tags: learning
title: Basic Philosophy of Learning

1. When taking notes, it is important to bear in mind your purpose for taking notes.
    1. Are your notes for you? Only for you? For a friend? For a general audience?
    1. Consider what would make your notes useful to their intended audience.
    1. What do you intend your intended audience to use them for?
        1. Learning or doing?
        1. If doing, think about writing a procedure to be followed
        1. If learning, see Memorisation below

## Memorisation
If you want to memorise something, then you want to *remove your dependence upon your notes as much as possible*.
Thus
1. Start with sufficiently detailed notes that you can recall *everything you need to* from those notes.
2. Write condensed notes that are enough to remind you of what you wrote in (1) above.
    * The idea is that through practice and repetition, these condensed notes become all you need.
3. Write even more condensed notes, following the same basic idea, this time enough to remind you
    of what you wrote in (2).
4. And so on. Until you can recall your last iteration of notes from memory.

This is a similar thing to e.g. memorising a piece of music, where you break it into chunks,
as small as needed so that you can learn a chunk by heart, then combine into larger chunks that
you learn by heart, and eventually glue together into an entire piece. Notes, or other reference
material, should be only what you need to remember everything.