Transcription
There are four layers of learning that any student or learner of any age should master. When we're able to master all four layers of learning, it is genuinely one of the most powerful learning strategies that you can learn. It allows us to have a better understanding and better retention. It makes learning faster, and it even makes learning more enjoyable.
Unfortunately, most of the students that I work with aren't able to follow the layers in the correct order. When this happens, it creates a lot of stress, wastes a lot of time, and can feel impossible to get the results you want. With enough time, we can start thinking that maybe we'll just never be good at learning, but that probably is not true.
For me, learning to learn in these four layers is one of the reasons I was able to get top results in both medical school and for my Master of Education. Trust me, there's nothing special about me; I'm not a genius. I've seen similar results with thousands of students and professionals that I've trained over the years.
By the end of this video, you'll know exactly which layer you tend to focus on, but most importantly, how you can master all four layers of learning.
Now, the first layer of learning is called the logic layer. This is by far the most overlooked but also the most important layer because without mastering this layer, the other layers will not work. This means you'll end up wasting hours of time studying without getting the results that you want.
Why, you may ask? Well, as you can see from the diagram that I've drawn, each layer of learning stacks on the previous layer. Efficient and effective learning should always build on itself, which means the learning you do initially makes the learning you do later easier and easier. I always say the more you learn, the easier it should get.
But most students don't feel that way. Most students feel like the more they learn, the more overwhelming it gets. There are more things to try to hold on to in your memory. The reason that happens is because instead of approaching learning in the right order—where we're going 1, 2, 3, 4—most students do it in the opposite order. They go 4, 3, 2, 1, and then they end up with this chaotic mess.
If the way you are learning looks like this instead of this, then learning efficiently becomes almost impossible. The easy way to think about this is to think of learning like building a house. You have to start with layer one, which is the foundation. Then, on top of that layer, you build the walls, the roof, and the overall structure. After that, you paint the walls and eventually decorate and put in your furniture.
But what you'll see by the end of this video is that most students aren't doing that. What they are doing is the learning equivalent of trying to build the walls without having a foundation. They are only building one corner of one room, painting that, chucking a couch in the corner, and then starting to build the foundation of another room, building that wall, and somehow trying to make it all come together.
So really, it doesn't matter how long you're spending on building the house; it's just going to crumble if you don't have that good foundation to start with. In learning, what a crumbling foundation actually looks and feels like is, "Hmm, I've technically covered this content; why can't I remember and use this knowledge?" It probably means that you had weak foundations.
When we're working on the logic layer, it means that we're looking for the biggest ideas within that topic. We're trying to focus on getting a big picture, fairly basic understanding of the entire topic. What are the main ideas, and how do those main ideas fit together in the big picture?
Spending time to deliberately create this logic layer is crucial for efficient learning because it helps you build context about what you are going to learn. It doesn't take very long to develop this logic layer. For a one to two-hour topic, it might only take you 10 to 15 minutes, but it is a step that most students skip without even realizing it.
This happens because most students believe that context is something that they will just develop as they keep studying. They think, "Okay, I've studied this now, and I don't really know how to apply the information, but I'm sure that if I keep studying it and then I do more practice papers and more flashcards, I'll eventually get to a point where it's all connected together." But this is not true. Just time passing does not mean the ideas connect together.
The act of connecting information together, developing context, is an active process we need to engage in. In fact, when we don't actively try to connect it together, build the context, and develop a big picture understanding first, that's when we run into the issue of the more we learn, the more overwhelming it gets.
Now we're just loading up our brain with all these bits of information where we don't know what to do with it. We don't know where it sits, but somehow we're expecting our brain to organize it, process it, hold on to it, and extract meaning out of it. Learning and taking in information when you don't have the context and the big picture is kind of like walking into a library, but then all the books are just scattered all over the floor without any bookshelves to clearly organize the information.
So if you've ever studied something and you've tried to solve a problem, but then you feel like, "Hmm, I kind of recognize some of the concepts that might be relevant to helping me solve this," but you can't actually solve it and connect it together and use what you have studied in that way, then it means that you probably didn't actively make the step of bringing it together in layer one of learning. Naturally, that is a very frustrating, annoying, and stressful process if that is happening to you constantly while you study.
But again, this can be entirely avoided by doing layer one properly. Here are my pro tips for doing layer one the right way:
First of all, do it upfront. Don't try to develop context after you've taken in a huge mass of information.
The easiest way to do that is step two: list out your keywords. Take a textbook, take whatever you're learning, and then just skim through it and collect the main keywords and concepts for that topic. These could be the titles and subheadings; they could be bolded words and new terminology; they could be from your lecture objectives. By doing this, it just creates a nice clean list of things for you to look through. You're not having to just constantly flick back and forth between all your resources trying to figure out what exactly is foundational logic layer stuff.
Then what you do, tip number three, is look through this list that you've got and start grouping it together. Think about what are the main similarities. What are the main ways that I might be able to organize all of these different keywords and concepts? There are going to be similar trends, similar purposes, similar parts of a process, and similar reasons for why it's important enough for you to learn them. Think about those things and start creating groups and relating these groups to each other.
