Super Learning: Advanced Strategies for Quicker Comprehension, Greater Retention, and Systematic Expertise Written by Peter Hollins, narrated by russell newton. Learning has never come easy for me, which explains my standing as a mediocre student from kindergarten to twelfth grade and through college. Even my parents seemed to intuitively know how learning challenged me, as they started to tell me about my “street smarts” and how good I was with my hands.
I assumed this was just so they could find something to praise me about, because they didn’t have the opportunity to do so with my grades. It was never something I struggled with or felt bad about like other kids might. I suppose some might have seen other people at the top of the class and become frustrated and jealous. I just felt that everyone had something to contribute in their own way and that grades weren’t necessarily a measure of my worth. I know, that’s pretty insightful for a child.
But in many ways, it was also incredibly misguided. It turns out I was right about grades not being important. Life is partially about whom you know, but once you get there, it starts becoming a meritocracy. The concept of learning—the ability to understand, recall, and use new knowledge—well, that’s something that truly begins to matter and can make all the difference in your career, relationships, and happiness.
In fact, it becomes the backbone of where you end up, though you might get a leg up on where you start. If you can learn quickly, you can effectively walk the walk before anyone catches on that you were bluffing the entire time. You can discover opportunities you would never see if you were stuck unable to understand something. And you generally have the ability to steer your life in whatever direction you want because your ability to learn is your only barrier to entry!
This was never more apparent to me than at my first job. I had a coworker named John, and I started a few weeks before he did. It soon become clear that he had lied on his resume and faked his way through his interview, because he had no idea what his duties were supposed to be or how to use the industry-standard software that we were all supposed to be proficient in. At first, I was angry and wanted to see justice done. But then a funny thing happened—he was an immensely fast learner.
He had Post-it notes all over his desk, had notepads full of notes, and he always seemed to be writing sets of three-step instructions for himself. It was impressive to see his drive toward learning, and within months, he was performing at right about my own level of proficiency with everything he had lacked before. Sure, he may have faked his way in, but at this point, there was no practical difference between me and him.
He had learned how to do our job in record time and stayed at the company for years afterward. You could call this a sobering epiphany for how I thought about the processes and value of learning. Processes .- It can’t be that hard, and there must be tried and true systems people use to learn better. After all, the kids that had better grades than I did definitely weren’t all smarter than me, right? Value .- Wow, learning can unlock so many doors. I had no idea.
It applies to way more than work and probably to my hobbies and daily life, too. Learning will get me where I want to be. So what exactly is learning (not a technical definition)? Learning is how you create the life you want. Learning is the only way to create a better version of yourself. Learning is one of the most fundamental skills you can possess because if you don’t have it, how will your existence change or improve?
Welcome to accelerated learning, where you can finally learn how to learn. Chapter 1. Fertile Conditions To Learning. How do we learn? It seems like such a simple question, but decades of scientific literature tend to disagree with that notion. We may simply consider learning an activity we just started engaging in as babies with no preparation. In our school years, we were the receptacles for a constant flow of information and experiences.
And in most traditional settings, instructors measured how well we learned by how well we repeated the information back to them. We had no choice in the matter and simply went along with what was presented to us. This data accumulation and regurgitation almost suggest that learning is an automated process that we can only monitor, not control. In truth, there are factors, limitations, and conditions that affect our ability to learn.
Understanding these elements can help you avoid mistakes and accelerate your learning. This book uses scientific principles and methods that will help you learn in a way that works best for you. All mental activities, including learning, are influenced by internal and external factors and conditions. Some factors we can control; others we have to overcome or work around.
This first chapter discusses the scientific principles that drive our learning abilities and some of the best practices we can use to expand learning capacity. In other words, we must create fertile conditions for learning; otherwise, we are sabotaging ourselves. You wouldn’t try to learn to ski in a desert, would you? The Human Attention Span. One of the first conditions to learning you must take into account is your attention span.
