Transforming by Learning: An Experiment with Review Questions in a Primer on Energy and Stress Management

Cat wrote about Energy and Stress Management. We inserted review questions in the public Notion document. I write about why and how.

My partner Cat has been reading a lot about stress, rest, and their relationships of the last few years. In conversations, those topics come up, and occasionally Cat sends people an email with some of their thoughts and ideas.

More recently, Cat wrote a nice document that covers the basics: Energy and Stress Management.

As part of this write-up, Cat and I wanted to experiment with something we learned from Andy Matuschak: inserting adjunct questions into the text, which a reader can use to check their comprehension while reading and come back to later to work on a fuller, long-term memorization of the important concepts.

This idea came from Andy Matushak and Michael Nielsen’s online book for learning quantum computing and quantum mechanics called quantum.country. They wrote the book as a "mnemonic medium" where the book itself has flashcards baked in, so that it's less effort to remember what you read.

I can't stop thinking about this essay How to Change Your Life Part 1 by Celine Nguyen. The essay talks about the conundrum of not knowing if you’re queer:

I’d argue that having queer sex for the first time—or even something more demure, like going on a queer date, or having your first queer kiss—is also epistemically transformative. Which sounds like a very bloodless description of something that is tremendously urgent and personally important in our lives. How do you understand your own desires, sexually or romantically or otherwise? How do you choose certain acts, like going to a gay bar or setting your orientation to Bisexual on Hinge, for the first time? When do you know that you’re 100% not straight? How are you supposed to find out?

Basically: having queer sex is important for figuring out if you're queer. But are you "queer" while you're searching? At what point, do you determine that you're queer? In what ways can one be queer without having had queer sex?

I'm fascinated by Nguyen’s idea of epistemic transformation. To me, this is about how learning changes us as people. When we learn, whether it’s from an experience we haven’t had before (a kind of sex) or from more traditional methods (a class at school), we change; we’re transformed into a different kind of person. We’re different because when we navigate new situations, our new selves process the environment differently, understand things differently, and make new kinds of decisions.

This is precisely what Cat and I want to achieve with the Stress Notion document. We don’t want the reader to just know more facts about stress or apply a few lifestyle changes that might result in habits; we want the reader to absorb the concepts such that the concepts become a part of them.

To this aim, Cat and I inserted questions throughout the Stress Notion document that ask the user about what they just read: they are simple, not personal questions. It's not an exercise, like "think of a time you were stressed and how you felt". They're fact questions, like "The two primary bodily states for energy management are the activated state and the ____ state."

Notion doesn't have a feature for this, so I wanted to write up how we did it.

How We Inserted Review Questions Into a Notion Doc

We started with Andy Matuschak's project Orbit, whose docs go over its web components that support review questions in any HTML page. For those familiar with web components and HTML, it looks like this:

<script type="module" src="https://js.withorbit.com/orbit-web-component.js"></script>
<orbit-reviewarea color="green">
  <orbit-prompt
      question="What's the working name for Andy's experimental mnemonic medium platform?"
      answer="Orbit">
  </orbit-prompt>
</orbit-reviewarea>

Cat then wrote up the questions. They used Michael Nielsen's Augmenting Long-term Memory as our guide for writing good questions, along with Claude to get question ideas and get started.

Meanwhile, I set up a web page using Svelte that renders the questions.

<script lang="ts">
  import { page } from "$app/stores";

  type Question = {
    question: string;
    answer: string;
  };

  const allQuestions: Record<string, Question[]> = {
    activated: [
      {
        question:
          "The two primary bodily states for energy management are the activated state and the ____ state.",
        answer: "Relaxation",
      },
      // more questions and sections go here.
    ]
  }

  const params = $page.url.searchParams;
  const section = params.get("section") || "activated";
  const questions = allQuestions[section];
</script>

<svelte:head>
  <script
    type="module"
    src="https://js.withorbit.com/orbit-web-component.js"
  ></script>
</svelte:head>

<orbit-reviewarea color="turquoise">
  {#each questions as question}
    <orbit-prompt question={question.question} answer={question.answer}
    ></orbit-prompt>
  {/each}
</orbit-reviewarea> 

Finally, we used Notion Embeds to create iframes that rendered each question’s sections. We made the Notion document public, and done.

What's really cool about Orbit is that it saves your progress. So if you do the questions and enter your email, you can return to the Notion document in 5 days to re-review the questions, then again at 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, and a year. The idea is that right before your brain forgets the facts, you recall them—think about them again, fire those neurons up—and then the ideas are entrenched.

From doing the questions myself, I feel like I'm understanding these ideas around stress more intuitively. I've found that I'm applying them in surprising places. I realized just a few minutes ago that as I was context switching between projects at my computer, I felt activated but confused as I looked at the new project. It felt like my brain knew it was ready to work, but because of the context switch, it wasn't really sure what to do.

I have no idea if this is good brain science, but I'm thinking about ways I can do quick relaxations or momentarily leave an activated state when switching which project I'm working on. I used to do this more naturally when using pomodoro timers because I would only switch projects at the end of a 25 minute pomodoro session. I wonder if in moving away from that practice (and I love the new practices I've developed generally), context switching into a new project became more challenging.