Retrieval and storage strength

Phones in our pockets allow us to retrieve information at any time, therefore making it useless to store data, while it is of utmost importance to remember how to retrieve it. This is similar to what Ahrens¹ defines as the difference between "Retrieval Strength" and "Storage Strength". Although storage strength is what education proposes (see: cramming is not understanding), it is possible that our brains can retrieve information under certain cues.

If, at the moment of learning, we link the pieces to existing knowledge, those elements could become cues to access specific information. This is not unlike the idea of a backlinking in this website (see: backlinks are the core of my digital garden). Of course, it is not the same a mental cue than an explicit text on a page, but they somehow feel related to one another.

Tags: #studying, #understanding #knowledge-generation #memory