What is the easiest way to learn?

David Robson meets a group of scientists

and memory champions competing to find techniques that make facts
stick... fast.

Face to face with the worlds leading memory experts, my mind is beginning to feel
very humble. Ben Whately, for instance, tells me about the famous mnemonist Matteo
Ricci, a 16th Century Jesuit priest who was the first westerner to take Chinas highest
civil service exams. The exam was an excruciating ordeal that involved memorising
reams of classical poetry a task that could take a lifetime. Only 1% of people who
took them passed them, yet Ricci passed them after 10 years, having not spoken any
Chinese before.
Think of learning like a buffet, rather than a set dinner One of the tips for rapid
memorisation
Can psychology give us all the same astonishing command of our minds? Thats
Whatelys aim. With former memory champion Ed Cooke, hes already designed a
learning app, Memrise, that uses some of the mnemonists principles, as BBC Future
has described in the past. Now theyve teamed up with researchers from University
College London to launch a competition to find the best possible way to enhance their
techniques. Memory experts from across the world were asked to conduct
experiments to find the easiest, and most effective, way to memorise new information.
Im here to observe the first round of judging. It offers a fascinating exploration of the
way our memories work. Whether you are a university student cramming for your
finals, or have simply yearned to pick up some tourist French, their insights could take
the pain out of digesting facts.

Can new tricks take the pain out of studying? (Credit: Getty Images)
The competitions task is superficially simple, says Rosalind Potts at UCL. We
wanted to know if you had an hour to study a list of 80 words, what do you have to do
in order to remember them a week later. The task is made more difficult by the fact
that those 80 words are all Lithuanian. The entrants had to test the strategy on

participants and compare them to a group who were not using any particular
technique.
Despite the fact that world-leading scientists entered the competition, some
approaches failed to lead to any improvement in memory recall. It shows how
difficult it is to translate scientific principles into real-life learning, says David
Shanks, also of UCL.
Boredom, for instance, proved to be a hurdle: one team found a subject falling asleep
during the hour-long word-memorising session despite the fact they were being paid
with cakes to take part in the study. It happens, says Yana Weinstein at the
University of Massachusetts Lowell, who is also on the judging panel.
Notwithstanding those minor hiccups, many teams found some benefits as much as
doubling the amount their subjects recalled. Rather than focussing on one single
technique, they tended to use combinations of the following strategies:

Fail once, and you'll remember better the next time (Credit: Thinkstock)
1) Embracing ignorance. Self-testing is one of the best ways to improve recall. For
me, the most surprising, and potentially useful twist, on this technique was a strategy
called errorful generation. Without any training, subjects were forced to guess the
meaning of the Lithuanian words. They will always be wrong the first time round,
says Shanks yet psychological studies have shown that the initial mistakes
subsequently make the words stick. Its remarkably better than if you had studied the
word.
Simply recognising your own ignorance, it seems, primes your mind into action
doubling the recall compared to a group who didnt use the technique. This builds on
the idea of desirable difficulty in psychology by making a task a little bit harder, it
can engage your attention and construct firmer foundations for later recall.

You need to ride the crest of your memory's natural rhythms (Credit: Thinkstock)
2) Surfing the memorys waves. You can easily waste time over-studying. So many
of the entrants had designed algorithms that cleverly work out how strong your
memory for each of the 80 words is, so they could rekindle it once you had started to
forget. Memrises app has one version of this approach that you can use for now and
the entrants may suggest ways to further refine it. Alternatively, you can rely on your
intuition to help time your learning leaving longer and longer periods before you
retest and learn from your mistakes.
One entrant also experimented with giving short breaks to the participants during the
word memorising task allowing them to watch a video of a waterfall potentially
allowing the information to sink in. When youre studying, its certainly worth taking
short breaks to ensure that fatigue doesnt overcome your natural abilities.
3) Buffet studying. It might seem tempting to chunk the material into themes and
learn them one by one so some of the entrants organised the words into categories
and themes. But one team found that simply cycling through all 80 words was
effective. Whately points out that memory champions memorising a pack of cards
take a similar approach rotating quickly through the whole pack rather than learning
it block by block.
If that sounds confusing, research does at least suggest that you should add variety to
a study session. Its better to spend small blocks of time on a variety of subjects and
skills rather than concentrating on a single topic. Think of it as taking from a buffet,
rather than eating a set dinner.

Take a pick-and-mix approach to studying. Switching topics makes your brain work
harder, with surprising effects (Credit: Getty Images)
4) Story-telling. Any form of elaboration can help reactivate those synapses and
seal the memory. One entrant asked the participants to build a story with the words
they were learning, for instance. Cooke and Whately were also excited to see one
team implement a memory palace in which you try to link the words to objects in
a room.
The program they designed might show a picture of a living room and give you the
Lithuanian word lova bed. You could then imagine your lover laying on a sofa
bed. Once you have mapped out your learning in this way, you should be able to
retrace your steps and recall the word with ease.
This was, in fact, the technique that allowed the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci to learn
Chinese to such an advanced level and it also lies behind Cookes ability to
remember 2265 binary digits in less than 30 minutes. The teams computer program
may simplify the process by making it more automatic. If this does turn out to be the
winner thats a serious discovery, says Cooke.

Making surreal connections can boost recall - and now an app can help fire your
imagination (Credit: Thinkstock)
The judges energy is infectious, but I cant help wondering if all this is still removed
from the kind of learning we need in everyday life. Indeed, for a previous assignment,
I had tried to use mnemonic techniques to learn around 1000 words of Danish and
although it was useful to help me memorise the individual words, it didnt translate to
the spontaneous recall needed to hold a conversation, on the fly, in a bar or restaurant.
Cooke agrees its just the first step. A lot of this stuff is what I call nurturing and
scaffolding while you are getting the memory down, he says. Its a brace its there
as long as you need it. Importantly, he thinks the same methods could easily be used
beyond language learning to all kinds of disciplines history, maths, or trivia for a
pub quiz. Repetition testing, spacing all these techniques work for almost
everything.
Having short-listed five entries, the team are now in the process of uploading them to
Memrises website. This will allow them to pit the techniques head-to-head to find the
ultimate winner for a prize of $10,000. The advantage for Memrise is to find ideas
that might improve their app; for Potts and Shanks, it will help them see which
combinations of techniques work best in the real world while testing them on many
more volunteers than would be possible in a typical lab study.
Learning game
The judges hope to run the competition every year as they further refine the art of
memory. In the future, there may be many more inventive approaches to consider.
Shanks, for instance, points to one project that failed to enter this year, but may still
be a promising strategy for the future. They were building a video game where you
shoot the spaceships out of sky, and completely incidentally, the spaceships have
Lithuanian and English words on them, he says. I thought it was a brilliant idea.
The real challenge for these memory experts, however, isnt just to make learning
quick and effective. As every student knows the biggest obstacle to learning is
distraction, whether its the idea of sunbathing in the park or switching on the TV. We
may need many more competitions before we can overcome that hurdle.