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The Forgetting Curve
sidelong.app/pub/forgetting-curveA weekly letter on learning, memory, and writing well.
Drafts
3Content ideas
4Why you forget everything you read
Drafting now. The Hidden Brain episode is the spine, the Farnam Street piece is the counterweight.
The seven-second tax
Carl Hendrick's finding: one notification costs seven seconds of re-settling, 150 times a day. Do the arithmetic for a working writer.
Spaced repetition for writers
Ali Abdaal's resurfacing system, applied to drafting instead of studying. The draft is the review session.
What Huberman gets right about memory
The post-learning adrenaline window. End writing sessions hard, and take the caffeine after, not before.
Notes
2Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. The Hidden Brain episode could be the cold open.
Caffeine 5 to 15 minutes after studying, not before. Test this for a week.
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Research that arrives mid-sentence.
As you type, Sidelong surfaces the highlights, quotes, and insights that speak to the paragraph you're in, right beside the draft. Cite one in a click and the footnote writes itself.
Why you forget everything you read
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The Forgetting Curve
A weekly letter on learning, memory, and writing well.
Why you forget everything you read
Drafting now. The Hidden Brain episode is the spine, the Farnam Street piece is the counterweight.
The seven-second tax
Carl Hendrick's finding: one notification costs seven seconds of re-settling, 150 times a day. Do the arithmetic for a working writer.
Spaced repetition for writers
Ali Abdaal's resurfacing system, applied to drafting instead of studying. The draft is the review session.
What Huberman gets right about memory
The post-learning adrenaline window. End writing sessions hard, and take the caffeine after, not before.
The caffeine window
Huberman's post-learning protocol: adrenaline after the session, not before. Counterintuitive enough to carry a short practical piece.
Forgetting on purpose
Hidden Brain says forgetting is the feature. Turn that on note systems that hoard everything: maybe the archive should decay by design.
Sending built in
Written here, sent from here.
Press publish and the piece lands in every subscriber's inbox, sent from your publication's own address. Substack and Beehiiv send newsletters. They don't help you write them.
Why you forget everything you read
The forgetting is normal. Losing it for good is optional.
You finish a book, close the cover, and a week later you can barely summarize the argument. It feels like a personal failing. It is not. It is the default setting.
Forgetting is not just a side effect of memory. It's not memory failing. It's part of what memory is supposed to do.
The research here is blunt. Highlighting feels like progress and does almost nothing on its own. Retention comes from friction: wrestling with an idea, restating it in your own words, and meeting it again at the moment you can use it.
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