[burntoutfire]

I had to basically memorize a particular academic book for a tough university entrace exam. I created around 50 pages of dense hand-written notes on it, and could recall all the arguments contained in the book with detail. 15 years later, all I remember from that is that the book was about early humans, tool making... or something along those lines. The note making helped with short-term retention, but did nothing for long term retention.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You need spaced repetition for long term retention.

Human memory is like dynamic RAM: you have to keep refreshing it.

[greymalik]

Did you ever revisit the notes? I would expect spaced repetition to help with that.

[causality0]

Why would he? Forgetting irrelevant information is not a problem to be solved; it's garbage cleanup.