked. Uh you put the mice back in the new environment, they're not freezing anymore. It seems like they have forgotten about this fear memory. Uh this new environment does not present any danger to them. But you remember how I said that they labeled it in a way that is sensitive to light. The researchers then used a laser to artificially stimulate those neurons using light, the same neurons that were involved in creating the memory. And what they found was that in response to that light, these memory neurons were reactivated and the mice began to show the fear response again. And the reason I'm telling you about this study is because it shows that when a memory is forgotten, it's not necessarily that it's gone. It could be simply that we have lost the pathways to access and recall that memory again. And so when we think about learning something once and being able to remember it forever, it's not just about storing the memory. It's about storing it and then maintaining that memory in such a way that we can then recall it in the way that we need to. And these are two separate challenges. And so the way I want you to think about this is that we have memory storage. We then have memory recall, but we also want to think about the way this memory is recalled. So we can call this the levels of recall. The most important part to get right about improving your memory is that you have to improve your memory at the level of recall you actually need. And I'm not just talking about what percentage of something you're able to retain. A great example of this is this guy called Kim Peak. Kim

Peak is this guy who was born with a medical abnormality in his brain which gave him pretty much memory superpowers. It's the most ridiculous display of memory that I've ever seen documented. His memory was so good that he could verbatim, word for word, with every grammar and punctuation mark, recite thousands of books that he would read. In fact, he could recite them verbatim back to front. But as a side effect of his condition, he also had a lot of issues with reasoning and problem solving. He wasn't really able to do a lot of basic problems solving tasks. And so the point here is that it's not enough just to have unfathomably amazing memory. Actually, what's more important is that your memory is just good enough, but the way you can use what you remember has to be very high. And so the real goal is not actually permanent memory or remembering something forever. The real goal, what you probably looking for is something that we call transfer ready knowledge. Transfer ready knowledge refers to things in your memory that you can recall and you can recall it in a way that is suitable for problem solving an actual application. And so in order to learn something once and have transfer ready knowledge available forever there are certain conditions that need to be met. I will tell you straight off the bat that meeting every single one of these conditions would take so much time and effort and planning uh that it is basically practically completely not viable. I guess the long story short is that in a day-to-day practical reality, it's not possible to have transfer ready knowledge available to you forever just by learning at once. But by meeting at least some of these conditions and spending a little bit more time and effort on meeting those conditions, we can boost the amount of transfer ready knowledge that's available to us by a huge amount. So what are these conditions? Without going too deep into a lot of complicated neuroscience research, uh these conditions are emotional salience. So if uh something is incredibly emotionally stirring, it is more likely to be remembered long term. The second is high levels of novelty or survival. So something is incredibly new uh and groundbreaking mentally or incredibly relevant for your survival. It tends to also be held in your brain for longer. The third condition is ample sleep. So sleep is an incredibly important mechanism for memory consolidation. It's actually called sleep dependent memory consolidation. And lots of very complicated processes uh happen in your brain when you sleep that transfers uh recently learned short-term memory into long-term stores and allows you to replay those memories so that your recall improves as well. So, if you've got a bunch of stuff that you need to learn and you don't have a lot of time and you're thinking about doing that allnighter, you may be able to get away with it for a couple of nights, but at a certain point, sleep deprivation is actually going to make all of that learning go to waste because you're not able to access those memories properly. Now, the next three conditions are a little bit more technical. They are retrieval, semantic encoding or processing and integration. And I'll explain what each of these things means uh really simply for you. Retrieval is the scientific term for recalling memories, using the memory. So you learn something, you need to actually use what you learn. This could be answering questions, literally just recalling facts, uh solving problems, using them, teaching someone, really anything that involves you accessing that memory and playing it out is a form of retrieval. But there is some nuance here in that the way you do your retrieval affects how you become more fluent with that knowledge. So, if the way you need to use that knowledge is to solve this really complicated problem at work and come to this important decision and make this strategy, but the way that you are practicing retrieving that knowledge is through reciting out flash cards, there's not going to be a lot of great transfer there. This is really important because retrieval is particularly sensitive to something that's called Q sensitivity. This means that the context in which you're trying to recall the memory significantly influences how well you're able to recall that memory. Basically, if you learn something in one way and you're constantly using it then all of a sudden you need to use it in a different way, you're going to struggle with that. So, what I always say is that you need to practice how you play, but you also need to practice regularly. For new memory to be something that you're able to recall for a long period of time is usually not enough just to retrieve it once the next day. This is where the term spaced retrieval comes from. The idea that you should do a retrieval practice every now

