Notes should serve as the medium for memorization
202211181919
Status:
Tags: Notetaking
The main criticisms of the Zettelkasten method are that it promotes redundancy through the creation of hyper-personal wikis that are often underutilized or poor in quality in comparison to Wikipedia or online resources.
Instead, you should create Embedding notes for ideas that you need to memorize → things like theorems, receptor densities, neuroanatomy, etc. You can do this in the same note as an atomic note (Notes should be atomic and disparate) by separating with ---.
By creating Embedding notes or flashcards within an atomic note, you can find yourself fighting the Ebbinghaus curve on two separate occasions — when you are reviewing flashcards (e.g., with Anki), and when you’re revising your atomic notes and communicating with your Zettelkasten.
Neuroanatomy is not something you need to make a Zettel from → the relative location of the hippocampus is not an original idea of yours, or a particularly creative thing, it’s just a fact. It’s fine to store facts, but try and contribute your own ideas there too, rather than just copy and pasting information from Wikipedia, hoping that it will become useful later.