You know, Herman, there is something deeply unsettling about the way the human brain handles vital information. We have this tendency to assume that once we have learned a life-saving skill, like the infant CPR we discussed recently, it just stays there, locked in a vault, ready for when we need it. We treat our brains like hard drives where a file, once saved, remains pristine until it is opened. But the reality is more like a slow, constant erosion. It is more like writing in the sand at low tide. If you are not actively reinforcing those neural pathways, the information does not just get dusty, it actually starts to dissolve. It is a biological imperative to forget, and today's prompt from Daniel really hits on the heart of that struggle. He is asking about the mechanics of spaced repetition, not just as a tool for learning a new language like the Hebrew he is working on in Jerusalem, but as a literal lifeline for things like emergency procedures. It is a question of how we fight back against that natural cognitive decay. How do we stop the tide from washing away the very things that might save our lives or the lives of those we love?
It is the eternal battle against the forgetting curve, Corn. And by the way, I am Herman Poppleberry, for anyone joining us for the first time. Daniel is right to be skeptical of that one-time training session model. We have all been there—sitting in a fluorescent-lit room for four hours, practicing on a plastic mannequin, feeling like experts by the time we walk out with our little laminated card. But the data on this is actually quite brutal. If you take a high-intensity, four-hour CPR course today and never look at the material again, your ability to perform those skills effectively can drop by as much as fifty to eighty percent within just six months. That is a terrifying statistic when you consider we are talking about keeping someone alive, especially for someone like Daniel who has little Ezra to think about now. The brain is incredibly efficient at pruning away what it deems unnecessary. It is a metabolic miser. If you do not use it, or at least simulate the use of it, the brain essentially decides that those resources are better spent elsewhere—probably on remembering the lyrics to a jingle from nineteen ninety-four or the plot of a movie you did not even like.
That pruning process is fascinating because it is meant to be a feature, not a bug, right? We cannot remember every single license plate we saw on the drive home, or every face in a crowded train station. If we did, our minds would be cluttered with noise. But when it comes to something like the "cognitive load of crisis" that we talked about back in episode eight hundred and sixty-three, that efficiency works against us. In a high-stress situation, your brain sheds non-essential functions to focus on survival. If your CPR knowledge is not deeply encoded, it is the first thing to go. So, if we are looking at spaced repetition as the solution, I want to dig into the actual numbers. Daniel asked about the recommended frequency. Is there a universal "golden ratio" for spacing out these reviews, or does it change depending on whether you are memorizing vocabulary versus a physical, motor-skill-heavy task like chest compressions?
That is the big question, and to answer it, we have to go back to the grandfather of this whole field, Hermann Ebbinghaus. Back in eighteen eighty-five, he performed these incredibly rigorous self-experiments where he memorized thousands of nonsense syllables—things like "wid," "kaf," and "zof." He used nonsense syllables because he wanted to see how fast he forgot information that had no prior context or emotional meaning to lean on. What he discovered was the exponential nature of forgetting. You lose the most information in the first twenty-four hours. In fact, his data showed that humans forget about fifty percent of new information within an hour, and seventy percent within twenty-four hours if there is no attempt to retain it. If you do not review within that first window, you are already fighting a losing battle. But here is the magic part: every time you review that information right before you are about to forget it, the curve flattens. The "space" in spaced repetition actually gets longer each time because the memory becomes more durable.
So it is not a fixed interval. It is an expanding one. It is like building a bridge. At first, the supports need to be very close together because the structure is weak. But as the bridge gets stronger, you can put more distance between the pillars. If I learn something on Monday, I should probably look at it again on Tuesday?
A typical high-level workflow for something complex might look like this: your first review happens at twenty-four hours. Your second review happens at seven days. The third is at sixteen days, and the fourth is at thirty-five days. By the time you get to that fifth or sixth review, you might be looking at a gap of six months or even a year. This is what researchers call the "Lag Effect." There was a massive study in two thousand and eight by Cepeda and colleagues that looked at over thirteen hundred subjects. They found that the optimal gap between study sessions depends entirely on how long you want to remember the information. If you want to remember something for a year, the optimal first gap is about twenty-one days. If you want to remember it for five years, that first gap should be about six months. But for Daniel, who is dealing with both language and life-saving skills, he needs a hybrid approach.
