General - What is Memtain?

Do you often come across interesting information and forget it ?
Memtain is a web content clipping tool combined with memory training and e-learning capabilities. It helps you to quickly save text snippets you encounter during surfing the web and find interesting. When you saved your information you can memorize them in your brain by visiting Memtain or getting a daily e-Mail with your saved contents. By using spaced learning algorithms, Memtain makes sure that all the information is memorized in the most efficient way with a high probability of remembering it later on, perhaps forever.

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General - What can I do with Memtain?

Use Memtain to train your brain for every piece of information you consider valuable and worth remembering for a longer term:

  • Remember facts from workshops and seminars even weeks later
  • Save now and learn later - this saves time and still assures you that you do not miss out important facts even by only skimming texts.
  • e-Learning courses and facts from student's scripts
  • Vocabulary of a new language you want to learn
  • General knowledge you often hear but always forget again which might have embarassed you already in some situations
  • Business information
  • Telephone numbers
  • Birthdays
  • Citations and sayings which you like
  • Good jokes you always cannot remember just when you want to tell them
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General - How does memtain work?

How does a painter learn to paint? He repeats.
How do writers learn to write ? They repeat.
How does an athlete learn his sport? He repeats.

Almost everything we achieve is learned through constant repetition and practice until a certain level of "neural wiring" is reached so you are competent and stable in doing or knowing something. Memtain uses the same princible (called "spaced repetition") for building and maintaining your memory (= Mem-tain) and subtracts as much time-consuming work from it as possible. You can very easily put stuff into memtain (mark text and click a bookmarklet or send an e-Mail with the contents). Memtain then takes care that you see your contents repeatedly (on screen or via e-Mail) in scientifically proposed spacings so as a result the probability is very high that in the end of your learning cycle the learned knowledge is stored deeply inside your long term memory (thus avoiding the typical forgetting curve) - never to be forgotten again, ready for recalling it whenever you need it.

By the way, compared to traditional learning, in the long term spaced learning produces better results than short term massing of input (see a study by Kornell, Castel, Eich, Bjork / 2010).

Her are some additional articles about the facts & benefits of spaced learning:
Short article in the Guardian about the success and background of spaced learning

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General - Spacing frequency

The spacing between two learning steps is in hours (days) is set to:

24 (1)
48 (2)
120 (5)
240 (10)
720 (30)

That means any piece of information is first show again 24 hours after saving it, then 48 hours afters saving for the second time and so on.

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General - Sorry for any errors!

We are in an early developing stage of Memtain and most of the things in here should work properly. Though we are not perfect yet and you might discover some errors and inconveniences when using Memtain. Sorry for that! You can help us by using the Feedback-Button and we will try to solve every issues that pop ups!

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General - Pricing

Memtain is completely free at the moment and will always have the free basic version everyone can use now. We will also introduce a Pro-account later on with tagging, sharing, configurable spacing and much more advanced features.

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General - Snippet limits

With your free or no account it is only possible to save up to 200 snippets. Yet you can always delete snippets from the archive to regain free storage space.

Each snippet can be up to about 4,000 characters in size.

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Using it - Bookmarklet lost: where can I get it again?

You can find the bookmarklet here if you are not a registered user: Memtain it!

For iPhone / iPad / Smartphone users missing have drag & drop here is the complete bookmarklet code. You can save it manually in your bookmarks:

Else if you are a registered user you can also find it in the "settings" page.

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Using it - See the setup screen although I have used memtain already

When you visit memtain.com we check if there is a cookie from us installed on your browser. If you see the setup screen, this means we did not detect this cookie in your browser. The cause in most cases would be that it is your first visit to memtain but if that is not the case with you it can have other causes like
- you use another PC, Browser or mobile phone than usually which does not have our cookie yet stored on it.
- you deleted the cookie on your computer. This often happens during "cleanups" or if privacy-related programs clean your computer or if you manually deleted your browser cookie.

If you would like to solve this problem and use Memtain from any Computer or mobile phone in the world independent from cookies, please register for an account!

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Using it - Bulk input feature

If you want to transfer several chunks of learning contents with the same topic into memtain you do not have to open the bookmarklet, fill the fields and save and repeat this a dozen times. Just click the bookmarklet or open a new eMail (registered users only), and put the contents in while separating them with the bulk input separator (three consequent slashes: ///). Try to keep each snippet under 50 words, this works best with your brain. When you're finished with your contents, send it and all will be taken over to Memtain.


Usage example:
Just watching an interesting TV documentary? Do it like here or open an e-Mail and write down each fact, followed by the bulk input separator and then again another fact and so on. At the end, just send it to the save email and it's all saved into Memtain!

Example:
Rome is in Italy///Italy is in Europe///...

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Using it - Help, I get too much snippets every day

If at some time after using Memtain you get some hundred snippets a day, well, that whole thing could quickly turn into work some day ;-) Here some hints to make it fun again:

- Just fly over the snippets and read them more on the surface. Even this will help your brain remembering the information!

- Archive some that you do not consider so important anymore

- Archive some which you think you have already well remembered in your long term memory

- For the future, remember: save shorter snippets and keep their content down to the most important facts - this is the most important thing to not get overwhelmed with snippets!

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Using it - ...where should I start?

New with Memtain and you do not know spontaneously where to start? Give these a try - there is interesting knowledge all around! Are you interested in...

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Using it - how to save information snippets

Generally there are two ways to get information into Memtain and your learning cycle:

  • Mark text on any webpage and click the bookmarklet. You can edit the text before proceeding and then send it to Memtain.
  • Send an e-Mail to save@memtain.com containing the information to save inside the mail body and a heading in the subject line. To use this feature, you have to be a registered user so we can connect the sender's e-Mail with your account and save it properly.
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Security - using Memtain on other computers and in internet cafes

If you use Memtain on other computers / smartphones / internet cafes as well, please do not use the "stay logged in"-function. Else other people could use your account, delete snippets, save information as snippets and confuse your learning cycle.

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Tip - How to learn the most effective

- Keep the snippets small, 1-4 lines (about 20-80 words) at best. So you can learn fast and stick to the most important facts!
- Do it regularly. If you often forget to visit memtain.com, register and switch on the e-Mail feature to get the learning content via daily eMail.
- If you have few time or you are not in the mood, no problem, the next day is enough too. Most important is that it should stay fun and not get a burden.
- Instead of skipping your learning sessions you can also skim over it. Takes only some moments and your brain will still take advantage even of that little refreshing session.
- Core pieces of information that are very valuable to you should be viewed / considered / thought about for about 8 seconds to remember it best.
- Don't worry if every topic gets mixed up with others. Studies show that this is even more effective to keep the learning material than if every topic is considered separate.
- Physical movement while learning is said to increase your memorization abilities significantly.

 

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Tip - Learn a snippet more than 5 times

On your 5th repetition, just mark the content again and memtain it again using the save bookmarklet!

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Tip - How to memtain TV documentaries

Often you will want to summarize and remember the most important information you get out of a tv documentary. For this I would recommend watching the documentary till its end and then - after the end and when your memory is still fresh - take one or two minutes to summarize all the important facts you got out of it and memtain it. You could also do it while watching but out of my experience, the permanent distraction takes much out of the fun and joy of watching and this is not the purpose of learning with memtain.

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Want your snippets as a daily e-mail and available on any computer or smartphone?

Register
 

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