How Memory and Learning Actually

Work
A complete guide based on Moonwalking with Einstein and Make It Stick
COVERING MEMORY SCIENCE, THE FORGET TING CURVE, THE MEMORY PALACE, RETRIEVAL
PRACTICE, SPACED REPETITION, INTERLEAVING, DESIRABLE DIFFICULTIES, AND MENTAL
MODELS.

The Big Picture What these two books are really about

Section 1 How Memory Actually Works

Section 2 Why Most Study Methods Fail

Section 3 The Core Principle: Elaborative Encoding

Section 4 The Memory Palace

Section 5 Retrieval Practice: The Most Important Learning Tool

Section 6 Spaced Practice

Section 7 Interleaving

Section 8 Desirable Difficulties

Section 9 Mental Models and Elaboration

Conclusion The Single Unifying Idea

The Big Picture

WHAT THESE T WO BOOKS ARE REALLY ABOUT

These two books are asking the same question from different angles: why do we forget almost
everything we learn, and what can we actually do about it?
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer approaches this as a journalist who spent one year
learning ancient memory techniques and ended up competing in the US Memory
Championship. His book is the story of that journey, but embedded inside it is a serious
investigation of how human memory works and why we are so bad at using it.

Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel approaches the same
question from the science side. They are cognitive psychologists who spent decades running
experiments on real students in real classrooms. Their finding, stated bluntly at the start of
the book: "People generally are going about learning in the wrong ways."

Together, these books tell you two things: what your memory actually is, and how to use it
properly.

Section 1: How Memory Actually Works

WHAT IT MEANS

Most people think of memory the way they think of a camera—you look at something, it gets
recorded, and then it sits there waiting to be played back. Foer explains that this is completely
wrong. "Photographic memory is a detestable myth," one of the memory champions in the
book says. "Doesn't exist. In fact, my memory is quite average."

What memory actually is, at a physical level, is a pattern of connections between neurons.
Every time you learn something new, those connections change. As Foer puts it: "Every
sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering
the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your
brain will have physically changed."

The most important thing to understand about how memory works is that it is associative—
meaning everything you remember is connected to something else. A memory only surfaces
when something else triggers it. This is why you forget a name until someone says the first
letter, and suddenly it comes back.

German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus showed through his own experiments that
memory follows a predictable "curve of forgetting." As Foer describes: "In the first hour after
learning a set of nonsense syllables, more than half of them would be forgotten. After the first
day, another 10 percent would disappear." After that, the pace of forgetting slows. But the
early loss is dramatic.
WHY IT MAT TERS

Understanding this changes everything about how you approach learning. If memory is
associative, the best way to remember something is to connect it to as many other things as
possible to give it more entry points into the web. If memory fades along a forgetting curve,
then reviewing material at the right intervals can arrest that decline. Most importantly, if
memory is not photographic, then the people who seem to have extraordinary memories are
not born different from you. They have learned techniques that work with the associative,
spatial nature of memory rather than against it.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• What a memory is at the level of the brain (a pattern of neural connections)

• Why photographic memory is a myth

• What the forgetting curve is and what it tells us about reviewing material

• Why memory is associative and what that means for how we recall things

Section 2: Why Most Study Methods Fail

WHAT IT MEANS

Make It Stick opens with a striking fact: "Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new
knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they're also
among the least productive."

The single most common study method—re-reading your notes and highlighted textbook
passages—barely works. One survey found that more than 80 percent of college students rely
on this method. Yet research shows that multiple re-readings in close succession produce
"negligible benefits."

Why? Because re-reading creates what the authors call the illusion of mastery. When you read
something multiple times, it becomes familiar. Familiarity feels like understanding. But they
are not the same thing. As the book explains: "Rising familiarity with a text and fluency in
reading it can create an illusion of mastery... the ease with which they follow the argument
gives them the feeling that they already know it."

The book gives a telling example: there is a famous test where people are shown twelve
different drawings of a penny and asked to identify the correct one. Most people, even after
handling pennies thousands of times in their lives, cannot do it. Repeated exposure without
active retrieval produces almost no lasting memory.

