Concept
Generation effect
The generation effect says: what you come up with or write down yourself, you remember better than what you only read.
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Mark the passage
You read an article, a PDF or a transcript and highlight what grabs you. One tap on “Core thought” holds on to the passage.
Mark the passage
You read an article, a PDF or a transcript and highlight what grabs you. One tap on “Core thought” holds on to the passage.
- 2
In your own words
The quote sits at the top; below it you write what it means to you. What you put into words yourself sticks better than what you only underline.
In your own words
The quote sits at the top; below it you write what it means to you. What you put into words yourself sticks better than what you only underline.
- 3
Let it come back
You turn your core thought into the learning format you like, here a flashcard. In the Feed it quizzes you, and Mnemorya brings it back shortly before you would forget it.
Let it come back
You turn your core thought into the learning format you like, here a flashcard. In the Feed it quizzes you, and Mnemorya brings it back shortly before you would forget it.
The generation effect means, roughly, the “made it myself” effect. A recipe you only read, you forget quickly. If you have tried it yourself and written it down, you can often still make it years later. What you do yourself sticks better.
In 1978 Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf ran a simple experiment in Canada. One group read word pairs like “hot – cold”. The others only got “hot – c____” and had to find the second word themselves. Even though it was super easy, the second group remembered the words better. In 2007 researchers analyzed many experiments like this together and found the effect again and again.
When you find something yourself, you have to think for a moment and connect it to what you already know. That creates more threads in your head that you can later use to pull the memory back out.
In Mnemorya you build your content yourself: your cards, your key ideas, which are short takeaways in your own words, and your Memory Palaces. You are already learning while you build.
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
People remembered words they had to fill in themselves better than words they had only read.
The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592–604.
doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.592An analysis of many studies shows: things you produce yourself are reliably remembered better than things you only read.
The generation effect: A meta-analytic review. Memory & Cognition, 35(2), 201–210.
doi.org/10.3758/BF03193441
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
