How To Learn Anything So Fast It Feels Illegal (evidence based)

Everything I'm about to tell you is based on science. Well, almost everything. All the learning techniques you're going to discover today are the result of years of scientific research.

What I'm planning to say about schools and teachers, well, that's just my experience. Regardless of that, by the end of this video, you will know how to learn anything quickly and thoroughly. You'll also know which techniques to avoid, like CNN at a Trump press conference.

Are you ready to be delighted, informed, and entertained? Let's do this. My school experience was pretty awful.

I don't know about you, but my teachers never taught me how to learn. They tried to teach subjects and in most cases badly, and they failed many of the students. Now, maybe I was to blame.

Perhaps I was a bad student. But in the few subjects where the teachers excelled, I did very well. And looking back now I know about the techniques I'm going to share with you.

I realize how much time I wasted on useless learning strategies when I could have learned twice as much in half the time. Now it's important we define the term learn. When I say learn in this video I don't mean memorize.

Obviously memorizing is part of the learning process but it's not enough. These techniques are not memorization techniques. They're learning techniques where learning means understanding the topic, generalizing it to new situations, incorporating it into your existing knowledge framework.

There's an excellent method of visualizing learning which breaks it down into two categories. One is low-level learning, remembering and understanding, and two is highle learning. What could that be?

Let me show you. The method of visualizing I'm referring to is called Bloom's taxonomy, and I've mentioned it in previous videos. It's a pyramid with six levels.

The first three are remember, understand, apply. That's low-level learning. And the next three are analyze, evaluate, and create.

If you've learned something well, you need to be working in this higher level of learning. But so many people stop at the lower level. Moving into this higher level is the path to mastery and expertise.

And guess what? The learning methods that are coming will push you up here. Before we go any further, there's something you need to know.

You can't make yourself remember. Reading willfully and thinking I must remember this as you go along will not make you remember. And to prove it, I want you to try to remember this.

5. 972 * 10 24 kg, which is the mass of the earth. Scientific research hasn't just discovered which learning strategies are effective.

It's also found out which ones are useless. And there's a problem here, though, because the useless methods are popular. And the reason they're popular is because they're easy and passive and give the illusion of learning when you're not actually learning at all.

So to begin with, I'm going to tell you which techniques you definitely should not be using. But I will hazard a guess that you are. Also, when I tell you what they are, you will resist.

You will say, "No, this method is effective. It works for me. " But it's not, and it doesn't.

How do I know? Because the research says so. The most useless learning strategies.

By far the most popular learning strategy is rereading. But it's not effective. In tests, students who read a text twice didn't learn any more than those who read it just once.

And it takes longer to read something twice, twice as long. So if you want to speed up your learning, stop rereading. It doesn't work.

But here's the problem. It feels like it's working because the second time you read the text, it's more familiar, which tricks you into believing you know it, but you don't. There's a way of using a form of rereading effectively, which I'll cover in the effective strategy section, which is coming soon.

The next terrible learning strategy is highlighting. Going through a book passively highlighting blocks of test does not help you learn. There is a way of doing it that can be effective and we'll come to that.

The third terrible strategy is not taking. Now before you start screaming at me, note-taking is often essential and can be highly effective but it depends how you do it. But just copying information from a book or a board is not an effective strategy.

So what do all these ineffective strategies have in common? They're passive and easy. They don't demand anything of you and effective studying is difficult.

It places a cognitive strain on you. It's hard work. If your learning feels easy, then you're not learning.

Now, it's time for the effective strategies. The most effective learning strategy is retrieval practice. If you're a regular viewer, you're probably sick of hearing me say this, but I'm not going to apologize because I want everyone to know it.

Retrieval practice is where you try to think of everything you can remember about a topic. It's difficult and you can feel your brain straining as you reach in to try to conjure up memories of what you've just read. It's more difficult than rereading.

Much more effort is required, but it doesn't always feel effective and people often give up on it in favor of rereading. Try not to do that. So, how should you put it into practice?

