6 learning tips in under 60 seconds @marvinliyanage

Most people do all the wrong things when learning.

Rereading, highlighting, and cramming are all techniques that give us the illusion of learning and are easier than actual learning. But they don't work.

Here's what does:

1. Struggle

Being faced with a problem and making mistakes primes your brain for new learning by teaching it how relevant that information really is to your life.

2. Make connections

My favorite way to do this is by making a map with the big ideas as categories and organizing new information under each big idea. You can also redraw this map from memory to test yourself.

3. Take breaks to test yourself

Rereading and highlighting don't work. But what does is the Doer Effect. Taking breaks to apply what you learn has been shown to increase comprehension up to 6x.

4. Find your blindspots

The other benefit of stopping to test yourself is that it lets you take inventory of what you know and what you don't know. This might seem obvious but there's a lot that you don't know you don't know. Find out where you're actually at in your learning and compare it to where you want to be. Then fill in the gap with practice.

5. Space out your learning

One way to think about learning is that in order to remember you actually just have to stop yourself from forgetting. Research shows that the best way to do this is just by making an effort to recall and use that information before you forget it.

6. Learn from experts

I've taught myself things in the past by cobbling together learning road maps from youtube videos, reddit tips, and advice from friends. The problem with this method is that most of the information you find will be worse than useless — it will actively teach you the wrong things or distract you from what you should be learning to get better, faster. The best shortcut I’ve found is to find someone who is really good at what I want to be good at and learn from them.

Go to BigThink.com/membership to become a Big Think Member and access 100+ expert classes from names like Adam Grant and Yuval Noah Harari.