In which the author tries to explain what "free recall" is without looking it up.

🕳 I got it right here somewhere!

"Free recall" is what you do when you conjure up some information from your memory without any kind of hint or reminder.

It's commonly observed in situations like when you hear a song from a singer you love, and you just can't for the love of you remember their name. That's the famous "tip of the tongue" experience, and it's as much frustrating to be in it as it is satisfying to be relieved from it by the name finally popping up into your head unannounced, hours later.

The satisfaction in finally remembering the dang thing is so great that many people will tell others "wait wait, don't tell me!" so they won't be robbed of it. Being told is like a spoiler, except that remembering something that's been itching like that can be even better than finding out about it in the first place, so the crime in spoiling it is proportionally much greater.

Some people though can't stand the suspense, or the prospect of failing at the retrieval task, and will beg for an answer or reach desperately into their pocket computers for relief. I used to be one of those (not always!), but I was saved by Scott H. Young.

🏆 The unreasonable effectiveness of free recall

You see, it turns out that paying the price of drilling into the depths of your brain reservoirs and waiting dutifully for the answer to bubble up out of it (as in a water well, not oil, yuck) is pretty much the bestest way of making sure it sticks around to make you rich wise.

In the book Ultralearning, which I super recommend, Scott told me about these experiments some scientists made where they tried a bunch of study techniques (mental maps, multiple-choice practice questions, etc.) and then tested people on what they had studied. Free recall left everyone else in the dust—by a long shot.

You'd think that when trying different testing methods afterwards, the study techniques that most resembled the test would come out winning at least in those instances, right?

Nope. Even when people studied by drawing mental maps, and then the test would ask them to draw mental maps, guess who won? Yep. The free-recalling people mental-mapped circles around everyone else.

Oh and it gets better: free recalling works before you even learn the answer you're trying to recall. Whaa??

Yes. If you frown and struggle for answers to exercises even before exposing yourself to the knowledge they're supposed to exercise, when you do study it, things stay much longer and stronger.

It's like you dig up craving holes for the answers, and then when you finally meet them in a textbook, class, or whatever, they jump out at you and immediately root themselves into the spots you left open for them. It's like preemptive remembering.

😖 "Free" as in straining

That was a nice branding trick there by research psychologists, calling it "free" recall. It might have been more aptly named "costliest of recalls," or at least "unaided recall."

Picking the right answer when you see it right in front of you among a list of multiple-choice alternatives is easy. Unearthing it from scratch takes mental muscle and leaves you panting.

And that's the whole point. If you read Ultralearning (which you should, if you want to), you'll see this word "strain" repeated a lot.

When you drag the answer out kicking and screaming from way down into your neural tangles, it bumps into and knocks over a bunch of other stuff in its path, and smudges itself onto them too, leaving everyone smelling like it. So next time you need it you can ask around that path of mayhem still vividly remembered in the neural neighborhood, and people will be quick to point fingers.

⚠️ Careful what you read around here

So, this article, besides being a meta-exercise in making sure I never forget what free recall is, is also a long-winded disclaimer about the kinds of things that are likely to show up here in this rustlog.

Never before has being wrong on the internet seemed so attractive. By free-recall-blogging (frogging?), look how many benefits you get:

You get all the top-of-the-line long-term retention advantages stated above.

You can write stuff off the top of your head without going through the trouble of researching any of it or carefully peppering it with links and references. Much shorter time-to-published.

You have the best plausible excuse for your screw-ups: "hey, I was practicing, and I happened to misremember that, okay?"

You (hopefully) get even better long-term brain storage by having the helpful internet accuracy police pick apart your mistakes and lecture you on the facts and nuances you missed.

Of course those are great combo-wins for the writer, but maybe not so great for the reader. The internet has too much lazy, inaccurate and poorly-researched trash piling up on its streets already, thank you very much.

But then again, maybe there isn't so much on the particular things I'll be talking about, or maybe not with the right narrative or analogy that will finally make it click for you, or maybe not with the exact mistakes that will piss you off or trip you up and then make you never forget the thing after you find out the right answer (and come back after me with a pitchfork.)

There might be something in it for both of us, is all I'm saying. Just don't bet your life on any of it. And to help you be on higher alert, I'll always make sure to tag such hand-wavy eyes-closed retrieval attempts with the #free-recall tag. How about that?