About
The term desirable difficulty comes from the psychologist Robert Bjork: a class of obstacles introduced into the learning process that slow you down, feel worse in the moment, and produce more durable learning as a result. Spacing instead of massing, testing instead of re-reading, interleaving instead of blocking, generating instead of being told — each one trades a fluent, comfortable study session for a rockier one that works better later, which is exactly the problem, because fluency in the moment is what most people use to judge whether studying is going well.
This site is a small, plain collection of essays on that literature: what's well-replicated, what's overstated, and what it implies for how to actually study, teach, or train something. No comment section, no tracking, no newsletter. Just static HTML.
Built with a text editor and deployed as a static site. If something here is wrong, it will stay wrong until someone notices and fixes it — there is no ongoing editorial process.