How to learn from a book (maybe) | note-taking, visualizations, spacing | history example

So, I'm almost done with this book on  Chinese history and I'd like to learn as much as I can from it. So that a  year from now or even 10 years from now I'll have a decent understanding  of Chinese history. In this video, I explain how I tried to do that and  what I might do differently next time.

Chinese history is full of dates and names  that sound similar and similar events that aren't quite the same. There's just a lot that  goes on in 5,000 years. As I've been reading, I've been doing some free recall  exercises and I've been telling the most interesting tidbits to my wife, but  those things alone are not really enough to learn from a book like this.

How do  I learn everything I can from this book? Before I talk about what I did, I want to talk  about what understanding something means. Some people tend to think that that if they could  just take a photograph of this book and put it in their brain - you know all the words and  the sentences and the maps and the diagrams - if they could just do that then that would mean  that they really learned from this book.

You could just have that book in your brain whenever  you wanted it. I think that's a misconception about what learning and understanding something  means. I think a more reasonable approach is to think of the book as a resource to learn from.

Of  course, in a book about history there are going to be important people and important events and  important dates and all these kinds of things but there are also patterns and themes and different  sources of conflicting evidence and uncertainty, even. We're not reading this book just to know  what happened in the past - we're reading it to make sense of what happened in the past. One  of the best ways that I know of to understand something is to organize it and reorganize it  in different ways.

As you dig into the material, as you pull the dates and the names and the  people together into patterns and themes, you're helping yourself to remember as well because  things that make sense are easier to remember. The first thing I did was to just write down the  different themes that seem to come up when reading about Chinese history. Some of these themes are  made pretty explicit in the book throughout the different chapters and other times these are more  my observations from reading and based on what I already know.

As usual, I write these themes  down without referencing the book at first. Let me give you a sense of what these themes are  in this case. There are several famous explorers throughout Chinese history Zhang Qian from  the Han Dynasty who makes it to the Persian Empire reports back to China on the wider world. 

There's Xuanzang, who lived in the Tang Dynasty who travels as a Buddhist monk, goes to India and  has many adventures along the way. Zheng He, from the Ming Dynasty, who travels in these giant  warships - the biggest ships at the time, during the Ming Dynasty travels all around  southeast Asia and even into Africa. There's certain similarities to these  explorations, but then there are also certain differences as well.

Another  pattern that that emerges in Chinese history is that there's the short dynasty  that sets everything up but pisses everyone off that is then overthrown by a much  more popular and long-lasting dynasty who basically does the exact same thing and  takes advantage of all the infrastructure that was built during that shorter, failed  dynasty to have a kind of long successful reign. You see this with the Qin and the Han  Dynasty you see this with the Sui and the Tang Dynasty and there are many other moments in  Chinese history that are kind of like this. Something else I did: I wrote down the  major dynasties and the eras as well as I could remember them.

I have all these different  ideas, these different events, and these different stories - how do I want to organize them together?  How do they all fit together in a way that makes sense? The meat of what I'm doing is writing  down and organizing what I know, finding gaps in my understanding, and filling in those gaps by  going back to the book or maybe going online if I think that it's faster or easier to go online to  find the answer to my question.

And I just do that over and over and over again. Up here I initially  started to write down some of the major figures from different eras, kind of stopped doing that,  and spent more time writing out these narratives that I remember from these eras. And, again, I'm  doing that without reference to the book until I I'm finished writing and then I go back and look  at the book to see what I I didn't understand.

Now you can see here sometimes I've highlighted  things that I'm a little uncertain about or that I need to check again. The advantage of doing  this goes beyond just filling in the gaps that you didn't know, because when you bounce back and  forth between your own thoughts or reflections and the book what happens is, when you go back  to read the book you see the material in the book differently. Different kinds of details are  going to stick out to you now because now you've changed the prior knowledge that you're going  into the book with.

So you're trying to help yourself kind of scaffold your way to deeper  and deeper understanding of the material, whereas if you had just read the book  through once you would have only gotten some of the most obvious things and most  prominent or attention-grabbing things. This probably looks incomplete and sloppy  but I'm not finished with it yet and I kind of wanted to make a bigger point here. Which is  that some people think that the notes are really important - like that the completeness of the  notes or the clarity of the notes is a really important thing to have.

It's far more important  what's actually in your head. Now, the notes are a reflection of what's in your head so in that  sense, yeah clear notes probably represents clear thinking. But the function of the notes  is really to enable you to have a conversation with yourself.

When the notes help you to think  about the material that's good, but when you're doing something, say because that's the format  that someone told you that you need to do it in, or because you're copying something out of  a book from memory, or something like that, you're not really struggling with reorganizing it  in a way that makes sense to you. You want to find different paths through the material. One path  might be looking at population change over time in China and the causes of that population change. 

Another path might be about economic changes - about how taxes are collected and differences  in how people grow crops and distribute goods. Another path might be about different sources of  religious influences and how those impacted how people thought about, say the emperor's role and  the the royal family's role in managing China. .

