Concept
Socratic method
With the Socratic method you don't get answers, you get questions, until you find the solution yourself.
- 1
The opening question
Mnemo names the topic and asks a simple first question. You see how many insights you need to find — not which ones.
The opening question
Mnemo names the topic and asks a simple first question. You see how many insights you need to find — not which ones.
- 2
Only questions
Mnemo claims nothing. When you're on a wrong track, he answers with a question that breaks it.
Only questions
Mnemo claims nothing. When you're on a wrong track, he answers with a question that breaks it.
- 3
Get there yourself
Every insight you put into words yourself is revealed. At the end you see the sentences of yours that hit it.
Get there yourself
Every insight you put into words yourself is revealed. At the end you see the sentences of yours that hit it.
Imagine you ask someone something and only get a question back. Annoying? Maybe. But after a few questions you suddenly notice: I actually know the answer myself. That is exactly the Socratic method. Learning through questions instead of being told.
Socrates lived about 2,400 years ago in Athens. He didn't write anything down himself, his student Plato passed on his conversations. In the dialogue “Meno”, Socrates asks a slave boy how to make a square twice as big. The boy first guesses wrong: just double the sides. Socrates doesn't tell him the solution, he only asks more questions until the boy finds it himself.
What you explain to yourself, you understand more deeply than when you only hear it. While answering you also notice where your knowledge still has gaps. And a solution you came up with yourself, you don't forget so quickly.
In the conversation exercises in Mnemorya, for example in a Debate with Mnemo, you can pick Socratic mode. Then Mnemo only asks questions. Mnemo doesn't claim anything and doesn't argue against anything. You get to the answer yourself.
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.
Teenagers who, while reading about blood circulation, had to explain to themselves after each sentence what it meant understood the material much better.
Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Understanding. Cognitive Science, 18(3), 439–477.
doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1803_3Across many studies it shows: people who are led to explain things in their own words while learning learn noticeably more.
Inducing Self-Explanation: a Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 30(3), 703–725.
doi.org/10.1007/s10648-018-9434-x
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