Since 2006, the nonprofit group Technology, Entertainment and Design—universally known as Ted—has produced a series of online videos featuring influential speakers and leaders from all walks of business and life. Ted Talks have become a viral source of sharing ideas and spreading inspiration. A big key to the success of Ted Talks is their brevity - all of them are capped at 18 minutes.
Ted curator Chris Anderson explained, “It is long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention.... By forcing speakers who are used to going on for 45 minutes to bring it down to 18, you get them to really think about what they want to say. What is the key point they want to communicate?" The overwhelming majority of Hollywood movies run no longer than 150 minutes; in 2016, half of them ran two hours or less.
Movies are easier to sit through because they’re essentially passive - with the visuals taken care of, we don’t have to use extra brain energy to imagine them. Ted Talks, on the other hand, are more active, participatory, and dense, with few visual stimulants besides one person moving around on a stage. They have to be shorter. There are no accidents here; these stipulations are all intentional to cater to the human attention span and be as impactful as possible.
But Ted Talks and movies both consume brainpower, though at different rates. At some point in the brain gets fatigued and has to take a break to recharge, whether it’s through distraction or relaxation. Whether it’s a one-hour lecture or a three-hour film, that mental weariness eventually sets in. Studies have suggested that the attention span of a healthy adult is, on average, 15 minutes long.
Other studies (Microsoft Corporation) assert that our immediate attention span—a single block of concentration—has fallen to an average of 8.25 seconds. That’s less than that of a goldfish, which have been shown to be able to maintain focus for a near-eternity of nine seconds. When we think about learning, we can’t help but think about attention, and memory.
You can only learn as much as you can pay attention to; therefore, much research in the area of learning and retention focuses on the aspect of time. So, how long can you focus for? What’s the optimal time to structure a study session, for example? Ellen Dunn of Louisiana State University’s Center for Academic Success suggests between 30 and 50 minutes is the ideal length for learning new material.
“Anything less than 30 is just not enough,” Dunn said, “but anything more than 50 is too much information for your brain to take in at one time." After the completion of one session, you should take a five-to-ten-minute break before starting another. In the 1950s, researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman found that the human body generally operates in 90-minute cycles, whether awake or asleep. This pattern is called the “ultradian rhythm."
The start of each cycle is defined as a period of “arousal,” ramping up to a mid-period of high performance before finally decelerating in a period of “stress." Understanding how the 90-minute rhythm cycle works in the context of the greater 24-hour rhythm—the “circadian rhythm”—can help us predict how we’ll function over the course of a day and how we can plan around it for peak performance.
All these examples and studies point to one primary strategy for improving our learning - breaking it down into smaller chunks of time because a flood of information will simply not make it into our heads. When you learn to work with your own in-built abilities and limitations, you not only learn better, but you also save yourself a lot of wasted energy, time and effort that wouldn’t have brought you any closer to your goal. Learning Over Short Bursts Of Time.
When you train your body’s muscles, you put then under a load and make them work; they undergo tiny, microscopic tears and damage at the cellular level, but then, once they repair, they are much stronger than they were before. The brain is not a muscle, but we can think of attention as a muscle that can be trained—we need to pace ourselves. Overtraining only exhausts us, but building in periods of rest actually makes us stronger.
By segmenting our learning activities according to blocks of time, we give the brain enough time off to reset and reenergize and enable ourselves to retain more information over longer periods. It’s therefore a good idea to start a new learning routine by simply setting up a schedule. Long-term planning. At the beginning of a semester, online course, or research project, block out your schedule to set up a studying regimen.
You can do this easily with a free online calendar program from virtually all Internet providers or with a paper calendar or whiteboard. Consider what times of day you tend to get the most accomplished—some of us start the day in high-performance mode, while others are classic night owls. Just make sure to leave ample time for sleep and eating.