That concept of "desirable difficulty" is something I think people really struggle with. We like feeling like we know things. We love that feeling of "fluency" where we glance at a page and think, "Oh yeah, I remember that." But the research suggests that if the review feels easy, you are actually not learning much. You are just experiencing recognition, not recall. You need that slight struggle to signal to the brain that this specific piece of information is worth the energy to keep. It is almost like a signal-to-noise ratio. The struggle is the signal. If it is too easy, the brain assumes it is trivial.
That is a perfect way to put it. Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the one who really championed that idea of desirable difficulty. He makes a crucial distinction between "storage strength" and "retrieval strength." Storage strength is how well-learned something is—how deeply it is embedded in your long-term memory. Retrieval strength is how easily you can access it right now. Spaced repetition is designed to maximize storage strength by intentionally letting retrieval strength drop a bit before you pull the memory back to the surface. It is like a muscle. You do not get stronger by lifting a weight that is too light. You need that resistance. For something like Daniel's Hebrew vocabulary, this is why apps like Anki or the spaced repetition plugins for Obsidian are so effective. They use algorithms like the S M two, which was developed by Piotr Wozniak for the SuperMemo program in the late eighties. These algorithms calculate those intervals for you based on how hard you tell the app the recall was. If you struggle, the interval stays short. If it was easy, it pushes the next review out into the future.
Okay, so that makes sense for vocabulary. You have a flashcard, you see the word, you try to remember the translation. It is very binary. You either know it or you do not. But how do we apply that expanding interval to something like CPR guidelines or emergency S O Ps? You cannot exactly put "how to save a life" on a flashcard and call it a day, can you? Well, I suppose you could, but does it translate to the physical world when the pressure is on? If Daniel is in his kitchen in Jerusalem and Ezra starts choking, he is not going to have time to open Anki and check his deck.
This is where we have to look at the difference between "declarative memory," which is facts and figures, and "procedural memory," which is how to actually do something. For emergency procedures, you need both. You need to know the ratio of thirty compressions to two breaths for an adult, which is declarative. But you also need the muscle memory of the depth and the rhythm, which is procedural. The American Heart Association has actually been moving toward what they call "Low-Dose, High-Frequency" training, or R Q I—Resuscitation Quality Improvement. They found that in hospitals, medical staff who did a massive training once every two years had terrible retention. But when they switched to ten-minute "booster" sessions every three months on a mobile simulation cart, their skill levels stayed at mastery levels year-round.
Ten minutes every three months. That feels incredibly manageable compared to a four-hour weekend block that everyone dreads. It is interesting that the "space" there is much shorter than what you might use for a foreign language. If I am learning Hebrew, I might eventually wait six months between reviews of a specific word. But for CPR, we are saying three months is the limit before the skill starts to degrade. Why the discrepancy? Is it just because the stakes are higher?
It comes down to the stakes and the complexity of the motor task. If Daniel forgets the Hebrew word for "bread," the consequences are minimal. He just looks it up or asks someone. If he forgets the correct hand placement for infant CPR, the consequences are catastrophic. Also, motor skills involve different parts of the brain, specifically the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. These pathways are incredibly robust once they are locked in—think about riding a bike—but they require a higher initial "re-hydration" of the memory to keep them from becoming sluggish. Think about it like a physical path through high grass. If you walk it once, the grass springs back in an hour. If you walk it every day for a week, you have a trail. But even a well-worn trail will eventually be reclaimed by the forest if you stop walking it for a few months. In a crisis, you cannot afford to be hacking through the weeds. You need a paved highway.
That is our first analogy for the day, and it is a good one. It really highlights that "use it or lose it" nature of our biology. I am curious about the data behind this. When we look at large-scale studies of medical professionals, who you would think are the best at this, what does their retention actually look like? Are they also falling victim to this curve, or does the daily exposure of being in a hospital protect them?
They absolutely are falling victim to it. There was a study published in the journal Resuscitation that looked at nurses and doctors, and it found that even among those who are frequently exposed to clinical environments, their CPR skills began to decline significantly as early as three months after training. By twelve months, their performance was often indistinguishable from someone who had never been trained at all. That is a sobering thought. It suggests that even "being in the field" is not a substitute for deliberate, spaced practice. This is because "being in the field" is often passive or observational. You might see a code called, but you might not be the one doing the compressions. Deliberate practice requires you to be the one performing the action. This is why the Red Cross and other organizations are trying to shift the culture toward these shorter, more frequent intervals. It is about "overlearning"—practicing something beyond the point of initial mastery so it becomes automatic.
