h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How we learn is different for different people.
Like your essay, there are different modes of memory [learning].
Most of us have a bit of all the different modes.
Most of us also favor one or two of the modes of memory.

It is very interesting to read about your “landscape.”
There are two modes in school, rote and associative memory.
In rote memory we just repeat something until it “sinks in.”
In associative memory, we [and you] link to something already in memory.

I have a learning disability with rote memory.
But this is a two-edged sword.
While my disability does have serious drawbacks, it also has the blessing of allowing me to be better than “average” when finding associations.
Some puns come to my mind easily.

I would guess that is also true of Dmitri.
The harder “d me try” the bitter. [smiles]

I like that. I agree - association is athe best tool for me. I always tried to get my language students to use it - some of them said they'd always thought they couldn't learn languages because of the memorisation involved, and now they knew better.

For instance, the subjunctive was soooo much easier to remember if you pretended you were being interrogated by Keystone-Cops Gestapo agents.

And after we'd laughed our way through a ludicrous timekeeping exercise, one bubba growled, 'I'm just WAITIN' for some German to ask me what time it is.'

Tactile memory helps for grownups, just as it did for my Laotian kindergartners. Merely the act of *reaching* for that dictionary one more time will trigger the memory of the word, BEFORE you look it up.

As a counter-example, I learned that writing something that I never looked at again [like class notes] made the lesson more memorable.

My theory is that the muscular coordination also coordinates the memories. Typing the same thing does not have the same effect. I am not sure why. Perhaps the handwriting is more of an intuitive act.

That could be it. (For me, typing does it, cos I touch-type and have a muscle memory of the keyboard - one in English, one in German...)

I think you've just explained a Carlos Castaneda moment.

Castaneda's Don Juan told him, 'Learn to take notes with an invisible pencil.'

Well all I can say is that I more or less have to write down my dreams if I have any hope of remembering them. I keep a little notebook by my bedside for that. But everything else that I need to remember, I generally can remember without special effort. I do make notes on various pieces of paper to remind me of things I need to investigate, though.

I think that's a great idea - you'll notice, we got MVP to write on that subject, too, because she's a great note-taker.

I just really can't do it, because I can't read it afterwards.

When I was at uni, I kept notes so that the prof would know I was paying attention. But they were usually garbage. Except for one course, when I decided to use note-taking to practice my command of Suetterlin, the pre-1930 version of German script. It's so angular, even I could do it. It looks like 'vvvvWWWWVVVVVwwwwmmmmnnnnUu...' with a few curly things thrown in.

Then one day, a student who'd missed a class asked to borrow my notes. I panicked - but it turned out she was an older woman who had grown up in Germany before the war, so she could read it.

Dmitri, you should see what my handwriting looks like when I'm woken up at three in the morning by my cat and decide I might as well jot down what I'd been dreaming.

You could dictate to the .