In fact, there is a scientific basis for whether you are more productive at night or in the morning, summed up by the terms “morning larks” and “night owls." If you’re really tuned in to your brain and body, you can get a bit more granular with your scheduling by applying the 90-minute cycle to the calendar—for instance, 90-minute blocks that account for breaks and fatigue.
This requires a little more careful introspection and monitoring, but if you can narrow down an even more specific time when your performance abilities are higher, you can fine-tune your learning agenda even further. Learning blocks. You can adapt the 30–50-minute study session as dictated by the L. S. U. study for your own purposes. Remember that 30 minutes is enough to make the study session substantial and that going over 50 puts undue pressure on your brain.
So within your weekly time block, make sure to schedule an attendant break after your core learning time. Again, adjust to what you know your system can handle - maybe it’s 50 minutes with a 10-minute break or 45 minutes with a 15-minute break. The study session can go down all the way to 30 minutes if absolutely necessary. You can use the renowned Pomodoro clock, which is commonly used for work productivity—25 minutes of activity followed by five minutes of total removal from that activity.
The specific amount of time is not set hard and fast; whatever it is, it just needs to be a time frame easy enough for you to stick through on a regular basis. Just ask yourself how you might cater to the attention span of a goldfish or even a child. Our adult minds are not so different as we might like to think. Concepts Before Facts, Understanding Before Memory.
Researcher Roger Säljö found in 1979 that we tend to view the act of learning in several ways, but it can generally be boiled down into two rough categories - surface learning and deep learning. Surface learning relates to gaining knowledge, facts, and memorization; deep learning refers to abstracting meaning and understanding reality. We’ll be returning to this distinction throughout this book, as we explore different learning approaches and techniques.
The use of the words “surface” and “deep” might imply that the latter is better in all situations than the former, but that’s not always true. Some subjects are best learned by memorization rather than additionally searching for some “meaning” to contextualize those concepts. In fact, your brain naturally uses both processes.
If I gave you a list of 30 random items and asked you to remember them, it probably wouldn’t help to ransack your brain trying to find a pattern or relationship between each item. It would waste your time when the task at hand is simple information retention. But more often than not, rote memorization serves to isolate facts rather than connect them.
It establishes facts as single pieces of information, and without a grounding context or relationship to a greater concept, it doesn’t anchor what you learn. Sometimes this is fine, but as a consequence, what you learn slips out of your short-term memory quite easily. The overwhelming majority of things that can be learned have some kind of pattern—hidden or obvious. These patterns, typically, are what you most care about learning.
Without these patterns, frankly, what you learn wouldn’t be useful anyway. Patterns make concepts useful. Without them, facts have very limited or temporary relevance and would therefore not be important to study in the first place. After all, this is the exact way that the human brain has evolved over thousands of years—only data that is meaningful and relevant to survival is absorbed, retained and understood. A typical course of study contains a mix of big ideas with a few details.
In that setting, it’s always the best idea to start with the big ideas—the overarching concepts that link the little details together. The primary reason is that many small details take on a random quality at first, but when seen through the lens of the larger concept, they fit together and form a context. That makes them easier for the brain to recognize and remember.
What you are essentially doing is laying out a map of the entire conceptual area, so that you can better navigate a path though it without getting lost. In fact, you can often forgo a lot of memorization, because the concepts themselves frequently serve to explain the facts. Instead of attempting to memorize by rote means, following the concept through to its conclusion will reveal the facts as you go along.
Like subheadings in an outline, they fall into place under the appropriate headings—it’s a logical progression. If you understand the governing principles around something, the facts follow organically. In this way, understanding and deep comprehension are always going to yield a better quality of learning than simply memorizing the superficial details without ever connecting them to one another.
For example, if you were studying the history of Miranda rights in the United States, you could memorize all the key players - the Supreme Court Justices, the lawyers, and the names of the plaintiffs and defendants. You could memorize the dates in the case. You could memorize the vote counts from all the courts involved in the suit and the appeals. You could memorize the names of cases that came afterward.
