Transcription
How do top learners actually learn in lectures?
You probably know there are people who attend every lecture, are super engaged, and never fall asleep in class. They remember way more than you do, even though you both attended the same lectures. Is there something they’re doing that you just can’t see, or are they really just that much smarter?
In this video, I want to talk about how important natural intelligence really is, based on 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 extremely excellent deep processors, but don’t worry; it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world for you. Fifty years ago, someone might have said that your intelligence can’t really be trained, but fortunately, that’s not the case.
Research over the last two to three decades, especially in the last ten to eleven years, has shown that, yes, although your IQ is strongly associated with your ability to perform academically—in some cases referred to as the IQ-achievement link—there’s a lot we can do within our IQ, and our IQ can actually grow.
Interestingly, some other research finds that self-discipline is actually more of an influencer than IQ. One study even concludes that a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential is their failure to exercise self-discipline. In my personal experience, this is very true.
If I think about myself back in high school, I didn’t have really any self-discipline to speak of. Honestly, I just played games all the time. When I entered university, I became really disciplined; I stopped playing games and went cold turkey on pretty much everything. As a result, my academic performance improved massively.
For a lot of students I work with, I see a similar pattern. Not that they necessarily lack discipline on a day-to-day basis—many students study really hard—but where I see a lack of discipline sometimes is in their consistency with improving their methods and learning new skills.
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 consistent or disciplined in working on a new method to replace that. Inevitably, they just continue to get the same results they’ve always been getting.
One of the things I’ve observed is that while it’s true that not every student can become a once-in-a-generation genius, most students can relatively improve compared to their baseline. That improvement is often surprisingly significant. For example, someone who normally achieves around 40 or 50% on a test can, with a bit of training, go up to 70, 80, or even 90%.
The reason is that most people in the mainstream have never really been trained on how to learn effectively. They’re just using a haphazard combination of techniques and habits they’ve picked up over the years. When you actually start training them, they become much more effective at using their intellectual potential.
I sort of think of it like learning a new sport. Not everyone can become an NBA basketball player, but most people can get relatively better 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? 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. To explain why that would be a terrible idea to just copy success, let me give you an example.
Let’s imagine that you are a doctor. A pharmaceutical company comes to you and says they’ve got a drug called Treatmentall, which is meant to be effective for a disease called Diseaseitis. Now, you have patients with Diseaseitis, and the pharmaceutical company tells you that 99% of the people who have recovered from Diseaseitis took Treatmentall. Do you recommend it to your patients?
Think about this: let’s say there are a million people with Diseaseitis. The reason for their success 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 they use.
This is why I always say that if you want 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 strengths? Create a method of learning that is optimized for you—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 many researchers have tried to isolate what works and what doesn’t. Research is very complicated. Here are a few studies that I would recommend 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.
Cognitive load is basically your mental effort. It’s how hard you have to think and how hard you have to try to organize something, process something, or make sense of the information. If I start speaking to you in some obscure language that you’ve never heard of before, you’re going to exert a lot of mental load trying to figure out what I’m saying.
Likewise, if I’m teaching something in a way that is very hard to follow and extremely complicated, you’re going to use a lot more cognitive load. It’s the same when you’re reading a book. If it’s in very technical, dense language, you need to use a lot more cognitive load to get through it.
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 is that you don’t want your cognitive load to get too high, because then you’ll be overloaded. But you also don’t want it to be too low, because that means you’re not really using your brain, and therefore you’re not actually learning. That’s kind of the worst waste of time.
A great example of that would be just reading and rereading and then rewriting notes multiple times. The cognitive load involved in that is very low, and that’s something we call passive learning. Remember, kids: passive learning will kill you—or at least it’s pretty bad for you.
Cognitive load management is not easy to do straight off the bat. This is partly because cognitive load can happen for multiple reasons. For example, if you’re trying to study but the neighbor’s dog is barking constantly, you now have to exert cognitive load to ignore the barking dog.
In this case, your cognitive load may be high, but it’s not high for a good reason. It’s not high because your brain is trying to make sense of it; it’s just high because you’re distracted. That’s not a 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, connect, relate, and compare and contrast ideas, these are the things that produce high-quality learning.
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 complicated; hopefully, you could follow that.
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. There are some free slides that I found from, I think, a state school.
If this is a lecture and I have my lecture slides available before the lecture, or maybe I have some textbook chapters or previous students’ notes that I’m using, it doesn’t really matter. Just to give me a basic idea, one of the really effective things you can do before going into a lecture is to prime yourself.
Priming basically means that you give your brain a little bit more to work with. If you’re introduced to something really technical and detailed, you don’t need to exert so much cognitive load to make sense of it.
For example, if I was going into the lecture and I’m reading this for the first time, I might not know what any of this stuff really means. If I look at Transport Security, I know what an IP address is, but I don’t really know what the IP protocol stack is.
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 won’t really know what’s going on. I’ll be overwhelmed very quickly. In other words, my cognitive load is going to overload almost immediately within the first few minutes, and for the rest of the lecture, my brain won’t really be doing anything. I’ll leave the lecture feeling more confused than when I came in, and we’ve really lost from the beginning.
The idea with priming is to give ourselves just enough knowledge so that when we look at this, it’s not so unfamiliar. There are lots of ways to do this. I’ve talked about how you could do this with nonlinear note-taking, but there are also much simpler ways if you’re not too comfortable with nonlinear note-taking yet.
It all comes down to isolating what the keywords are, what the pieces of terminology are, and getting a general understanding of those keywords and terminology. Start thinking about 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.
For example, if I have a word that says IPC processing and another word like IPC implementation, I might ask the question: how are IPC implementation and processing related to each other or dependent on each other?