So for Daniel, or any of our listeners who want to maintain these critical skills, what does a "spaced repetition workflow" actually look like in practice? If we want to move beyond the app and into the real world, how do we structure this? We have talked about the theory, but I want to give Daniel a blueprint he can use while he is balancing his work as a developer and his life as a new dad.
I think it starts with an "Emergency S O P" audit, which we touched on in episode seven hundred and sixty-five. You identify the top three to five scenarios you are most concerned about. For Daniel, that is likely infant choking, infant CPR, and maybe basic first aid for common household injuries. You create a simple one-page cheat sheet for each, which we talked about in episode six hundred and twelve. Then, you set a recurring calendar invite. Not for a long study session, but for a "dry run."
A dry run. So, actually physically going through the motions?
On day one, you read the guidelines and practice on a pillow or a dedicated mannequin if you have one. Then, you set a reminder for twenty-four hours later to just spend two minutes visualizing the steps. Visualization is a powerful tool—studies show that mental rehearsal can activate the same neural circuits as physical practice. Then, seven days later, you do another physical practice. Then, thirty days. After that, you move to a quarterly "booster" where you and your partner, or in Daniel's case, he and Hannah, actually run a mock drill. "Okay, Ezra is choking, what do we do? Go." You want to trigger that "retrieval effort" in a way that mimics the stress of the real event. You want to feel that little spike of adrenaline.
I love that idea of involving the partner. It turns it from a solitary study task into a shared household safety culture. And it addresses that "cognitive load" issue because if one person freezes, the other has that reinforced spaced repetition to fall back on. It becomes a team-based retrieval. But let's pivot back to the language side for a moment, because I know Daniel is also very engaged with his Hebrew studies. Spaced repetition for language is a slightly different beast because of the sheer volume of information. You might be tracking thousands of cards. How do you prevent "review fatigue" where the system itself becomes a burden? I have seen people's Anki decks reach a point where they have eight hundred reviews due in a single day, and they just delete the app in frustration.
Review fatigue is the number one killer of spaced repetition systems. It is the "S R S graveyard." People get excited, they add a hundred new words a day, and then two weeks later they wake up to a backlog of five hundred reviews and they just quit. The data shows that the most successful learners are the ones who strictly limit their "new" input. It is better to learn five new words a day and never miss a review than to learn fifty a day and burn out. The magic of the algorithm is that it protects your time by only showing you what you are about to forget. If you trust the system and stay consistent, you can maintain a vocabulary of ten thousand words in about fifteen to twenty minutes of study a day. But you have to be ruthless about what you add. Piotr Wozniak has a famous list called the "Twenty Rules of Formulating Knowledge." Rule number one is: Do not learn if you do not understand. If you just memorize a string of sounds in Hebrew without understanding the grammar or the context, the card will always be difficult, and it will keep coming back, clogging up your system.
That is an incredible R O I on twenty minutes. But I want to go deeper on the "how" of the language side. We have talked about Anki and S M two, but there is also this idea of "interleaving." Most people think they should study all their verbs, then all their nouns, then all their adjectives. They want to "block" their learning. But the research suggests that mixing them up, or even mixing different subjects entirely, actually leads to better long-term retention. How does that play into the spaced repetition workflow?
Interleaving is like a secret weapon for the brain. When you block-study, like doing twenty past-tense verbs in a row, your brain gets into a groove. It stops working as hard because it knows what is coming next. It is like doing twenty reps of the same weight at the gym. But if you interleave, meaning you see a verb, then a noun, then a sentence structure, then maybe even a completely different topic like a medical term, your brain has to "re-load" the context every single time. That re-loading is another form of desirable difficulty. There was a famous study involving baseball players practicing hitting different types of pitches. One group got fifteen fastballs, then fifteen curveballs, then fifteen sliders. The other group got the same forty-five pitches but in a random order. The "blocked" group performed better during practice, but the "interleaved" group performed significantly better in actual games. They had learned how to recognize the pitch, not just how to swing.
It is like the difference between practicing a golf swing on a flat range versus playing a round of eighteen holes where every shot is different. The range feels better because you are hitting "pure" shots, but the course is where you actually learn how to play. So, for Daniel's Hebrew, he should not just be doing "at the restaurant" cards for an hour. He should be mixing "at the restaurant" with "tech terminology" and "basic grammar" all in the same session. He should be forcing his brain to switch gears.
