I decided to learn the greek alphabet (as one does on a Monday afternoon). I will try to do it as fast as possible and I'll try to see how well making the characters' recognition reflex in my mind.
I do a lot of physics, a domain in which greek letters appear more often than clean values. Learning the names of the letters will probably help with memorization and communication.
I want to test my brain. A point of this experiment is simply to see in how much time I could learn 24 (the greek alphabet only has 24 letters) pieces of discrete information.
I want to test a setup that I hope might force my brain to make character recognition a reflex. For this, I've created a simple website that shows a greek letter for a split second (20ms) and prompts me for the character that I think was shown.
I will define the amount of time (15 minutes) to work on this instead of starting with the target of learning all letters. This simply means that I'll try to learn as much as possible in exactly 15 minutes and then I'll test myself.
I might know a few characters already like delta, theta and a few commonly used letters, but I don't think that's really the point of this experiment. When taking a test online, I knew 58% of the letters.
I first got
134 / 145
with no training before hand while keeping an image of the greek alphabet open in another window. The point is to learn, and having a reference to not be completely lost is useful.
I then increased the speed of the program and got a new practice run with
130 / 134
and without using any external references.
When taking the same test as I had before the experiment, I got 100%. That's a 42% increase
These tests aren't difficult at all and I probably could have finished memorizing the greek alphabet from what I knew before hand in any range of ways in those same 15 minutes. I wanted to test the method of flashing a prompt on screen and building up a reflex, and this experiment doesn't show any conclusive data. Learning the greek alphabet was mostly an excuse for testing this, but no interesting data was created from trying to learn such a small subject.
I was interested in possible ways of memorizing a large amount of small pieces of data for a PAO system that I might want to give a try. Creating links between discrete elements that have no relation between each other and a translation is a very specific kind of memory for which I haven't found many sources on. What I mean by "no relation" is that apart from being in the same alphabet, θ and φ don't have anything to do with each other. It doesn't make sense to connect them in memory because this would create a dependance system. I want to avoid any system in which I might need to go through all letters before theta before remembering θ. I only want θ to be related to "theta" and nothing else. I also want this relation to be quite fast, ruling out anki, which is better for larger pieces of data.
The point of finding a good method is to memorize a PAO system. This is the "Person Action Object" system, which is made to let people memorize numbers really well by only remembering and visualizing a scene in their mind that translates to a number. For this, there needs to be a very fast way to link every single number between 0 and 100 to a person, action and object, and without linking any of the numbers together. This greek alphabet rabbit hole could be considered as a test run on this method, but then it hasn't produced any valuable data.