We're all familiar with the notion that memorizing facts takes persistence, time and repetition. What isn't so obvious is that there's an optimum time to practice the recollection of facts you are trying to learn, and that time is precisely before you are about to forget that fact:

Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information.

...

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially.

Wolf's article primarily discusses Piotr Wozniak's SuperMemo software, an application which is designed to take advantage of this insight. You fill it with a database of things you'd like to remember, and it attempts to model your retention curve for each of the facts while you use it, prompting you to recall information at just the right time to optimally burn it into memory.

Unfortunately, I couldn't track down an open source tool that does anything similar. Some of the legacy versions of SuperMemo appear to be freeware, and the full application itself isn't expensive, but I can't help but think this would make for a really cool open source package.

Software aside, I wonder how effective a person could become at general studying and fact retention by taking this insight into consideration. Are any readers actively using this tool or something similar? I'd love to hear your comments.

Typically the creation of a hologram involves lasers and various other expensive equipment and materials. William J. Beaty figured out a low-tech way to create your own holograms using a simple abrasion technique that requires only a compass and a chunk of plastic. He came across the idea while walking through a parking lot, noticing strange hand prints that seemed to float above or deep inside the surface of polished car hoods.

The images were naturally-occurring holograms. The owner of the car had obviously polished the hood with a dirty mit, and the millions of particles of grit in the mit traced out millions of nearly-parallel scratches in the black paint. The particular hand motion had created a geometry of abrasion patterns which turn out to be nearly identical to the interference patterns which make up those embossed-foil Benton whitelight [holograms].

So how do you make one? All you need is a spanner (compass with 2 needles) and a chunk of hard plastic such as Lexan. For simple flat shapes, you just draw the reference shape below where you want the hologram to appear. Set the diameter of the spanner to an inch or two, put one of the points on the shape and score a small arc across the plastic. You then repeat this process for a bunch of other points on the shape, leaving a number of small arc shaped scratches. When you observe the scratches in the light, you'll see a hologram of the shape that appears to float beneath the surface of the plastic.

The image above, from William's site, is actually a stereo photo of one of his holograms. You can cross your eyes to see the effect. The cube that reflects from the scratches appears different based on the angle you view it.

The depth of the hologram is related to the width of the spanner, so you can actually create three dimensional holograms using the same technique. William's FAQs have more details on doing this, as well as hints for creating opaque shapes that have other objects hidden behind them which are only viewable from certain angles.

Abrasion Holography - Link

Over at the Mind Hacks blog, Vaughan writes:

The Children's Hospital Boston have created a fantastic 'virtual neuron' which allows you to explore the basics of neural transmission with an interactive flash demo. Strictly speaking, of course, it's designed for children, but it's remarkably good fun whatever your age. Once you've got the demo window up, the options at the top of the screen allow you to choose different demonstrations, and the text below explains what's happening. Yay!

Virtual neuron at Children's Hospital Boston

Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb
Price: $24.95
Buy: Maker store - Mind Hacks
This exploration into the moment-by-moment works of the brain uses cognitive neuroscience to present experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, and subliminal perception. Each hack examines specific operations of the brain. By seeing how the brain responds, you'll learn more about how the brain is put together. If you want to find out what's going on in your head, then Mind Hacks is the key.

Hackszine reader nathaN writes:

i have mind performance hacks here on my lap, and i found hack 56. you included transformational grammar, surface/deep structure, you have to be aware of this other book on my desk, next to my lap. The book describes a method of using transformational grammar to analyze statements and gather incredible amounts of information, the technique is called the Meta Model, i had to write this post after i found #56 in your book. it's out of print, i think, but it's not too hard to find used if you make a few calls. it cost ME $35, but its probably online as well, torrents or whatever =(

its the single most useful "hack" i've ever found, ive been using it for about an year and it gives me more options than i know how to take advantage of.

The Structure of Magic I, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder
Introduction by Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson.
Science and Behavior Books, Inc
copyright 1975

Unfortunately, the Google Books entry for The Structure of Magic I wasn't a full scanned version. There is, however, a wealth of information about the Meta-model and other Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) tools on Wikipedia:

The meta-model in neuro-linguistic programming (or meta-model of therapy) is a heuristic set of questions designed to specify information, challenge and expand the limits to a person's model of the world. It responds to the distortions, generalizations, and deletions in the speaker's language.