and again. As a general rule of thumb, I often say that for best results, try to retrieve it the next day, then a week later, then a month later. But these are very loose guidelines. And at the end of the day, it really comes down to when you can fit it into your schedule. As a bonus, if you're already using this new knowledge every day at work, you don't really need to schedule in extra time just to practice retrieving it because you're already doing it at work. So, that's retrieval. The second thing is semantic encoding or semantic processing. This is basically your brain's ability to create meaning and context in what you're learning. This comes down to how you learn it in the first place. And this is equally as important, if not more important, than practicing different types of retrieval. There's a saying that goes memory is the residue of thought and in fact in memory research uh we often use the term memory traces and these residues these traces are generated by the type of thinking that we do when we first learn the new information. usually information that is more relevant to us uh that applies to the problems that we're using or that we deliberately try to find ways to connect it with our prior knowledge or with other related facts and concepts will be encoded more strongly and therefore our retention will be greater. This is a good time to introduce the third one which was integration because integration means that memories are stronger if they integrate with your own self schema or self identity. For example, if I'm learning about a bunch of leadership skills, I'm going to remember these skills better and to a higher quality. If I tell myself this is the type of leader I want to become. If I associate my identity with that, it helps our brain to find relevance, build connections, and then ultimately feel that this information is meaningful enough to hold on to. And so if you remember that I said that it's not really viable to meet all of these conditions in a practical day-to-day life. And that's because when you're learning something new, you often can't really control how emotionally salient it is or how novel or related to your survival that information is. So even though these two are technically conditions for enduring memory, we can't really do much about this. We can do things to optimize our sleep and we can certainly employ strategies to help build meaning and context more effectively and to use more strategic retrieval strategies. And this is where my memory ladder framework comes in. The memory ladder creates a very simple question that you need to answer for yourself. It gives you a decision that you need to make when you learn something. And that decision is how much will I pay for this memory? And we're not paying in money. We're paying in time and effort. At the top of this memory ladder, we have strategies that involve a high amount of time and effort. And in exchange for that time and effort, you receive a high level of memory quality. High quality memory is more enduring. it lasts longer, you retain it for longer, and you can usually use that memory in more complex ways. So, when you're learning something new, sometimes you need to be an expert at that. It's not enough just to have a few facts. And so, it's worth paying that time and effort to develop that expertise. On the other hand, at the bottom of the ladder, these are things that involve very little time and effort. And as you'd expect, these result in very low quality memory. So lowquality memory being very transient, probably short-term, and you can probably only use it in very, very simple ways like reciting a definition, recalling some facts. And the thing is that top of the memory ladder is not always the best place to be. If I get you to do some kind of task and you don't know how to do this task, you probably don't need to become an expert at that field just to complete the task, it may be good enough to not even remember anything. You can just ask Chachi BT what to do. It just tells you what to do and you literally do it. And so if this is not something that you need to do repeatedly to a high level of expertise, you're not dealing with things that have a high level of consequence or where you need to be solving complex problems in complex systems. You may not need to be at the top of the memory ladder. And so here's how you make this memory ladder into something that is strategic and practical. So the first place that I want to start is actually uh not on the ladder at all. It's actually something that sits next to the ladder because this is a very special situation where it involves very little time, very little effort and over time it also produces a high memory quality. So even though it is very easy and even though it doesn't take much time, uh it's beneficial for your memory in the long term. And this here

is the strategy of joining my newsletter. It only takes 3 to 5 minutes to read uh one of my newsletters per week. And in these newsletters, I teach you strategies that sit on different parts of the memory ladder to improve your memory quality, to help you to manage your learning, time and your productivity a little bit more efficiently in some sustainable ways that I found work really well for myself and my clients over my 14, 15 years of coaching this. I type all those emails myself that I I don't use any AI to generate them. It's just coming straight from my own brain. So, if you're interested in signing up to that, I'll leave a link for you to join in the description below. Coming back to the full memory ladder, let's start at the very bottom. Strategies at the bottom of the memory ladder often involve repetition and volume. So, the best example of this is just flash cards. Uh, you create a bunch of flash cards for yourself quizzing you on just very specific things like define this term. What is the name for this molecule? And you just repeat that. you repeat that again and again and again. This is a way that you can build memory. This isn't a super efficient way of building high quality memory. Usually, you're not going to have a lot of transfer with that knowledge, which means that if you get tested on that in a slightly different way, your memory is a bit more fragile. You can't access it so well. And usually you also need to keep up with this space retrieval very frequently. And so, uh that can actually be very timeconuming overall. But for some things, this is still the preferred option because the time and effort it would require to build that memory to a high quality may actually take longer than just doing all of that repetition in volume. For example, there might be this particular