Tip number four: keep it simple. You just need to have a very general surface-level understanding of the overall topic—something that you could explain to a 10-year-old. By the end of layer one, you should be able to generally explain what this topic is talking about. You can say, "This topic is about these main types of ideas, and they are important because they influence and relate to each other in this way."
You won't be able to explain any of those concepts in detail. You won't really remember all the little sub-concepts and terminology that fits within that. You're not going to be able to recite anything from memory necessarily, but in the later layers, when you go to learn that level of detail, you will be able to understand where it fits in the big picture, and you'll have ideas on why it's important and relevant to learn.
So this process of making it a bit more specific and adding on extra detail onto that first layer, the logic layer, is layer two. Layer two is called the concepts layer. This is where we're taking those big groups of ideas and we're actually splitting them out into the more specific major concepts within them.
Layer two is important because this is what gives that topic depth. It's what gives it more substance; it makes it a little bit more specific. During layer two, we're developing the ability to actually explain things in detail, and we should be able to answer a lot of those questions that might come up in an exam.
Because in layer one, we generally figured out how these big ideas relate with each other, it means that when we come to a more complicated problem that requires us to connect different concepts from different parts of the topic and use them together, we know how they connect, and we can actually do that now.
Layer two is where we need to spend the majority of our studying time. Around 60 to 70% of all the time we spend studying a topic should be spent in layer two if we want to get top results. However, there is something that holds a lot of students back from being able to do this correctly, which I will talk about later in the video.
But right now, I want to make it clear that this entire process, especially during layer two, where we are adding on those extra details and our big picture understanding is starting to get more and more accurate and more specific, takes time. For me, if I'm learning a large topic, this can take me multiple study sessions across multiple days.
If you've never tried learning in this way before, it can feel very confusing and even quite frustrating sometimes, just knowing whether you're doing it right or wrong. But just like for learning any new skill, those feelings are completely normal and expected as part of just improving your skills.
I'll mention here as well that as an extra resource, I also have a free weekly newsletter where I go through more evidence-based tips and strategies that can help you work through this process. I talk about these layers of learning in a little more detail with a few more examples, and I also talk about a lot of other strategies that can help you get top results. So if that's something that interests you, I'll leave a link in the description. Again, it's totally free.
Now, at this point of our layers, once we've done layer one (the logic) and layer two (the concepts), we have a generally pretty good understanding of the topic. We see how it fits together, we can talk about the big picture of things, why what we are learning is important, and how we can use it. We can see how the ideas are connected together, and we can explain these concepts in pretty good detail as well.
So what we're missing at this point are those really specific details. These could be very particular pieces of terminology, the name of particular catalysts and molecules, or particular types of dates or locations that an event happened. These are the very fine granular details you might get tested on or need to use as part of your essay or writing.
This is where layer three comes in. Layer three is what we call important details. The reason it's called an important detail is that these are the specific pieces of information—the details that are important for helping us to understand layer two.
This is actually really important because it’s saying that this very specific piece of information, which when you first look at it you might think, "That's just something I need to memorize," is actually connected to a concept that you've learned. There is a reason for you to learn that detail, which means from your brain's perspective, there is a place for it to fit. There is a way it can organize it in relation to everything else you've been learning.
So figuring out what is in layer three is actually kind of simple. All we have to do is look at that piece of information and ask ourselves, "Does this help me understand something from layer two or make something from layer two more concrete?" If the answer is yes, then it fits into layer three. If the answer is no, then we'll talk about that in the next layer.
But even though it's technically very straightforward to figure out what is in layer three, here is the issue: the reason so many students feel overwhelmed with learning, especially for big topics, and the more they learn, the more overwhelmed they get, is that they jump into layer three without having done layer one and layer two first.
That is actually disastrous. As soon as you've done that, you can say goodbye to your efficiency. Think about this: when you ask yourself, "Is this detail important for me by helping me to understand the concept or making it more concrete?" how can you know the answer to that if you haven't actually figured out the concepts in the first place?
And how do you know whether it's going to be important if you don't know how you're going to use those concepts, which is something we figure out during the logic layer (layer one)? Spoiler alert: the answer is that you can't.
So when you start with just layer three, just ramming through all the details as much as we can—like, "There's so much to learn; I better just go through trying to memorize absolutely everything from start to finish"—then everything becomes irrelevant because there is nothing to connect it to. We end up with a disorganized mass of disconnected, isolated facts and individual concepts and explanations and processes, which means our retention is not going to be very good, and our understanding is not going to be very deep.
We can't use the knowledge the way that we need to, and we have to compensate by just trying to memorize all of that more—like just doing more repetition, more flashcards, spending more time studying.
The key to avoiding that and making it so that learning does get easier the more you learn, and you're not getting overwhelmed and falling into a trap of endless repetitive memorization, is to understand that learning in the right order makes learning build on itself.
Layer three is the perfect example of this because when you first go through a textbook on a topic you've never studied before, everything is very detailed. Everything feels very specific, like there's no other way for you to learn it other than memorizing. Maybe that's what everyone else is doing, but you know just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's good.
