How the Top 0.1% Learn in Lectures

how do top Learners actually learn in lectures you probably know there's people that are at every lecture they're super engaged they're never falling asleep in class they are remembering way more than you do even though you both attended the same lectures how is there something that they're doing that you just can't see or are they really just that much smarter well in this video I want to talk about how important natural intelligence really is based on the research and some strategies that you can use to make lectures much more valuable first things first how much

does your natural intelligence or IQ really matter most people are not really extremely excellent deep processors but don't worry it doesn't mean it's the end of the world for you 50 years ago that's probably what someone would have said is that your intelligence can't really be trained but fortunately that's not the case research over the last two three decades especially in the last 10 11 years has show that yes although your IQ is strongly associated with your ability to perform academically in some cases in the research this is called the IQ achievement link there's a

lot we can do within our IQ and our IQ can actually grow but interestingly some other research on this finds that self discipline is actually more of an influencer than IQ and one of the studies even concludes that a major reason for students falling short of their intellect actual potential is your failure to exercise self discipline which in my case my personal experience is very very true if I think about myself back in high school like I didn't have really any self-discipline to speak of honestly I just play games all the time and then when

I entered into University I was like really really really disciplined like I stopped playing games I went C- turkey on pretty much everything I went actually really over the top but as a result my academic performance was like massively improved and for a lot of students that I work with I see a very similar thing not in that they necessarily are lacking discipline on a day-to-day basis a lot of students are studying really hard but where I see a lack of discipline sometimes is a lack of consistency with improving their methods and learning new skills

like they'll have a certain set of techniques or methods of note taking or handling lectures that they're used to and even though it's not really working they're not really consistent or disciplined in working on a new method to replace that and so inevitably they just continue to get the same result that they've always been getting and one of the things that I've observed is that while it's true that not every student can become like this once in a generation genius most students can relatively improve compared to their Baseline and that Improvement is often surprisingly significant

like someone that is normally achieving you know like 40 or 50% in a test in my experience they can go up to 70 80 90% with a bit of training and the reason is because most people in the mainstream have never really been trained on how to learn effectively they're just using like a haphazard combination of techniques and habits that they've picked up over the years and so when you actually start training them they become much more effective at using their intellectual potential and I sort of think of it like learning a new sport not

everyone can become a NBA basketball player but most people can be relatively bitter at playing basketball if they actually train and learn the right techniques so the next question is what are the right skills to use for example in lectures well the easiest way to figure that out is to look at what some top students are doing and then copy them if you agree with that statement you'll be wrong okay so to explain why that that would be a terrible idea to just copy success let me give you a example let's imagine that you are

a doctor haven't put this on in a while let's say that a pharmaceutical company comes up to you and says that they've got a drug it's called treatment tall and treatment tall is meant to be effective for a disease caus disease itis now you've got patients with disease itis and the pharmaceutical company tells you that 99% of the people that have recovered from disease itis took treatment all do you recommend it to your patients think about this let's say that there are a million people with disease [Music] [Music] a reason for their success it might

just be a common technique that a lot of people use and they themselves might have sufficient deep processing to allow them to be successful regardless of the technique that they use which is why I'm always saying if you're wanting to become a more efficient learner you have to understand the principles of learning and do your own evaluation what is your level what are your weaknesses and your strengths and create a method of learning that is going to be optimized for that not just taking what someone else does in their own context with their own brain

and expecting to get the same results yourself most of the time it doesn't work like that now there's a lot of research on what exactly is an effective technique and a lot of researchers have tried to isolate exactly what works and what doesn't research is very complicated here are a few studies that I would recommend just starting with if you're interested but if you want to cut to the chase it's really about managing what's called cognitive load that's a central theme of A lot of these effective techniques so cognitive load is basically your mental effort

it's how hard you have to think and how hard you have to try to like organize something or process something or make sense of the information like if I start speaking to you in some obscure language that you've never heard of before then you're going to be exerting a lot of mental load trying to figure out what I'm saying likewise if I'm teaching something and I'm teaching it in a way that is very very hard to follow and extremely complicated you're going to be using a lot more cognitive load uh it's the same for when

you're you know like reading a book if it's in very very technical dense language you need to use a lot more cognitive load to try to get through it and the trick to learning effectively is about keeping your cognitive load in an optimal State I've talked about this in a lot of other videos before and the summary of it is that you basically don't want your cognitive load to get too high cuz then you'll be overloaded but you also don't want to be too low because that means that you're not really using your brain and

therefore you're not actually learning and that's kind of like the worst waste of time a great example of that would be like just reading and rereading and then rewriting notes multiple times the cognitive load involved in that is very very low and that's something that we call passive learning and remember kids passive learning will kill you or at least it's pretty bad for you anyway cognitive load management is something that is not easy to do Straight off the bat and this is partly because cognitive load can happen for multiple reasons for example if you're trying