Precisely. And he should be moving toward "active recall" as quickly as possible. This is another crucial piece of the data. Passive review, which is just reading your notes or looking at the back of a flashcard, is almost useless for long-term retention. In one famous study by Roediger and Karpicke in two thousand and six, students were divided into two groups. One group read a text four times. The other group read it once and then tried to write down everything they remembered—that is active recall. When they were tested five minutes later, the "reading" group did better. But when they were tested a week later, the "active recall" group blew them away. They remembered fifty percent more.
That is such a counter-intuitive finding for most people. We have been conditioned to think that more "exposure" equals more "learning." We highlight books, we re-read chapters, we listen to the same lecture twice. But the brain is not a sponge. It is more like a muscle. You do not get stronger by watching someone else lift weights, and you do not learn by just letting information wash over you. You have to actively reach into your memory and pull it out. This is why I think Daniel's use of Obsidian is so smart. If he is writing his own notes and then using a spaced repetition plugin to test himself on the key concepts he has written, he is combining the synthesis of writing with the rigor of active recall. He is building the weights and then lifting them.
It is a powerhouse combination. And for someone in a technical field like Daniel, who is also an open-source developer, this applies to coding too. If you are learning a new framework or a new language like Rust, you can use spaced repetition for the syntax and the architectural patterns. There is actually a great concept called "First-Language Attrition" which we discussed in episode seven hundred and ninety-nine. It explains how even your native language can start to slip if you are totally immersed in a second one. Spaced repetition is the tool that keeps those plates spinning. It allows you to maintain multiple high-level skills simultaneously without any of them falling into that "forgetting curve" abyss. It is about being the architect of your own memory.
I want to talk about the "optimal interval" one more time because I think people want a concrete rule of thumb. If I want to remember something for a year, what should my spacing look like? Is there a mathematical way to calculate that without needing a complex algorithm?
There is. A common rule of thumb in the research is the ten-to-twenty percent rule. If you want to remember something for a certain period of time, your review intervals should be about ten to twenty percent of that duration. So, if you have an exam in ten days, you should review every one to two days. If you want to remember something for a year, your final review interval should be about one to two months. If you want to remember something for the rest of your life, you eventually need to get those intervals out to several years. This is why the "expanding" part of the interval is so important. You are essentially proving to your brain that this information has permanent utility. You are telling your hippocampus, "Hey, don't delete this file, we use it every year."
That is a very clear, actionable metric. Ten to twenty percent. It takes the guesswork out of it. Now, what about the "data" Daniel asked about? Is there any evidence that some people are just "better" at this than others? We all know that person who seems to have a "photographic memory." Is the forgetting curve a universal human constant, or are some of us just born with better hardware?
It is remarkably universal. While some people might have slightly better baseline memories or faster processing speeds, the rate of decay follows a very similar mathematical pattern across the population. What separates "gifted" learners is almost always the systems they use, not their raw hardware. Even people with what we call "photographic" or eidetic memories often find that their retention is actually quite poor over long periods if they do not have a way to organize and retrieve that data. The beauty of spaced repetition is that it is a "leveler." It takes the biological reality of our messy, forgetful brains and overlays a structured, algorithmic solution that anyone can use. It is like having a pair of glasses for your memory.
It is essentially a patch for our cognitive firmware. We know the hardware has this "delete after thirty days" default setting for unused files, so we write a script that pings those files every twenty-nine days to keep them active. It is very much an engineering approach to the mind, which I think resonates with the way Daniel thinks about the world. But I want to touch on one more thing before we get to the practical takeaways. What about the "emotional" component of memory? We know that things associated with strong emotions, like fear or joy, tend to stick better without any repetition at all. Does that bypass the need for spacing? If Daniel has a close call where he almost has to use CPR, does that "lock it in" forever?
It does, to an extent. This is known as "one-trial learning." If you touch a hot stove, you do not need spaced repetition to remember not to do it again. The amygdala, which handles emotion, can "fast-track" certain memories directly into long-term storage because they are deemed essential for survival. But the problem with emergency procedures like CPR is that they are often learned in a calm, classroom environment. There is no emotional "spike" to lock them in. In fact, when the real emergency happens, the resulting emotional spike can actually impair your ability to recall those calmly-learned facts. This is the "Yerkes-Dodson Law"—performance increases with physiological arousal, but only up to a point. After that, it plummets. This is why the repetition is so vital. You need the skill to be so deeply encoded that it becomes an "automatic" response that doesn't require the higher-level cognitive functions that tend to shut down during a panic. You want it to be a "reflex," not a "thought."
