If you want to really understand information, use it.
We learn things in order to use them.
Memorisation without practice may end up an artificial and thereby ineffective process because that is not the way we learn things in the rest of our lives.
We learn something in order to do a thing. We learn to drive because we want to have the independence. The actual information about the different pedals and the function of the wheel are important, but not nearly as much as the use of that information in practice.
In the same way, there is little use in knowing the definition of #catachresis if we do not need to use the term to describe the phenomenon. But if we are often analysing work with such imagery within it, the word becomes more useful to us and so it is likely to be more readily absorbed into our working knowledge.
If we have a desire (for whatever reason) to grow intellectually in a particular way, we should put more time into using newly encountered information than we should trying to memorise it. If we can treat Learning as a Generative Activity then we also kill two birds with one stone: we let ourselves learn information more easily and we produce something in the process.
To learn something, we have to try to use it.
This brings to mind Michel de Montaigne 's original idea of the essay as an 'attempt' to understand something. The essay is a brilliant way to put newly encountered information into an understanding of that thing (for understanding is different to knowledge: Knowledge vs. Understanding. We may know a fact, but we only understand it when we can use it). The essay itself becomes the mnemonic device. We don't need to base everything we wish to memorise on flashcards; we need to re-read and rework our essays through the process of Creative Recall (generative learning) to truly assimilate that knowledge.
This has significant impact on my own practice. I use Anki in my own practice, but maybe it would be better for me to use the time I spend with Anki to develop my ideas in my through Creative Recall (generative learning).
This would require a bank of information to be gathered first of all before it could be included within an essay (or Mind Forest note). The is good for collecting highlights and generating new notes, but it does not extract the content of the highlight itself from the note, meaning it is easier for information to go unused when preparing for an essay. I keep new words in a 'Wordbook' deck within Anki, for example, and I'm not sure I want to fill up my Mind Forest with definitions of words. The Mind Forest is supposed to be my own ideas rather than the collection of information.
I do wonder if the 'soil' within the forest would serve this purpose suitably for some information, although longer quotations and data-based elements may not be served as well as simple vocabulary definitions.
It's a slow process to always create something from the information we encounter.
Often we may not have an appropriate context (or essay) in which to employ that information.
There are still schools of thought that believe knowledge and understanding are the same thing.