After all, you know COVID was also pretty widespread, but there are lots of detailed specific pieces of information that become relevant, become logical, become intuitive, and easy to understand and remember when you know a little bit more about the topic.
That fact that seemed irrelevant and detailed, and the only way you could learn it was memorization, now when we look at it, we think, "Oh yeah, that makes sense. I can see how that fits in." You can only get to that feeling by learning the layers in the right order.
So let's say we have gone through layer one, then layer two, and now we're at layer three. We've identified which details seem to be important for layer two, which things make that concept more concrete. What do we do with that?
Well, first of all, we can add them into our notes. If you're using mind mapping, then you can add them into your mind map. We can also add those into something like flashcards. Flashcards are great for helping us remember those detailed specific pieces of information.
So we're covering both of our bases. We're making sure that we're not going to forget those details; we're documenting them. We're using flashcards, which gives us the benefit of pretty decent queued recall and spaced repetition. But we're also making sure we know how to use that information in the right way by connecting it through something like a mind map.
By the end of layer three, we have a big picture understanding of how things are connected to each other with specific concepts, and we also have specific details that make those concepts more concrete. At this point, we are 80-90% on our tests and exams or more.
So what could possibly be left? Well, what's left is layer four. Layer four is a major source of confusion and overwhelm for a lot of students, and that's because layer four is what I call arbitrary details.
Arbitrary details are the types of details that are just not important. They don't help you to understand a concept; they don't seem to fit into the big picture anywhere. It's kind of like there's no reason to really learn this if you are not going to get tested on it. It's basically just all the stuff that's left over after you've done layers one, two, and three.
But here's the reason why layer four is the thing that trips up so many students: you can only figure out what is layer four, what is an arbitrary detail, if you've already figured out what is layer three (the important detail). You can only figure out what's important if you've done layer two (the concepts), and you can only figure out the concepts if you know where they fit, which is layer one (the logic).
At the start of this video, I said that the reason why a lot of people struggle and get overwhelmed with learning is because they're not learning in this order; they're learning in the opposite order. This is exactly what I'm talking about. This is the major trap you need to avoid if you want to be more efficient and get the results that you're looking for.
When you open up a textbook, the information as it's given to you biases you into starting at layer four. That's because when we open up a textbook, the majority of that information is very detailed; it's in this layer three or layer four. Because we feel like there's so much we have to learn, we get on with it. We spend that time trying to get through all of these details to remember and understand every single detail.
But remember, if we start this way, we don't know what's important. We don't have context. We don't know how we're going to use that information. We don't know where it fits. Now our brain is trying to do multiple things: it's trying not only to understand what you're reading and just comprehend it, but it's also trying to desperately hold on to and remember that information.
It's also trying to figure out why the heck it needs to hold on to that information in the first place. Why is it relevant? Where does it fit? How does it relate to anything else? We spend hours and hours just churning through this detail layer.
Over enough time, we can get a sense for, "Oh, some of these things seem to be a little bit more important." The layer three important details become a little clearer. As we see these important details, we start thinking, "Hold on a second; maybe these are related to this particular concept." Those concepts become clearer, and we start to be able to understand in more depth.
Eventually, maybe if we have enough time to do enough practice questions and test ourselves, we might see how they all connect together and get that light bulb moment of understanding the purpose of why we were learning everything and how to actually use it. That is when we reach layer one. Sometimes we never reach that because we run out of time.
So then the question is, how do we avoid that experience, and how do we learn in the right layers in the first place if we're hit in the face with so many of these details to sift through?
The solution is to actively filter the information in these four layers to begin with. If you have a single page in a textbook, you're no longer going to look at it as one page of information. You're going to see that that page has four layers of information. It becomes a process of skimming the information to deliberately look for the things that for you feel like they belong in layer one and focusing our attention on just the layer one information.
Once we've gone through our material, defined all the layer one information, and built our layer one with a strong foundation, we're going to go through all the stuff again a second time, this time filtering and looking for the things that feel like layer two. Remember, layer two takes the longest.
Once we've done that, we can go through it again to filter out the things that are layer three or layer four. Usually, you can do those last two layers in the same step. If you are in the unfortunate position where you do need to actually learn these layer four things as well, that's also when you might just put them into some flashcards.
But on top of doing this, you also need to be able to detect when you're doing it in the wrong order. One of the telltale signs, red flags, that you're going in the wrong order is that you are very early on in your studying process, and already you are making flashcards or you are in your mind just trying to remember and hold on to what you're learning.
That's your mindset, and that's what you're doing. That's a very clear sign that you're focusing on the wrong layer. If you do want to be a top learner, or even if you just want to make learning a little bit easier than it is now, I can promise you—I can guarantee it—if you start thinking of learning in layers, you will find that you are more efficient, your memory gets better, your understanding is deeper, you're getting better results, and you'll start feeling more confident in the way that you learn.
So if you want more specific strategies and tips on how to navigate these four layers, then remember my free weekly newsletter. The link is in the description. If you want to learn even more learning strategies and techniques, then I recommend checking out this video here. I think you'll like it.