Learning how to improve your learning

The highest leverage activity we can undertake is improving how we learn. The most important step in improving how we learn is understanding how we learn.

Increasing the speed with which we learn is the highest-leverage activity we can do. Every decision we make, every experience we have; they’re all impacted by our knowledge and understanding of the world, which has come from learning.

On an individual level, the quicker we learn, the more likely we’ll be a good contributor at work, the more likely we get the promotion; the more likely we’ll have interesting conversations, the more likely we’ll have interesting experiences.

On a collective level, learning is the foundation for human progress. The more people that learn at an increasing rate, the more big problems can be solved, the more discoveries and innovations we’ll see.

The world is 7.8B people today, give or take a couple of hundred million. Let’s say 5% of humankind already learn to the best of their ability. That’s 390m people working to the best of their mental ability. A large number of these people will be able to work on the biggest problems we face today, as well as innovate in ways we haven’t thought of.

Now let’s say that we can improve general learning processes worldwide. Now, more people are exposed to better learning practices and an extra 2% enter the category of working to the best of their ability. This means that all of a sudden, the world has access to 150m peoples’ brains working at their maximum capacity. Clearly, it’s an important endeavour. But how do we do it?

First, it’s probably important to understand what learning is.

What is learning?

Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist who wrote an amazingly insightful book, How We Learn (which I’ll be referencing quite a bit) has defined learning perfectly well. It is “to form an internal model of the external world.” So learning is not just knowing that a fact exists, it’s to update how you internally perceive the world.

Learning happens rapidly in your early years and does eventually slow down over time, but it doesn’t have to stop. In fact, there are many things you can do as you age to not only keep learning, but learn at a faster rate. The most important first step to this is to understand how we learn.

The five key components to learning

Four of the five key components listed here come from the book I mentioned previously (the author, Stanislas Dahene, is a neuroscientist with decades of research in the area. If you’re looking to go deep into how we learn, I highly recommend reading that book rather than me telling you).

The four components he talks about are attention, active engagement, error feedback and consolidation. I’ve broken out a fifth – memory – which I feel is valuable to speak about separately. Understanding and improving each of these components is guaranteed to help your learning efficiency.

Learning component 1: Attention

This is the ability to pay focus to one particular thing, while ignoring the multitude of other things around. Neurologically, your ability to pay attention increases until your early 40s before it slowly declines. This is not to say it can’t be improved at any age.

Dahene outlines attention as having three key attributes related to how we learn.

Alerting attention is when to pay attention. More immersive experiences naturally assist this type of attention. The better the educational content is in capturing the learner’s attention, the quicker the learning will happen. So if you’re training that new co-worker, it pays to put some more effort into how you’ll capture their attention.This type of attention can also be worked on internally. The more monomaniac you are (on anything), the more you’ll be able to apply a singular focus to some other thing. So if you find meditation is a great way to focus, this will help you focus in work. If you find learning a musical instrument, pottery or even gaming allows your attention to be streamlined, your focus improves everywhere. Be careful though, getting lost in a passive activity (like watching TV) won’t help your focus. It needs to actively capture your attention – the more thought it takes the better.
Paying attention to the right thing is referred to as orienting attention. This means that an educator (whether that’s a teacher, a parent, or someone running a meeting) needs to align the learner(s) on what they want actually want to teach. Keeping classes or meetings streamlined to one particular goal is going to resonate and be more memorable than trying to cram in six new topics.It also means if you’re learning asynchronously (on YouTube for example), you should have a clear outline of what you want to achieve in the long-term, and break it down lesson by lesson so you’re focus and attention is on one learning outcome. If you think you’re special and can pay attention to many things, please watch this video: The Monkey Business Illusion.
Executive attention is often classified under concentration or discipline, and it refers to how we pay attention. The Diderot Effect talks about how the more you shop, the more likely you are to buy more. In the context of learning, think of The Diderot Effect every time you go to pick up your phone. Every time you say no to reaching for the phone to distract yourself is another time you strengthen your concentration muscle. Again, this muscle won’t just be applied to picking up the phone.Studies have shown that overly decorated rooms, and allowing smartphones in the classroom impact not just short-term performance, but long-term as well. Fluid intelligence (aka the ability to reason and solve new problems) is dramatically impacted by an individual’s executive attention.

Learning component 2: Active Engagement

Active engagement is being fully cognisant of what is being taught to you. It’s comprised of two closely related features of learning: active learning and curiosity.

Active Learning

The opposite to active learning is passive learning.

Passive learning is hearing someone knowledgeable speak on a topic, quoting them in your notes and assuming this knowledge is now yours to use whenever you want. Active learning is listening with intent and understanding, while formulating your own views on what is said. It’s agreeing and disagreeing. It’s creating hypotheses and testing them on the real world. It’s generating your own mental models from the content you’ve been taking in.

The external environment can play a role in improving your ability to learn actively. A more immersive classroom, a coach or teacher that asks the right questions, experiments set up to test on the outside world. These will all improve how you learn. Frustratingly, these are out of the control of many people. There are some things you can control though.

