Somehow: How to Learn?
Physicist Richard Feynman wrote: “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way — by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
Why do we forget what we learn?
Long story short: we learn in a vacuum and don’t maximise the learning’s difficulty and interconnectedness.
In his book Range, David Epstein three learning strategies that have scientific backing:
- Spacing
- Testing
- Making connections
When you space a topic, you give time between testing sessions. The idea? The longer the interval of time between tests, the more longer-lasting the re-formed memory will be.
You forget a word on Monday, recall it in ten days’ time, then thirty and fifty days’ time, and it is the principle that drives memory apps like Quizlet and Anki.
Testing is what it says on the tin: tough, frank feedback as to what you can do, solve and recall by asking yourself questions, such as “what came next, how did this connect to data structures again or why do birds appear throughout this poem?”.
We improve in a cycle where we perform, observe, critique, adjust.
It is ideal when we perform 4% beyond our capacity according to James Clear.
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Cal Newport visited New Acoustic guitar player and maestro, Jordan Tice. He remarked that Jordan would play the same guitar lick over and over. Only when he could play at the current tempo error-free would he ratchet up the speed once to 4% beyond his current capabilites
We benefit from tests with minimal hints. If you are revising, it is more valuable to write everything you know about a topic and how it connects to other topics than to answer pre-made questions.
Similarly, when learning STEM, it is best to struggle towards an independent solution which is incorrect multiple times before reaching an answer because the very motion of correcting after a dead-ended solution reinforces learning immensely.
The more vigorous and profound the failure, the deeper we set the roots for our eventual learning.
It is great to build feedback into any learning practice, whether filming yourself do sports, recording yourself play an instrument, playing Devil’s Advocate with your own line of argument or testing your code on a regular basis.
The final notion is making connections. This is perhaps the most interesting.
The idea is to connect ideas to pre-existing ideas, kinesthise mathematical graphs and functions by moving your body, translate arguments into pseudocode, connect stories to other stories, draw the Mona Lisa in the style of Snoopy and write a rap response to Othello’s monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello.
The more we move between topics, styles, abstraction and concretion, the more profoundly we learn, benefitting from the power of connection.
In STEM and the Arts and Humanities, we benefit from varied and mixed practice.
This is the idea that to learn, you should widen the range of problems you solve as much as possible and tackle problems from as many vantage points as possible, by combining topics, varying question types, changing the modality of your answer, asking open-ended questions and questions around how one problem type and its answers connect to another problem and set of answers.
Try to think about the computer science principles which animate that great Andrew Bird song you listened to, and the management and function of randomness in the latest computer program you wrote.
How have you used spacing, testing and making connections in your life?
Let me know in the comments.
William
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Range, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Atomic Habits and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! are brilliant introductions to the art of learning.