. Now for this particular project you notice I'm  using this visualization software called Miro, but I'm not really taking advantage of the  visualization affordances in this in this program. There's just a lot of text and I think  this is partly a result of me and partly a result of the subject matter.

The way I've been trained  is to think with writing so it really helps me to think through things when I write them and I'm  not as adept at creating say a visualization that captures my thoughts as easily. I also  think that in this particular case, history kind of lends itself to writing a little bit  more and as time goes on I'll probably add more visualizations which can help consolidate a lot of  complex information in a neat, easy to understand form. When I put things in an external form like  this it helps me to see relationships that I might not otherwise see if I was just speaking all of  this out loud.

So I've done this note-taking/free recall process and I did this out loud story time  with my wife and now I'm engaged in this back and forth organizational process, but as I was engaged  in this organizational process I discovered that the specific dates when things happen kind of  eluded me. I put off understanding dates in the beginning because if you just memorize a bunch of  dates and they don't really have meaning to you then I don't find that to be that helpful. But now  that I have a better understanding of the overall picture and I want to understand more precise  cause-and-effect relationships - like I'd like to know is this guy alive during this event?

That  would be interesting. This event probably shaped his understanding and his opinion about what's  going on. I want to know that so I wanted to do something a little bit different so that I really  pinned down those dates.

And basically I did a kind of modified flashcard testing system. So I  wrote down the dates that I knew were important and I wrote down some of the events that I knew  were important and these are going to serve as flashcards for me later - like timelines that I  can test myself on. I can either start start from the date and go to the event or I can start from  the event and go to the date.

I can talk about this era - this 100 years. There are different  ways of using it for self- testing but I want to create a resource for myself where I know that  these are the events that I think are important, these are the dates that I think are important.  This is how to get deeper into the material.

You might ask, why these visualizations?  Why these charts? Why break things up like this?

And the answer is just that I thought  about it. Whenever we're learning something, we're always trying to make sense of the material.  So I'm trying to take steps that help me make sense of the material.

There's never going to be  one visualization or one organizing framework to rule them all. Tt's just like there's never going  to be a perfect map of any particular area. There are good maps and there are bad maps but different  maps also just do different things.

There are tradeoffs when you create a map because you have  to decide which information is more important: is elevation important? Is the location of the  rivers very important? Are things like addresses important to you?

Or electrical lines important  to you? Are sewage lines important to you. .

. ? So I'm going to keep going like this,  refining my understanding over time, but there's something else that I need to do  to make things really stick in the long term.

I'm setting a date a few months from now where I  will try to recreate what I am creating here and I might take little bits of time over the course  of a week to try to do that and then eventually I'll go back to what I created to fill in the  gaps and see what I didn't remember and maybe even go back to the book or to the internet to  to kind of get a bigger better overall picture of things. This process just helps us stretch  out the amount of time that we have seen the material. It doesn't matter how focused I am  right now, how hard I try to remember all the stuff right now.

If I don't use it for the next  2 years, 3 years, a lot of it will just be gone. I want to put a disclaimer here because I cannot  say that this is the best way to learn from a book. I decided to try to understand this  book deeply and I just kind of bumbled my way through it.

There are some things I would  probably do differently next time. One would be to do my note-taking or free recall sessions  more frequently as I was reading the book. There were times when I was just reading and I was  just so excited about what was happening next that I just got wrapped up in the story and  I didn't take the time to sit down reflect, take some notes understand what's going  on, really consolidate what I knew, before moving on to the next chapter or the  next section.

I think if I would have built my knowledge a little bit more slowly, it wouldn't  have been so over overwhelming or intimidating at the end and it would have helped me understand the  next sections more deeply the first time around. One of the other things that comes up when reading  history books is geography. This city is north of that city; northeast of that city by 500 km. 

Just reading that is not really the best way of understanding how all of these places fit  together and what their attributes are. If I were to go back in time I would have built up a  little map for myself of greater Asia so that I knew what they were talking about when they  were talking about it. I did do this little dinky map thing a couple of times - I tried to  do that much later on - but if I would have done that at the beginning and build up a map over  time, I think that would have been more helpful.

Another thing I would have done is try to  incorporate more self-testing into the process. I didn't start to do this until relatively  late. I have played around with GPT to get it to ask me essay questions based on the notes  that I've taken.

That kind of works a little bit, but really the best thing that I can imagine  doing is reading a book with a partner or with maybe a couple of other people. You're all reading  the book, you're all really trying to understand as much as you can you come into to say group  sessions and you each ask each other questions and develop your thoughts and understanding.  In my experience, when you're collaborating with someone like this, it can really lead  you to deeper better understandings of the material that you could never get just on your own  because you're just always inside your own head.

But anyhow I'm sure I will have other  improvements in the future. I'm going to keep doing this as I read more non-fiction  books and if you like this video, if this was the kind of thing that was interesting to you,  let me know in the comments because then I can make updates to this video to show how my methods  are progressing over time, as well as how these methods should change depending on the kind of  book you're reading or the kind of subject matter that you're tackling. That's it for today. 

Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time!