WHY IT MAT TERS

This matters because it means that working hard and studying for many hours is not enough.
The method matters more than the amount of time. A student who spends three hours re-
reading notes is doing far less useful work than one who spends one hour trying to recall
those notes from memory. The book is direct: "When learning is harder, it's stronger and lasts
longer... gains achieved during massed practice are transitory and melt away quickly."

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• Why re-reading is an ineffective study strategy despite feeling productive

• What the "illusion of mastery" is and how to avoid it

• Why cramming produces short-term gains but fast forgetting

• The difference between familiarity and actual understanding

Section 3: The Core Principle: Elaborative Encoding

WHAT IT MEANS

This is the single most important idea in Moonwalking with Einstein, and it underlies every
memory technique in the book.

Our memories did not evolve for the modern world. They evolved during the Pleistocene
when humans were hunter-gatherers who needed to remember where food was, which
plants were poisonous, and how to navigate home. Our brains became exceptionally good at
remembering places, images, stories, and spatial information. What they are very bad at is
remembering abstract information: numbers, names, lists of words, facts from textbooks.

Elaborative encoding is the solution to this mismatch. It means taking information that your
brain is bad at holding and converting it into information your brain is good at holding. As
Foer writes: "The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don't
remember all types of information equally well... The point of memory techniques is to take
the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the
kinds of memories our brains were built for."
Make It Stick describes the same principle with different language, calling it elaboration: "the
process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it
with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning
relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be."

WHY IT MAT TERS

This is the master key. Every single memory technique—the Memory Palace, the Link Method,
acronyms, the Major System—is just a specific application of elaborative encoding. They all
work by doing the same thing: forcing you to convert dull, abstract information into vivid,
concrete, connected mental images.

It also explains why emotional events are so much easier to remember—they are already
elaborated. The memory techniques manufacture that vivid quality artificially for
information that does not naturally have it.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• What elaborative encoding is in plain language

• Why the brain remembers visual and spatial information better than abstract information

• Why this explains both why memory techniques work and why ordinary note-taking often fails

• How Make It Stick's concept of "elaboration" is the same principle described differently

Section 4: The Memory Palace

WHAT IT MEANS

The Memory Palace is the oldest and most powerful memory technique ever developed. It
was invented, according to legend, by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos around the fifth
century BC.

Foer opens the book with this story: Simonides left a banquet just before the roof collapsed,
killing everyone inside. When asked to identify the bodies—all mangled beyond recognition—
he was able to guide relatives to the exact spot where each person had been sitting, simply by
mentally walking back through the room. He had not tried to memorise the seating
arrangement. But his spatial memory had recorded it automatically.
The technique: convert each thing you want to remember into a vivid mental image, and
place each image at a specific, familiar location in a space you know well. To recall the list,
mentally walk through the space in order, and each location triggers its associated image.

Foer's teacher explains the logic: "The thing to understand is that humans are very, very good
at learning spaces. If you are left alone for five minutes in someone else's house, think about
how much of that house could be fixed in your memory... Without really noticing it, you'd
remember the whereabouts of hundreds of objects."

The images you place in your Memory Palace must be striking—absurd, funny, disgusting, or
exaggerated. As Foer writes: "The general idea with most memory techniques is to change
whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful,
so exciting, and so different from anything you've seen before that you can't possibly forget
it."

A Memory Palace can be any space you know well: your home, your street, your school route,
a building you visit regularly. One memory champion used his own body parts as loci to
memorise an entire 56,000-word dictionary. The technique does not require a palace—it
requires familiarity.

WHY IT MAT TERS

This technique is 2,500 years old and still used by every top competitive memoriser today. It
works not because it is magic, but because it converts abstract information into the spatial,
vivid, associative form that the brain is already built to handle perfectly. More broadly, the
Memory Palace teaches you something important: your memory is not broken. It is just
selective. When you give it the right kind of information—even artificially—it performs
remarkably well.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• The origin of the Memory Palace and the Simonides story

• The two components of the technique: images and places (loci)

• Why spatial memory is so strong and how the Memory Palace exploits it

• What makes a good Memory Palace image (vivid, unusual, active)

• Why this works for ordered lists but needs adaptation for other kinds of information
Section 5: Retrieval Practice: The Most Important
Learning Tool

WHAT IT MEANS

This is the central finding of Make It Stick, backed by more than a century of research. Every
time you pull a memory out of your brain—every time you actively retrieve something you
have learned—that memory becomes stronger and easier to retrieve in the future.