Read something you want to learn and then instead of rereading, close the book. Set a timer for 5 minutes and then write as much as you can from memory about what you just read. Keep going for the full five minutes, even if it feels as though you've written everything you remember.

Do not look at the text. While you're writing, try to connect what's in the text to what you already know. Put it in your own words.

And then when the five minutes are up, go back over the text, see what you got right, and which areas need more work. This is where rereading can be useful when it's paired with retrieval practice. You can also highlight sections that you want to test yourself on, but it's selective highlighting to remind you to retrieve.

Another way of applying retrieval practice is to create flashcards, but no cheating. You have to come up with the answer and fully explain it before turning it over. Method two is elaboration.

There are two main strands to this. First, explain things out loud to yourself. So if you're learning the structure of the atom, explain to yourself that there's a nucleus containing positively charged particles, protons, and neutral particles, neutrons.

They're orbited by negatively charged electrons. The second part is to ask yourself questions. Why is it like that?

If the nucleus is stuffed full of charged particles, how come they don't repel each other? Like charges repel, don't they? And also, if you have a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons, why don't the electrons rush to the center and the whole edifice collapse?

That is elaboration. Describe, explain, and ask yourself questions. It's actually very similar to the Fman technique, and it's effective.

Retrieval practice elaboration. Is there anything else? Yes.

Interle. This just means mix up your revision and learning. So, if you're studying maths, instead of focusing on differentiation and then on integration and then on vectors, mix them up.

Research shows that this is more effective. Why? because you have to discern what the problem is and how to solve it.

If you practice in blocks, you know the answer must involve, let's say, differentiation because that's what you're practicing. But when interle could be anything. So it helps you to learn to recognize what type of problem you're dealing with and how that differs from other problems and how to solve it.

And if you're revising, it's likely when it comes to the exam, you'll be answering different types of problems. And if that's been part of your learning process, it'll help your exam performance, too. So, when you're studying, mix up your topics.

Think about how those topics relate to one another and to what you already know about the subject. You're always trying to build up your understanding and evaluation to move away from memorization to intuition. And another excellent way of doing that is the next method, concrete examples.

A body remains at rest or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line unless it's acted upon by a force. Newton's first law. But what does that actually mean?

Can you think of a way of visualizing it? There's an orange on my desk. It never moves.

Why? Because I prefer biscuits. Yes, that's true.

But nothing makes it move. There's no force applied to it. But hang on.

When I moved the desk the other day, the orange did move, but not relative to the desk. It was on the desk, but not in the office anymore. When I throw the orange at the window, it bounces back.

But when I throw a brick at the window, it doesn't. If I place a brick on my foot, it doesn't hurt. But if I drop it on my foot, h rate of change of momentum, Newton's second law.

We don't learn well in abstract. So think of concrete examples for whatever it is you're learning. And that's why the final method is so useful, dual coding or words and pictures.

Research shows we learn better when our learning materials combine words and pictures. Think of that atom. much easier to understand if you have an image of it with all the parts labeled or if you're learning history maybe a visual timeline.

Find the visuals and the words. If they don't exist, make some. Now, what was the matter of the earth?

One of the reasons I became interested in different learning techniques was because of brilliant. org, the sponsor of this video. Brilliant helps you get smarter every day with thousands of interactive lessons in math, science, programming, data analysis, and AI.

What's the best way of learning? It's not just watching videos, engaging with the subject, thinking about it, using your brain to process and connect the ideas. That's how you learn, and that's what makes Brilliant the most effective way to learn.

It's a very hands-on process. And as you work through Brilliant's interactive problems, something else happens. You build your critical thinking skills.

It teaches you how to think. So, what can you learn with Brilliant? A lot.

I like Brilliant's newly updated programming courses. They're a great way to build a foundation in coding, get experience with real world applications, and learn to think like a programmer. This hones your thinking skills even further as you break down complex problems into manageable chunks of code.

You'll start to develop an intuition for computer logic whilst also learning to design and debug real programs. It's a whole brain workout. To try Brilliant for free, visit brilliant.

org/python /python programmer or scan the QR code on screen or you can click on the link in the description.