Ultralearning

by Scott Young

  In case you’ve been living under a rock, Scrabble is based on forming crosswords. Each player has seven letter tiles, drawn from a bag, with which to form words. The catch is that the words must link up with the words already on the board. To be a good player requires a voluminous memory, not only of the words we use every day but of obscure words that are useful because of their length or the letters they contain. A decent casual player quickly learns all the valid two-letter words, including unusual ones such as “AA” (a type of lava) and “OE” (a windstorm in the Faroe Islands). To perform at tournament level, however, requires memorizing nearly all of the short words, as well as longer seven- and eight-letter words, since if a player uses up all seven tiles in one turn, there is an extra fifty-point bonus (or “bingo,” in Scrabble jargon). Memory, however, isn’t the only skill needed. Like other competitive games, tournament Scrabble uses a timing system, so skilled players must not only be able to construct valid words from a scrambled set of tiles but quickly find spaces and calculate which words will score the most points. In this regard, Richards is a master: given the tiles CDHLRN and one blank (which can be used for any letter), Richards ignored the obvious CHILDREN and instead linked up multiple crosswords to make the even higher scoring CHLORODYNE.

  Richards’s virtuosity is only intensified by the mystery that surrounds it. He is quiet and mostly keeps to himself. He refuses all interviews with reporters and seems completely uninterested in fame, fortune, or even providing explanations for how he does it. A fellow competitor, Bob Felt, bumping into Richards at a tournament noted his monklike serenity, telling him “When I see you, I can never tell whether you’ve won or lost.” “That’s because I don’t care” was Richard’s monotone response.3 Even his competing in Belgium, which briefly pulled him into the international media spotlight, was done as an excuse to do a cycling trip through Europe. In fact, prior to his victory, he had spent only nine weeks preparing. After he beat a Francophone player, Schelick Ilagou Rekawe from Gabon, in the final match, he was given a standing ovation but needed a translator to thank the audience.

  What Is Nigel Richards’s Secret?

  The more I read about Nigel Richards, the more intrigued I became. Richards was as mysterious as he was incredible in his mnemonic abilities. He steadfastly ignores opportunities for interviews and is famously laconic in descriptions of his methods. After his victory in Louvain-la-Neuve, one reporter asked him if he had any special methods for memorizing all those words. “No” was Richards’s monosyllabic response. Still, even if he wouldn’t divulge his strategies publicly, perhaps some digging could reveal clues.

  The first thing I discovered was that although Richards’s victory in Belgium was astounding, it wasn’t entirely without precedent. Other players of the game have won World Championships without being fluent in the language of competition. Scrabble is particularly popular in Thailand, for instance, and two former world champions, Panupol Sujjayakorn and Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, are not fluent in English. The reason is simple: remembering words in one’s native language and remembering words in Scrabble are different mnemonic feats. In spoken language, the meaning of a word, its pronunciation, and its feel are important. In Scrabble, those things don’t matter; words are just combinations of letters. Richards could win at French Scrabble without speaking French because the game wasn’t much different from English; he just had to memorize different patterns of letters. A native speaker has an advantage, of course, since many spellings will already be familiar. But there will still be a large number of arcane and unfamiliar words to memorize, and the skill of rearranging the letters into valid board positions and calculating to achieve maximal points remains the same in every language in which Scrabble can be played.

  The next piece of the puzzle I discovered was that Scrabble, it turns out, isn’t the only activity in which Richards possesses a strange intensity. His other love is cycling. Indeed, in an early tournament in Dunedin, New Zealand, he got onto his bicycle after work finished, pedaled through the night from Christchurch to Dunedin, a distance of over two hundred miles, without sleeping, and started the tournament first thing in the morning. After he won, competitors he met at the tournament offered to give him a ride home. He politely declined, preferring to bicycle back the entire way home to Christchurch for another sleepless night before starting work again Monday morning.4 At first that felt like just another odd quirk in his profile, like his home-done haircuts and reluctance to be interviewed. Now, though, I believe it may hold some keys to unlocking some of his mystery.

  Cycling, of course, isn’t a great mnemonic technique. If it were, Lance Armstrong would have been a fierce contender. However, it does illustrate a common theme in Richards’s personality that overlaps with that of other ultralearners I have encountered: an obsessive intensity that exceeds what is considered a normal investment of effort. Richards’s cycling, it turns out, also lines up well with the only other clues I’ve been able to uncover about his methods: he reads lists; long lists of words, starting with two-letter words and then moving up. “The cycling helps,” he explains, “I can go through lists in my mind.”5 He reads the dictionary, focusing exclusively on combinations of letters, ignoring definitions, tenses, and plurals. Then, drawing from memory, he repeats them over and over again as he cycles for hours. This aspect also corresponds with a method that is common to other ultralearners and that has shown up in other principles of learning so far: active recall and rehearsal. By retrieving words, Richards likely takes his already impressive memory and makes it unassailable through active practice.

