On 6 May 1954, at the Iffley Road track in Oxford, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4 and broke a barrier physiologists had called impossible. The detail everyone forgets is what happened next: within 46 days John Landy had broken it too, and within a few years dozens had. The wall was never in…
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Santiago Ramón y Cajal is, quite simply, the father of modern neuroscience. Working in nineteenth-century Spain with a microscope and a staining technique he refined himself, he established the neuron doctrine: that the brain is built from discrete cells signalling across gaps, not one continuous fused web. He shared the 1906 Nobel Prize for it,…
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Barbara Oakley flunked her way through high school maths, then became an engineering professor who teaches the world how to learn. Her course “Learning How to Learn” is among the most popular MOOCs ever made, and her book “A Mind for Numbers” turned cognitive science into a usable toolkit. Her central insight is that the…
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Spaced repetition is a learning technique that schedules reviews at increasing intervals — a day, then a few days, then weeks — timed to catch information just before you’d forget it. It works because of the “spacing effect”: memories strengthen more when recall is effortful and spread out, rather than crammed. Each successful review pushes…
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Sebastian Leitner was an Austrian science journalist who, in his 1972 book “So lernt man lernen,” gave the world a beautifully low-tech learning machine: a box of flashcards. The Leitner system sorts cards into compartments according to how well you know them. Get a card right and it moves to a box you review less…
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The Leitner System is a method of efficiently using flashcards to aid in the learning and memorization of new information. The system is based on the idea that our ability to recall information improves with repetition and that the timing of the repetitions is important. The Leitner system uses flashcards with questions on one side…
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Mind mapping is a technique used to organize and structure information. It involves creating a visual map of ideas and concepts, with the main idea at the center and branches radiating out to represent related ideas. Mind mapping can be used for a wide range of purposes, including note-taking, brainstorming, problem-solving, and project planning. The…
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Benedict Carey spent decades as a science reporter for The New York Times, and in “How We Learn” he did something valuable: he took the replicated findings of cognitive psychology and demolished a great deal of cherished study advice. The headline is that much of what feels like good studying isn’t. Re-reading your notes produces…
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Dr. Sean Young is a behavioural scientist at UCLA and UC Irvine who studies why people abandon changes they genuinely want to make. His answer, laid out in “Stick with It,” is that willpower is the wrong lever entirely — psychology, not grit, is what makes behaviour persist. He packages it as seven forces under…
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Agile is a project management and product development approach that emphasizes flexibility and collaboration. Agile was first outlined in the Agile Manifesto, a set of guiding values and principles for Agile software development. The Agile Manifesto prioritizes: The most popular Agile methodology is Scrum, an Agile framework for managing and completing complex projects. Scrum is…
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