learning - What is the best way to retain learned materials

No matter who you talk to, students or professors, they all say that the materials they once learned can be quickly forgotten without further experiences that utilizes or enhances on that prior experience.

I fondly remember a professor once telling me that his final year in undergrad was the happiest year in his life, at time when he felt he could do anything, from nuclear physics to parallel programming to electromicroscopy to constructing an audio amplifier...then one year later he has forgotten almost everything.

This is more noticeable in students, where it is often exaggerated to the cliched phrase "you never actually use anything you learn in school".

This is problematic for students who aspire for higher learning because much of the material or understanding is accumulative. It amazes me how people manage to get all the way to the top of the academic ladder (PhD, Post-Doc) without losing previously gained knowledge along the way. I'm sure there were important theorems, relations or techniques that I once learnt, maybe was even an expert in, the question is how do I unlock these memories so I can be more effective in tackling the problems I have today?

How do people deal with the inevitable loss of knowledge from years of disuse? Do you start from scratch? Can someone offer good ways for retention of class room materials?

Answer

This is problematic for students who aspire for higher learning because much of the material or understanding is accumulative.

Actually, that's precisely why it's not problematic. If you had to memorize random trivia, it would become more and more difficult as you had to remember more unrelated things, but academic studies work in the opposite way. Because it's accumulative, you are constantly practicing and applying what you learned before, which helps you solidify your understanding. Furthermore, the more you learn, the more connections you can see, and these relationships help you organize and retain knowledge. Of course you'll still forget some details, but you'll forget less than you expect and recover it more easily.

My impression is that severe forgetfulness in students typically occurs when they are studying ideas in isolation and setting them aside as soon as the class is over. Instead, it's important to play with ideas constantly. How are they related to your past studies? To other interests of yours? Can you think of further applications or connections? This can help bridge the gaps between how you learned these ideas. This sort of exploration is almost essential if you want to do research, and it's a useful study technique in any case.