  There are other clues about Richards’s performance: he focuses on memory, not anagramming (rearranging the tiles to create words); he works forward and backward, starting from small words, going on to big ones and back again; he claims to recall the words visually, as he cannot remember words when they’re spoken. All of these clues provide glimpses into Richards’s mind, but they leave out even more than they reveal. How many times does he have to read the words from his list before he can rehearse it mentally? Are the words organized in some way or just listed alphabetically? Is he a savant with exceptional abilities and lower-than-normal general intelligence or an all-round genius for whom memorizing Scrabble words is just one of many impressive abilities? Maybe his intelligence is quite average and his dominance in Scrabble represents his extreme dedication to the game. We might never know the answers to those questions.

  I certainly can’t rule out the theory that Richards’s mind is simply hardwired differently or better for memory than my own. After all, nothing I’ve encountered so far about his method is so boldly original that serious Scrabble players would be unaware of it. Yet Richards has completely dominated his competition. Part of me suspects that his intense, obsessive personality, which enables him to cycle for hours reviewing lists mentally, might also form at least a partial explanation. Whatever gifts he might possess, he also seems to possess the ultralearner ethos I’ve described thus far in the book. For whatever it is worth, Richards himself argues for more of the latter than the former: “It’s hard work, you have to have dedication to learn,”6 elsewhere adding “I’m not sure there is a secret, it’s just a matter of learning the words.”7

  Scrabble words may not be important to your life. However, memory is essential to learning things well. Programmers must remember the syntax for the commands in their code. Accountants need to memorize ratios, rules, and regulations. Lawyers must remember precedents and statutes. Doctors need to know tens of thousands of factoids, from anatomical descriptions to drug interactions. Memory is essential, even when it is wrapped up in bigger ideas such as understanding, intuition, or practical skill. Being able to understand how something works or how to perform a particular technique is useless if you cannot recall it. Retention depends on employing strategies so the things you learn don’t leak out of your mind. Before discussing strategies of retention, however, let’s take a look at why remembering things is so difficult.

  Why Is
It So Hard to Remember Things?

  Richards is an extreme case, but his story nonetheless illustrates many themes that are important for anyone who wants to learn something: How can you retain all of the things you learn? How can you defend against forgetting hard-won facts and skills? How can you store the knowledge you’ve acquired so that it can be easily retrieved exactly when you need it? In order to understand learning, you need to understand how and why you forget.

  Losing access to previously learned knowledge has been a perennial problem for educators, students, and psychologists. Fading knowledge impacts the work you do as well. One study reported that doctors give worse medical care the longer they have worked, as their stored knowledge from medical school is gradually forgotten, despite their working in the profession full-time. Quoting from the original abstract:

  Physicians with more experience are generally believed to have accumulated knowledge and skills during years in practice and therefore to deliver high-quality care. However, evidence suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the number of years that a physician has been in practice and the quality of care that the physician provides.8

  Hermann Ebbinghaus, in one of the first psychological experiments in history, spent years memorizing nonsense syllables, much in the same way Richards memorizes Scrabble words, and carefully tracking his ability to recall them later. From this original research, later verified by more experimentally robust studies, Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve. This curve shows that we tend to forget things incredibly quickly after learning them, there being an exponential decay in knowledge, which is steepest right after learning. However, Ebbinghaus noted, this forgetting tapers off, and the amount of knowledge forgotten lessens over time. Our minds are a leaky bucket; however, most of the holes are near the top, so the water that remains at the bottom leaks out more slowly.

  Over the intervening years, psychologists have identified at least three dominant theories to help explain why our brains forget much of what we initially learn: decay, interference, and forgotten cues. Though the jury is still out on the exact mechanism underlying human long-term memory, these three ideas likely form some part of explaining why we tend to forget things and, conversely, provide insight into how we might better retain what we’ve learned.

  Decay: Forgetting with Time

  The first theory of forgetting is that memories simply decay with time. This idea does seem to match common sense. We remember events, news, and things learned in the past week much more clearly than things from last month. Things learned this year are recalled with much greater accuracy than events from a decade ago. By this understanding, forgetting is simply an inevitable erosion by time. Like sands in an hourglass, our memories inexorably slip away from us as we become more distant from them.

  There are flaws with this theory being the complete explanation, however. Many of us can vividly recall events from early childhood, even if we can’t remember what we ate for breakfast last Tuesday. There also seem to be patterns in which things are remembered and which are forgotten that go beyond the time since they were originally learned: vivid, meaningful things are more easily recalled than banal or arbitrary information. Even if there is a component to our forgetting that is simply decay, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is the only factor.

