Scientists have discovered a great deal about the inner-workings of learning and memory, but most of this knowledge is buried away in scientific journals, rarely seeing the light of day. Our mission at Smart.fm is to combine proven learning principles with web technology to improve the way people learn. Working with a team of researchers we've assembled numerous principles from the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science and incorporated them into our web platform, Smart.fm. The result? A system that helps people learn more quickly and remember longer.
One of the key concepts our applications are built around is spaced rehearsal, which simply says the best way to learn information is to space out the review of that information over increasing periods of time. Studies have shown, and most people know from experience, that the opposite approach, cramming loads of information over a short period of time without review doesn't lead to long-term retention.
In 1886, Herman Ebbinghaus, the German psychologist who first pioneered the experimental study of memory demonstrated that there is a predictable and measurable rate at which people forget what they have learned. He also showed that there is an optimal moment to review what you have learned and that moment is just before you're likely to forget it. Reviewing something while it's still fresh in your mind or after you have completely forgotten it is inefficient. The key is to activate that latent memory just as it's about to fade. Over 100 years of experimental studies have confirmed this basic hypothesis that an optimal moment of review exists. The problem is that calculating this moment for the vast stream of information we encounter at different times is far beyond the capacity of the human brain, but it's not beyond the capacity of computers and that's where Smart.fm comes in.
Evaluating what we know and what we don't know is notoriously difficult. We can't just peak under the hood to see if it's there. So, what we do is guess and our guesses are usually flawed. The faculty of evaluating one's own knowledge is called metamemory and the problem is people have inaccurate metamemory. As a result, people don't spend the right amount of time on the things they most need to review. Additionally, just trying to keep track of this information is a burden that distracts you from the actual study process. Managing and scheduling one's own learning, even poorly, can be exhausting. The good news is that at Smart.fm, we've built a system that tracks and predicts your performance across every piece of information you're studying called items, so you don't have to waste any time on this process. Instead, you can focus all your energy on learning. Our system adapts to differences in learning speeds and item difficulty, constantly measuring memory and predicting performance across all the other items from French verbs, to art history, to the names of the galaxies. We track your performance on every item and then predict your optimal review time on an item-by-item basis. What's more, the system actually improves as you use it. The more we learn about you, the better we get at managing your memory and most importantly, the faster you learn. Simply put, we eliminate the hassle of self-paced instruction, of trying to figure out what to study and when. If you want to set a personal goal, just set your end date and the system will generate your personal learning schedule, or you can just let us stream content to you in a manner optimized for long-term retention. You can even visualize your progress across all your items and goals. Instead of being left in the dark, you can actually see what you've learned and how far you still have to go.
Every time you study within Smart.fm the system assigns a memory strength to each of your items based on a number of factors such as time last seen and cumulative performance. The system then selects which items are most urgent for you at that moment and creates a lesson for you with these items. This urgency battle that takes place between all your items allows us to determine what information you most need to see at any given moment in time and by presenting that information to you at that very moment will give you the best chance at consolidating it as long-term knowledge.
Our system is designed to promote both active recall and passive recognition. Some parts of our training cycle test your ability to recognize information while others train you to produce an answer from scratch. The end goal is to reach a level of automatic recall, that ability to recall information effortlessly and with confidence. At this point information is not simply remembered, but known. It's frustrating to half-learn something and then quickly forget it as it drifts off your mental horizon. When you learn something you want to really know it.
Smart.fm, the world's sharpest learning tool.
Goodness, that was longer than I was expecting.