As many have, I've spent a lot of time reading. I found it be a great return on my investment of both time and mental energy. One thing bothered me: this investment had immediate short-term payoffs in the form of new knowledge — but I found it quite difficult to retain that knowledge for what I considered to be an appropriate duration. An avid note-taker while reading — I would often look over my notes from time to time and take comfort in the idea that I had now regained my previous knowledge. This regained knowledge faded as well.

Then I had an idea (admittedly, aided by the information in the books I had read) — if real learning and skill acquisition comes through strenuous, deliberate practice — then that might be a good model for how to revisit and retain the information in books.

There is an analogy from the book, Make it Stick, by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, that Professor Mary Pat Wenderoth uses to illustrate this idea to her students: “Our brains are like a forest, and your memory is somewhere in there. You're here, and the memory is over there. The more times you make a path to that memory, the better the path is, so that the next time you need the memory, it's going to be easier to find it. But as soon as you get your notes out, you have short-circuited that path. You are not exploring the path anymore, someone else has told you the way”.

With this excerpt in mind; if, through the power of retrieval, reflection, and other such tools — one can find aid in doing the work to create those paths within their “mind's forest” — then that would be the goal of this project.

The above paragraphs lay out the seed for the idea. I developed a mobile app as the primary medium for this content, but recently decided to create this website as well (which is a work-in-progress). As I go through the process, the mobile app should eventually be available on iOS and Android.

The content, is, unfortunately, quite slim at the moment — but my hope is that others will contribute via the ‘Add Content’ section as they read and happen upon ideas and questions they’d like to reflect on at a later date. I hope that this will enable the ‘open-sourcing’ of content from which everyone can use and benefit from.

May we all grow together.

- Gal