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Important to note that repetitions are never exactly the same: new connections are found each time.

Also, choosing what to repeat seems important. Drilling in what is already understood may help you become a good teacher but how does one develop new and original ideas?

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Someone might be better equipped to write something new and original if they knew 10,000 words vs 1,000. Or to bring it to programming, do you think a programmer who has complete mastery of the syntax of a language might be better equipped to develop innovative software than a developer who had to refer to stack overflow to lookup whether == was assignment or equivalence?

You develop new ideas by connecting old facts. The better you're able to recall old facts, the better you're able to connect them to synthesize new ideas.

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