You could even write down the contents of the Miranda rights (“You have the right to remain silent,” etc.). Sounds a bit boring, right? None of those facts would have any relevance by themselves, and we’d have no reason to keep them in memory.
(In fact, I’m sure you’ve already forgotten some of them, even though you’ve just read them!) Emphasizing the larger concepts surrounding the Miranda rule—defendants’ rights, police procedure, or landmark Supreme Court cases—help to funnel the facts as they come up. A bigger narrative helps contextualize these facts and makes them mean something. In this context, the brain is more likely to retain the information it actually needs to know about the subject.
You would be able to essentially predict the facts with a reasonable degree of accuracy once you understand the underlying concepts and how they interact. True, you may not have “memorized” certain information, but when necessary, you can logically work your way through the question and arrive at the same answer as if you had memorized it. This is known as concept learning. It shows us how to categorize and discriminate items according to certain critical attributes.
It entails pattern recall and integration of new examples and ideas. And rather than being a mechanical technique of grinding memorization, concept learning is something that must be constructed and cultivated. Using Concept Learning in Daily Life. Applying the concept method to learning and developing new skills, even outside of the classroom or study hall environment, can help derive new meaning and, by logical extension, even improve how we perform certain tasks or jobs.
Cooking is an easy example. Standard practice is that learning a new recipe involves following a list of ingredients and a set of instructions. If you’re making a tomato sauce for pasta, you can look up a popular recipe on the Internet and have it nearby as you prepare it. You can repeat this exercise as often as you like, and eventually you’ll probably know the steps well enough to repeat it without a guide.
But understanding the point of each step isn’t something that comes through in the instructions. They generally don’t say why you sweat onions and garlic first, why you bring the sauce to a boil, or why you let it simmer for a time. Understanding that sweating the onions and garlic builds a flavor base, that boiling the sauce distributes the ingredients, and that simmering them bonds the flavors together gives you a better handle on the process of your preparation.
Most importantly, understanding those concepts makes it easier to recognize and use the techniques in other, completely different dishes - soups, chili, gravy, and even basic broth and stock. Going even further, learning the particulars of the exact scientific processes could open the door to cooking entirely different foods that aren’t liquid-based—in other words, any food you can think of.
If you simply know which flavors tend to conflict and which tend to complement, you’ll be way ahead of the chef who memorizes recipes. You can also adapt and adjust if things don’t go according to plan; because you understand why a certain step exists, you can come up with an alternative if necessary, get creative, or troubleshoot a problem. You become one of those people that doesn’t need a recipe, because you know more than how to read a recipe—you understand what it means to make good food.
This template is sneakily easy to replicate. A small business owner figuring a tax budget is better served knowing the concepts of taxation and how they’re distributed. A musician who understands how rhythm works in the context of a song better knows how to program a drum machine. A chess player gets more mileage from comprehending the differences between overall strategies rather than learning where each piece can move.
Even a clothes launderer makes fewer mistakes and ruins less clothing by learning how cold and hot water affect colors in variant ways. You get the idea. In fact, certain kinds of education and ways of learning are so general and transferrable that you could be proficient in a skill you’ve never encountered before, simply because you know how to learn. You can learn the particulars of any task and even perform it suitably a few times.
But knowing the principles and ideas that link them together is a more effective way to retain those facts or skills. When the time comes to learn something new, you may very well be able to frame that new knowledge with concepts you’ve already nailed down. Learning heuristics is very similar to the act of concept learning (Barsalou, 1991, 1992). Heuristics describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.
It takes our preconceived notions or ideas of the world and uses them as a means for interpreting and classifying new information. For example, there are ways you might act at a birthday party that you wouldn’t at a funeral (and, we’d hope, the other way around). The “codes” you follow for how you’d handle and behave in each situation, and any other occasions, are ordered within a heuristic. Establishing and understanding the heuristic rules for whatever you’re about to learn is always helpful.
