How learning ACTUALLY works

if you want to be able to learn absolutely anything in as short time as possible then you need to actually learn how to learn learning how to learn is probably one of the most important skills you could ever learn because it helps you with literally everything preparing for exams learning new languages learning any new skill learning how to play an instrument whatever you want to do in life you need to know how to learn so that way you can learn things in as shter time as humanly possible I see a ton of people working extremely hard but they don't get the results that they really deserve because they are not learning efficiently it's a common misconception that smart people are people that can learn things quickly because they're smart they're just biologically better than us but that's not the case instead they're a lot more efficient with their time and if we can get that efficient we can also appear to learn things extremely quickly and be therefore smart okay that's great but how exactly do you do that well let me tell you exactly what works with me and what works in the literature so the first thing you need to do is you need to actually do something so a lot of the time people just flick on a YouTube video they'll just read a book or they do something like this but let me ask you if I got you to read a book on playing the piano would you be able to play the piano even if you read for 10 hours 50 hours probably not you need to actually do something learning is an active process in your brain you need to actually physically do something with the information that you have in order to get it to stick into your long-term memory so for example if you're just reading something that's not good enough what you need to do instead is after you read a certain passage you need to then think about it in your own words you need to read explain it ideally you would explain it to someone else that's the best way to do it but if not imagine that you had to teach this to someone else imagine you had to explain it to your parents or maybe to someone in a lower year group or to someone else that's interested how would you explain it ideally you want to reword everything into its simplest form into a way that works for you even better if you can make an analogy so a kind of compar comparative situation that you can refer to as well once you know you can do that it will build up those connections in your brain and you also know that you've understood it rather than being able to just regurgitate what it says in a textbook or on a video some other ways that this can help for example if you're praying for an exam best way to do it is to do past paper questions if you're learning another language you need to actually use the language write sentences in that language try and speak about your day in that language in short do something with the information you're trying to learn if you're learning to play the piano again reading a bunch of sheet music not really going to help you you need to actually you know play the piano the key idea here is to get your brain working is a proven scientific fact that we only really remember 20% of what we read or listen to so you need to actively do something with the information in order to get your brain to do it learning is an active process in your brain your brain is literally rewiring itself so your brain doesn't want to do it but it will do it if it thinks that the information is worthwhile after about 45 minutes of actual active studying you should feel the fatigue in your brain just like when you go to the gym okay when you go to the gym and you exercise you feel tired you should feel tired after revising for about 45 minutes to an hour and then you can take a 15-minute break jump straight back into it but again this goes for any kind of learning you should feel tired or exhausted after a relatively short period of time there are people that say to me I've studied for 5 hours in a row because all they've done is read a book for 5 hours the reason why you're able to do that is because you're not really tired that tired again imagine if someone said they went to the gym for 5 hours you'd think there's no way that you've done a proper workout however someone's gone for an hour and they're dead you would assume that they've done a lot more and that is the case remember that human beings are quite lazy in general this isn't an attack on you it's your brain your body does not want to do stuff that requires energy if it doesn't have to so again you might be tempted to just read a book or watch a YouTube video or something like that but you need to do something with that information to be able to do it Point number two is repetition going back to the first point about the brain being lazy it doesn't really want to remember information that won't be useful to it and nine times out of 10 if you just revise something once your brain will go oh that's cool I can do it today well I probably won't need it tomorrow so it checks with you it says okay tomorrow have we used it no then I'm not going to bother making it into our long-term memory and after a week you would have forgotten all of it how many times have you gone into a test you've crammed really really hard for it you've done decently well on the test but then a week later two weeks later can you remember anything probably not we've all been there and that's because because we haven't done repetition your brain again think of it in terms of your brain being a very smart creature right it will learn things that it repeatedly uses that's why when you guys get a job or you go and you do something every single day you remember it forever you remember your name you may remember your passwords for various websites or whatever that's because you repeatedly use them but you don't remember maybe the quadratic formula because you don't use it all the time so again it's all about repetition so here's how it works on screen now you're going to see a picture of the forgetting curve essentially after you learn something once it will Decay exponentially the amount they actually retain however if after one day you repeat it then it boosts itself back up and as you repeat it more and more frequently if you notice the drop off is getting less and less each time this is because your brain's getting convinced it's like okay fine we've used it three times in a row here's the ideal spacing you do something once the next day you recap it now this doesn't mean that if you spend an hour today you have to do an hour tomorrow it can be as simple as remembering in your brain doing some active recall on what you did it could be answering a single question so I'm going to use math as an example because I'm a mathematician let's say we learn I don't know trigonometry here the next day all I need to do is do one trig question which take me 5 10 minutes and I've recapped it then you wait another 2 days so that's 3 days after you initially learned it you do again you do maybe a trick question and what you'll find is after about a week of doing this so you've done day one do it the day after two more days and then another 3 days you'll actually retain it in your long-term memory now teachers do normally try and do this in their lessons with their starters they try and give questions from before to try and help but again you can't rely on that but I hear you say okay let's say you're trying to learn multiple things at once again most of you guys watching a GCC or a level students well how how you meant to revise 10 subjects it's quite simple let's say you're doing Ma today tomorrow you do a trig trig question and then you'll revise your history afterwards so in your hour of studying you may have 10 minutes or 20 minutes of what you did the day before in a different subject that's completely fine and that's also why when I give people a revision time tables I don't necessarily want them just doing oh maths this day English the next day science the next day because it's not really realistic and it's not helping you study it's not helping you remember also when you do do those exams you're going to be doing multiple exams on the same day so you may have maths in the morning and geography in the afternoon so it's not good if you only can do one subject per day CU