Feed Your Elephant Flags

Want to know your Irish from your Ivory Coast? Then Feed Your Elephant Flags.

We all learn in big chunks, when we should be s p a c i n g. Feed Your Elephant is a series of learning apps that space learning out. It uses active learning (it asks you questions), and has a heuristic feedback algorithm (it learns from your answers), so it presents the questions you are unfamiliar with more often, and less so the ones you have mastered. This gives it a thing called 'desirable difficulty' and that is why it works.


The science is unequivocal:

"More than 100 years of distributed practice research have demonstrated that learning is powerfully affected by the temporal distribution of study time."
- 2006 Cepeda, Pashler, Vul and Wixted

"Although spacing effects are very robust and have important implications for memory and education, people often underestimate the benefits of spaced repetition when learning”
- 2012 - Logan, Castel, Haber & Viehman

And your memory is practically infinite:

"New Estimate Boosts the Human Brain's Memory Capacity 10-Fold to around a quadrillion bytes"
- Scientific American

"The Human Brain's Memory Could Store the Entire Internet"
- Live Science

2016 Guardian Article on Spacing:

"Why does it work? By taking advantage of the way our brain has evolved...

It forces learning to be effortful, and like muscles, the brain responds to that stimulus by strengthening the connections between nerve cells. By spacing the intervals out, you’re further exercising these connections each time. It produces long-term, durable retention of knowledge, and in my experience, once people start using it, they swear by it...

Spaced repetition is simple, but highly effective.”

So download Flags and begin Feeding Your Elephant.