molecule that's used in a pathway and you just need to remember the name of this molecule and it's just like a series of random letters and numbers. You could go and read a thousand pages of someone's research dissertation to understand exactly why this molecule is called what it is and why it functions the way that it does. But if the only time you need to learn this is for the single specific pathway, the time it takes just to memorize that is probably better than the time it takes to uh go and learn this super out of scope in-depth piece of work. So you can see how depending on your goal, how you need to use that piece of information, how important it is for you, and how recurring it is, it dictates whether it's actually worthwhile spending the time and effort and paying for that memory or not. And so what are some of these strategies on the upper rungs of the ladder? In the middle of the ladder, we have strategies that involve diverse types of retrieval practice. As a student, for me, this involved doing a lot of different types of practice questions and quizzing myself, trying to apply my knowledge in in lots of different ways, like writing essays and writing summaries, making practice questions for myself. Now, the great thing about any kind of learning through doing more retrieval practice is that it is probably the most accurate way to demonstrate your true quality of memory. If you learn something and then you try to retrieve it and you can only remember 50% of it and the 50% you do remember you can only use it at a very basic level that's you know empirically it's telling you that you the quality of that memory is not very good. A really simple tip to make sure that you are practicing how you play is to just think about how you will need to use this knowledge when it really matters and just simulate that in your retrieval practice. You might also be able to use AI to give you some feedback on this as well. Now, even though it's so important to do diverse retrieval practice, the main blocker is that it does take a decent amount of time and effort, there's this balance between, do I spend this time on practicing my retrieval and something that I learned before, or do I spend this time on learning the new stuff? And what I'd recommend is that if the knowledge you're trying to gain is something that you need to have to a reasonably high quality, then prioritize doing the retrieval on the stuff that you learned before and try to learn the new stuff as quickly as possible just to get to the point where you can start retrieving on that. In reality, most people, and no offense, but most people uh the strategies that they're using to learn material for the first time are not that great anyway. And so if you spend, you know, two hours reading something and writing a set of meticulous notes, the quality of memory you're creating with that method is probably not much different from literally just reading through it kind of quickly. And the benefit you would gain from just retrieving on it and learning after you've retrieved on it when you found your gaps is going to be much higher than the same amount of time spent on just trying to remember it better, learning it the first time around. Now once we get to the top of the ladder, this is stuff that really involves deep evaluation, comparison, and synthesis. What this means is that when you learn something new, you are taking the time and the effort to ask

yourself, how is this similar or different to what I already know, to what I previously learned? How is this similar or different to something that I literally just learned, an adjacent concept? You ask yourself, how does it fit together? How is this all fitting into a big picture? How is this relevant to my purposes, the problem that I'm trying to solve? One of the best questions to ask yourself is, why is this important? You're taking the time and effort to make a value judgment on how important this thing is compared to everything else. This is time spent just thinking about things. You're not consuming any more information. Maybe you're looking up a few things if you've got questions that you're trying to answer, but you're taking the time to really go deep on this knowledge to understand it and to connect it. The time extends even more if you're synthesizing. Synthesizing means you're actually trying to create a model or a framework that you can use to see this through. You're not only taking in new information, you're not only thinking about why it's important, you're then trying to generate a whole new way of thinking about this topic based on your own conception. And so when you do this, the memory it creates, the residues are incredibly strong. It is so deeply connected in a web that not only is the memory incredibly enduring, but you can also usually use this in much more complicated ways because you've thought through all those complexities. And you can even use this kind of thinking for very small pieces of information like if you're meeting someone and you're trying to remember their name. You could use uh a lower memory ladder strategy such as just repeating that name in your head multiple times. Or you could use a retrieval strategy like trying to use their name in conversations throughout the night. Or you could just do a little mental exercise where you say, "hm, this person's name is Josh. Well, how is this person similar or different to another Josh that I know? What do I think of when I think of the word Josh? How does my mental image of that word compare to this person? " Even just doing this very quick comparative thinking helps to strengthen that memory. And so while I say that these top of the ladder strategies take more time and effort, it's really just time and effort upfront and it may actually save you time in the long term by not doing so much repetition. And so if you want to learn something just once and remember it forever and use that information through transfer ready knowledge, then you should be doing as much of this as possible when you learn it. And even if it doesn't last forever, it's going to last a pretty long time. And if it happens to be emotionally salient and incredibly novel and relevant to your survival, then you may just have unlocked a new lifelong memory. If you're interested in learning some more strategies and you want to see how I think about learning as a learning coach, then I recommend that you check out this video here where I go through a master class on just that. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.