Impulse

An impulse is not a test. It is a sentence, a question, a thought that surfaces while you are doing something else — and lets you touch the topic again for a few seconds. That brevity is the point: it costs nothing and interrupts nothing, but it moves the moment at which you would lose sight of the topic for good.

Behind it lies the best-documented finding in learning research: spaced beats massed. Repeating ten times in one evening does less than ten times spread over weeks — considerably less. The best gap depends on how long you want to keep it; the more distant the goal, the wider the gaps may be.

The catch is that the right thing feels wrong. An impulse arriving when you have nearly lost the answer is harder work than one shortly after learning — and that is exactly why it works better. Learning research calls such hurdles desirable difficulties: what is more effortful in the moment lasts longer.

In Mnemorya you decide how often impulses may surface and on which topics. Mnemorya works out the moment — shortly before the topic is about to slip, not on a fixed timetable.