Active learning is like a muscle you can build. The more you actively learn, the easier it becomes, the more you can do it. This applies to passive learning too. So anything that forces you to give up the comfort of passivity will help you improve your learning. You can apply active learning to the most basic of tasks to improve in this area.

Let’s take reading a book as an example. From the past few books you’ve read, how much do you remember and how much could you talk about with any deep understanding? If you’re like me, it would be very little.

However, you can actually push yourself to gain great understanding from every book you read to the point where you change your internal mental models.

The book ‘How To Read A Book’ by Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren shares a step-by-step procedure for doing this. I won’t go into the steps (you should read the book), the point here is that you can start reading (and learning) actively in the quiet of your living room, all by yourself.

Curiosity

In understanding curiosity, it’s vital to point out there is a difference in ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding.’ Knowing something may mean you can recall facts about it and apply it within a few set parameters. Understanding something is being able to talk at length about the topic, in your own words, with your own opinions.

Curiosity is the desire to get to a state of understanding on a topic. Internally, you need strong metacognition to be curious – that is, know what you know and don’t know. You can also boost your curiosity with vision exercises and continuously running experiments.

Externally, your curiosity is easily lost if your brain isn’t being stimulated enough. This comes in two forms:

The topic may be so far out of reach that you don’t know what is happening. You’re bored.
You know what is being taught to you already and have fully internalised it. You’re bored again.

To fuel your curiosity, the inverse must be true. What is something that captures the attention of its users from the start and builds the knowledge over time? Video games.

Video games always have an easy first level. This ensures that you, the player, learn about the game’s basics. You learn about the game at a first principles level. Only when you’ve learned that (and defeated the level) are you progressed to the next level. This carries on and on. This is why video games are so addictive.

Learning component 3: Error Feedback

Error feedback is feedback to any prediction you make. A crucial component is that you must make a prediction (whether it’s written down or inside your head) before receiving feedback. There are three main areas of feedback we’ll discuss here

How you receive the feedback;
The frequency of testing (and feedback); and
The treatment of errors.

Feedback can come from a range of sources, but it must be accurate, it must have more detail than less and the quicker you receive it, the better. While the obvious port from which it will come is a teacher, or co-worker, it doesn’t have to be limited to this. You can write flashcards for yourself (I recommend Anki). You can also research the correct answer yourself whether that be through a book, internet sources or most people will probably use some form of AI chat messenger these days.

On the frequency of testing, it’s quite simple, the more testing you do, the better. This is the most scientifically proven way to improve your long-term knowledge. And why is this? It forces you to face reality head-on and test what you actually know and don’t know. So instead of sitting there highlighting your textbook for two hours, try jumping to question section and see if you can answer some of the questions first.

The treatment of errors has significant long-term ramifications on anyone’s ability to learn as well. It’s essential that getting answers wrong must not be punished or judged at all. As soon as you make someone uncomfortable getting an answer wrong, the slipperiest slope has just been entered. And that slope makes the learner increasing anxious and timid. Two key features that a learner does not need in their toolkit is anxiety and timidity.

So create an environment for testing all the time, ensure you feel comfortable asking any question and where you can, get confirmation as quickly as possible as to whether you were right or wrong.

Learning component 4: Consolidation

This one won’t get a deep commentary, but it’s simple. Sleep helps you process what you’ve been learning and synthesise it. Things to note are that this only happens after intense thought work, and unfortunately, you don’t have great control over it.

The way it works is that our vague thoughts are reactivated in sleep at an increasing rate. There is a twentyfold acceleration of neural discharge while in the REM state of sleeping which means that information is flying through the brain, but it’s also compressed so you’ll be capturing glimpses of what you learned.

There are a plethora of books on sleep, consciousness, unconsciousness and how it works on the mind, so I won’t go into it much here. The key takeaway though is: get sleep. And get decent amounts of it.

Learning component 5: Memory

I’m going to add a fifth pillar of learning in here – memory.

As a general rule of thumb, no person will understand something that has more than four new pieces of information in it. So if you’re reading about quantum mechanics on Wikipedia and there are four concepts in a paragraph you don’t understand, your short-term memory will enable you to research the four concepts, understand them and still make sense of the paragraph. Over this amount though, and you’re toast. This is because short-term memory is limited in what it can hold.

Long-term memory on the other hand is nearly unlimited. The more you can commit to long-term memory, the more you’ll be able to understand.

So how can you improve memory? The more you use it, the better it becomes. The best way to do this is frequent testing, as mentioned about. It’s receiving a question and trying to recall what the answer is. If you can’t recall it, try harder and make sure you hypothesise what the answer could be. This is hard and frustrating work, but the more you do it, the more you’ll improve.

The knowledge of the five pillars of learning won’t make you instantly smarter. But they will help you understand the process of learning and give you a good place to start to improve your learning process. Next time you’re learning anything (it doesn’t have to be a school lesson – it could just be a new fact at work), you’ll have the knowledge of how you can improve the process – both internally and externally.

It will take a lot of time, and a lot of hard work to see significant improvements. However, know that if you do put in the hard yards, your learning will improve. Not only will you reap huge rewards in the long-run, the world with the additional person learning well will be improved.