> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.
But does the effectiveness of this hold up over time or will your brain get accustomed to the font after a while such that reading it eventually becomes no different than reading whatever font you used to use before?
I don't think it's true that all fonts eventually approach the same level of easy readability.
Yes, you will get better at reading this font than you were at reading this font initially, but probably you still won't be able to read it as fast as you can read some other font.
> But does the effectiveness of this hold up over time or will your brain get accustomed to the font after a while
I would posit that this might be true if everything was in sans forgetica, but since only your notes should be in that font, then it will likely retain it's utility over time.
Is the goal that you type these notes in SF and hope the font trains you to remember? There was a scene in the video where someone just "switched" the notes to SF en-masse... seems like that'd be not so useful.
It doesn't help you read but it does help you remember, so if you get better at reading it doesn't mean you'll forget easily
... Or at least that's what I think they claim.
My favorite "desirable difficulty" from cog psych is to practice recall. I recall a study with 3 groups of students:
1. read essay 4 times
2. read and take notes, study notes
3. read once, then have to write out (a few times) what can be recalled on a blank piece of paper
The groups were from most to least confident in their learning but the actual success on a test for concepts (which requires recall) was opposite.
So, better than using a weird font to push encoding of memory is to plan for and then do recall practice. Like tell other people about what you learned or test yourself on it.
You get good at whatever you practice. If you reread something over and over, you don't get better at recalling the ideas, but you do get better at reading the thing. I bet the first group above would do better than the others at giving a live reading of the essay.
There was excitement when the first study showed hard-to-read fonts improved test performance in 2007[1]. Since then, there have been enough attempted replications for a 2015 review to conclude that there's no effect[2].
It's too late for me to edit this comment, but I was wrong to dismiss Sans Forgetica based on the review. I checked the paper and it notes:
> Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning.
Credit to kradroy for noting the discrepancy and prompting me to check. I regret the error :(
Compelling, but the Sans Forgetica font's effect is focused on recall/remembering. From the two abstracts you linked (I'm not paying for the papers) it appears the experiments were testing the effect of disfluent fonts on reasoning. These are different cognitive activities, so it doesn't really disconfirm the font's creators' claims.
You also have to factor in reading speed. If you can remember 7% more but end up reading more than 14% slower, you are better off reading more (or rereading) with the lower 50% retention rate.
I can't find it at the moment, but the last time I looked, attempted replications of an early "illegibility improves recall" study failed. (IIRC, that didn't use a custom font, but rather some de-contrasting/visual-noise applied.)
I see no cited papers here, just the claim, in the video, that "over 100 students" were used in testing to pick this font from several candidates.
I'm doubtful of any long-term value here. Even if "desirable difficulty" mechanism is real, I'd expect different readers to need wildly different levels of interference, and for their perceptions to adapt quickly to consistent letterforms. (So, to really get the benefit, you'd have an adjustable and dynamic level of perceptual-interference.)
It makes a lot of sense to me. You want your primary public facing site with a TLD that people know about. .edu immediately confers legitimacy by assuring the visitor that its a legitimate educational institution (I’m assuming .edu.au is the Australian equivalent).
But when it comes to sites and services students and professors would want to use, go for the TLD, (e.g.s alumni.rmit, bursar.rmit, athletics.rmit). It’s a much more pleasing (I don’t know whether rmit actually does that or not).
While some folks here are joking about mirroring text, there's a sane point behind that.
There's an ancient Greeks' way to read text more effectively called Boustrophedon. The idea is that the text lines are interleaved with x-axis mirrored lines, so your eyes move not by Z-shape trajectory, but like meander. There're demo texts to learn to use it [1].
As for my experience, I can't say I'd been understanding or remembering more or less while reading boustro, especially when I'd begun to get used to it.
which is mostly designed around annotation and spaced repetition.
You can store all your documents and web content in one place and since you're obviously trying to read and retain all that information it might be interesting to enable this as a one-off feature to see if it helps.
Another idea could be to just have them for the flashcards since this is the key information you're trying to retain.
That font seems quite legible actually. The letters are all quite distinct and apart from the gaps and backward-slant, follow proper typographical conventions.