to study but then the neighbor's dog is barking constantly you now have to exert cognitive load to ignore the Barking Dog so in this case your cognitive load may be kind of high but it's not high for a good reason it's not high cuz your brain's trying to make sense of it it's not high because you're processing it it's just High because you're distracted so that's not good increase in cognitive load whereas if your cognitive load is high because as you're reading you're trying to piece it together think about it connected relate compare and contrast

ideas these are the things that produce high quality learning so this this case cognitive load would be high for a good reason so we want our cognitive load to be reasonably high for good reasons and we want anything that creates cognitive load for a bad reason to be reduced or removed that might have sounded a little bit complicated hopefully you could follow that so let me give you some examples I have some lectures here I just found a random lecture slide about network security don't ask me why I'm studying network security it just randomly popped

into my head and there are some free slides that I found here from I think it was in state school so if this is a lecture and let's say I've got my lecture slides available before the lecture if not maybe I've got some textbook chapters maybe I've got previous students notes that I'm using or a course guide or something it doesn't really matter just to give me a basic idea one of the really effective things that you can do before going into a lecture is to Prime yourself priming basically just means that you give your

brain a little bit more to work with so if you're introduced to something really really Technical and detailed you don't need to exert so much cognitive load to make sense of it so for example if I was going into the lecture and I'm reading this for the first time you know for me cuz I'm a total Noob I don't know what any other this stuff really means so if I you know if I look at Transport Security I I I know what an IP address is IP protocol stack I don't really know what that is

IP layer security protocol like again I don't really know what that is these acronyms I like know what they are but I again don't really like understand and that's like just the intro and if I go in and start learning this for the very first time at this level of detail I'm going to be very overloaded because I'm not going to really know what's going on and I'm going to be overwhelmed very quickly in other words my cognitive load is going to overload probably almost you know immediately within the first few minutes and then for

the rest of the lecture I'm sort of dead you know like my brain's not really doing anything and I'm going to leave the lecture feeling more confused than when I came in and so we've really lost to begin with and so the idea with priming is we want to give ourselves just enough knowledge so that when we look at this it's not so unfamiliar now there's lots of ways that we can do this I've talked about how you could do this with nonlinear note taking if you want to check that video out you can have

a look over this one uh but there's also much simpler ways that you can do it if you're not really too comfortable with nonlinear note taking yet but it all comes down to isolating down what are the keywords what are pieces of terminology get a general understanding of those keywords and terminology and start thinking to yourself how they all fit together you can do this by writing out a list of questions that you want to prompt yourself with during the lecture so for example if I have a word that says IPC processing here and I've

got another word that's like IPC implementation then I might ask the question how are IPC implementation and processing related to each other or dependent on each other you take the keywords you think about how they might be related to each other if you can represent that on some nonlinear notes great it's going to be more convenient for you alternatively if you're not super comfortable with nonlinear note taking yet you can just write down some keywords write the definition in the simplest terms that you can possibly do you don't want to be writing down definitions but

then the definitions are so complicated that you're now exerting cognitive load to just remember the definition if you're going to write definitions you want to make sure that is simple enough that when you read it you're like yep I pretty much understand what it means and even if it's not at the technically best level it's still better than not having anything and it will be better than having one that's really really technical but so comp applicator that you can't actually understand so write down the key words write down some key questions uh and then during

the lecture you can look at the questions and now you've got certain Milestones of thinking to help your brain sort of process that information and because you've already familiarized yourself with some of that terminology the lecture is less confusing and if you've done well you've also thought about some of the relationships between them so when the lecturer talks about some of the relationships again it's a little bit more familiar so again this is all about Prime yourself so now the second thing that we can do is to take that concept of asking questions and we

can actually extend on that a little bit further there's a really effictive part of learning that comes from having to elaborate on something but elaborating on something doesn't just mean explaining it more or going in more depth a big part of elaboration is about figuring out how a concept is shaped what are the edges where does it apply where does it not apply and what are the relationships that are less obvious and so an easy way that we can try to trigger this is by asking nonobvious questions so an example if I use information network

security as an example might be this term that says authentication header so an obvious question would be usually something like what is authentication header or what is the importance or significance of an authentication hitter what is the advantage of an authentication hitter right so these are things that are usually very factual and very discret they may ask about how it relates to other Concepts as well however the answer is usually relatively simple and it's something that most people will be expected to know asking these questions is valuable as well but most of the time you're

going to learn that anyway if we are going to the effort of thinking of questions to ask that are really going to help us with our learning it's worthwhile thinking about the questions that people might not be asking and a very quick and you know like kind of reliable is way of doing this that I do you know pretty often is I try to look for the things that don't seem related to each other at first glance for example it could be something at the beginning of the lecture like IPC implementation and I might scroll

all the way down to something that seems a little bit less relevant like Hub and spoke VPN right so I might look at those two things and again I don't actually know if those two things are actually Rel to each other but I might say well how are those two things is related and for most topics any concept is related to any other concept even if that concept relationship is indirect and somewhat distant there's some kind of relationship and forcing yourself to think about that also forces you to revise all the different relationships and interactions

