How to better remember everything you learn

In her course “Learning How to Learn” Dr. Barbara Oakley, points out many of these illusions of competence.

• Seeing information in front of you, such as reading a book, doesn’t mean you know it.
• Seeing or hearing someone come to a conclusion doesn’t mean you know how to get to that conclusion or explain their argument.
• Searching for something on Google gives you the illusion that the information is in your brain.
• Spending lots of time with material doesn’t mean you know it.

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks

Mortimer Adler, PHILOSOPHER

This is the fundamental difference in feeling informed and truly understanding something. I am as informed as ever, I can more or less parrot articles I read site random facts but when I am tasked with explaining what something is all about, WHY it is important, WHAT its connection is with other facts and theories and putting it in context, I sometimes fall flat on my face.

It is dangerous when I let these illusions of competence slip into my opinions. I so often feel strongly about a position but when pressed I could hardly argue for it. So much of the media now is designed to make understanding things for ourselves obsolete, the packaging of intellectual positions and views is a booming business, viewers and listeners get hit with persuasive audio visuals, professional rhetoric and carefully selected data.

It all amounts to a nice little package for the viewer to make up their own mind with little difficulty, except the packaging is often done so effectively that viewer listener or reader doesn’t make up their own mind at all. Instead people become no better than a human Spotify playlist that spits out other people’s neatly wrapped opinions without actually understanding any of them.

To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is from this fact that the liberal arts acquired their name.

Mortimer Adler, PHILOSOPHER

Not being able to explain my position or parroting someone else’s means I’m never thinking for myself, now we are all entitled to our own opinion no matter what it is, that’s the hallmark of democracy. I know that my life would be fuller if I actually understood everything my emotional brain so adamantly believes I do.

So like any conclusion on getting better at something there’s a lot involved, I have to do a lot of active reading, listen to as many arguments as I can, argue with people smarter than me, fight against my own emotional bias, think about as any variables as possible. It’s not the easiest thing to do and there’s also my problem at the beginning of this article, how am I supposed to form an opinion or understand something when I keep forgetting all the information I digest.

One of the many reasons why people have trouble explaining videos or books or articles is because they simply don’t remember what was said, it’s worth then understanding how the memory works. There are two parts, short-term and long-term memory. In recent years we’ve discovered that long-term memory is the seat of understanding, it stores not just facts but complex concepts or schemas.

Think of the long-term memory like an investment portfolio, as you gather more and more schemas you gain intellectual compound interest over time, they all begin to connect to each other increasing your understanding of the world exponentially over time. But, and here’s the key, for information to get to your long-term memory in the first place it has to go through a part of the short-term memory called working memory.

Working memory has about two to four slots where we process information, it acts as a bottleneck for the infinite amount of information around us. The problem is what we hold there can quickly vanish if we don’t keep thinking about them or rehearse them in our heads. In other words, if we don’t grapple with the ideas in our working memory for an extended period of time, they never get sent to the long-term memory, they just disappear. Our current culture makes this process challenging, we’re blasted with new stimuli and information at the rate of a fire hose. This couldn’t be worse for our memories, once we surpass these two to four slots in our working memory, once we overload with information we begin to get distracted, our ability to process and retain information begins to plummet.

This is in part why I feel like I know so much but understands so little, why I can scroll down my twitter feed and barely remember any of it.  Information jumps into my working memory only to be replaced by the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, very little of it if any makes it into my long-term memory.

As we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data.

Nicholas Carr, WRITER

But it’s not just information overload that affects our ability to remember things, multitasking is just as bad. Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time, when we’re multitasking all we are really doing is switching from one task to another and our brain struggles to commit anything to long term memory when we’re constantly “task switching” , “tab shifting” and “notification checking”. Every switch is like hitting the reset button, it gives no time for deeper processing.

So what’s the fix? The first step is to eliminate multitasking, distractions, and information overload.

This is not so easy, I know. We are all well aware at this point that social media services exploit our psychology and it is hard to resist the dopamine serge that comes from checking them, but once you have that one source of information, a book for example, and it’s the only thing you are paying attention to, how do you remember that? How do you get the information into you’re long term memory to the point where you could explain them back to someone.

There are a lot of methods you can use to commit things to long term memory but we will only look at the three big ones:

1. Recall
2. Feynman Technique
3. Spaced Repetition

Recall

After you have read or watched any material, simply look away and see what you can remember and recall from the material you have just taken in. In one experiment students who used this method learned far more compared to others who simply went on to something else or just re-read everything again.

Practicing recall is counter intuitive to most consumers of content, you finish a chapter and go on to the next one, or you finish a video and move on to something else. But spending as little as 30 seconds after finishing a chapter or a video and recalling its content vastly improves your understanding of a topic and your commitment of it to long term memory.

Feynman Technique

World renown physicists and teacher certified this method of learning. It’s probably the best method if you want to understand something, but it is also the most work intensive:

1. Take something you want to understand
2. Write out an explanation as if you were teaching it to someone who didn’t understand the subject
3. Whenever you get stuck, go back to the material and re-learn. Fill in the gaps in your knowledge until you can write an explanation without source material
4. Simplify. Get rid of technical/convoluted language

Simplify it to the point that a child could understand it. An easy method is to use analogies. Analogies connect complex ideas to something more relatable and make it easier to understand

Spaced Repetition

Tiger Woods probably hits a golf ball more times a day than we eat food. This repetition makes him a world class golfer. Why don’t we do that with information and arguments? There are a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is that people assume that the brain is a computer, once you get the information it is there forever. But the brain functions much more like a muscle, and like a muscle it needs to be exercised.

It takes a lot of effort to repeat the same process more than once, that’s why we get lazy and rely on others to do it for us, so we watch more and more videos and the cycle of information overload continues.

Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect

Wikipedia

Life is not a book report so you don’t have to remember everything but it is worthwhile to concentrate on something important you would like to remember instead of trying to take in as much information as possible only to forget most of it anyway.

It is better to increase the quality of the information you receive rather than the quantity and to spend more time with it. The internet plays to our tendency to vastly overvalue what happens to us right now, our bias towards novelty is strong and forces us towards the trivial rather than the essential.

Intellectual Humility

To recognize the limits of your knowledge and to appreciate others intellectual strengths is one of the best things a person can do. It’s not only where learning happens but also where disagreements become more constructive. As Confucius once said, real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

The trick is not to be fooled by illusions of superiority, and to learn to accurately evaluate our competence each day. In Adler’s words: “True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline”

What’s on trial is not just the weight of our opinions but our entire understanding of the world.

It seems to be in our nature to focus on how we were wrong over the fact that we’re now smarter (as if we can’t be works in progress), and we often attach our egos to what we believe. A view is just how you see something. It doesn’t have to define you, and trying to detach from it to gain understanding can be a very good thing.

Kal Turnbull Founder of the Change my view subredit