Another great way to learn concepts is the Feynman technique, which we’ll discuss in a later chapter. Aim To Be Frustrated (Yes, Really). In competitive situations, we tie accomplishment with success - winning, positive outcomes, and finding solutions. But in learning, a key component in achievement is failing. It’s counterintuitive, but embracing the right kind of failure may be one of the key elements to taking your learning to the next level.
“Productive failure” is an idea identified by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. The philosophy builds on the learning paradox, wherein not arriving at the desired effect is as valuable as prevailing, if not more. Kapur said that the accepted model of instilling knowledge—giving students structure and guidance early and continuing support until the students can get it on their own—might not be the best way to actually promote learning.
Although that model intuitively makes sense, according to Kapur it’s best to let students flounder by themselves without outside help. Kapur conducted a trial with two groups of students. In one group, students were given a set of problems with “scaffolding”—full instructional support from teachers on-site. The second group was given the same problems but received no teacher help whatsoever. Instead, the second group of students had to collaborate to find the solutions.
The “scaffolded” group was able to solve the problems correctly, while the group left to itself was not. But without instructional support, this second group was forced to do deeper dives into the concepts by working together. They generated ideas about the nature of the problems and speculated on what potential solutions might look like. They tried to understand the root of the problems and what methods were available to solve them.
The two groups were then tested on what they had just learned, and the results weren’t even close. The group without teacher assistance significantly outperformed the other group. The group that did not solve the problems discovered what Kapur deemed a “hidden efficacy” in failure - they nurtured a deeper understanding of the structure of the problems through group investigation and process.
The second group may not have solved the problem itself, but it learned more about the aspects of the problem and the ideas behind it. Going forward, when those students encounter a new problem on another test, they’re able to use the knowledge they generated through their trial more effectively than the passive recipients of an instructor’s expertise. Consequently, Kapur asserted that the important parts of the second group’s process were their miscues, mistakes, and fumbling.
When that group made the active effort to learn by itself, it retained more knowledge needed for future problems. Three conditions, Kapur said, make productive failure an effective process - •Choose problems that “challenge, but do not frustrate." •Give learners the chance to explain and elaborate their processes. •Allow learners to compare and contrast good and bad solutions.
Struggling with something is a definite condition that leads to learning, though it requires discipline and a sense of delayed gratification. Helping Children to ...Fail? The notion of productive failure can also be seen in strategies for child-raising. Does intentionally letting our children fail actually make learning easier for them?
Judith Locke of the Queensland University of Technology said that “over-parenting” might keep our children safe and supported but could impede their growing processes. Locke observed that children raised in a state of helplessness were destined to lead anxiety-ridden adulthoods.
Parents who were overly responsive to their children’s needs restricted their children’s ability to solve problems on their own and hampered the development of emotions they need to cope with future setbacks and failures. In a way, we over-parent ourselves. We push ourselves not to fail, work too hard to achieve the desired outcome, and get frustrated when we get stuck or fall short. How can we, so to speak, let failing work for us? Get your brain into “growth” mode.
When we believe that we have all we need to accomplish whatever we want, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment when our process goes awry. This is because we think our abilities are fixed—if we can’t succeed based on what we already know or can do, we never will. That makes our disappointments more profound and corrosive. So at the beginning of a project that seems unfamiliar, we need to tell our brain that we’re in learning mode.
We need to establish that one of our main takeaways will be new knowledge, not just an immediately successful outcome. Reframe your expectations to make the learning as important as the result—more important, if possible. Document your process. Companies use “paper trails” (literally or digitally) to determine points or events that altered an outcome. When you’re in the weeds of a new project, keeping your own trail will help you learn new knowledge and refine your processes for future efforts.
