{Edchat} Flashcards are becoming big in Silicon Valley

Eager to keep up with the pace of change, some Silicon Valley researchers are embracing a grade-school technique to enhance their cognition and memory.

Michael Nielsen, a research fellow at Y Combinator Research, a division of Silicon Valley’s top startup accelerator, took to Twitter last week to explain his approach: flashcards. To comprehend fast changing fields such as machine learning (or ones that escaped him such as the command line for the operating system UNIX), he relies on breaking down new fields into the key bits of information, the smaller the better. Over time, he then arranges these facts and concepts into a hierarchy of knowledge that he eventually commits to memory.

Source: The latest brain hack to get ahead in Silicon Valley: flashcards

This is interesting to me. Even though I’m not totally sold on the long term ramifications, I did use flashcards to get me through Spanish at college. It worked pretty well on vocabulary.