Right, you want it to move from the prefrontal cortex, which is your thinking brain, down into the more primitive, robust parts of the brain. You want it to be as automatic as breathing. That makes so much sense. So, let's distill this for Daniel and for everyone listening. If we are going to build a "My Weird Prompts" approved spaced repetition workflow, what are the steps? How do we take all this data and turn it into a daily habit?
Step one: Identification. Do not try to "space repeat" everything. You will drown. Use it for the high-stakes stuff and the high-utility stuff. CPR guidelines, emergency contact numbers, core professional concepts, and your current language goals. Step two: Atomic units. This is huge. Break the information down into the smallest possible pieces. Don't try to memorize a whole paragraph on how to clear an airway. Memorize one fact, one step, or one word. This makes the "retrieval effort" focused and effective. Step three: Choose your tool. For declarative knowledge like Hebrew, use an app like Anki or a plugin in Obsidian. For procedural knowledge like CPR, use your calendar.
And for that procedural stuff, we are looking at that "Low-Dose, High-Frequency" model. A two-minute visualization tomorrow, a five-minute practice next week, and a ten-minute drill every three months. It is about consistency, not intensity. I think that is the biggest takeaway for me. We often think that to learn something "for real," we need to suffer through a grueling multi-hour session. We think of learning as a marathon. But the data says that ten minutes of focused, spaced effort is worth ten hours of cramming. Cramming is just a way to pass a test tomorrow and forget everything by next Tuesday.
It really is. Cramming is the cognitive equivalent of trying to eat a week's worth of food in one sitting. You might get it all down, but you are not going to absorb most of it. Spaced repetition is the healthy, sustainable diet that actually builds the "muscle" of memory. And for Daniel, especially with a young son like Ezra, that peace of mind that comes from knowing you actually know what to do in a crisis is invaluable. You aren't just "hoping" you'll remember; you have a data-backed system that ensures you will. It is the difference between anxiety and preparedness.
It is about moving from "I've heard this before" to "I have mastered this." And that transition only happens in the gaps between the sessions. It is a bit like physical exercise. You don't get stronger while you are lifting the weights; you get stronger during the rest periods when the muscle fibers are repairing themselves. Memory is the same. The "space" is where the actual learning happens. The review session is just the stimulus. If you don't give the brain that time to consolidate, you're just spinning your wheels.
That is our second and final analogy, and it is the perfect one to end on. The rest is just as important as the work. If you don't give the brain that space to almost-forget, you never give it the chance to strengthen the connection. So, embrace the struggle, trust the intervals, and don't be afraid to let a little bit of time pass. That is where the magic happens. And Daniel, keep up with that Hebrew. Jerusalem is a beautiful place to be a lifelong learner.
This has been such a great deep dive into something that feels so fundamental to how we operate as humans. Daniel, thanks for the prompt. It is a great reminder for all of us to audit our own "mental trails" and see which ones are starting to get overgrown. I know I have a few first-aid skills that could use a "re-hydration" session this weekend. I might even get my partner involved and do a mock drill for a kitchen fire.
Same here. I think I need to refresh my knowledge on basic water safety before the summer hits. And if any of you listening want to dig deeper into the specific emergency side of this, I highly recommend going back to episode eight hundred and sixty-three on infant CPR or episode six hundred and twelve on home first aid. They are the perfect companions to this discussion on how to actually make that information stick. We have the resources; we just need to apply the timing.
And hey, if you are finding these deep dives helpful, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It genuinely helps the show reach more people who are looking for this kind of collaborative exploration. We love hearing from you, and it keeps the momentum going. We are building a community of curious minds here, and your feedback is the "spaced repetition" that keeps us improving.
It really does. You can find all our past episodes, including the ones we mentioned today, over at myweirdprompts.com. We have got a full archive there, plus a contact form if you want to send us a prompt of your own, or you can just email us at show at myweirdprompts.com. We are available on all the major podcast platforms, so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next one. We have some fascinating prompts lined up for the coming weeks.
And a quick shout out to Suno for our show music. It is amazing what is possible with these tools now. We will be back soon with another prompt from Daniel, but until then, keep learning, keep spacing those reviews, and stay curious. Remember, your brain is a garden—you have to tend to it if you want it to grow.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. We will see you in the next one.
Goodbye, everyone!
Take care.