that's not what's going to happen and again in the real world if you're if you're an adult or if you're at University or whatever you're going to have multiple subjects or multiple things you need to learn the next reason why repetition is so important is that knowing something actually takes two parts there's two components to it one part is the knowing so it's somewhere in your long-term memory it's very deep the second part is recall so actually being able to to drag that information out from your long-term memory so you can think of it so have you ever had that thing where you kind of sat like I know this I know this I know this and then 5 10 minutes later you're like that's it got it again in real life if you're learning a language you're learning how to play an instrument or you're studying for an exam you can't afford to sit there for 5 10 minutes waiting for the answer to come to you instead what you have to do is recall that information very very quickly so how do you do that well all you need to do is practice the recall aspect so this is why flash cards with timings are actually pretty good cuz it's like oh random definition okay that's what this is Boom there you go you practice it that's also why when people try and learn the language this is again maybe slightly off topic they practice reading and writing a hell of a lot but then they can't speak because they're not practicing recalling the information if you think about it when someone speaks to you you can respond instantly that's when you truly know something when you can respond straight away so keep that in mind if you happen to be doing a Lev maths I actually have a revision planner that will lay it all out for you you write the date on which you did a topic and it will automatically schedule in all the repetitions it's completely free I'll link it in the description and I'll link the video associated with explaining it cuz it might be a little tricky to use but there's going to be a video and a link in the description in case you're doing a level maths as or year 13 and you'll be able to use that in order to just automate this process before you make it a bit easier for you third thing it's a a term used in educational litery quite a lot called interleaving so what is interleaving interleaving is all about linking together different topics now just so you know how your memory actually works is you have this kind of core concept this idea one when you learn something new what your brain tries to do is link it to pre-learned stuff so for example if you already know idea one then it tries to link idea 2 to idea one now of course this can get hellishly complicated because everything is linked to something else let's say if you're learning about multiplication you may think of all of the different places and this is what your brain does where you might have multip multiply maybe in a game that you've played a sport that you've watched pretty much anything or when you had to maybe bake something or cook something or use multiplication ever it will link it all together now this is actually a very good thing these individual things are called schemers okay and the build building of schemas is what learning is it's taking a small idea and it's building adding more and more and more and more onto it but also linking individual schemas to other things so what do I mean by doing this well in order for something to be very strongly connected we need to link it to as many things as possible in this case we have idea 1 idea 2 there's only one little kind of thing connecting it it doesn't seem very stable however if I link this to a bunch of other ideas you can see that it seems a lot more connected how this works neurologically speaking is it means that more things can remind you of it so let me give you an example let's say we're learning about thermodynamics in gcsc or a level physics well the teacher then tells you that thermodynamics the word just means the study of temperature in your head your brain is going to try and say okay temperature what do I know what do I know oh okay it could be measured in degre celi deg fah okay cool well I know you know 0° C is the freezing point of water and 100° C is when water boils and it tries to link things together and the more that it can link current learning so what you're actually learning now to previous ideas the quicker you will adopt new knowledge this is actually why if you the further you study let's say maths the better at learning new maths you become it gets faster and faster and faster so when you first started maths back in Primary School counting was difficult for you but the idea going 1 2 3 4 5 was incredibly difficult for you the idea of multiplying incredibly difficult but then as you jump and you go ahead to let's say here 78 and N multiplying numbers quite easy so anything involved with multiplying numbers become you learn faster than learning the first thing in the first place because there's more ideas that the new idea can link to so what does this mean to you right well what it means is when you study something you should be consciously and making explicit the different connections so what does that mean again when your teacher says thermodynamics is the study of temperature you should think in your head or even out loud probably not out loud in the classroom because you get a detention but you should be consciously thinking okay what what temperature what does it mean okay well when it's warm this and you're thinking about all of the different things that temperature can be linked to and you should do this when you're studying as much as humanly possible for example if you're studying biology as well which is I did that for a level as well if I saw something to do with heart I would link it to the other parts of the circulatory system or I would think about it in terms of the lungs as well oxygenated and deoxygenated and trying link things together now I know Elon Musk is a pretty controversial person but he actually designed some of the rockets that SpaceX uses and someone asked him how on Earth do you learn all this stuff because you aren't a trained rocket scientist and he said that whenever he reads something whenever he tries to learn something he breaks it down and links it to something else that he knows about he always does that and that is how he's managed to learn so many different things in his life it is a well-known fact so again whenever you're learning something try and think it to something else the more interesting thing is you can do this across subjects so if you're doing biology and chemistry for example there's no reason why when you're looking at the biology you can't link it to something from chemistry when you're learning maths you can't there's no reason why you can't link maths and physics or go beyond that link it to completely different subjects the more connections you make explicit clearing your brain the faster you remember something which means you'll need to spend less time trying to memorize it it will just work naturally so that kind of brings us to the kind of summary these three key steps that you can use in order to maximize your learning potential if you do all of these you'll find that you need to study far less or you'll learn more in the time taken again your study sessions should not be more than an hour before you have a break because if you're doing this hardcore you're actually using all of these your brain's going to be tired after probably 40 5 minutes I would say so keep that in mind sitting there for 3 hours if you're not tired and you think you can go longer then you're definitely doing something wrong aim to do these three things again do something with the information that you're learning actively do something try and explain it in your own words repetition make sure you hit the subject the topic multiple times if you learn something on one day and you can do it it doesn't mean you'll know how to do it next week so repeat it inter leaving link everything you're learning to other subjects and other Concepts within or outside of your your subject itself do these three things and you'll be able to learn anything it will apply inside School outside school whatever you want to learn hope you enjoyed hope you found it useful I'll see you in the next one