What I'm curious about is how can I use something like this for books, or podcasts? Re-reading entire books or re-listening to 1hr+ long podcasts is obviously not realistic.
Should I be re-reading/re-listening to certain chapters? Keep notes and refer back to them often?
There is something called "Mindmaps", learn about it, it is very useful.
With mindmaps and using the "pause" button in a podcast you can take notes WHILE you listen or read that are minimal. The trick is that you do not need more than a few words-images-sounds in context to reconstruct all the podcast or video or book.
What is context? Imagine you have a screw and a piece with a hole on it. Where the screw goes? There is only one possibility. You do not need to store the info "where it goes". You can reconstruct it on real time.
With multiple elements interacting, reduction is enormous,in fact neurons work extracting connections of key elements. Take japanese "r, l sound", because the language does not make the distinction,a monolingual japanese could not differentiate between a "Ra" sound and "la" sound. The additional info is of no use so reural connections prune it.
You hear the additional info, but discharge it.
With context you could reduce information to remember more than two orders of magnitude(100-1000 times less).
What you do normally is forget most of what you hear. I believe re reading entire books or podcast is completely realistic if it is a good book that is important to you. There are not so many.
If you have read lots of books or podcast you know which ones are essential.
For me for example it could be "The C programming language" or "Structure and interpretation of computer programs". I have created a C and LISP compiler so those books are sacred. For Einstein, it was Newton's or Faraday's work.
I read books that I could reread 5 times and I learn something important and new every time. As I get deeper, I become a master that could understand concepts and ideas that myself as a novice could not grasp.
> Should I be re-reading/re-listening to certain chapters? Keep notes and refer back to them often?
No - simply re-reading your notes or the original text is not optimal and can give you a false sense of progress.
It's important that your repetition involves active recall - that is, you must close the textbook/notebook and try to recall the key definitions and ideas. Only then should you open your notebook and compare your current knowledge with the original information. If there are large gaps in your knowledge, schedule the next review soon otherwise leave it longer.
I've found it's quite painful to sit and force my mind to grasp onto ideas which are just out of reach, especially when the information is just a click away, but it leads to much better retention of important knowledge.
Read other materials on the same subject. That has the benefit of giving you similar things, differently. Maybe another author is more illuminating. But both will introduce the same vocabulary, so there will be overlap. Plus you'll have to think about what you agree with.
You can with Supermemo's incremental reading feature. There is a plugin for YouTube if you can find your podcast there. I'd recommend converting your ebook to html first though.
The best introduction to spaced repetition, Michael Nielsen's Augmenting Long-term Memory (http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html), includes a detailed explanation of how to use Anki for studying books.
I recently built a Chrome extension that encourages you to add anything you don't want to forget (say, insights from a podcast), then quizzes you in your new browser tabs on those chunks of knowledge using spaced repetition.
Should I be re-reading/re-listening to certain chapters? Keep notes and refer back to them often?
How do you all do this? I'm very curious.