along the way whereas when you ask about questions that are very very obvious and the relationships between the ideas are like super super apparent then it's so easy that it's not really testing or challenging you whereas if you ask about a relationship between two concepts that are pretty far apart then you have to go through multiple different hypotheses to figure out which path actually makes sense it's kind of like solving a maze you know the entrance is here you know the exit is here but you're not really sure how to go from the entrance to

the exit so you have to go through multiple paths in the middle to try to figure it out and in doing that it actually re enforces and consolidates the knowledge and it also allows you to whether it's before a lecture during a lecture or after a lecture hit that topic from multiple different angles and all of these things help to improve your memory and your ability to apply that information this is a really good one because it really doesn't take very long you could think of maybe four or five nonobvious questions in just like one

or 2 minutes usually even if there's no real answer to that question just the fact that you're trying to answer the question is valuable because it's making you explore all these different options if you've watched some of my other videos you might see some similarities between this and Inter leing and indeed this can also be a method of interleaving if you haven't checked out my inter leaving video you can check that one out here now I mentioned that all of these things relate back to cognitive load the first one priming it's obvious because that's taking

dense pieces of information breaking it down simplifying it and giving your brain a little bit more to work with so that it's not so overloaded during a lecture and the second one reduces cognitive load because when you ask these non-obvious questions it helps your brain think in a certain direction instead of saying how does everything fit together it gives it a little bit more of a purpose a little bit more of a focus your brain likes having a narrow Focus so that also helps reduce cognitive load because it means that you can do productive relational

thinking which is good for building knowledge without as much of the confusion of just kind of mindlessly looking for relationships but there's probably nothing that helps quite as much as this third thing which is to filter and Screen information much more critically so most top Learners are pretty selective about what they're going to learn and when they're going to learn it well most top Learners are not going to study absolutely everything at the maximum level of depth from the very beginning and if they are and that's how they're able to be suc successful their natural

deep processing level is probably completely off the chart and I can guarantee you that that's just not going to work for the vast majority of people what we mean by filtering out information is that when you read through something there are certain pieces of information that are going to be more suitable for your current level uh and what makes sense to you right now and there going to be some things that are so detailed that you're just not ready to learn it yet and the way that you can tell is very very simple which is

you simply ask yourself do I know enough about this to make it simpler so when you read it if you read something and you don't understand it enough to even make it simple you probably don't have enough knowledge about it to really consolidate it into your memory and organize it so you're probably going to then study it and that knowledge is going to fade away and you're going to wonder where all that knowledge went so for me a complete Noob knowing nothing about this when I read this slide actually I can probably simplify that but

if I read uh if I read this slide it's complicated enough for me and I know so little that I don't really feel like I can simplify this uh and and make it easier to understand while keeping it accurate and so as a result it means that the information on this slide for my current level is not appropriate it's too detailed what I need to do is I need to find an easier version of the same concept or I mean in this case cuz I've literally not studied this before it would be maybe to go

back to some of these fundamental ones and make sure that I understand some of the more fundamental concepts but the way that it works is that knowledge is like building blocks they build on each other so when you start with a building block that is right at the very top at the top level of detail there's nothing for it to stack onto and then you're going to have to spend more time rebuilding it again and again but it doesn't matter how many times you put the block at the Top If there's no Foundation it's going

to fall every single time and that's what causes a a lot of unnecessary repetition and learning if you know that as soon as you try to put it there you don't even understand it well enough to simplify it then you may as well just dial it back to the version of that information that is simple enough for you to make sense of it and once you have locked that in you can go up one level of detail and up one level of detail and so on a single slide there might be multiple different layers of

detail some things are easy to understand some things are difficult to understand and your job is to filter out what is easy enough for me to learn now and what is harder so I will come back to it later you can keep a list on the side you can use Post-it notes to remind you of the things that you have skipped so that you do come back to them but it's very very important that the first time you learn something you do not learn everything the first go because some of that detail is going to

be too much for you to handle right now and it is much more efficient for you to come back to it later when your foundation are stronger and the reason this is so good for lectures is because if you've been doing the other methods I told you about just now and you've primed yourself that means that during the lecture you already have some foundations there is a mid level that you know is going to be appropriate for you and then there is a extra level of detail that the lecturer might talk about that you know

straight off the bat is too much for you to hold on to and so instead of exerting your precious cognitive load and trying to understand that you say okay that's the stuff that I can come back to later when I'm studying this later and you can direct your focus on the stuff that you think is at the right level of detail for you at that time and you can come back to it instead by looking at lecture recordings or like lecture notes or slides or whatever it is that you've got available uh one thing that

can help you is if you are recording the lecture you can look at your watch to see what time it is when you decide that something is too detailed and you can make a long of all the time so that when you're going through the lecture you can actually go back to the particular moments that you skipped which is probably a lot more effective than just like watching a lecture at triple the speed uh because again just because you can listen to someone three times as fast doesn't mean that you can learn three times as

fast in fact most people probably can't learn fast enough to catch up to one times speed so you know again that's kind of a misnomer uh watching a lecture faster does not actually make you learn faster yeah there a little bonus tip for you so next time you're on lecture give these a go thanks for watching and I'll see you next time