The act of retrieval does not just measure what you know. It changes what you know, and
how well you know it. The authors describe this as the testing effect: "practicing retrieval
makes learning stick far better than reexposure to the original material does."

A 2010 study found that students who read a passage and then took a test retained 50 percent
more of the information a week later than students who simply re-read the passage. A
classroom study found that students scored a full letter grade higher on material they had
been quizzed on. Another study found that students who were tested three times forgot only
13 percent of the material after a week, while students who spent the same time cramming
forgot 50 percent.

The key insight is that retrieval must be effortful. An easy recall that requires no mental
struggle strengthens memory less than a harder one. As the book states: "The greater the
effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened
by retrieval."

WHY IT MAT TERS

This changes how you should think about studying entirely. Re-reading is passive—familiarity
grows, and you feel like you are learning. Testing yourself is active—you close the book, you
try to remember, you struggle, and sometimes you fail. It feels less productive. But research
consistently shows it is far more productive.

The book puts it plainly: "We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we're
not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn't feel productive, we are drawn to
strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often
temporary."

Practical implication: after every lesson, close your notes and write down everything you
remember. That five minutes of uncomfortable struggling is worth more than another hour of
re-reading.
 WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• What the testing effect is and the evidence behind it

• Why effortful retrieval strengthens memory more than easy retrieval

• The difference between testing as a measurement tool and testing as a learning tool

• Why re-reading feels productive but is largely ineffective compared to active recall

Section 6: Spaced Practice

WHAT IT MEANS

Make It Stick is clear: spreading your study sessions out over time produces far stronger long-
term retention than doing the same amount of study in one sitting.

When you study something, then wait a day or two and study it again, the slight forgetting
that has happened in between makes retrieval harder—and that harder retrieval is exactly
what strengthens the memory.

The book explains: "When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between
sessions, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting
learning."

In one study, students who crammed did better on an immediate test but forgot 50 percent
within two days. Students who spaced their practice forgot only 13 percent.

This connects to Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve. The optimal time to review something is just
before you are about to forget it—when a little fading has happened but the memory has not
disappeared entirely. Each review at that point pushes the next forgetting point further into
the future. This is exactly the logic behind spaced repetition software like Anki.

WHY IT MAT TERS

This principle exposes cramming as almost entirely wasted effort for anything you need to
keep long-term. Short, regular study sessions are more valuable than long, infrequent ones.
One hour spread across three sessions (twenty minutes each, on different days) is more
effective than one hour in a single sitting.
Instead of studying a topic until you feel like you understand it and then moving on, study it—
then come back two days later and test yourself, then again a week later. Each return visit
locks the memory in more deeply.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• Why spacing practice is more effective than massed practice (cramming)

• How spaced practice relates to the forgetting curve

• Why studying when you are "a little rusty" is actually beneficial, not a sign you haven't learned

• The practical logic behind spaced repetition software like Anki

Section 7: Interleaving

WHAT IT MEANS

Most people study one topic at a time—all of one subject, then all of another. This is called
blocked practice. It feels orderly and efficient. Make It Stick shows it is largely ineffective.

Interleaving means mixing different topics or types of problems within a single study session.
Instead of doing thirty exercises on one concept in a row, you mix different concepts—
switching between them constantly.

The book's research found: "When learners interleave the practice of two or more subjects,
they learn each better than if they had studied them one at a time in sequence."

Why? Because when you switch between topics, you cannot rely on momentum or the
previous example to carry you forward. You have to retrieve the relevant approach from
scratch each time, which requires more cognitive effort. That effort is what builds durable
memory.