  Interference: Overwriting Old Memories with New Ones

  Interference suggests a different idea: that our memories, unlike the files of a computer, overlap one another in how they are stored in the brain. In this way, memories that are similar but distinct can compete with one another. If you’re learning programming, for instance, you may learn what a for loop is and remember it in terms of doing something repeatedly. Later, you may learn about while loops, recursion, repeat-until loops, and go-to statements. Now, each of these has to do with doing something repeatedly, but in different ways, so they may interfere with your ability to remember correctly what a for loop does. There are at least two flavors of this: proactive interference and retroactive interference. Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information makes acquiring new knowledge harder. Think of this as if the “space” where that information wants to be stored is already occupied, so forming the new memory becomes harder. This can happen when you want to learn the definition of a word but have difficulty because that word already has a different association in your mind. Consider trying to learn the concept of negative reinforcement in psychology—here the word “negative” has the meaning “absent,” as opposed to “bad,” so negative reinforcement is when you encourage a behavior by removing something, say a painful stimulus. However, since the earlier meaning of negative as “bad” already exists, you may have difficulty remembering this and it becomes easy to incorrectly equate negative reinforcement with punishment. Retroactive interference is the opposite—where learning something new “erases” or suppresses an old memory. Anyone who has learned Spanish and later tried to learn French knows how tricky retroactive interference can be, as French words pop out when you want to speak Spanish again.

  Forgotten Cues: A Locked Box with No Key

  The third theory of forgetting says that many memories we have aren’t actually forgotten but simply inaccessible. The idea here is that in order to say that one has remembered something, it needs to be retrieved from memory. Since we aren’t constantly experiencing the entirety of our long-term memories simultaneously, this means there must be some process for dredging up the information, given an appropriate cue. What may happen in this case is that one of the links in the chain of retrieving the information has been severed (perhaps by decay or interference) and therefore the entire memory has become inaccessible. However, if that cue were restored, or if an alternative path to the information could be found, we would remember much more than is currently accessible to us.

  This explanation also has some advantages. Intuitively it seems to be somewhat true, as we all know the tip-of-the-tongue experience, when we feel as though we should be able to remember a fact or word but we’re not able to summon it up immediately. It might also suggest that relearning things is much faster than learning them initially, because relearning is closer to repair work, while original learning is a completely new construction. Forgetting cues seems highly likely as a partial, if not complete, explanation of forgetting many things.

  Cue forgetting as a complete explanation for our memory woes isn’t without its problems, however. Many memory researchers now believe that the act of remembering is not a passive process. In recalling facts, events, or knowledge, we’re engaging in a creative process of reconstruction. The memories themselves are often modified, enhanced, or manipulated in the process of remembering. It may be, then, that “lost” memories that are retrieved through new cues are actually fabrications. This seems especially likely in the case of “recovered” witness testimony from traumatic events, as experiments have shown that even highly vivid memories that feel completely authentic to the subject can be untrue.9

  How Can You Prevent Forgetting?

  Forgetting is the default, not the exception, so the ultralearners I encountered had devised various strategies for coping with this fact of life. These methods roughly divide into tackling two similar but different problems. The first set of methods deals with the problem of retention while undertaking the ultralearning project: How can you retain the things you learned the first week, so that you don’t need to relearn them by the last week? This is particularly important for memory-intensive ultralearning efforts such as Benny Lewis’s language learning and Roger Craig’s Jeopardy! trivia mastery. In these domains and many others, the volume of information to be learned is often so large that the forgetting becomes a practical obstacle almost immediately. The second set of methods, in contrast, has to do with the longevity of the skills and knowledge acquired after the project has been completed: Once a language has been learned to a level you’re satisfied with, how can you keep yourself from forgetting it completely a couple years later?
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  The ultralearners I encountered had devised differing methods for dealing with these two problems, which varied in effort and intensity. Some, like Craig, preferred elaborate electronic systems that can optimize memory with fancy algorithms, leaving little waste and inefficiency, if at the cost of introducing greater complexity. Others, like Richards, seem to prefer basic systems that succeed on their simplicity.

  You need to pick a mnemonic system, which will both accomplish your goals and be simple enough to stick to. During intense periods of language learning, the sheer volume of vocabulary often meant that spaced-repetition systems were helpful for me. Other times, I preferred having conversations to maintain my speaking ability, even though this method is not quite as precise. With other subjects, I’m happier to allow for some degree of forgetting as long as I practice the skills I need to use continuously and have the ability to relearn.

  My approaches may not reach a theoretical ideal, but they may end up working better because they have fewer possibilities for error and can be sustained more easily. Regardless of the exact system used, however, all systems seemed to work according to one of four mechanisms: spacing, proceduralization, overlearning, or mnemonics. Let’s look at each of these mechanisms of retention first, in order to make sense of the quite different and idiosyncratic manifestations used in different ultralearning projects.