Looking back, I now realize that I didn’t know much about learning, or how to improve my ability to learn, during all the years I was in school and taking lessons in playing the piano. Like everybody else my age back then, I assumed that learning was mainly about quantity of time spent studying or practicing. The big question then was, did I have enough self-discipline to spend enough time doing it? I didn’t get good grades but I did manage, on one very special occasion, to practice the piano for almost three hours. I was exhausted, but proud of myself, until I learned that a concert pianist, one of my early fantasies, had to practice six or seven hours every single day. That was the end of that dream. I also assumed, like a lot of other people at the time, that anyone who got really good grades was just lucky - they must have been born with a high IQ. I wasn’t the only one who held these assumptions, even teachers and parents seemed to think this way. As I discovered what neuroscientists and psychologists had to say, I realized that I didn’t know much about learning growing up, and a lot of people might be better learners if they knew more about how humans learn. I hope you find this post interesting and useful.
The Most Important Kinds of Learning in Life
The human brain is always performing learning tasks—even while you’re sleeping, and our bodies seem to have been designed to make learning our primary activity in life. It’s how we survive and prosper.
According to psychologists, the most important learning is learning about the aspects of reality that empower you to (1) understand yourself, what is called self-learning and, (2) successfully engage and compete with other people in any marketplace. They also say that the most successful learning combines both types—i.e., a combination of internal self-awareness with external practical and critical-thinking skills.
We all have to decide what are the most important specific kinds of learning for us and find ways to make those types of learning happen. Overall, we can see that cognitive learning—the kind we go to school to get—is our primary focus. But there are also other kinds of important learning we need, such as subconscious learning and muscle learning. Let’s focus on cognitive learning and outline five principles of maximizing your cognitive learning power that I’ve summarized below.
Five Ways to Maximize Your Cognitive Learning
1. Maintain Good Mental and Physical Health
Your ability to learn and take advantage of your learning opportunities requires good health. Don’t take good health for granted if you’re young. Seek to develop and maintain habits that keep you healthy. Good physical health habits include regular exercise, good sleep, and thoughtful eating. Good mental health includes minimizing and managing stress and managing your overall emotional state. Overly excited minds have trouble focusing, loading information, processing it, and retrieving it. All of these health goals are well worth the effort to establish and maintain if you wish to be a successful learner.
2. Manage Your Working Memory Loading
Psychologists talk about working memory as the kind of memory that temporarily holds new information as you continue to work with it. You must remember it has limited space. If you try to dump too much at once into it, you’re not going to remember it or fully understand it. This is the reason to avoid doing an “all-nighter” when studying for a test - it just doesn’t work. After this step, new information goes to short term, then long term memory, both of which basically store the new information until you want to retrieve it.
3. Practice Retrieval of New Information in Timed Stages
Plan to deliberately recall new information at different times. Psychologists think of planned retrieval as one of the most effective ways to improve memory because it strengthens the neural pathways and reorganizes the new information in short-term or long-term memory. This makes your memory more resilient to forgetting. One suggestion is to plan to recall and re-summarize it, in your own words, in three days, then again in one week, this could be a habit you develop. Another recall method I find very helpful, is to retrieve it later by asking your own questions, and then write out your summary answer. Writing always helps me tighten my understanding and recall. I strongly recommend writing out answers for this reason.
4. Use Acronyms or Sentences to Help You Remember Lists
If you have long lists to memorize, find a way to use an acronym or sentence to help you remember. This may take a little time, but it could be worth the effort. For example, you can remember all the names of the Great Lakes by remembering the first letters spell the word HOMES. For a long list you might prefer to use a sentence such as: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos”. This is called a mnemonic device. Like an acronym, the first letter helps you remember the names of the planets in our solar system in their order from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Medical school students sometimes use Shakespearian phrases to remember complex lists, like the names of the nerves in a part of the brain. It’s up to you what mnemonic device you chose.
5. Personalize a Concept By Explaining it In Your Own Words
I find this one of the most useful ways to remember and use new learning. Basically, this comes down to asking and answering your own questions in your own words. You are adding context and meaning this way by connecting the new information to what is already in your memory. This helps you remember better and also gives you different dimensions of information you can add. This is likely to create multiple new access paths later. There are different ways to do it, and I like presenting the information as a teacher might. I can ask and answer questions verbally, or ask questions for a different Google AI search each time. I find that very productive and memorable.
Dan’s Net Take-Away
The basic idea underlying these five methods is you can learn better when you take charge of your own learning process. Instead of just following and doing what you’re told to do, you can think for yourself and try to bring together the new information with what you already know. Don’t ever hesitate to personalize your learning process; it makes everything more interesting and memorable.
Very good Dan. In aviation we called the memory aids "gouges" but then what do pilots know?