>>as a student, I am interested to know what is the best way to keep what I learn from science textbooks in my memory ( not a cramming-for-tests memory, but long term memory)
>
>I doubt that anyone really knows; I have found that in at least one case
>(German) I retained the material much better than I thought I would, even
>with years of total disuse.
>
>I might suggest that any facts be related to structure and concepts. Are
>concepts, once learned, ever forgotten? It is extremely difficult to test
>this.
Yeah, I agree. As I'm sure any mathematician knows, it takes far less
"knowledge" or "memory" or whatever if one learns the concept because he
understands it rather than memorizes it. And, I'll take this even one
step further: When I went to graduate school, my "concept" learning
method occasionally broke down; I actually forgot a few concepts. Although
I'm not sure this is true, I suspected it was because I was being exposed
to more information in a shorter period of time than ever before. Further,
I theorized that, since I had this new concentration of information, my
brain wasn't going to retain even a concept unless it was "ready" or
"uncluttered". The adjustment I made was to make sure that I was "ready"
when I needed to learn, making a conscious effort to turn off the background
stuff I was thinking of. This sounds a lot like concentration problems,
but I don't think it was that; maybe my brain was working on these other
things subconsciously and the problem I had was like static on AM radio.
Although I don't completely understand what was happening (could you figure
that out?!), it did teach me that I learned a lot better when I made
myself "ready". Anyone got any thoughts on that or can anyone put what
