You finish a book or article and, a fortnight later, you can’t recall a single insight. That’s not a personal failing but Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve at work: 42 percent gone after 20 minutes, 56 percent after an hour, 80 percent after a month. You confuse recognition with understanding. Reading feels like learning because the words look familiar, but you’ve never forced your brain to retrieve the ideas. Richard Feynman tackled that gap with a simple four-step method. First, pick one concept and write its name at the top of a blank page. Second, explain it in plain language as if you were teaching a 12-year-old. Third, flag every spot where your explanation falters. Fourth, return to the source material, fill those gaps, and invent an analogy to cement the idea. Each stage demands retrieval—proven by studies like Karpicke and Blunt (2011) to boost retention—and embraces “desirable difficulty,” Robert Bjork’s term for the productive struggle that actually builds memory. You can replicate this in Claude with four quick prompts. Prompt 1 spits out the five core ideas of your topic. Prompt 2 delivers a model “12-year-old” explanation, then pauses for you to type your own. Prompt 3 compares that text to the ideal, pinpointing exactly where your grasp slips. Prompt 4 asks Claude to suggest two personal analogies per idea and highlight where they break down. In twenty minutes you cycle through mapping, explaining, gap-finding, and locking in each idea. That beats rereading or highlighting, which leave you empty-handed when you actually need the knowledge.