You take the keywords and think about how they might be related. If you can represent that in 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 and write the definition in the simplest terms possible.
You don’t want to write down definitions that are so complicated that you’re exerting cognitive load just to remember them. If you’re going to write definitions, make sure they’re simple enough that when you read them, you understand what they mean. 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 so complicated that you can’t actually understand it.
Write down the keywords, write down some key questions, and during the lecture, you can look at the questions. Now you’ve got certain milestones of thinking to help your brain process that information. Because you’ve already familiarized yourself with some of that terminology, the lecture is less confusing. If you’ve done well, you’ve also thought about some of the relationships between them, so when the lecturer talks about those relationships, it’s a little bit more familiar.
This is all about priming yourself.
The second thing we can do is take that concept of asking questions and extend it a little further. There’s a really effective part of learning that comes from having to elaborate on something. But elaborating on something doesn’t just mean explaining it more or going into more depth. A big part of elaboration is about figuring out how a concept is shaped, what the edges are, where it applies, where it does not apply, and what the relationships that are less obvious are.
An easy way to trigger this is by asking non-obvious questions. For example, if I use information about network security, a term like “authentication header” might come up. An obvious question would be something like: what is an authentication header? What is its importance or significance? What is the advantage of an authentication header?
These are usually very factual and discrete questions. They may ask about how it relates to other concepts as well. However, the answer is usually relatively simple and something that most people are expected to know.
Asking these questions is valuable, but most of the time, you’re going to learn that anyway. If we’re going to the effort of thinking of questions to ask that are really going to help us with our learning, it’s worthwhile to think about the questions that people might not be asking.
A very quick and reliable way of doing this is to look for 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 down to something that seems a little less relevant, like hub-and-spoke VPN.
I might look at those two things and say, “How are those two things related?” For most topics, any concept is related to any other concept, even if that relationship is indirect and somewhat distant. Forcing yourself to think about that also forces you to revise all the different relationships and interactions along the way.
When you ask about questions that are very obvious and the relationships between the ideas are super apparent, it’s so easy that it’s not really testing or challenging you. However, if you ask about a relationship between two concepts that are pretty far apart, 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, and the exit is there, but you’re not really sure how to go from the entrance to the exit. You have to go through multiple paths in the middle to try to figure it out. In doing that, it actually reinforces and consolidates the knowledge.
This allows you to, whether it’s before a lecture, during a lecture, or after a lecture, hit that topic from multiple different angles. All of these things help to improve your memory and your ability to apply that information.
This is a really good method because it doesn’t take very long. You could think of maybe four or five non-obvious questions in just one or two minutes. Even if there’s no real answer to that question, just the fact that you’re trying to answer it 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 interleaving. Indeed, this can also be a method of interleaving.
Now, I mentioned that all of these things relate back to cognitive load. The first one, priming, is obvious because that’s about 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.
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 more purpose and focus. Your brain likes having a narrow focus, so that also helps reduce cognitive load.
But there’s probably nothing that helps quite as much as this third thing: filtering and screening information much more critically. Most top learners are pretty selective about what they’re going to learn and when they’re going to learn it.
Most top learners are not going to study absolutely everything at the maximum level of depth from the very beginning. If they are, and that’s how they’re able to be successful, their natural deep processing level is probably completely off the chart. I can guarantee you that this just won’t 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 and what makes sense to you right now. There are going to be some things that are so detailed that you’re just not ready to learn yet.
The way you can tell is very simple: you simply ask yourself, “Do I know enough about this to make it simpler?” When 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.
You’re probably going to study it, and that knowledge is going to fade away. You’re going to wonder where all that knowledge went.
For me, as a complete novice knowing nothing about this, when I read this slide, I can probably simplify it. But if I read a slide that’s complicated enough for me, and I know so little that I don’t feel like I can simplify it while keeping it accurate, then the information on that slide is not appropriate for my current level.
It’s too detailed. What I need to do is find an easier version of the same concept. In this case, since I’ve literally not studied this before, it would be to go back to some of the fundamental concepts and make sure I understand those.
Knowledge is like building blocks; they build on each other. When you start with a building block that is at the very top level of detail, there’s nothing for it to stack onto. You’ll have to spend more time rebuilding it again and again.
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. This causes a lot of unnecessary repetition in 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. Once you have locked that in, you can go up one level of detail and then another level of detail, and so on.
On a single slide, there might be multiple different layers of detail. Some things are easy to understand, and some things are difficult. Your job is to filter out what is easy enough for you to learn now and what is harder so you can come back to it later.
You can keep a list on the side or use Post-it notes to remind you of the things you’ve skipped so you do come back to them. It’s very important that the first time you learn something, you do not try to learn everything at once. Some of that detail is going to be too much for you to handle right now, and it’s much more efficient to come back to it later when your foundations are stronger.
The reason this is so good for lectures is that if you’ve been doing the other methods I told you about, like priming yourself, that means that during the lecture, you already have some foundations. There’s a mid-level that you know is going to be appropriate for you, and then there’s an extra level of detail that the lecturer might talk about that you know is too much for you to hold on to.
Instead of exerting your precious cognitive load trying to understand that, you can say, “Okay, that’s the stuff I can come back to later when I’m studying.” You can direct your focus on the stuff that you think is at the right level of detail for you at that time.
You can come back to it by looking at lecture recordings, lecture notes, slides, or whatever you have available. 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 note of that time.
When you’re going through the lecture, you can go back to the particular moments that you skipped, which is probably a lot more effective than just watching a lecture at triple the speed. Just because you can listen to someone three times as fast doesn’t mean 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, that’s kind of a misnomer. Watching a lecture faster does not actually make you learn faster.
Here’s a little bonus tip for you: next time you’re in a lecture, give these strategies a go.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time!