Memory grand master Ed Cooke gets $1M to teach his tricks at new startup

http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/16/memory-grand-master-ed-cooke-gets-1m-to-teach-his-tricks-at-new-startup-memrise/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

by gregdetre • 14 years ago

38 12 14 years ago

venturebeat.com

bproper2• 14 years ago

These mnemonics techniques have been used since the ancient Greeks and Romans. But does it train your brain in the same way if the images and storylines are being given to you with pre-packaged GIFS?

Brining gaming and crowd-sourcing into memory training is interesting, since this kind of learning has traditionally been a very isolated practice.

gregdetre4• 14 years ago

This is a great question.

In our experience, we've found that creating your own mnemonic is usually the best way to really deeply encode a new memory.

But a great mem from someone else works almost as well. And it's a lot easier to breeze along, giggling at other people's imagery, occasionally coming up with something new of your own.

da5e• 14 years ago

I used to use memrise, and enjoyed it, especially the gamification and the ability to put your own mnemonics in as well as see what images others used. But when they changed to a garden metaphor I lost track of what their algorithm was doing and went back to more traditional flashcardexchange.com mostly. I'll take another look though.

bproper2• 14 years ago

When did they switch to a new style?

gregdetre4• 14 years ago

We added the garden narrative in Spring 2011. The goal was to wrap our internal model of the state of your memories in a visual metaphor to make it clearer and more vivid for you as a learner.

We've improved the underlying algorithms a lot since then. Do let us know if you still find the garden confusing.

syaz1• 14 years ago

Heh I thought it's about computer memory.

adamalix• 14 years ago

These guys are badasses and the product works great. Learned ~100 Mandarin characters with very little effort and the product gets iterated on very quickly (their support team really listens to customer feedback). Congrats on the funding!

zander1229• 14 years ago

I really enjoyed memrise when I used it but I wish it had a couple more features for languages, like sentence building with the words youve learned. Also, I would've used it everyday if there was a mobile app. Its been awhile since i have played with it though. Overall, a great tool and I've recommended it to fair number of people :)

gregdetre4• 14 years ago

Thanks for the positivity. We have an iPhone app coming out in the next 10 days. Definitely let us know what you think of it if you try it.

Sentence building is definitely on our radar, but it's a rich and thorny domain, and we want to take our time coming up with something good.

P.S. Android is going to take a little longer.

daralthus• 14 years ago

Great ideas, would like to highlight the community generated mems/memes feature! Could use a canv.as like meme maker on the site, it could shoot up mem/meme generation to the stars.

Jach• 14 years ago

> Cooke says that returning to a memory is crucial, and the Memrise has algorithms that learn when a student needs a friendly reminder, via an email say, to recall a certain lesson.

Are these algorithms any different than the ones used by Anki et al? I'd be surprised if they were. The novel thing for the isolated case (gamification is interesting but I'm not sure how general that is for helping) seems to be thickly layering on the mnemonic tricks instead of relying on pure flash-card memorization of information, is this correct?

gregdetre4• 14 years ago

Broadly, our scheduling algorithms are based on the same ideas of spaced repetition that inspired Anki, SuperMemo and lots of others, though the devil is often in the details.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

However, neither Anki nor SuperMemo enrich and speed up your learning with mems (crowd-sourced mnemonics), which provide a huge and well-documented boost to your learning rate and retention.

Perhaps most of all though, we've worked really hard to make Memrise a really happy learning experience. It's harder to put numbers on that, but hopefully you can feel it when you try it!

Memory grand master Ed Cooke gets $1M to teach his tricks at new startup

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