some pseudoscientific slop i wrote one morning trying to figure out what the TART system should do differently and how exactly i should be writing notes
What I think “knowledge” is
- The brain encodes all of its “knowledge” as connections between neurons. Because it is encoded through connections, relations, interdependence, it means that learning strategies that connect ideas in many modalities (spatial, visual, audible, olfactory, abstract ideas) are the most effective, much like how building structures are made stable with more pillars and legs. It is physically connected through the branching of propagating signals, allowing certain neurons to fire together in many permutations that manifest in creative ideas/output. It is not a hard drive that encodes raw data as english words. Additionally, concepts and ideas are further encoded into the strength of neuron connections; some connections and branches propagate signals with more intensity and activation than other weaker, “thinner” branches. “Facts”, “knowledge”, and “concepts” are emergent from these extremely intricate structures.
In short, “knowledge” and “mastery” only exist as literal branches and pathways between many neurons.
What I think is necessary for kickstarting knowledge
- In order to create these branches, some amount of guiding and prompting is required. This is why it’s recommended to get advice from mentors and masters instead of self-study, it is to ensure your created neural pathways are optimal (at least to some extent since building on generational knowledge is usually a good idea). Through their carefully crafted guidance, they lead the river of neuron-pathway development into the right directions, the right associations, the right conceptions, the right behavior. And even if you only had self study material, that’s much better than having nothing: no learning can happen without any stimuli, without any digging of the river, without any initial spark to drive further sparks. If the scaffolding is too distant, the topics taught too abstract, no prerequisites acquired, the learning is ineffective and is equivalent to confusing stimuli that guides nothing. It does not move the needle.
In short, granular scaffolding and some hand-holding is necessary to kickstart neural pathway growth. Without close-enough rungs, the brain cannot create pathways — it becomes noise.
What I think is necessary for maintaining
- The workout of active recall is essential to reinforcing these networks of connected neurons. When these networks are reinforced, your brain can use the right connections to induce the right action automatically. The difficulty can vary from the prompt you are given; from “straight up copying the cheat sheet” to “produce an oral answer in a high-pressure, no help, no scaffold examination”. Whereas passive intake (copying the answers, watching a video without manipulating or thinking about the ideas) produces no helpful amount of signal reinforcement and leads to decay, moderate activation (multiple choice, scaffolded with hints) can lead to some activation, and pure active recall (free-response, oral examination, teaching others unprompted with no help) will significantly reinforce the pathways.
In short, increasingly “active” and un-scaffolded recall is how we maintain existing branches and pathways into our long term memory.
What I think is necessary for correct growth
- As a natural result of being a spatial and physical phenomenon, learning can be hindered by “interference”: the retrieval/recall of one memory is impaired by other existing memories. When similar information exists, branches and pathways can become muddled and tangled with eachother. A master or expert may have developed subtle distinguishing between muddled concepts, while a novice risks entangling branches that should be more separate. There’s proactive interference: previously learned information/pathways interferes with learning new information. (This is also why “unlearning bad habits” is super important. You risk newer advanced teachings being built on wrong (yet strongly encoded and reinforced) fundamentals, handicapping your development and understanding.) There’s retroactive interference: new information interferes with previously learned information. If you memorize a new password, you can confuse the old password with new ones. If you learn a new software and associate new key binds with familiar actions (“CTRL+K to cut a video clip”), it’ll interfere with your old habits if you try to go back to the old software (“wait, CTRL+K doesn’t work here? what was the old key bind again?“) Similarity of ideas are the most likely to connect on the neural level, overlapping neurons or connections, and thus the most likely to interfere. Instead of just saying “all connections are good learning and should be encouraged”, we have to distinguish the right development, the right connections. What makes unintended connections undesirable is that it’s missing some subtlety, some distinguishing fact, a nuance — thus leading to wrong behavior, wrong action. “Nuances” or “subtleties” are simply more ideas, more information. And so to prevent interference, directly attack the entanglement by increasing the resolution of connections, creating brand new branches so that two ideas transform from blurred to unique boundaries. If you strengthen the distinctive concepts, encode the nuances and subtleties, then physically this means creating even more unique neural branches that inevitably look differently, behave differently, and fire differently. Another way to mitigate interference is varied practice and contextualization. The same environment’s stimuli (like your bedroom while you study) can become entangled with the study knowledge, and can be hard to recall in a cold testing room without the familiar stimuli of your study room. Prevent the entanglement of such stimuli by reinforcing a branch in many different environments; only encourage the growth of the pure domain knowledge and not the environment with it. The “environment” can also include the other topics you’re learning. Thus, if you learn two topics side by side, they risk becoming entangled the more similar they appear to be. Cycling through different and disjoint topics, growing them separately, can reduce neural pathway entanglement.
In short, branches can erroneously “tangle/merge” together because of low resolution of branches. Add novel distinguishing ideas (subtleties and nuances) to make branches more unique, and grow branches as independently as possible to mitigate unintended interference.
Why do we care about guiding and maintaining the right neural pathways? It is because they dictate our actions. We want to get the correct answers, deal with situations in the optimal way, use our mastery to affect the world around us, increase our autonomy, allow more creativity on rock-solid foundational skills and knowledge, free up our mind for more advanced skills and capabilities while changing our perspective for the better.
This is an outcome-oriented argument: that the right neural pathways will change your life, your environment, your material condition. And naturally, outcomes are driven by actions. The way to truly test one’s character and mastery is through their actions (the more active recall, the better reflection of their mastery).
We can say that learning is about growing, guiding, and maintaining branches and rivers in specific ways.
There is a right and optimal way to grow.
- Learning strategies that are designed around these facts, built upon the understanding of how memory actually works (as opposed to passive lecturing, re-reading with no further understanding, blaming and punishing you without actually helping you grow)
there is a right and optimal way to guide/distinguish,
- Note taking (or curriculum curating) that lends itself easily and naturally to such interconnectedness and active-recall techniques (as opposed to ignoring connections, ignoring recall, frustrating to write/create, not helping you moving the needle in true mastery)
there is a right and optimal way to maintain.
- Testing that truly measures one’s mastery and automaticity that helps communicate your current mastery and becomes a compass to guide you where to train next (as opposed to testing the wrong branches, the wrong skills, giving false positives, giving false negatives, giving you a false sense of mastery and guides you to the wrong development)