I would have made the letters monospaced at least (no kerning either), and would have used base letter shapes that look much more alike (e.g., the bowls of the d, a, q, and c should be the same, because slight differences in them help you identify letters more readily, which is precisely what proper fonts do).
Also, does that university actually own their own top-level domain? Those don't come cheap do they?
Me too. Taking write-only notes was one of my best study weapons in college.
Though, just think of your memory retention if you take notes by hand-drawing this font. Sure, it's time consuming, but you're never going to forget those two sentences that you got through.
> Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing
Based on this logic - harder the process better the processing - its obviously a mistake that schools are increasingly using technology to teach, like visualizing geometric shapes on screen in 3D instead of painstakingly drawing on the board and letting students see it in their heads.
The basic idea has to do with a concept called processing fluency. Studies have shown that the harder your brain has to work to process the information, the more likely you are to absorb it -- at least to a point.
One recent study that manipulated processing fluency using a hard-to-read font is "Fluency and the detection of misleading questions: Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses illusion," Social Cognition, 2008.
The study found that people who read information in a hard-to-read font were better at spotting a certain category of error than people who read the same information in an easy-to-read font.
(Incidentally, this study is one that I adapted for my book "Experiments for Newlyweds: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform With Your Spouse," due out in April. So if you know any couples who'd like to try it out together, it makes a great wedding gift!)
When I was a student, I used multilinguality for a similar purpose.
When I was studying from notes or a book in Spanish (my native language), I would review in English. Actually, my review consisted in presenting the contents to an invisible audience in English (yes, I've never been able to study in libraries or other places where you need to remain silent, most of my time studying consists in standing and talking...)
Conversely, when I studied from material in English, I would review it in Spanish, also by presenting to an invisible audience.
I always found this to be very effective (even before learning about the cognitive science concept you point out). Of course, it's just anecdotal evidence with sample size of 1. But it's a fun way to study anyway, it also lets you practice a foreign language, and you're more likely to not get bored and set "autopilot" on (maybe this was also a big factor why it worked for me...)
In my experience, a good strategy is to read your notes aloud, preferably while walking.
This forces you to really notice what is written, helps sustain your attention (when you're walking and talking, there's not much cognitive slack for drifting off), will improve your memory (we tend to remember things better when we have spent a larger effort on them), and leads pretty naturally to reason aloud about what you have just read.
Apparently, there used to be perambulatory monks that would follow a similar strategy, reading or reciting sacred texts while pacing around the courtyards of their monastery.
Interesting. I remember in high school history we'd often get the exam essay question to prepare. As a boarder, I used to break into one of the school classrooms, re-arrange all the furniture so the chairs formed a giant circle, and I'd pace around it memorising what I'd prepared.
I'm now wondering if the added chair-balance while walking enhanced the approach you're describing.
Fortunately I’d spent years watching Jeff in action before my turn came, and I had prepared in an unusual way. My presentation -- which, roughly speaking was about the core skills a generalist engineer ought to know -- was a resounding success. He loved it. Afterwards everyone was patting me on the back and congratulating me like I’d just completed a game-winning hail-mary pass or something. One VP told me privately: “Presentations with Jeff never go that well.”
:
To prepare a presentation for Jeff, first make damn sure you know everything there is to know about the subject. Then write a prose narrative explaining the problem and solution(s). Write it exactly the way you would write it for a leading professor or industry expert on the subject.
That is: assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have ground-breakingly original ideas in your material, just pretend it’s old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material.
You’re almost done. The last step before you’re ready to present to him is this: Delete every third paragraph.
Right when I saw the example text, I was immediately reminded of typographical rivers[0]. If you have a visual memory, I'm guessing rivers in paragraphs may also help you remember what you read, since the negative space creates branch-like structures in the paragraph, which adds an extra visual memory cue. After looking at a few examples of this font, it's clear that this font was designed to do that. You can see similar continuous structures in the text itself. Pretty neat. Looks like they also borrowed ideas from Daniel Kahneman, as well[1]. In his book, I believe one of the examples does a test on Princeton students to see how many riddles they can solve, and they did better when the font was harder to read.
I'm inclined to think someone behind this was having a lot of fun, and it looks nice.