In addition to whatever tools you’re using for a project, set up a diary or journal for what you discover on the way. Set this diary up any way you want, whether it’s a paper notepad, word processing or text software, the audio recorder on your smartphone, or whatever your preference. Document your process the way a chef would write down the steps of a recipe or a detective would remark upon evidence in an investigation.
These notes can be the kernels of knowledge that will come in handy in future situations—even if what you’re using them for now ends in failure. The ideas they generate might seem small, especially if they end up not working. But when we use these kernels to solve future problems, their value increases. You may not notice any insight on a day-to-day basis, but when you compare weeks or months of progress, the difference may be startling. Use your failures to plan next steps.
If you’ve documented your process and diagnosed where something went wrong, then turn those evaluations into plans apart from your project. For example, let’s say you’re planting a vegetable garden for the first time, noting the steps and techniques you use along the way, and when it’s time to harvest, some of your plants didn’t come out the way they were supposed to. Was it because you used the wrong soil? Use your resources to find out why that soil was wrong and what it needs to look like.
Was the failed plant too close to another? Learn techniques for maximizing placement within a small space. Or in a slightly more common situation, let’s say your sales results fell short of projections. If you found a mistake that led to an over-estimate, locate online information on how to set up your spreadsheet to avoid those errors. If your sales “game” was off, seek out workshops that can help improve your pitch or increase your interpersonal skills with clients.
If you just didn’t have enough clients, learn how to make your professional network broader and more potent. Expect, but don’t succumb to, frustration. Chances are you’ll come across a moment or two of defeat in your process, along with the temptation to give up. You may even sense this before you start, which can lead to crippling anxiety that can hover over your work. Anticipating frustration in advance is just good planning—but you also have to plan how to deal with it.
Sketch out an idea on how to alleviate frustration when it happens—most often, this will be taking a break from the situation to recharge and getting some momentary distance from the problem. Quite often, the mere act of pausing allows for objectivity to seep in, letting you see the hang-up more clearly. But in any case, it will abate the most immediate anxieties you’re feeling and give you the chance to approach the issue from a more relaxed frame of mind.
Why are we even bothering to tackle preconditions to effective learning? Because many people dive right into learning without understanding what works on a psychological and even physical level. Many others think that effective learning is measured by the number of hours spent on a task, but we all have our limitations, and working within those bounds will only accelerate your learning. You can’t outwork your attention span or commitment to rote memorization. Takeaways.
•Accelerating learning means working with the pre-existing, inbuilt mechanisms we all already possess. When we work with rather than against the brain, we can get the most from our learning experiences, and enjoy learning more. •An unavoidable fact is that the human attention span is limited. We need to respect the limits of our attention and plan learning accordingly—i.e. by digesting new information is smaller, more manageable chunks.
•A good length of time for any learning period is more than 30 minutes, less than 50. Too short and you won’t be able to get into any depth, and too long and your cognitive powers will begin to fatigue. •To use your time wisely, plan ahead and designate times in your schedule for specific learning blocks. •Use concept learning to guide you - as you learn, prioritize understanding and comprehension over rote memorization, i.e. concepts before facts.
When you have a deep rather than surface appreciation of information, you anchor new ideas in context and make it easier to remember and apply them. •Deliberately engage in productive failure. Know that failure can actually be a valuable source of information, if embraced correctly. •Challenge yourself without frustrating yourself, and make sure that when you work (and fail) you give yourself the chance to look closely at why things happened as they did.
Ask yourself why you failed and think about how you could have done better. •Cultivate a growth mindset, where you set ego aside and assume that learning is uncomfortable sometimes. Failure is a part of learning, so embrace it when it happens. Use your failure to inspire you to make new plans for going forward, and shape your next steps. •“Expect frustration, but don’t succumb to it." With the right mindset, “failure” is something that brings you closer to success, not further from it.
This has been Super Learning: Advanced Strategies for Quicker Comprehension, Greater Retention, and Systematic Expertise Written by Peter Hollins, narrated by russell newton.