ZettelFeyMindSpace: how I study

Lots of bricks and few houses

I spent years studying how to study. Seriously. Like, an embarrassing amount of time. I read about Zettelkasten, the Feynman Technique, Mind Palace, Spaced Repetition. I watched more videos than any human being should about “how to study better” and I applied each of these techniques with the religious fervor of a recent convert.

And every single one let me down.

Not because they’re bad - they’re brilliant. The problem is that each one attacks a single part of the learning process and pretends the rest doesn’t exist. And me, a persistent explorer of other people’s knowledge, kept falling into every gap they left behind.

Until one day I realized that the gaps in one are exactly the strengths of another. They fit together. Like pieces. Of a system.

And then the Systems Thinking that lives in my head said: “hmmm, interesting.”

I put it all together and called it ZettelFeyMindSpace.

Yes, it’s a ridiculous name. But it’s mine and it works, so leave me alone hahaha.

The pieces (and their gaps)

Before I show you the whole thing, I need to talk about each piece separately. And more importantly: about the gap each one leaves. Because it’s precisely by understanding the gaps that you understand why they need each other.

Zettelkasten - the German who wrote on index cards

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist who produced more than 70 books and almost 400 articles over 40 years. When people asked how the hell he was so productive, the guy basically shrugged and said he didn’t think everything on his own - a lot happened inside his box of index cards. He had 90,000 handwritten cards. Ninety thousand. Written by hand. In a world without Obsidian, without Notion, without even ctrl+F.

The method: you read something, write it down in your own words (never copy - this is important), and create atomic notes. One idea per note. Then you link that note to others that already exist. Knowledge doesn’t live in any single note. It lives in the connections between them. Luhmann called the Zettelkasten a “communication partner” because the system would surprise him with connections he hadn’t planned himself.

The Zettelkasten isn’t a note-taking system. It’s a thinking system. The notes on their own are worth nothing. The connections between them are worth everything. It’s like neurons - a single neuron doesn’t think. Billions of connected neurons and suddenly you’re reading this text and judging my choice of GIFs.

The gap: you can have 10,000 beautifully linked notes and still be unable to explain the core ideas without looking at them. Zettelkasten accumulates and connects, but it doesn’t test whether you actually understood. It’s the collector’s fallacy - confusing having with knowing. (I fell for this. A lot. Like, more than I’d care to admit.)

Feynman Technique - the physicist who taught children

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and became famous not just for his research, but for being able to explain quantum mechanics as if he were telling a joke at a bar. The guy kept a notebook called “Notebook of Things I Don’t Know About” - a catalog of his own knowledge gaps that he filled in systematically.

The technique is disarmingly simple: pick a concept, try to explain it as if you were teaching a child, identify where you got stuck, go back to the material, and study exactly that point. If you can’t explain it simply, you didn’t understand it.

Sounds basic? It is.

Does it work? Absurdly well.

Because it exploits something we do all the time without noticing: the illusion that we understand. There’s a study (Rozenblit and Keil, 2002) showing that people think they understand how things work until they’re forced to explain step by step. Someone asks you to explain how a zipper works and you discover you actually have no idea. It’s Dunning-Kruger in its purest form: those who know little think they know a lot, because they don’t have the tools to perceive what they don’t know. The attempt to teach shatters that illusion. Violently.

I mentioned in my first post that I feel really good giving seminars, that I “like the way ideas organize themselves when they know they’re going to be put on display.” The Feynman Technique is exactly that, formalized. The act of preparing to teach is already the learning.

The gap: Feynman synthesizes and tests, but it doesn’t accumulate. Each concept is an island. You understand deeply in the moment, but where do you put it afterward? In some random Google Drive folder you’ll never open again? Without a structure for accumulation, every insight is born and dies alone.

Mind Palace - the Greek and the ceiling that collapsed

This one is the oldest and the most cinematic (yes, it’s the Sherlock one). The Method of Loci was born in Greece around 477 BC and its origin story is violent: the poet Simonides of Ceos stepped out of a banquet moments before the ceiling collapsed and killed all the guests. The bodies were unrecognizable, but Simonides remembered exactly where each person had been sitting. That’s when the guy realized: spatial memory is absurdly more reliable than abstract memory.

The technique: you create a mental space (a building, a route, a place you know well), define a fixed path through it, and place knowledge at specific points as vivid, exaggerated images. To remember, you walk mentally through the space.

The neuroscience explains it: the hippocampus - the same organ that forms declarative memories - is also the brain’s spatial navigation system. It has “place cells,” neurons that fire when you’re in a specific location (John O’Keefe, Nobel 2014). Roman orators like Cicero knew this intuitively 2,000 years before neuroscience existed.

I have one. My Mind Palace starts on a terrace, with a door. I go down two flights of stairs and on the wall there’s a huge painting - a copy of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. I open the door and I’m in the Main Hall. Each station along the path has something, and I can walk around in there like someone walking through a real house.

The gap: Mind Palace internalizes but doesn’t necessarily comprehend. A world memory champion memorizes an entire deck of cards in 15 seconds and understands nothing about probability. The palace is an incredible space for retention, but on its own it doesn’t generate connections across different domains and it doesn’t test whether what you put in there makes any sense.