If it turns out not to be a joke/hoax/psychology/social experiment, I will be sure to remember - I made a note to check back later, using this special font that aids memory.
[+] [-] codetrotter|7 years ago|reply
But does the effectiveness of this hold up over time or will your brain get accustomed to the font after a while such that reading it eventually becomes no different than reading whatever font you used to use before?
[+] [-] adrianmonk|7 years ago|reply
Yes, you will get better at reading this font than you were at reading this font initially, but probably you still won't be able to read it as fast as you can read some other font.
[+] [-] r00fus|7 years ago|reply
I would posit that this might be true if everything was in sans forgetica, but since only your notes should be in that font, then it will likely retain it's utility over time.
Is the goal that you type these notes in SF and hope the font trains you to remember? There was a scene in the video where someone just "switched" the notes to SF en-masse... seems like that'd be not so useful.
[+] [-] skookumchuck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdsdfe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] make3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrangle|7 years ago|reply
1. read essay 4 times
2. read and take notes, study notes
3. read once, then have to write out (a few times) what can be recalled on a blank piece of paper
The groups were from most to least confident in their learning but the actual success on a test for concepts (which requires recall) was opposite.
So, better than using a weird font to push encoding of memory is to plan for and then do recall practice. Like tell other people about what you learned or test yourself on it.
You get good at whatever you practice. If you reread something over and over, you don't get better at recalling the ideas, but you do get better at reading the thing. I bet the first group above would do better than the others at giving a live reading of the essay.
[+] [-] michaelkeenan|7 years ago|reply
[1] Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning: http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-16657-003
[2] Disfluent fonts don’t help people solve math problems: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-13746-007
[+] [-] michaelkeenan|7 years ago|reply
> Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning.
Credit to kradroy for noting the discrepancy and prompting me to check. I regret the error :(
[+] [-] kradroy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liamzebedee|7 years ago|reply
> "Students remembered 57 per cent ... written in Sans Forgetica, compared to 50 per cent .... in Ariel"
7% delta retention isn't so much, is it?
[+] [-] curiousgal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tudelo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetwo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|7 years ago|reply
I see no cited papers here, just the claim, in the video, that "over 100 students" were used in testing to pick this font from several candidates.
I'm doubtful of any long-term value here. Even if "desirable difficulty" mechanism is real, I'd expect different readers to need wildly different levels of interference, and for their perceptions to adapt quickly to consistent letterforms. (So, to really get the benefit, you'd have an adjustable and dynamic level of perceptual-interference.)
[+] [-] keehun|7 years ago|reply
Interesting that the university's website is not on that TLD but rather https://rmit.edu.au
[+] [-] gowld|7 years ago|reply
Anyone can apply for their own gTLD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain
Interestingly, one of the major promoters of gTLDs is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_IT a neighbor of RMIT
[+] [-] r00fus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] addicted|7 years ago|reply
But when it comes to sites and services students and professors would want to use, go for the TLD, (e.g.s alumni.rmit, bursar.rmit, athletics.rmit). It’s a much more pleasing (I don’t know whether rmit actually does that or not).
[+] [-] dorian-graph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eli_P|7 years ago|reply
There's an ancient Greeks' way to read text more effectively called Boustrophedon. The idea is that the text lines are interleaved with x-axis mirrored lines, so your eyes move not by Z-shape trajectory, but like meander. There're demo texts to learn to use it [1].
As for my experience, I can't say I'd been understanding or remembering more or less while reading boustro, especially when I'd begun to get used to it.
[1] https://boustro.com/app/
[+] [-] burtonator|7 years ago|reply
I'd like to see more research here and see where it can be used and how it can be used.
I've been working on an integrated offline browser for documents and annotation named Polar:
https://getpolarized.io/
which is mostly designed around annotation and spaced repetition.
You can store all your documents and web content in one place and since you're obviously trying to read and retain all that information it might be interesting to enable this as a one-off feature to see if it helps.
Another idea could be to just have them for the flashcards since this is the key information you're trying to retain.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|7 years ago|reply
I would have made the letters monospaced at least (no kerning either), and would have used base letter shapes that look much more alike (e.g., the bowls of the d, a, q, and c should be the same, because slight differences in them help you identify letters more readily, which is precisely what proper fonts do).