WHY IT MAT TERS

Interleaving also trains something more important than memorisation: the ability to
recognise which type of problem you are facing before you try to solve it. If you only ever
practise one type of problem at a time, you always know which method to apply—you are just
drilling the method.
When you interleave, you must first identify the problem type and then choose the right
method. This is exactly the skill you need in real situations. The temporary confusion you feel
during interleaved practice is not a sign of poor learning—it is the learning happening.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• What interleaving is and how it differs from blocked practice

• Why interleaving feels harder but produces stronger retention

• How interleaving trains problem-recognition, not just problem-solving

• Why the confusion you feel during interleaved practice is a sign of productive effort

Section 8: Desirable Difficulties

WHAT IT MEANS

Both books converge on the same counterintuitive idea: making learning harder makes it
more permanent.

Make It Stick introduces the concept of "desirable difficulties"—conditions that slow down
learning in the short term but dramatically improve long-term retention. Spaced practice,
interleaving, and retrieval practice are all desirable difficulties. They feel unproductive. They
feel frustrating.

But that friction is the brain working harder, and harder work produces stronger memories.

This directly contradicts what most people believe about learning. The book states: "Many
teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster, the learning will be better.
Much research turns this belief on its head. Learning is deeper and more durable when it's
effortful. Learning that's easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow."

WHY IT MAT TERS

This reframes frustration. When you are struggling to recall something, or when a study
session feels slow and difficult, that is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that your
brain is doing serious work.

The smooth, easy feeling of re-reading familiar notes is the false signal. The uncomfortable
effort of retrieval practice is the real signal that durable learning is happening.
 WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• What a "desirable difficulty" is

• Why difficulty during learning, rather than ease, tends to produce stronger long-term retention

• How this principle unifies retrieval practice, spaced practice, and interleaving under one idea

• Why the feeling of effortless learning should be treated with suspicion

Section 9: Mental Models and Elaboration

WHAT IT MEANS

Both books agree that isolated facts are fragile. What makes knowledge robust is when it is
organised into a connected structure—what Make It Stick calls a mental model.

A mental model is an internal representation of how something works—a framework that

Elaboration is the process of building these models. Every time you explain a new idea in
your own words, every time you connect it to something you already know, every time you
find an analogy or a real-world example, you are adding strands to the web that holds the
knowledge together.

Foer demonstrates this with the Russian journalist S, who had an extraordinary memory for
images but could not grasp abstract concepts because he could not connect them to anything
concrete. A powerful memory without a framework for organising knowledge is like a
warehouse without shelving—things get stored but cannot be found.

WHY IT MAT TERS

Rather than treating each course or chapter as a separate thing to memorise, the goal should
be to build a single mental model of the subject—a map that shows how everything connects.
Then each new thing you learn is not a new isolated fact but a new detail added to a structure
you already have.

When you elaborate—when you ask "why does this work?", "what does this remind me of?",
"how does this connect to what I already know?"—you are building mental models. This is the
deepest form of learning, and it is the form most likely to transfer to new problems you have
never seen before.

WHAT YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN

• What a mental model is and why it is more useful than isolated facts

• What elaboration means as a learning strategy

• How to elaborate actively: restating in your own words, finding analogies, connecting to prior
knowledge

• Why knowledge organised into mental models transfers to new problems, while isolated facts do
not

Conclusion: The Single Unifying Idea

Both books, from opposite directions, arrive at exactly the same place.

Foer finds it in the ancient memory tradition: memory works through vivid, active, connected
images—not through passive exposure or repetition. The techniques that have existed for
2,500 years work because they force you to do something active and elaborated with
information rather than just reading it passively.

Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel find it in cognitive science: retrieval, spacing, interleaving,
and elaboration all work because they make the brain work harder, and harder work—
provided you succeed—produces stronger, more flexible, more lasting knowledge.

The same truth, stated two ways: learning requires effort, and the effort is not the price you
pay for learning—the effort is the learning.

Based on: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer (Penguin Press, 2011) and Make It Stick: The Science of Successful
Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III & Mark A. McDaniel (Harvard University Press, 2014).