https://praxis.fortelabs.co/progressive-summarization-v-the-faster-you-forget-the-faster-you-learn-916b59a4e00f/
In Part I, I introduced Progressive Summarization, a method for easily creating highly discoverable notes. In Part II, I gave you examples and metaphors of the method in action. Part III included my top recommendations for how to perform it effectively. Part IV showed how to apply the technique to non-text media.
In Part V, I’ll show you how Progressive Summarization directly contributes to the ultimate outcome we’re seeking with our information consumption: learning.
In traditional schooling, the ability to recall something from memory is taken as the clearest evidence that someone has learned something. This is the regurgitation model of learning — the more accurately you are able to reproduce it, without adding any of your own interpretation or creativity, the higher your mark.
But in the real world, perfect recall is far from ideal.
This New York Times article tells the fascinating story of the 60 or so people known to have a condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). They can remember most of the days of their lives as clearly as the rest of us remember yesterday. Ask one of them what they were doing on the afternoon of March 16, 1996, and within just a few seconds they’ll be able to describe that day in vivid detail.
These are people who have achieved the holy grail of recall — perfect memory. And yet, they often describe it as a burden:
“Everyone has those forks in the road, ‘If I had just done this and gone here, and nah nah nah,’ everyone has those,” she told me. “Except everyone doesn’t remember every single one of them.” Her memory is a map of regrets, other lives she could have lived. “I do this a lot: what would be, what would have been, or what would be today,” she said….“I’m paralysed, because I’m afraid I’m going to fuck up another whole decade,” she said. She has felt this way since 30 March, 2005, the day her husband, Jim, died at the age of 42. Price bears the weight of remembering their wedding on Saturday, 1 March 2003, in the house she had lived in for most of her life in Los Angeles, just before her parents sold it, as heavily as she remembers seeing Jim’s empty, wide-open eyes after he suffered a major stroke, had fallen into a coma and been put on life support on Friday, 25 March 2005.
It seems that perfect memory isn’t quite the blessing you’d expect.
I propose that forgetting is just as important to the process of learning as recall. As the world changes faster and more unpredictably, attachment to ideas and paradigms of the past becomes more and more of a liability.
Contrast this with most books and courses on “accelerated learning,” which tend to offer two kinds of approaches:
This leads to techniques like spritzing, listening to audiobooks on 2x speed, speed reading, focusing on already highly condensed sources, blocking distractions, deep focus, and biaural beats.
This leads to techniques like spaced repetition, memory palaces, mnemonics, music and rhyming, acronyms, and mindmapping.
All these techniques work. And they completely miss the point. They both operate with the same misguided metaphor: the mind as an empty vessel. You fill it with information like filling a jug with water, which you can then retrieve and put to use later. With this framing, your goal is to maximize how much you can get in, and how much you can take out.
But there’s a fundamental difference between a mind and a static container like a jug of water or a filing cabinet: a mind can not just store things; it can take action. And taking action is where true learning actually takes place.