Spaced Repetition - the depressed German and the forgetting curve

In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus published “On Memory” and proved something nobody wanted to hear: without reinforcement, we forget 50 to 70% of what we learned within 24 hours. 24 hours! The forgetting curve is exponential - steep, relentless, and profoundly unfair.

But he also discovered the antidote: every time you review and recall with effort, the curve resets with a gentler slope. Review 1: you forget in 2 days. Review 2: you forget in 5. Review 3: in 2 weeks. The intervals grow exponentially. Robert Bjork (UCLA) called this “desirable difficulty” - the effort of almost-forgetting is what strengthens memory. If it’s too easy, it strengthens little. If it’s impossible, there’s nothing to strengthen. The sweet spot is when it’s almost fading away.

Counterintuitive? Very. Feeling like you’re forgetting feels like it isn’t working. In reality it’s exactly when it’s working best.

The gap: Spaced Repetition keeps isolated facts with absurd efficiency, but it fragments. You know the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but you might not understand cellular respiration as a system. Flashcards on their own create a collection of disconnected pieces. Like having all the puzzle pieces loose inside a bag.

Now for real: the system

See the pattern?

Each gap in one is exactly the strength of another. They complete each other by filling each other’s gaps and - okay, I heard that “wink wink.” Let’s move on.

The flow (which isn’t linear, but pretends to be)

In practice the techniques intertwine. But the general movement:

1. Zettelkasten accumulates. I read, watch, listen. I create fleeting notes (quick captures of thought), literature notes (a summary in my own words of what I read), and permanent notes (atomic ideas linked to others I already have in Obsidian). Bit by bit, a network forms.

2. Feynman + Mind Palace - synthesizes and internalizes at the same time. This is where the method becomes truly mine. I step into the Mind Palace and teach inside it. I take the knowledge I accumulated in the Zettelkasten and try to build the route in my mental space - placing at each station an image that represents what I learned, trying to explain it to myself as I walk the path. Where I get stuck, where the image doesn’t quite form, where the route gets confusing - that’s where the gap is. I go back to the notes in Obsidian, study that point, and repair the route. Feynman and the Palace aren’t separate steps - they’re the same thing happening together.

4. Spaced Repetition consolidates. The most important insights and connections become material for spaced review. I revisit the Mind Palace path at growing intervals. Whatever is weakening goes back to the start of the cycle.

The feedback loops (the part that cost me sleep)

What turns a list of techniques into a system are the loops:

• Zettelkasten feeds Feynman+Palace - the network of notes is the raw material. The gaps that show up while trying to build the route in the palace become new notes in the Zettelkasten. The system grows exactly where it was weakest.
• Feynman+Palace self-filter - if you can’t explain while walking through the palace, the image doesn’t form. The process itself rejects what you didn’t truly understand. No external evaluation needed - the palace tells you.
• Palace feeds Spaced Repetition - the path you built is what gets revisited. If a station is confusing during review, it’s a sign that something needs to go back to the Zettelkasten.
• Spaced Repetition feeds everything back - each review is a diagnosis. Whatever decays goes back into the whole cycle.

If I drew it, it would be a spiral, not a circle. Each turn produces knowledge at a different level from the previous one. The second time I go through the cycle, the notes already contain not just what I read, but what I learned trying to teach and what I noticed walking through the palace. That accumulates. And that’s exactly what no single technique does: accumulate and self-strengthen over time.

The Systems Thinking part (because of course there’s one)

I study Systems Thinking. It’s one of my many obsessions. And one day I looked at ZettelFeyMindSpace and realized that without meaning to I had built a system with the same properties I study in theory.

Each method in isolation is a component. Combined, they form a system with emergent properties - the whole produces something no part can achieve on its own. Luhmann would use this exact argument (in fact, his Zettelkasten was literally the application of systems theory itself to individual thinking).

Donella Meadows would call the loops of ZettelFeyMindSpace “positive reinforcing loops”: the more knowledge passes through the cycle, the richer the connections get, the more articulate the explanations, the denser the palace, the more efficient the repetition. The system strengthens itself.

And it’s exactly the opposite of what happens when you study without a system: everything you learn lives in isolation, decays individually, and you feel like you’re always starting from scratch. That anguish of “I know I’ve studied this before but I don’t remember anything.” A negative reinforcing loop. The most depressing thing there is.

What’s still missing

ZettelFeyMindSpace isn’t a finished method. It’s a living system I keep iterating on. There are things I haven’t solved: how to integrate it better with digital tools (Obsidian handles the Zettelkasten part really well, but it doesn’t cover the Mind Palace). How to adapt the Spaced Repetition intervals for different types of knowledge (a philosophical concept doesn’t decay the same way a formula does). How to measure whether it’s working beyond the subjective feeling.

But the anguish I used to feel - lots of bricks and few houses - that one has shrunk considerably. For the first time, I have a structure where learning doesn’t depend only on my memory or my discipline. It depends on the system. And the system, when well built, works for you even when you’re not paying attention.

I talked about this in my first post. Alone, without structure, without the possibility of someone seeing - the energy simply doesn’t show up. But give it a structure, a path, a reason to organize - and it turns into Super Saiyan.

Knowledge is the only key that opens every door.

PS: If you made it this far and you don’t use any of these techniques, start with Zettelkasten. Seriously. Grab Obsidian, create a note about something that interests you, and link it to another. Then tell me what happens when the network starts growing on its own.