Also, does that university actually own their own top-level domain? Those don't come cheap do they?
[+] [-] erichurkman|7 years ago|reply
It's about $200k.
[+] [-] jeieo3949|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] have_faith|7 years ago|reply
I always thought the use of study notes was just in writing them to stimulate memory, not actually reading them (for me at least).
[+] [-] adrianmonk|7 years ago|reply
Though, just think of your memory retention if you take notes by hand-drawing this font. Sure, it's time consuming, but you're never going to forget those two sentences that you got through.
[+] [-] gvx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinayms|7 years ago|reply
Based on this logic - harder the process better the processing - its obviously a mistake that schools are increasingly using technology to teach, like visualizing geometric shapes on screen in 3D instead of painstakingly drawing on the board and letting students see it in their heads.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|7 years ago|reply
Edit: NOOOO!!! I said DOWNVOTE! ;(
[+] [-] jawns|7 years ago|reply
One recent study that manipulated processing fluency using a hard-to-read font is "Fluency and the detection of misleading questions: Low processing fluency attenuates the Moses illusion," Social Cognition, 2008.
The study found that people who read information in a hard-to-read font were better at spotting a certain category of error than people who read the same information in an easy-to-read font.
(Incidentally, this study is one that I adapted for my book "Experiments for Newlyweds: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform With Your Spouse," due out in April. So if you know any couples who'd like to try it out together, it makes a great wedding gift!)
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|7 years ago|reply
When I was studying from notes or a book in Spanish (my native language), I would review in English. Actually, my review consisted in presenting the contents to an invisible audience in English (yes, I've never been able to study in libraries or other places where you need to remain silent, most of my time studying consists in standing and talking...)
Conversely, when I studied from material in English, I would review it in Spanish, also by presenting to an invisible audience.
I always found this to be very effective (even before learning about the cognitive science concept you point out). Of course, it's just anecdotal evidence with sample size of 1. But it's a fun way to study anyway, it also lets you practice a foreign language, and you're more likely to not get bored and set "autopilot" on (maybe this was also a big factor why it worked for me...)
[+] [-] metalliqaz|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Y_Y|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] edent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostatseajoshua|7 years ago|reply
“Sans Forgetica is designed for non-commercial use only. It is bound by a creative commons, non-commercial, attributed (CCBYNC) license.”
[+] [-] felipeerias|7 years ago|reply
This forces you to really notice what is written, helps sustain your attention (when you're walking and talking, there's not much cognitive slack for drifting off), will improve your memory (we tend to remember things better when we have spent a larger effort on them), and leads pretty naturally to reason aloud about what you have just read.
Apparently, there used to be perambulatory monks that would follow a similar strategy, reading or reciting sacred texts while pacing around the courtyards of their monastery.
[+] [-] JacobAldridge|7 years ago|reply
I'm now wondering if the added chair-balance while walking enhanced the approach you're describing.
[+] [-] frankzander|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robaato|7 years ago|reply
https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...
Fortunately I’d spent years watching Jeff in action before my turn came, and I had prepared in an unusual way. My presentation -- which, roughly speaking was about the core skills a generalist engineer ought to know -- was a resounding success. He loved it. Afterwards everyone was patting me on the back and congratulating me like I’d just completed a game-winning hail-mary pass or something. One VP told me privately: “Presentations with Jeff never go that well.”
:
To prepare a presentation for Jeff, first make damn sure you know everything there is to know about the subject. Then write a prose narrative explaining the problem and solution(s). Write it exactly the way you would write it for a leading professor or industry expert on the subject.
That is: assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have ground-breakingly original ideas in your material, just pretend it’s old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material.
You’re almost done. The last step before you’re ready to present to him is this: Delete every third paragraph.
[+] [-] anonytrary|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yusee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfz|7 years ago|reply
If it turns out not to be a joke/hoax/psychology/social experiment, I will be sure to remember - I made a note to check back later, using this special font that aids memory.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|7 years ago|reply
Instead of simply deleting messages after a short time, Snapchat should render them in Forgetica Light, so you can't even remember them!
[+] [-] bluetwo|7 years ago|reply