6 Quotes by Benedict Carey

Answering does not only measure what you remember, it increases overall retention.

The technique is called distributed learning or, more commonly, the spacing effect. People learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute – or “space” – their study time than when they concentrate it.

And we will show that some of what we’ve been taught to think of as our worst enemies – laziness, ignorance, distraction – can also work in our favor.

Once a goal becomes activated, it trumps all others and begins to drive our perceptions, our thoughts, our attitudes,” as John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale University, told me.

Zeigarnik’s studies on interruption revealed a couple of the mind’s intrinsic biases, or built-in instincts, when it comes to goals. The first is that the act of starting work on an assignment often gives that job the psychological weight of a goal, even if it’s meaningless.

In plain English: The act of guessing engaged your mind in a different and more demanding way than straight memorization did, deepening the imprint of the correct answers. In even plainer English, the pretest drove home the information in a way that studying-as-usual did not.