In the process of communicating, the mind is forced to translate a person's experiences and their internal understanding of the world into words, making language a highly optimized and compressed representation of a complex internal mental state. This translation occurs a second time, as the listener parses language and interprets that communication based on their own mental world model and past experiences.

The meta-model provides tools for quickly parsing the structure of a communication, determining implied meaning, and locating potential points of misunderstanding. When you can recognize the linguistic translation artifacts that are common patterns in the communication process, you can respond to them. On the receiving end, this helps you better understand the experiences that underlie the speaker's language. On the sending end, it helps you to better communicate without misunderstanding. Internally, it helps you to analyze and debug your own model of the world.

Meta-model (Neuro-linguistic Programming) - Link
Mind Performance Hacks @ the Maker Store - Link

"When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly," said Meyers-Levy. "They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics."

The research demonstrates that variations in ceiling height can evoke concepts that, in turn, affect how consumers process information. The authors theorized that when reasonably salient, a higher versus a lower ceiling can stimulate the concepts of freedom versus confinement, respectively. This causes people to engage in either more free-form, abstract thinking or more detail-specific thought. Thus, depending on what the task at hand requires, the consequences of the ceiling could be positive or negative.

There's a study in the journal Science (abstract here) that found that recent declarative memories (facts and experiences) were better recalled when subjects were cued with a scent during the memorization process and again during slow wave sleep. Procedural memories, such as learning to ride a bike, were not improved by the scent cues.

I'm curious how this could be used as a study aid, especially for preparing for tests or presentations, situations where a person might typically sleep immediately after a memorization session. Imagine a desktop device that periodically emits an intense scent while you study, then sits by your bedside and repeats the burst of scent when it detects the onset of slow wave sleep -[via] Link.

Related:

• Slow wave sleep
• The Hippocampus (and its role in consolidating declarative memories)
• Mind Hacks

My pal Mikey pointed me to Energy fiend, a fantastic site that has new caffeinated energy drinks along with caffeine content in each drink - Link.

Also - Celsius just popped up on my radar, 400mg and no corn syrup, anyone try this yet? - Link.

Fun fact from energy fiend...Sweden, Denmark and Norway -- all around 400mg of caffeine per person per day. Cracking DRM, running pirate bay - it all makes sense now.

Pictured here, my brief experimentation with caffeine soap.

In Hack #59 of their book Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb use a classic illusion known as the McGurk Effect to show how our senses combine to completely change our ultimate experience of perception. Knowing what's going to happen doesn't even keep you from experiencing the illusion. It just weakens the effect a bit.

Let's try it out. Watch my lips as I make a few sounds:

[[McGurk Effect clip]]

Now, listen to just the audio portion from that clip:

[[audio clip]]

Besides perhaps being a little bit creepy, when you watched the video, I should have appeared to be saying "da da," but when you listen to the audio without the video, it's clear I'm saying "ba ba."

This illusion can't happen in real life. Like McGurk, I made it by splicing the audio of me saying "ba ba" over a video of me making a different sound: "ga ga." When you're not watching the video, you hear what I'm actually saying. But when you see my lips moving, the two bits of information clash. The position of a person's mouth is key in telling what sound someone is making, especially for distinguishing between speech sounds, called phonemes, like "ba," "ga," "pa," and "da," which are all made by popping air out.

Beyond a neat mind trick, the McGurk Effect has some practical uses as well. In Hack #57 of his book Digital Video Hacks, Josh Paul shows how to create the effect yourself, as I've done in this video, and use it in your own movies to fool your audience.

Here's an example of an applying the effect. Watch my lips as I mouth a couple words, while dubbing over a completely different phrase:

[[olive juice effect]]

What did I say? Could you tell that I was saying "olive juice" in the video, before editing it with a different audio track? Does it even matter?

This type of editing occurs frequently when feature films are shown shown on TV. Some words obviously are frowned upon by the FCC, and when movie houses edit them out, they generally try to fool you into believing the audio is original to the movie, or at least keep you from noticing the difference too much.

A common example is when someone shouts "Forget you!" onscreen. Though you know a different phrase was used in the original, the illusion is convincing enough to keep you from being distracted by the dubbing. But when the illusion is used with words that don't quite fit the context of the movie, the effect tends to break down. For example, when I hear John Goodman shout, "This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps," I know the attempt has failed miserably. - Link to video download.

Resources:
Mind Hacks, by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb