Anthony Metivier's Blog, page 12

The 15 Main Thought Processes and How to Improve Them

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an ultimate list of thought processes?

A definitive resource you could bookmark and refer to whenever you want to sharpen your thinking?

I thought so too, and that’s why I decided to create one.

Who am I to care so much about thought processes and talk about them in-depth?

Well, I taught an advanced critical thinking course for years at a university.

And I personally practice many types of thought as I continue to absorb many philosophical traditions from around the globe.

So if you want multiple thought process examples and sure fire ways to improve your thinking, let’s dig in.

What Are Thought Processes?

According to researchers, a thought process can be both conscious and unconscious. In fact, your mind can be processing more than one thought at the same time.

For this reason, the exact definition of a thought process is simple:

It is being engaged with the stuff of thought.

The fact that many of your thoughts are outside of your awareness is cause for concern. Although many positive types of thought process stimulate our creativity and problem-solving capacities, Daniel Kahneman’s work has shown us to be at the mercy of many cognitive biases.

Cognitive bias is any of a wide number of thought processes that cause us to take shortcuts. We distort reality and make irrational decisions as a result.

For this reason, it’s a very good idea to become familiar with as many thought processes as possible.

Types of Thought Processes (with Examples)

As an exercise, don’t just read the following list passively. Try to think of a time you’ve either thought these ways yourself, or observed others involved in these thinking processes.

For best results, write your personal examples and observations down.

Also, reflect on whether or not each thought process is positive, negative, neutral or more than one of these options at the same time.

One: Associative Thinking

Being able to see how one thing connects to another is an important skill. In healthy children, the ability to think in terms of association begins early. Most of us get better at it as we age because more life experiences creates pattern recognition.

For example, we often relate things we see in life to mythological patterns. You might associate someone with King Midas if they’re greedy, or say that a Pandora’s box has been opened. These are kinds of associative thinking stimulated by pattern recognition.

It doesn’t have to be Greek myths either. Since 1999, it’s been very common for people to respond to certain events in the age of the Internet by saying, “It’s just like in The Matrix.”

Freud famously asked his patients to engaging in free association, leading to many new psychological therapies and procedures, such as the Rorshach test. 

And association is widely used. Creative people frequently allow themselves to follow random trains of thought in order to come up with interesting and unique ideas. Students use mind mapping and association is a key mnemonic strategy.

Two: Abductive Thinking

This form of thinking involves drawing conclusions based on observations. It is also called inferential reasoning and Sherlock Holmes provides the most well-known examples. Real life detectives use it as well.

A simple way to think about this thought process is that you’re arriving at a conclusion without having the full picture. If you arrive at a crime scene and find a knife covered in blood, you can reasonably conclude that it is the murder weapon. But you don’t actually know – you’re inducing the conclusion.

Note that many people mistake this kind of reasoning with deductive thinking. So let’s look at that next.

Three: Deductive Thinking

Deductive thinking is often formulaic. It usually involves an “if this then that” structure. For example, you can deduce that if you don’t get on the freeway before rush hour, it will take you longer to get home.

Unlike induction where you are drawing a conclusion from an incomplete picture, you do have a complete picture of how traffic works on the highway.

Deductive reasoning is typically easier to test when there is an abundance of evidence. There are three main types to master:

SyllogismsModus ponensModus tollens

To help yourself further, check out these critical thinking book recommendations.

Combined, inductive and deductive thinking form what we tend to think of as logical or rational thinking.

Four: Social Thinking

We tend to think of ourselves as individuals.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Humans share a variety of languages, and when you think about it, none of the words or phrases belong to any individual. Rather, we collaborate on the continuous evolution of this communication tool.

We’re increasingly using the Internet to communicate using our languages as well. Students use it to study together, which means thinking together to help one another achieve goals.

We can also think about transpersonal thinking in this regard. When we realize that the role of the individual isn’t all that it’s made out to be, we’re able to transcend the ego and resolve ourselves into the great river of life.

Sound abstract? Never fear. We’ll be tackling that kind of thinking next.

Five: Abstract Thinking

To think abstractly is to literally pull away from an idea or concept. 

We just did that by thinking about how language is not owned by any individual person, even if it is experienced in personal ways.

This is an “abstract” thought precisely because we’re pulling back from the individual and looking at the entire species.

This is a nuanced thought process, so you can read more about abstract thinking with other examples if you’re interested.

Six: Concrete Thinking

Concrete thinking involves ideas that are directly related to material reality. For example, you might think about how things feel and make comparisons and contrasts in your mind.

An orange and an apple feel more similar to one another than an orange and the handle of a shovel, for example.

Talking about rain “pounding” is another example. 

Seven: Analogical Thinking

Analogical thinking involves making comparisons and assuming that when something is true for one thing, it is also true for the other.

We can use them well, such as when we say that an argument is going in circles. If the same points keep coming up again and again, they really do feel like they are on a loop.

But analogies often fall apart because things are rarely as similar as they seem. Watch out anytime you hear someone saying, “it’s like x.” Although the comparison they are about to make sense on the surface, all too often the connection winds up being facile.

Eight: Analytical Thinking

Analysis literally involves taking things apart.

For example, when a Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass participant comes to me with a problem they’re trying to solve, I analyze what they’re saying by looking for the individual components.

That’s not to say I don’t also take the problem as a “whole.” Rather, analytical thinking takes as a basic premise that everything is built from parts.

In philosophy, the notion of deconstruction is an analytical process that reveals how many of our most cherished truths were built over time. It is an innovation on what Nietzsche called genealogical thinking.

A simple way to get better at this form of thinking is to practice observation and questioning literally everything.

Nine: Linear Thinking

Linear thinking is all about structure and following a particular process.

But that doesn’t make it boring. 

In fact, Triz is one of the most interesting collection of tools for linear thinking on the planet. It’s also incredibly inventive.

Nonlinear thinkers are sometimes thought to use fewer structures, or purposefully introduce randomness.

For example, the German band Einstürzende Neubauten create new songs by drawing ideas and roles from a hat. Although the singer might not be a world class drummer, if he selects a slip that requires him to play percussion while composing a new song, he will.

Although this form of creativity looks like it is nonlinear and “outside the box,” it’s also procedural and linear in its own way. If we “deconstruct” the notion of linear thinking by using analytical thinking, we might find that there really is no such thing as nonlinear thinking at the end of the day.

Ten: Reflective Thinking

Making time to contemplate is incredibly important.

It’s simple and easy to practice and there are many powerful reflective thinkers you can draw inspiration from.

Simply put, find a place to sit, pour your thoughts out onto paper and use analytical thinking to sort, sift and screen through the material of your mind.

It’s perfect for helping yourself make better decisions and expand your mind.

Eleven: Counterfactual Thinking

We often think of alternative histories as the stuff of fiction. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a common example.

However, it’s very useful to think about what could have happened in our everyday lives.

For example, sometimes when I’m feeling down, I create a “counterfactual” image of what my life would be like if I’d never completed my Ph.d.

I happen to know a few people who didn’t finish. The thought of working at an ice cream parlor like one failed PhD I know makes me grateful for everything in my life – especially because the accomplishment led to me writing this blog.

Let’s look at the opposite of this kind of thinking next. It’s also very useful.

Twelve: Speculative Thinking

If counterfactual thinking involves imagining alternative scenarios in the past, speculative thinking involves running through two or more possible future outcomes.

One simple exercise for thinking through your future is Dan Sullivan’s “dangers, opportunities, strengths” routine.

By asking yourself questions around these three core areas, you can imagine a practical path forward for your future.

You can also use the journaling exercise I share in this video about how to think correctly about the path to mastering your memory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k7ho...

Thirteen: Decisive Thinking

When it comes to the future, you’ll never get there without being able to make decisions.

One of my favorite problem solving models is found in Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath. It’s called the W.R.A.P. technique:

Widen your optionsReality testAttain distancePrepare to fail

Using step-by-step decision processes like this can always be considered “heuristic thinking,” because you’re making using the tool a rule of thumb.

I’ve connected this technique with a much older tool called ars combinatoria that you might want to become acquainted with on your quest to master multiple thought processes.

Fourteen: Metacognition

Ever heard of Zen?

It’s a fairly radical philosophy that helps you realize that the present moment is all we really have – and since it’s slipping by so quickly, the notion that we have it at all is an illusion.

In order to realize this fact and hold onto the realization so that you can experience lasting mental peace, the great masters of meditation use metacognition.

To become a master yourself, you just need to cultivate an awareness of the operation of your own thoughts and a meta-level awareness of how the thoughts about your thoughts operate too.

I’m a big fan of this form of thinking and wrote about a powerful process in my book, The Victorious Mind. 

You could also call this form of thinking, “mindfulness thinking.”

Fifteen: Skeptical Thinking

I’ve saved the most important form of thinking for the end. And I want you to use it on everything I’ve just said.

Why?

Because one of the most powerful things you can do is to question the validity of the claims people make.

Think for yourself.

Do your own research.

Test.

If you don’t, you risk being naive.

Of course, you don’t want to go overboard. It’s also useful to be curious and allow certain things the benefit of the doubt from time to time.

This is where you want to use your discernment, which is where practicing all of the skills on this page will really come in handy over time.

How to Improve Your Thinking

The best way to experience significant gains in your thinking abilities is to complete critical thinking exercises.

On top of that, you’ll want to improve your: 

Reading strategiesReading comprehensionVisualization skillsMemory Palace skills

But above all, you want to set aside time for studying great thinkers and time for practicing thinking.

It just takes commitment and consistency. 

And the best part?

You now have new ways to think about how you might increase your commitment and consistency by using tools like analytical thinking and speculative thinking to become the architect of your future.

So what do you say?

Are you ready to enjoy multiple types of thought?

Dive in!

 

What Is Philosophy? A Life Changing Answer

A major problem with philosophy is that just about every philosopher has a different definition of what they do as a philosopher.

This is sad because it turns a lot of people off who would otherwise benefit tremendously from exploring the art, science and craft of philosophy.

So let’s simplify things by looking at the two ways philosophers define the field first.

Descriptive (what philosophy is) Prescriptive (what philosophy should be)

Once we realize that people rotate between these two categories of definition, everything will become much clearer.

Ready?

Let’s dive deeper into the wonderful realm of philosophy!

What Is Philosophy? The Simple Answer

The most direct philosophy definition I’ve ever seen is that philosophy tries to make sense of existence. And more than merely make sense of it, know that the sense we make is true, or at least accurate. Typically, this is done through the use of reason, though there are many other philosophical tools.

Now, you might be wondering…

Why doesn’t science take all of this up?

The problem is that science is a tool that helps us gather evidence to validate or invalidate our ideas about the world. But existence itself? We don’t even know what being is or have the tools needed to study whatever existence is. And until we do, we’ll need philosophy.

Now, within existence, we find many ideas, concepts, people and objects. They all seem to exist in different ways. Yet, they are bound by a major similarity. They exist.

Philosophy tries to figure out the what, why and how of existence, or what some philosophers call Being with a capital B. Then, they work on figuring out what that knowledge about being tells us about how we should live in the world.

Now, because existence is quite complex, philosophy has split up into many different types and categories. We’ll talk about several of these in a moment.

But I mentioned above that many philosophers talk about what philosophy should be by way of defining it.

An Alternative Philosophy Definition

One classic example is found in What is Philosophy? By Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They say that philosophy should be the creation of concepts.

This is a prescriptive definition rather than the descriptive one I gave above.

The book gives examples that show how philosophers define philosophy only by creating concepts. Plato created the concept of the Idea which later influenced Descartes’ notion of cogito.

In this way of thinking, philosophy is something that influences the production of conceptual responses to previous ways of doing philosophy.

You could then say that philosophy is almost like a living thing, evolving along with the human species. This co-evolution is just one of many reasons why philosophy is so important.

And here’s the point:

If philosophy is subject to evolution, then we should do all we can to help it evolve in a positive way.

What Philosophy Is Not

What does philosophy mean?

Another way to get at the answer is to look at what philosophy isn’t. And that means looking at people who pretend to be philosophical, but aren’t.

In a work of philosophy called The Sophist by Plato, we find three key definitions of the kind of person who fails to hit the mark of creating new concepts and properly answering the questions of existence.

First, Plato points out that many people sound philosophical when in fact they’re just playing around with words. If you’ve done any amount of reflective thinking in your life, you might have wound up doing a bit of wordsmithing yourself, as have I. But that doesn’t mean what we came up with was properly analytical.

Second, Plato noticed that Sophists used tools of persuasion to win arguments. These people weren’t really concerned with the truth about existence. They just wanted to come out on top in the discussion. As a result, technique was more important to them than accuracy.

Finally, Plato felt that these people who only appeared to be doing philosophy lacked modesty. Rather than admit or even seek the limits of their knowledge, they pretended to know-it-all. Doing so is inherently un-philosophical.

With these counter-examples in mind, we can say that to be properly philosophical, you need to:

Use clear language, or at least use language for the goal of creating clarityDon’t switch your analytical tools and rhetorical style just to win an argumentBe humble and remain conscious of the limits to your present understanding

As a result, as you use philosophical thinking to pursue the truth, you will truly expand your mind.

Philosophy Throughout Time And Place

Unfortunately, it’s all too common for people to think only of philosophy in terms of specific times and places.

For example, some people focus exclusively on Continental Philosophy or only Ancient Greek Philosophy.

But as Bryan van Norden points out in his book, Taking Back Philosophy, many cultures have used philosophy to determine what existence is and use that knowledge to decide how best to live in the world.

The more you know about philosophy throughout the ages and around the globe, the better you’ll be able to formulate your own concepts as Deleuze and Guattari say that we should.

Styles of Philosophy

One of the things that makes philosophy exciting is that it comes in many different styles.

Philosophers like Plato, Hume, Bruno and many more wrote dialogs, for example. While reading them, you can imagine various characters working through the ideas.

Other books might use aphorisms or use language in ways that illustrate the point the author is trying to make. 

For example, one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s points was there really aren’t any truly coherent philosophical systems. He used puns, poems and an aphoristic style to drive home the point. He also made his philosophy visually resemble the surviving fragments of the Pre-Socratic philosophers he so admired.

Likewise, Jacques Derrida explained his theories of deconstruction, the metaphysics of presence and the trace by writing in ways that showed them in action. In other words, he wasn’t merely talking about the concepts. He was doing them.

Although this frustrated many readers, Derrida was engaged in exactly what Deleuze and Gauttarri claim philosophers must do: invent concepts. 

The 11 Subfields of Philosophy (And Why They’re Important)

I mentioned that philosophy is subdivided in many ways.

Let’s look at some of the most important.

One: Logic

Logic can be defined in a few ways.

First, it can refer to a particular form of argumentation. Thinking logically can help you solve problems through discussion with others, or even on your own.

Logic is also about the best possible forms of inference. As Graham Priest puts it, the norms around how we use inference change over time. There are rival theories that compete with one another over what is the exact best ways to use logic.

Two: Metaphysics

Ta meta ta physica literally means “the ones after the ones about physics.”

When Aristotle used this term to differentiate his work on physics, he was referring to the fact that humans have things to discuss for which there is no scientific process. 

Whereas it is possible to think concretely about many aspects of the world, topics like being require abstract thinking. Thus, we can think of metaphysics as a kind of mental activity more than a science. It is a means of trying to make sense of things that science cannot yet account for.

Another way of thinking about metaphysics is that it is a means of working out what is real. For example, if you’ve ever tried to work out whether or not infinity is possible, you’ve engaged in metaphysical thinking. No one can physically hold infinity in the palm of their hand, so we’re forced to think about it abstractly and without the benefit of physical evidence that we can examine.

Three: Ethics

Ethics is a branch of philosophy that helps us define and improve our moral principles. Whereas some thinkers believe that morality is subjective, others believe that it is objective.

The difference matters because if people are free to believe that the definition of morality is up to them, they might make hideous decisions. But if there is a concrete means of determining what truly does lead to the most good for the most people, we can consider our obligations around implementing laws that help produce such good for the majority.

Jeremy Bentham’s felicific calculus was one interesting attempt at working out a way of measuring pleasure and happiness to help determine the moral status of different human activities.

Four: Epistemology

This type of philosophy focuses on the nature of knowledge. What does it mean to know things? What kinds of things can be known? And how do we know that we know them?

Epistemology looks at the limits of knowledge as well, and can be tremendously humbling.

Five: Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of mind brings together many other fields. As William Jaworski puts it, the field brings together five areas of study together with metaphysics and epistemology:

Mind and bodyConsciousnessMental representationPsychology and neuroscienceAction theory

In this field, there tend to be two styles: monism and dualism. Whereas monism posits that there’s only one kind of thing that makes up our being, dualists argue that there are at least two kinds of properties. Monists suggest that everything is ultimately mental and dualists think there is at least the mind and the physical, material world, perhaps more.

There’s nothing particularly new about this argument. Ancient Indian philosophy, particularly Advaita Vedanta, features many discussions about monism vs. dualism.

Six: Philosophy of Science

Is it the job of science to arrive at the truth?

Some people say yes. Others, like myself, argue that science is merely a tool that helps us validate ideas and what counts as truth is always contingent. We can always run our experiments again and produce new data that may change the conclusions science has helped us produce.

Some people have created terms for these two different philosophies of science. As James Ladyman puts it in his book, Understanding Philosophy of Science:

“Scientific realism is the view that we should believe in the likes of electrons, whereas scientific antirealism is the view that we should stop believing in the truth of scientific theories and content ourselves with believing what they say about what we can observe.”

Personally, I don’t think of myself as an anti-realist whatsoever. In fact, I’m very much a Realist, even if a quirky one.

But I don’t think Ladyman means anything negative by using this term. What is a philosophy of science like mine best called? I would perhaps call it Scientific Contingency Realism. Such a term helps reflect the positive choice to acknowledge that science can always produce new data that always has at least the potential to change what we thought was once true.

Seven: Political Philosophy

When I started university, I was in Political Science. I read Plato’s Republic and had a career as a politician in mind.

However, I quickly needed to pivot into English Literature in my second year. After interviewing a politician for the school newspaper, I quickly realized that he was a tyrant. I worried that if I continued, I would become one too.

Why is this a problem?

Because political philosophy is a risky business. It’s all about the difference between political ideals and the way the world really works. As Joseph Chan puts it in Confucian Perfectionism, political philosophy almost always has an ideal in mind because:

“Any form of political theorizing that lacks an ideal is like a ship embarking on a voyage without a destination, and political theorizing that is insensitive to the constraints of reality is like a ship on rough seas without competent navigation.”

Can you see the problem here?

We don’t actually know what reality is. That’s why we still have philosophy in the first place.

Yet, politicians are that unique breed of person who thinks reality has been understood and that’s another reason I needed to get out of the Political Science program immediately. In some ways, political philosophy makes too many assumptions to really be considered a philosophy at all.

(Note: No shade to Chan, by the way. It’s a good book and he readily admits that his definition is bound to be controversial.)

Eight: Legal Philosophy

Legal philosophy has more redeeming value in my mind. This is because the law is used to help restrain and correct the overreach of the politicians.

As Matthew Kramer shows in What is Legal Philosophy?, determining what counts as evidence in a trial requires a theory of knowledge or epistemology. There are also many moral dimensions to be considered that science cannot yet answer.

Nine: Business Philosophy

Businesses face many issues, from ethics to what you might call a philosophy of performance.

How do you keep morale high? How do you respond to mistakes? What’s right and wrong with respect to the bottom line and how do you know?

In many cases, the science of business can tell you a lot about what’s going to be the most profitable way to answer those questions. But focusing on profit doesn’t always lead to longevity in the market.

Ten: Personal Philosophy

In many ways, each of us are like mini-businesses. Or at least, we’re all like entrepreneurs.

Even if you don’t have a business, you invest in your health, your education, your psychological well-being. And whenever you invest, you’re expecting a return.

Many philosophical questions arise as a result. And as Nietzsche reminds us, there’s a lot of truth out there. But we don’t always know when it’s a good idea to act just because we know that something is true. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense goes through such issues.

To craft your own personal philosophy can be quite a challenge. That’s why I’ve been working on something to help you.

Eleven: Philosophy of Memory

I’ve often argued that the quality of our lives is directly linked to the quality of our memory abilities. After all, the ways that we act in the world rely on what we can recall on demand when we need to act or make decisions.

Even our ability to ride a bicycle well relies on the strength of our procedural memory.

To this end, I’ve started a new book, my most challenging book yet. You can get a sample chapter called The Primacy Effect if you’d like.

Part of the concept of a philosophy of memory I’m creating suggests that we need a personal philosophy of performance that exercises our memory holistically.

We’ll be doing that through many exercises, so feel free to get involved while I write the book.

How Philosophy Can Change Your Life

As we’ve seen, there are many branches of philosophy.

The question is… so what? What does it all amount to?

First, philosophy helps us question the wisdom of others and ask what’s at stake? If we have developed a personal philosophy with the notion of being in mind, we’re much less likely to take what people tell us for granted.

Likewise, when we have thought through the nature of science, we wind up being able to live more scientifically ourselves. We can be less guided by passion and experience the benefits of reason and logic.

As John Dewey once said, philosophy is best when it is a method that helps us deal with our problems.

To make it a method, we need to study and apply philosophy, ideally by creating our own concepts.

Of course, as Nigel Warburton points out in Philosophy: The Basics, there is never any guarantee that the clear thinking philosophy brings will “provide convincing answers to the difficult questions, but it does increase the chances of this happening.”

Personally, I’m grateful for how the odds have worked out in my favor thanks to philosophy.

Now, how about you?

Are you excited to dig deeper into philosophy, craft one for yourself and experience more clarity about the nature of reality?

 

Memory Spaces: What They Are and Why They’re Important

People who use memory techniques enjoy a diversity of terms.

“Memory Palace” is my favorite, but more and more I’m leaning towards adapting Lynne Kelly’s use of the term “memory spaces.”

I like it because that’s essentially what a Memory Palace is: a space for storing information.

Of course, we’re usually using an imaginary version of that space.

However, there are times when we can use these memory storage areas in much more direct ways. 

On this page, I share some of my favorite approaches.

Why should you care?

Because when you’re able to rapidly learn and remember information using these techniques, your quality of life goes way up. You can:

Pass any examLearn languages fasterRemember everyone’s nameAbsorb entire booksMaster mathematics

And that’s just for starters.

Ready to learn more?

Let’s dive in.

What Are Memory Spaces?

A memory space is literally any location you use as a foundation, canvas or platform for encoding information with associations.

Let’s say you want to remember the name Luke. You can place Luke Skywalker on his shoulder.

His shoulder becomes a “memory space.”

In the method of loci, this specific spot would be called a “locus.”

Generally, though, I would just call this a station in a Memory Palace, particularly because I usually at events. Luke would be just one of many I would memorize.

But these are all typical approaches. Let’s look at a few more.

The Lukasa 

Now, there’s a sneaky reason I used the name “Luke” in the example above. That’s because my first example of an alternative memory space was going to be the lukasa.

Also sometimes called a “memory board,” the word means “long hand” or “claw.”

Typically made of wood, they often come shaped in a way that might remind you of an hourglass.

People would cover them in colored beads to help them remember histories, plant locations and names of medicines. Folk wisdom, military matters and other information would also be encoded.

These devices also helped people remember how their societies were organized and give them a common point of focus for discussing the law.

As far as I understand, they would run their fingers along the surfaces. Each bead would help them recall a story or piece of information.

The relationship to how encoding in a Memory Palace is clear. It involves all of the principles related to the linking and story method.

Related to the lukasa are many other items. You can learn about them from Aboriginal and indigineous memory expert Tyson Yunkaporta.

The Guidonian Hand

Can you imagine holding 75 hours of music in your mind?

Anna Berger suggests that people regularly memorized and retained this amount in her book, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. She quotes Kenneth Levy who estimates that their knowledge “would correspond to the selection of Beethoven’s instrumental works plus the full Wagnerian canon.”

That’s a lot of information!

How did they do it?

Many scholars, including Berger, have shown that a lot of the memorization was done by the medieval monks using their hands.

Basically, they would turn their fingertips and the joints into memory spaces. Each spot would be marked with a name that corresponds to the musical staff they were using at the time. The approach gets its name from Guido of Arezzo.

In contemporary terms, you could use your hand to memorize the clef notes quite quickly. For example, if you take the notes of the bass clef that appear between the lines, you could align them like this on your pointer finger:

The hand doesn’t just have to be used for music, however. Tyson Yunkporta gives a great example of using your hand to remember knowledge in his book, Sand Talk.

I’ve also used my hands to remember and practice Sanskrit verses that I’ve memorized. The important thing is to figure out the grid you’re going to mentally layer onto your hand and then stick with that configuration. Otherwise, you risk confusing yourself.

Buttons

I once read that Napoleon might have used the buttons on his shirt to help him remember simple things.

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it totally makes sense. And when we think about military people, all of those medals, badges and other insignia are literally spaces we use to help us remember rank and other important information about people.

To use the buttons on your shirt as a kind of mini-Memory Palace, start by counting them up. Don’t forget to include the buttons on your cuffs.

Then, when you want to remember something, link it with the buttons. If you already have a PAO System, you can use those images as a pre-loaded hook on a button-by-button basis.

In case it isn’t obvious to you, by using buttons like this, you’re essentially turning any relevant item in your wardrobe into a kind of lukasa!

Coins

Sure, they’re small. But that’s no reason why you can’t use the coins in your pocket in a pinch.

Before I started using shoulders as my memory spaces for names, I would meet one or two people and place their names on a coin. It was a reference that worked great.

All you do is divide the coin into two surfaces. Apply one name to the heads side and another to the tails.

How to Use Sites of Memory to Remember More

I’ve mentioned the Memory Palace above, and I still believe it is the ultimate mnemonic device.

But when it comes to giving our memory spaces extra meaning, we can make some deliberate choices.

For example, if you’ve ever visited an old cathedral, even if you don’t practice any given faith, its atmosphere can give the things you choose to memorize using it an extra boost.

Likewise, you can choose locations like:

MuseumsLibrariesHistorical sitesUniversity campuses

Or any personal option that has special meaning for you.

You can also transform places that don’t have positive memories into calm and soothing points of reference.

For example, I had a troubled youth. One home in particular used to be packed with disturbing memories.

One day, I decided I would stare this collection of bad memories in the face and encode it with positivity.

To do this, I started in the worst part of the home and started using it to memorize the Nirvana Shatakam.

A few days later, I had completely forgiven the past and now have an incredible meditation poem to reflect on, one that creates even more peace and love.

To get started with the Memory Palace technique yourself, give my FREE Memory Improvement Kit:

It will help ensure that you’re able to achieve any learning goal quickly and deepen your memory skills in meaningful ways that create lasting fulfillment.

Memory Sites Are Everywhere

The important takeaway is that anything physical occupies space – and that means we can use those objects to help us remember information. We can use people, tables, memory boards of our own creation or even the coins in our pockets.

The trick for many people is to commit to working out the order of the individual memory spaces they’re going to use on their objects or landscapes.

Then, you need to develop your association skills. Typically this is done by working out a highly personalized pegword method. This should only take an hour or so, perhaps a bit more over a few afternoons if your imagination has gotten rusty.

It’s well worth the effort, though. Once you have the foundational techniques in place, you can apply them to learning just about anything better.

So what do you say?

Are you ready to start examining the objects in your life a bit differently?

The world is full of resources just waiting to help you experience rapid recall of the knowledge you need to succeed.

Why Is Philosophy Important? The Answer Can Change Your Life

Why study philosophy?

After all, aren’t philosophers just a bunch of people who use big words in unreadable books?

I mean, think about it…

Half the time it seems like they’re preaching to us about how we should act in the world while they bumble through their personal lives.

Although that assumption can prove true more often than I’d like, the importance of philosophy is not owned by philosophers.

It’s also not necessarily the “love of wisdom” as people often translate it from the ancient Greek, φιλοσοφία.

As Emmanuel Levinas put it, we might do better if we think about philosophy as “the wisdom of love.”

I find Levinas’ formulation useful because it reveals how better thinking can help us discover what’s truly important in life. 

And when we focus on allowing the love in wisdom to guide us, we will almost certainly respond to our fellow citizens from an elevated position.

Sure, it might not involve “love” as such in a personal way, but it will certainly involve much higher levels of care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU2Z9...

What Is the Purpose of Philosophy?

Philosophy has many purposes. One of the best is that it helps us learn how to think. And the more we practice philosophy, the more we have a chance to keep our thinking skills sharp.

Thinking philosophically serves many outcomes too, including benefits for your career. You can benefit from philosophy as a lawyer, artist, civil servant, musician, programmer, manager, or author. 

Even if you work in a career that seems like it wouldn’t benefit from critical thinking, you can still engage fruitfully in philosophy.

This is true in three senses because:

One: Philosophy is an active form of thinking.

Not merely think about the questions that arise in life, but to analyze and then argue in a way that produces positive outcomes.

Along the way, we might also create new concepts, a major point made by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?.

We can also create entirely new subject areas or what the philosopher Michel Foucault called discourses.

For example, Foucault points out how Sigmund Freud made it possible to think about the nature of the mind in a way that created far more conversations about things like the “unconscious” than ever before.

By extension, philosophy helps us reorganize existing concepts in unique ways. This is important because if we always approach the history of ideas from the same types of organization, we risk having them always produce the same conclusions.

That’s why I’m always interviewing different memory experts and getting their take on memory science.

For example, speaking with people like Tyson Yunkaporta, Scott Gosnell and Lynne Kelly has provided clues for new ways we can talk about the philosophy of memory by reorganizing how we’ve thought about philosophers of memory from the past. 

Two: Personal outlook on life

Active thinking also helps us produce answers to big questions that guide how we live our personal lives.

What is existence?Why do things change?What is right?What is wrong?What inalienable rights do humans have? How about animals and plants?How do laws function and under what circumstances can they be ethically broken?What is the nature of the mind?What is science? Is philosophy itself scientific?What is art?How do we know that our definitions of the terms we use are correct?Why do we believe what we believe?Why do we take so many things for granted without examining them?

The purpose of philosophy is to ask and answer questions like these, and there are many more.  The more we spend time answering such questions, the better equipped we are as life continues to change.

And because life is always changing, we need that sharpness because there are questions we don’t even know to ask yet. When the time comes, it’s useful to be able to question our questions themselves to make sure that the answers we come up with are truly useful.

Although it can sound kind of circular, questioning the very questions we ask is itself incredibly useful so that we can avoid spinning our wheels.

Three: Philosophy is pleasurable

The greatest thing about philosophy is that people are engaged in it all the time. You don’t have to read dense books of philosophy to use philosophy.

Of course, your pleasure in asking the big questions of life is bound to increase if you do read some of those big books.

But even if you don’t, using reflective thinking, it’s possible to read your own mind as if it were a kind of book. All it takes is practice.

Of course, some kinds of philosophy might feel difficult. That’s because they involve abstract thinking.

The good news is that when you use memory techniques like the Memory Palace, it’s even more pleasurable to get over the humps.

Why is Philosophy Important? 7 Life-Changing Reasons

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari suggest that opinion is chaos.

When you look at social media sites like Twitter, you almost feel like they must have had the ability to peer into the future when they wrote this book back in 1991.

But if there’s one reason above all that makes philosophy important, it’s the reduction of random, chaotic influence. The more you develop yourself philosophically, the more you can avoid being yanked around by the chaos of opinion.

With this point as our governing theme, let’s explore a few more reasons philosophy is so important.

Systematic Analysis

As different views and opinions flood the news and social media, instead of taking them at face value, you can use philosophical tools to pick them apart.

How? There are at least 9 critical thinking strategies you can use. The more of these tools you have in your mental toolbox, the more you can overcome barriers that impede your thinking.

By practicing this kind of analysis, you’ll also be better at perceiving systems as such. They are everywhere and being able to spot them has a lot to do with our next point.

Thinking philsophically helps you perceive and then remove the barriers that hinder your life.

Know When You’re Being Influenced

Unfortunately, we’re all gullible from time to time.

But the more we analyze the world around us, the more we can steep ourselves in positive influences while draining out the bad.

And it’s important to note that even useful sources can sometimes deliver unhelpful ideas. We need to be able to spot influence as such. That way we can properly evaluate it.

These critical thinking books will help you develop the ability to seek top quality influences in your life and weed out the poor performers.

Interpret & Respond Optimally

Events in the world create all kinds of emotional responses. 

But when you’re well-versed in philosophy, you’re equipped with a kind of “science of emotions.” You’re better able to perceive when you’re being irrational and use abstract thinking to pull away from your gut response.

Now, you might be thinking, “Hang on, people keep telling me that I need to listen to my gut response, not ignore it.”

True, there are some cases where you want to listen to your gut. Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear has been personally helpful on that front.

Following your intuition is great – but only in certain contexts. Thinking philosophically can help make sure you’re using the right tools at the right times.

But in many areas of life, listening to your gut just doesn’t stand to reason. In fact, in Decisive, Dan and Chip Heath share research that strongly demonstrates going with your instincts is all-too-often one of the worst things you can do. Their W.R.A.P. technique is a fantastic little philosophical tool that helps you avoid irrational decisions so you can respond to life optimally.

Evaluate Ideas

A large part of thinking rationally involves knowing the value of various ideas.

For example, take two people, John and Cindy. They both buy the same book.

John says, “It was $20 dollars, but I only got one idea out of it. I went on to buy five other books and ultimately never did anything with that original idea.”

Cindy says, “I only got one idea out of the book, but it was only $20 and even though it was just one idea, I managed to put that idea to work in my business. It increased profitability by thousands of dollars.”

Albeit simplistic, this example shows that Cindy evaluates ideas differently than John. Keeping our principle of philosophy as a form of active thinking in mind, she gives the idea life by using it.

She also makes it valuable by putting it into action.

As you explore philosophy, you’ll find that you can better evaluate many ideas. You’ll also reduce the kind of judgmentalism that causes you to dismiss ideas that could be extraordinarily valuable if you put them into action.

Understand the Law

Many people do not realize that the laws governing them were arrived at based on philosophical thinking.

The more you learn about philosophy, the more you’ll be able to see how philosophical ideas shape the rules of your society. And this means you’ll be able to participate in how they are crafted in a more integral way.

You can also start to see how governments lead heavily on mimetic behavior, which means shaping your desire based on the desires you see in others. This process is the basis of all propaganda, but it starts with philosophical ideas we can see in some of the earliest philosophers.

For example, Confucius talks a lot about imitating not just what the ancients did, but also to desire what they desired. Likewise, Mozi advised kings to promote certain kinds of behaviors so that others in society would imitate them. See Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy for these references.

Spot and Resolve Contradictions

The human species is incredibly complex.

And our success on the planet is difficult to understand because we contradict ourselves all the time.

Yet, thanks to the mental tools we’ve developed using philosophy, we’ve managed to thrive.

In many ways, the technological projects we’re engaged in are trying to resolve human contradictions. From memory implants to AI, it often feels like the human species is under attack.

By the same token, we’ve always had this relationship with our technologies. Plato worried about how our technology might be able to copy itself and run rampant. Mary Shelly imagined Frankenstein’s monster taking vengeance on his creator for neglect and there are many other fantasies that philosophize about our inadequate human behaviors. They ask questions like:

Although we clearly no better than to damage ourselves and our entire planet, why don’t we do better?

Although we still rarely find consensus on the answers our philosophizing helps us produce, we’re lucky to have the thinking tools more available than ever before. We can consult all the major philosophers, often for free, just by searching Project Gutenberg and Youtube.

Understand Your Thinking Style

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche tells us that Heraclitus was essentially his hero. During what appears to have been a period of great discomfort for the philosopher, Nietzsche seems to have taken great solace in this connection.

As you read philosophy, you’ll encounter multiple styles of thinking and learn more about yourself as you’re drawn to some and have a harder time relating to others.

This does not mean that you reject those who don’t resonate with you as invalid. It just helps you gain perspective on who you are and gives you a basis for reflecting on how and why you came to be that way.

These perspectives will sometimes challenge and even destabilize your self-perception. But as we know from the example of Nietzsche, finding points of comparison can be tremendously stabilizing too.

All the more reason to keep reading a wide variety of philosophers from multiple cultures and time periods. The ability to compare multiple perspectives is personally rewarding and provides great brain exercise.

Why Study Philosophy?

I think the number one reason to study philosophy is that we all practice active thinking each and every day to solve our problems.

Why wouldn’t we want to get better at it?

Philosophy is unique in that it is the one field of human endeavor that still makes sense to read historically.

Here’s what I mean:

It might be a novelty to read the earliest books on chemistry. But it won’t help you use contemporary chemistry very much, if at all.

But when it comes to philosophy, it’s possible to gain tremendous value from going as deep into history as possible. We learn as much from the oldest philosophical books as we do from the new ones.

Indeed, in many cases, we cannot understand many books of philosophy without knowing at least a little about the earliest philosophers.

Sure, you can read Plato and get a great deal out of it. But you get even more out of it if you’ve also read and put some thought into the Pre-Socratics to whom Plato was responding.

And this feature of philosophy means that you stand to receive endless rewards.

The study of philosophy is deeply pleasurable. And all the more so when you can remember the philosophy that you read.

To help you out with that, please register for my FREE Memory Improvement Course:

This exclusive program teaches you the Memory Palace technique with key exercises that help you excel in using it.

That way, when you come across the names of philosophers in articles like this one, you’ll be able to remember them. You’ll also be able to remember the names of their books and key concepts too.

As a result, you’ll be able to put their ideas into action. Again, action is essential. Without it, you cannot craft your own personal philosophy. You’ll struggle to increase your personal delight with the quality of your mind each and every day.

So what do you say?

Do you agree that philosophy is one of the most important mental activities in the world?

And are you ready to deepen your relationship with it?

I know I sure am. As a practice with no end in sight.

Long-Term Memory Explained In Plain English

It’s hard to find good info on long-term memory, isn’t it?

You get drowned in difficult terminology, when all you want is to understand what it is and learn how to improve it.

On this page, you’re going to discover the different types of long-term memory in plain English.

But that doesn’t mean we’ll be skimping on the science of this type of memory. You’ll understand why scientists distinguish long-term memory from short-term memory.

We’ll also look at the sub-systems of long-term memory before turning to the most important topics of all. These are how to:

Maintain your current long-term memory abilitiesImprove your long-term memoryProtect all aspects of your memory for the rest of your life

So if you’re ready to increase your long-term memory capacity as you understand its many ins-and-outs, let’s dive in.

What Is Long Term Memory?

Long-term memory is ultimately about stability.

Do you remember your first day at school? If you can get even just a small sense of where and when that event took place, that memory is relatively stable. If you can access visuals of the school, how you felt and the names of any teachers or friends you had at the time, this long-term memory is even more robust.

How about the meaning of a word like “justice”? If you can give a reasonable definition, then your memory of the term is a demonstration of persistence. As before, if you can give examples of when you learned the term and how your understanding of it has changed over time, the stability of this knowledge exists on a scale.

The Categorical Nature of Long-Term Memory

But here’s what’s super-interesting about the duration of long-term memory:

It’s ultimately about categories.

For example, if you think about your visual memory (or iconic memory), you’d be tempted to think of visual memory as a whole.

But according to researchers, our long-term visual memory relies upon categories. Your brain seems to literally “tag” different visuals as if by name and then draw upon those tags later. 

For example, researchers at MIT and Harvard found that the brain’s pattern recognition draws heavily upon categories like ocean, field and even more specific terms like golf course and amusement park.

When asked to remember images shown from over 160 image categories, people remembered scenes better than objects. They believe that the categorization itself explains these higher levels of recall because categories are more prominent in long-term memory.

What do these findings mean?

Well, it doesn’t mean that eidetic memory grants anyone superpowers or that photographic memory exists. (It doesn’t.)

It suggests that how memory works so fast relies upon how surfaces and icons are embedded in contexts.

The same thing is true when it comes to reading faster. Scientists have thoroughly debunked most claims about so-called “speed reading.”

But one thing the science agrees on is that you can read faster if you improve your vocabulary.

Just as people were better able to remember scenes that draw upon information in long-term memory, people with larger vocabularies read faster. Their brains draw upon long-term memory with greater efficiency because they have greater speed of pattern recognition.

Long-Term Memory Examples

Since long-term memory involves everything that persists in a stable way that you can access on demand.

As mentioned, not all long-term memories will be equally robust. But as long as you can recall something about the information you’re looking for, the memory has indeed persisted in your long-term memory.

In terms of where these memories are “stored” in the brain, scientists still disagree. Whereas some believe long-term memory and short-term or working memory follow a “single store” model, other researchers think that the location of remembered information or “mental imagery” changes over time.

With those points in mind, let’s look at some examples of long-term memory.

Procedural Memory

Probably the easiest type of long-term memory to understand is procedural memory.

Anytime you ride a bike, use chopsticks, type an email or play a musical instrument, you’re drawing upon skills that are deep in your long-term memory.

The visual pattern recognition we discussed above is highly-related here. When we look at a painting, we can determine practically on autopilot whether we’re looking at an object, portrait of a person or a landscape. There’s a procedural quality to how we understand the visual world around us.

Episodic Memory

Episodic memory is all about time. It’s personal and related to you. Anything you remember about specific events and periods of your life belong to this category:

Getting marriedTripsBirthdaysJob interviewsSemantic Memory

Everyone knows multiple facts about the world, and that’s thanks to semantic memory.

Whereas memories of different events in your life such as the recall of an anniversary belong to episodic memory, knowing the name of the country, city and street where the anniversary took place belongs to semantic memory. They are rigid facts, not episodes, which are much more fluid.

Other facts that exist in long-term memory include information like numbered addresses, years and months.

The 2 Types of Long-Term Memory

The examples of long-term memory we’ve looked at are organized into different types and sub-systems.

There two major types are:

Explicit memoryImplicit memory

Briefly, explicit memory is information you have to work at remembering, such as a formula for solving an equation. Implicit memory comes back to you at random, such as suddenly thinking about a concert you attended with a friend.

Either of these types of memory can be long-term.

The sub-systems are everything we’ve just talked about: procedural memory, semantic memory and episodic memory.

There are a few other sub-systems to explore, such as:

Flashbulb memoryProspective memoryAutobiographical memory

Ultimately, it’s important to understand that the science of memory is still emerging. More types of long-term memory emerge.

Or, as some scientists have proposed, the term “memory” may need to be updated, if not replaced. The larger context of cognitive ability is an important area of study to consider as you think through the definition of long-term memory.

How Long Does Long-Term Memory Last?

All good things come to an end. This means that anything that enters memory will exit it.

At least insofar as human life has an expiration date.

However, let’s think about this question philosophically for a moment.

Homer’s Odyssey was written down circa 480 BCE. The stories that were originally held in long-term memory by ancient people have survived for thousands of years. They’ll likely go on to survive for many thousands of years more.

Plus, human knowledge involves many categories. Things fold together and repeat in many different ways, meaning that we can rapidly refresh knowledge and learn new things simply by improving our pattern recognition abilities.

My personal answer then? As long as humans are here to record and activate information by reading books, watching videos and holding discussions, our memories will last.

Practically speaking, however, information lasts for as long as you maintain the knowledge through use. You also have to think about what exactly you’re trying to remember.

If you stop riding bicycles, you might still remember how to do it decades later. But if you stop speaking a language, linguistic deskilling can take place very quickly. For example, when I lived in Germany, my English skills took a nose-dive. Now that I live in an English-speaking country again, it’s my German that I have to maintain.

So as they say, use it or lose it. Anything you want to remember long-term should be kept in circulation.

How to Improve Your Long-Term Memory (and Prevent Memory Loss)

There are many ways to improve your long-term memory. These include:

Completing a memory improvement courseUsing a Memory PalaceLearning and practicing a Major System

Make no mistake. These are by far the best ways to improve your memory. They will also teach you a great deal about the power of deliberate practice.

When it comes to preventing the loss of memory skills you already have, practice is the key, but also things like:

Eating memory friendly foodsTaking care of your sleepGetting lots of time in with friendsDaily physical exercise (for example, yoga)Daily brain exercise

Specific, Long-Term Memory Exercises

Ultimately, to improve and maintain long-term memory, we should focus on exercises and tasks that exercise this specific skill.

It’s best to get started sooner than later. Don’t wait for signs of Alzheimer’s or other signs of memory loss to emerge, such as:

Confusing the names of loved onesForgetting aspects of your lifeLosing track of objectsStruggling with terminology and even basic vocabularyGetting lost

We know from many studies that bilingualism is one way to fend off such problems. But not everyone is going to invest the time into learning another language.

So let’s look at some activities you can do that will exercise your long-term memory, grow its strength where needed and keep it sharp for life.

One: Keep a Memory Journal

It’s long been known that keeping a journal improves mental health. As Richard Wiseman reports in 59 Seconds, it can also help extend your experience of time.

When it comes to tracking your memory activities, it’s also an incredibly powerful activity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BracG...

You can keep your Memory Palaces gathered in one spot, set goals and reflect on your progress. And as you continue jotting down aspects of your life, you’ll get the benefits of remembering more of your life because you’ve increased your observation skills with daily practice.

The reason it works is probably because the more information you practice with that is inherently long-term in nature, the more your long-term memory gets exercise.

Two: Memorize Mantras

Although this technique won’t be for everyone, it’s a great way to give your long-term memory a workout.

I’ll share my approach to this, a practice I started in 2017.

Using Memory Palaces, I started committing long form texts in Sanskrit to memory. Like beading a necklace, I keep adding line after line, after reciting the entirety of what I’ve memorized.

Because there’s an intellectual component to the material that involves understanding a fairly simple, yet robust philosophy, memory improves as critical thinking skills also enjoy a boost.

Three: Expand Your Thinking Skills

A lot of people turn to games to give their memory a workout. The problem is that a lot of those games only make you better at playing the game. The skills don’t transfer to other aspects of life.

But when you complete critical thinking exercises regularly, you’re doing something similar to working with mantras. You’re rehearsing what you’ve placed in long-term memory while also adding new knowledge. 

Four: Exercise Your Episodic & Semantic Memory Together

Remember how I said that there’s a difference between remembering a birthday party and remembering the city and street name where the party took place?

Well, a great way to exercise your memory is to think about different episodes of your life, then write down as many semantic pieces of information as you can.

In your Memory Journal, write out a list of all the birthday parties you can remember – both your own and those of family and friends. Write out some of the details you remember in terms of what happened.

Next, give your semantic memory a workout. List the year, the location and any other facts that come to mind. What shows were on television at that time? Popular movies? Music that you liked?

As an example, I remember a birthday party where we stayed up all night and had ice cream cake from Dairy Queen. That’s the episodic part.

For the semantic part, I list out the names of the friends who attended and facts like the year being 1987 and that Kiss’ Crazy Nights came out.

Five: Live a good life

This tip is easier said than done, but could anything be more true?

Lying, cheating, stealing and other crimes are destructive because they make remembering hard to bear.

But focusing on being a truthful person who contributes to your community produces countless rewards.

Note that it doesn’t have to be epic amounts of contribution. Just doing what you can to be a force of good promotes long-term memory benefits because you’re giving yourself plenty of material worth remembering.

Six: Take On Large Learning Projects

Studying information in-depth helps your brain create more connections.

I suggest you pick a topic you’re passionate about and read 3-5 books on the topic. Even if some of the material might feel repetitive, you learn a lot by seeing how different people approach the same topics. Plus, you get some natural repetition that helps reinforce key ideas.

Also, spend some time reading topics that are outside of your comfort zone. For example, I was quite nervous about reading into computation. I didn’t think I’d be able to wrap my mind around it.

But I persisted by simply reading and letting understanding arrive gradually. Soon, my brain started making connections and now I have a new point of reference that will build even more connections as I continue to cross-reference new information with this growing knowledge-set.

When it comes to long-term memory, the more you know, the more you can know.

Seven: Learn Hands-Based Skills Like Arts & Music

Our brains benefit so much by developing procedural memory skills. Drawing, painting and playing musical instruments are incredibly useful. It’s delightful to draw upon the skills you’ve developed over the long-term and you can always improve them. There is literally no ceiling.

The beautiful thing about these skills is that you can combine study and practice. For example, I’m taking a jazz bass course at the moment. In addition to getting the instrument in my hands and learning more about chord tones and arpeggios, I am also reading books about the history of the genre.

If you were learning to draw, it would be easy to also add on a few books about the lives of various artists to embed the procedural memory skill in knowledge that develops both your episodic and semantic memory.

Build Your Own Long-Term Memory Systems

Now that you know what long-term memory is and how it works, take a hands-on approach to developing it.

One of the best things you can do is dedicate yourself to practicing the ancient art of memory. Developed when people needed to carry entire books in their minds because they couldn’t carry them on their backs, it is designed to address long-term memory development.

If you’re interested in learning how to use it, register for this FREE Memory Improvement Kit:

It will give you worksheets and four videos that give you a foundational course in these techniques.

And since the skills are so fun to use and instantly rewarding, you’ll wind up using them for life.

So what do you say? Are you ready to take the future of your memory into your own hands?

Enjoy the journey and just shout out if you have any questions along the way!

How to Memorize Flashcards Fast (From Someone with a Ph.D.)

The best way to study flashcards is not to study them at all.

Now, before you bounce away, hear me out.

There’s a small set of techniques that make learning with flashcards so fast, you really won’t feel like you’re studying at all.

Instead, you’ll feel like you’re creating the knowledge you want to learn.

Isn’t that exciting?

I’ve been using cards for decades and spent hundreds of hours experimenting to find out how to memorize flashcards effectively.

I’ve used them to help me learn languages and get my Ph.d.

And on this page, I’ll share with you the best tips I’ve discovered along the way.

Ready?

Let’s dive in.

How to Memorize Flashcards Effectively: 10 Proven Tips

There are a small number of steps to follow.

They’re easy to learn, but let’s not beat around the bush.

What I’m going to share may feel counterintuitive at first.

You probably won’t be used to thinking or learning in these ways.

To get comfortable with the approach, you just need to practice. Seeing me talk about some of my own flashcards will also help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6HrJ...

Now here’s more information on how to set yourself up for success.

Step One: Identify The Main Points And Subpoints

Before you start making flashcards or committing them to memory, it’s important to have a strategy for identifying the main points.

Often, your study material is loaded with clues. Knowing how to analyze your information sources is key, so be sure to learn how to memorize a textbook effectively.

Step Two: Use The Right Sized Flashcards

Typically, 3×5 is a good size. It helps you focus on recording just the key points.

However, you may need to experiment first with a few different sizes. Use discernment and your own experiments to find out what sizes are best for you.

And don’t hesitate to use different sized flashcards for different kinds of learning projects.

Also, keep in mind that you can always photograph cards of any size and import them into a spaced-repetition software like Anki.

Step Three: Use Multiple Colors

Nothing limits your imagination like using just one color.

I try to always use at least 3 colors in each of my cards, a tip I learned from memory expert Tony Buzan.

Making sure your flash cards have multiple colors is a key strategy for engaging your brain and amplifying the learning process.

Not only does using multiple colors make the card creation process more interesting. It also makes looking at your cards later much more engaging.

Step Four: Integrate Words And Drawings

When learning how to study with flashcards, it’s easy to get stuck on using words.

However, even with limited artistic skills, it’s important to incorporate images as much as you.

Even the simplest of sketches will help you with the next tip.

Step Five: Create Puzzles For Your Brain To Solve

The number one problem people face when using flashcards is rote repetition. This is when they use the cards to repeatedly expose themselves to the information.

That is no fun!

Instead, use keywords, images and even empty spaces to give your mind the opportunity to fill-in-the-blanks.

Let’s talk about the empty space principle in a bit more detail.

This simple flashcard creation strategy lets you harness the power of active recall.

For example, on this card for the Mandarin word Měishù guǎn or art gallery, there’s a line instead of an image for the guǎn sound.

Notice the three colors in this flashcard example and how the blank space stimulates the use of active recall for rapid memory formation.

When looking at the card, I know it’s my job to press my imagination for a solution. We’ll talk more in a minute about how we use our imagination, but for now, make use of this principle as often as you can. It’s powerful.

Step Six: Leave The Opposite Sides Blank As Often As Possible

Many people will be reluctant to do this in the beginning, but it is a very strong learning strategy I recommend you experiment with as soon as you feel confident.

Including the answers on the back of your flashcards is problematic because it leads to cheating. When you know you can just glance at the answers, you’re tempted to simply look at it instead of trying to generate the answer from memory.

This is a huge problem because it leads you into the memory-destroying boredom of rote learning.

As you build up to using flashcards as puzzles your mind has to solve to reinforce what you’re learning, try using the principle of blank spaces.

For example, on this card for the word Kǎoshì or test/exam, multiple colors have been used (black, white and pink).

The front side of the card uses images alone to help the mind solve the puzzle.

On the backside of the card, notice how the blank space creates a puzzle to be solved, avoiding the horrible boredom of rote reptition:

The backside of the flashcard uses active recall to stimulate faster absorption of the target information into long term memory.

Although this procedure lessens the challenge of recalling the word from pure imagery, you may adding words with a fill-in-the-blanks approach useful in the beginning as you build your flashcard mastery.

Step Seven: Use Your Multisensory Imagination

Although flashcards focus a lot on our hands and eyes, we don’t want to leave out our imagination.

As you create your cards and the associations that will help you remember definitions and key terms, include at least these sensations:

KinestheticAuditoryVisualEmotionalConceptualOlfactoryGustatorySpatial

Here’s an example of what I mean.

The Měishù guǎn example pictured above and discussed in the video included with this post is not just a picture of Aunt May, some shoes, a blank space and some art in a gallery.

In my mind, I am physically feeling Aunt May kick a boot at my image for guǎn, which is a musical group called Gwar.

I can hear the sound of the boot hitting them and see them getting angry. I experience their anger and conceptualize their plans for revenge. They are going to burn all the art in the art gallery, which allows me to imagine the smell of fire and the taste of soot in my mouth.

As you work with your flash cards, imagine each image larger than life. You can project them on the walls of a Memory Palace for even better and faster learning outcomes.

I also take a second to imagine how big everything is and exaggerate the sizes. Combined, all of this multi-sensory association and visualization exercise makes the learning process so much faster.

Step Eight: Use Questions As You Study Your Flashcards

Rather than passively move through your cards, actively ask questions.

If you don’t, it’s easy to get frustrated.

My favorite question is, “What is this image trying to tell me?”

Then I focus on the clues and work it out verbally.

It’s important to get your mouth involved in order to help you harness the levels of processing effect.

In addition to speaking and answering your cards out loud, you can also keep a memory journal. Doing so will deepen your brain’s processing of the learning material even further.

Step Nine: Follow A Consistent Schedule

To memorize flashcards effectively, you need to reduce repetition by following all of the steps outlined above.

But none of us can reduce repetition entirely.

For best results, go through your cards in small, reasonably sized sets. I prefer 10-20 sets at a time.

Then, craft a schedule based on a pattern like:

5x daily for the first 5 days1x daily for the first 5 weeks1x monthly for the first 5 months

But that time, you should have everything in long term memory that will in many cases last for life.

If you want to speed up the process, consider also using a Memory Palace.

Each card can be “cross-indexed” with a Memory Palace. I often number my flash cards to help keep track of where in a particular Memory Palace they have been encoded.

Step Ten: Experiment With Additional Techniques

As powerful as flashcards can be, I don’t recommend using them in isolation.

Instead, consider combining them with the Memory Palace technique and mind mapping.

A powerful way to add your cards to a Memory Palace is to simply number them. Then, place a version of each association on your cards at a Magnetic Station in your Memory Palace for that number.

In other words, the fifth card’s information goes on the fifth station of its Memory Palace.

When it comes to mind mapping, I highly recommend reading Mind Map Mastery and checking out the work of Phil Chambers and Marek Kasperski.

Memorize Flashcards Fast

Today’s suggestions will serve you well, so please explore them systematically.

But it’s also important to experiment.

When ideas come to mind, give them a try.

Seriously.

I’m aware of no “Flashcard Police” anywhere on the planet.

Also, put aside your fears of wasting time or failure.

Mistakes will be made, but experimenting with new learning techniques and your ideas cannot waste time.

You will only learn new things that help speed your progress. The only waste that happens is when people let the fear of trying new things stand in their way.

And if you like trying new things and learning to put fear aside, check out my FREE Memory Improvement Kit:

In it, you’ll learn to use even more memory techniques than we’ve discussed today. They are fast, fun, effective and always like a game.

So what do you say?

Are you ready to take your flashcard game to the next level?

Give it a go and enjoy the learning journey!

 

How Memory Works: A Guide Anyone Can Understand

Memory works like breathing and blinking:

You can control it to a certain extent and it operates entirely on autopilot, whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

How do we know?

Think about your home.

Did you have to work hard to learn the layout?

Probably not. You probably learned it automatically.

The alphabet, on the other hand, required exercises and repetition over weeks. Your teachers guided the process.

As an adult, you need to guide the memory process yourself when you want to learn new information.

Given that memory is both an automatic process and a tool we can use deliberately, how exactly does it work?

The answer is fascinating and comes with many clues that will help you improve it.

Let’s dig in.

How Does Human Memory Work? The 3 Main Processes

Scientists think that memory is built from processes that work together. These processes are:

EncodingStoringRetrievingEncoding

Encoding takes place during and after information enters your brain through the senses.

Take the example of learning your home layout. In Human Spatial Memory: Remembering Where, the authors present a number of theories. One of them is that our brains remember spatial layouts by determining which objects are on top of other objects.

This approach suggests that you remember the location of the kitchen because the countertops and the stop stand on top of its floor. The tub is on top of the bathroom floor, etc. The brain then uses what is called its “coordinate system” to encode the information.

One theory of memory says that our brains track surfaces and what objects or on top of other objects in order to remember our environments.

When it comes to learning information like a language, we can deeply integrate with the process by using one of several forms of active recall.

How are Memories Stored In The Brain?

In terms of storage, scientists think our spatial information may reside in the parietal lobe. They’ve reached this conclusion because damage to this area of the brain disturbs our spatial awareness.

Storage is a big topic because it’s not clear that information ever really stays put in the brain. 

On the contrary, scientists have shown that information we’ve memorized moves around over time. Memory expert Dr. Gary Small likens this movement to how families might travel from homes around the world to gather at a Thanksgiving dinner.

Retrieval

Dr. Small’s analogy suggests that our memories are actually split apart and keep moving around in the brain. Then, when we retrieve the memories, they move to a single location so we can perceive them as something that feels whole.

And when our recall does not feel whole and complete, that’s because some parts of the memories did not make it to the party.

Here’s more detail on recall and retrieval with more details on where memories are stored.

How Are Memories Formed?

People tend to think that long term memories take time to form.

However, scientists know this not to be the case. Not only can certain protein synthesis formations rapidly form long term memories, we also experience flashbulb memory.

Either way, the direct answer to how memories form is neurochemical. It is literally the collaboration of existing brain structures working together to “connect.” 

You can even see the process take place with your own eyes as neurons find one another and connect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ3d1...

As memories connect, myelin wraps around the connections. The strength of any given memory appears related to the robustness of the connection itself, the strength of the myelin sheath and the length of the dendritic spines on the neurons.

Although the exact process of how memories are formed and stored is still not well-understood, scientist and memory expert David Eagleman claims in The Brain that every healthy brain has room for a zettabyte of information.

Where Are Memories Stored?

As mentioned, memories are stored all over the brain. And the exact location changes.

This means that the most direct answer to the question is that our memories are stored in our synapses. They are literally stored in connections.

But there’s another way to think about the question.

Memories aren’t just stored in your brain.

They are stored in the brains of other people.

In books.

Movies.

Recorded music.

Library archives.

Our species has devised alphabets, words and grammars to help us encode knowledge in a variety of mediums. To focus only on the brain is missing the point.

But what remains the same is the focus on our memories being stored in the connections themselves.

As you read this post, you are connecting your brain to mine. My remembered knowledge about memory is flowing into your brain. And if you decide to engage with it deeply, this knowledge will become part of your knowledge-set.

If you don’t, the fact of your individual forgetting does not mean the information isn’t stored somewhere. It will still be right here on this page, located in the memory of multiple computers across the Internet.

We tend to think that memory is stored in our minds. In reality, it is stored in multiple locations and devices, if not in the connections between things themselves.

My suggestion is an example of abstract thinking about memory, and I’m confident that when you reflect on the point, you’ll agree that it’s true.

Ultimately, I think the most interesting type of memory involves new research suggesting that memories are not stored in synapses at all. Rather, they are stored in DNA and RNA.

This is new and emerging research that hasn’t been performed on humans yet, so has to be taken with a grain of salt. But it’s worth keeping an eye out for developments.

The Main Types of Memory

Confused by all the types of memory you find people talking about?

I don’t blame you. There are a ton of them.

Luckily, we can break them down into the three main types of memory. Then there are all the rest.

The biggest three are:

Sensory memoryShort-term memoryLong term memory

After that, memory scientists break the categories down into:

Episodic memoryAutobiographical memoryProcedural memoryWorking memorySemantic memoryIconic memoryVisual memoryContext-dependent memoryProspective memoryEchoic memoryImplicit memoryNon-declarative memoryExplicit memoryEidetic memory

In addition, you’ll find special topics like:

Focused attentionCrystal and fluid intelligenceSynesthesiaHyperphantasiaSerotonin and memoryAmnesiaLong term memory lossStress and memory lossMemory disordersThe myth of photographic memory

 

Conclusion: How to Improve Your Memory

Luckily, you can easily improve your memory.

The first step is to pay attention as much as possible.

Then, you’ll want to learn various techniques. The most important are:

The Memory Palace techniqueThe Major MethodThe Pegword MethodPAO System

To place the foundations of these memory improvement skills in your hands, grab this FREE Memory Improvement Kit:

The best part?

Once you have superior memory skills, it’s easy to remember all the different kinds of memory we discussed today.

It’s a real win-win for you and the world. The more we understand about how memory functions and what exactly it is, the more people can better navigate reality and lead more fulfilling lives.

So what do you say? Are you ready to live a life more connected to the information storage and retrieval device alive and well in your head?

Why Questioning Everything Is the Smartest Thing You Can Do

Do you want to know why questioning everything is the best policy in life? 

It’s because humans are prone to error, including the smartest amongst us. 

In fact, there’s a principle called “the curse of knowledge” that highlights this problem.

A popular example of how this plays out in life is in the exchanges between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. 

Holmes often points out how Watson doesn’t see the simplest things simply because he doesn’t question the details enough.

It’s not that Watson isn’t a smart guy. He’s a doctor, after all. But because questioning things is such a small part of his mental activity, he misses both the big picture and the granular details.

As a result, Holmes shines as an incredibly bright individual and Watson seems rather dim, despite his credentials. 

If you’d like to learn how to question things with greater frequency so you can observe the world in-depth, stick around.

In this post, we’re diving deep into why you should always question everything and different ways to do it well.

Why Questioning Everything Is Critical to Great Thinking

The ancient Greeks knew that asking questions was their best bet when it came to critical thinking.

A lot of people associate questioning as a tool introduced by Plato through the Socratic dialogues. 

Although it’s true that Plato used the character of Socrates to highlight the use of questions to sharpen our thoughts, inquiry is much older. 

The Pre-Socratics, for example, devised what is called Eleatic Philosophy.

Parmenides of Elea, from which Eleatic Philosophy gets its name, is sometimes considered the first of the Greeks to use questions to explore the nature of reality itself. 

How Questioning Removes Errors Quickly

Here’s the most important point about these philosophers:

They preferred to use logic instead of their direct senses. 

And this meant using language in particular ways.

In fact, a lot of their wording boils down to a kind of math though the use of syllogisms that help with thinking logically.

Here’s an example of a typical syllogism:

“All mammals are animals. All elephants are mammals. Therefore, all elephants are animals.”

To test the validity of this statement, the philosophers would use questions that remove their senses.

It might sound silly to us today, but put yourself in their shoes for a moment.

If you were to use purely your sense of touch to assess an elephant, you could conclude that this animal is a reptile based on its leathery skin. 

So, before the Greeks developed classification systems, many of which we still use today, they needed to question everything in order to rule out errors that could mislead them.

Another way to look at the questioning process is to understand the difference between abstract thinking and concrete thinking. In each of these types of thinking, you use different kinds of questions to arrive at the truth. 

The Dialectic Approach

Sticking with the ancient Greeks, let’s look at Plato a little further. 

One of Plato’s main contributions is called dialectical thinking.

Through the use of questions, it allows you to reason effectively by producing multiple ways of looking at just about any issue or problem.

It works because you use questions to examine your thoughts and the thoughts of others before, during and after arriving at conclusions. 

In other words, the process of questioning never really ends.

This process is the core of the scientific method, in which nothing is ever “proved.” Instead, we use our scientific questions to help us produce evidence that either validates or invalidates our assumptions about the world and reality. 

Without being able to ask and answer questions as an ongoing process, truth fizzles up quickly. And this is why Plato’s recording of the dialogues of Socrates is such an astonishing document.

Whether Socrates is right or wrong, what matters is the freedom to debate and keep questioning things.

Other Traditions Based on Questioning Everything

Although the ancient Greek philosophers are very important, they weren’t alone in urging us to question.

The urge to question everything why as a repetitive practice is found in other ancient texts like the Upanishads. 

These texts were influential in forming contemplative traditions like Advaita Vedanta.

In Advaita Vedanta, there is a process called “self enquiry” (Atma vichara).

In it, you use questions to explore reality as it appears to you. 

For example, you can ask, “To whom is this experience happening?” 

When you try to find the “inner I” or what some psychologists call the “ego” within the frame of your experience, you will probably struggle.

That’s because things like “I” and the notion of having an identity is fundamentally an illusion. It is one we maintain by failing to ask questions. Instead, we simply go with the flow. 

Or we avoid questions out of fear, which is one of the messages you find in some religious traditions. For example, in the Book of Job, asking god to explain why suffering exists is strongly frowned upon. 

The popularity of such restrictions is a bit puzzling, but a lot of psychoanalysis helps explain. And psychoanalysis itself uses a process of questioning to help people relieve the suffering that not asking questions creates.

How To Start Always Questioning Everything

If you want to commit to a life of enquiry, bravo. I’m confident you’ll find it very rewarding.

In order to get started, consider the following steps:

One: Decide To Go All In And Plan

One of the biggest problems people face when they take on a new goal is that they’re not fully committed.

That’s just not going to work when it comes to committing everything. And the reason why should be clear:

We’re talking about everything.

So if you want to question just some things, some of the time, reconsider whether or not dialectical thinking is really something for you. It’s not about dabbling. 

And because it’s not about dabbling, you’ll want to plan. 

For that, let’s move on to the next step.

Two: Study Inquisitive People And Their Traditions

One of the best ways to learn how to enquire deeply is to study those who have gone before you.

And a reading plan of the classic texts that are based around questioning everything is key. I’ve already mentioned a bunch from the Greek tradition, but here are some other suggestions. 

Merely by reading the books and resources on this list, you should find yourself starting to question everything almost on autopilot as your brain starts mimicking the process.

Plato’s Republic Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics Ramana Maharshi’s Be As You Are Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and PhilonousHeidegger’s The Question Concerning TechnologyList of unsolved problems in philosophyHoftstadter’s Gödel Escher BachSand Talk by Tyson YunkaportaHarris’ Free WillWeber’s Evolving Beyond ThoughtThe Victorious Mind (my book, building on Dr. Weber’s work)

There are many other books to recommend, but these are some of the ones I’ve found most useful for training my mind to ask questions.

Not just any questions, but questions of the highest possible value.

You can apply the study of inquisitive people to any area, including finance. For example, studying the questions asked by investors like Warren Buffet can be incredibly rewarding.

Three: Put Your Questions In Writing

We often resort to questioning things mentally.

However, getting our hands involved is a best practice due to the benefits of haptic memory. This form of memory involves physical touch and belongs broadly to sensory memory, which is readily exercised.

To practice questioning in writing, consider keeping a journal dedicated to this purpose.

Also, note that writing out answers to questions is part of the artistic process. In The Successful Novelist, David Morrell shares how he has used a process of questioning to help him derive the plots of very successful novels. He uses writing to flesh out answers to specific questions that draw out realistic plot points his readers love.

Four: Verbalize Your Questions With Others

Just as we benefit from processing our ideas physically through writing with our hands, processing questions with our mouths is a godsend.

Think about it:

Speech science reveals that at least 100 muscles are involved in speaking aloud.

Now, not everyone has interested parties to speak with, so get this:

You can still exercise all those muscles by asking yourself questions out loud.

I do this often and feel no shame in it. It’s a purposeful verbalization of my questions that not only generates better answers, but sometimes helps me improve the questions themselves.

This happens because I hear how sometimes I limit my wording, or miss the point. I cannot imagine perceiving these deficiencies in any other way.

Five: Review Everything

Re-reading books  or re-taking courses is one of my favorite strategies for asking better questions.

In fact, at the time I’m writing this post, one of my projects involves trying to re-read as much of my university syllabi as possible from my first year to 2009 when I completed my Ph.d.

It’s a massive project, and I don’t pretend that I’ll be able to cover everything.

However, I’ve already noticed with the books that I’ve re-read so far that the quality of my questions have improved. They’ve done so by virtue of a kind of guiding meta-question:

Who was I when I first read these books?What did I feel when I was reading them?Where was I? (Both physically, emotionally and in terms of my street smarts?)What did I conclude after reading them?

These questions now have a powerful pair:

Who am I now as I read them again?What do I feel now?Where am I?What do I conclude now?What are the notable differences between then and now?

 

Although you might not take your re-reading strategy to the same lengths I am, the benefits of comparing and contrasting your experiences based on these questions is huge. I personally feel that this is one of the most strategic ways to enquire into many aspects of reality at the same time, so hope you’ll give it a try.

Question Everything Within Reason

Although I’ve presented questioning everything as a beneficial practice, moderation and discernment are required.

I imagine that you, like me, ultimately want freedom in life. This means that we can’t become a slave to needing to question everything all the time. Frankly, I doubt anyone could, even if they tried, certainly not without making themselves sick.

Rather, enquiry is best as a constant practice. This means that you work on it consistently, a mental strength initiative no different than the physical strength programs we apply to our bodies.

This means that some planning will be useful, and self-monitoring to make sure we aren’t going overboard.

And the best way to do that? 

Using questions about how we’re going about questioning things, of course!

If you’d like a simple course that will help you remember to keep questioning yourself within reason, give this Free Memory Improvement Kit a try:

And let me know:

What questions are you going to ask yourself next?

How to Find The Main Points in an Article: A Simple Guide

The number one reason students struggle to find the main points in their reading is simple:

You are being tested on your ability to figure out what they are and why they’re important.

Teachers worth their salt won’t give you the answers because to do so violates your ability to learn this skill.

Why is this true?

Because all of human progress relies upon unique and innovative solutions to problems.

And knowing how to find the key points in an article is something that is learned by doing.

Plus, content is not king in this regard.

Instead, context is god.

So you not only need to practice identifying what the key points are.

You need to justify in your own words why those points are so important.

Don’t worry, however.

I have tips for you that will help you improve your skills in this area.

Even if giving main points examples is beside the point, I will share some from my own reading.

I’ll teach you how I as a person with two MAs and a PhD earned those degrees by finding what’s important in my topic and justifying my decisions.

Ready to see A+ written all over your report cards and university transcripts?

Let’s get started!

What Is A Main Point?

A main point has several aspects to it. For starters, we have:

What the author meantWhat the author actually said

Now, you might think that this is splitting hairs.

But as Stanley Fish put it, “the world is one thing, words another.”

Fish is the author of How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. A huge part of his point is that there’s a difference between what a person actually means and how words can be interpreted in many different ways.

There’s a word for this problem: Polysemy. We face it when “a single word, phrase, or concept has more than one meaning or connotation.”

Because many sentences have this issue, the main idea of a passage almost always requires interpretation in your own words.

And if you want to interpret really well, you need to give evidence to demonstrate why your take on the meaning of the passage is valid.

So we might as well face an uncomfortable truth: 

To a certain extent, a main point is what you say it is plus what you can validate through argumentation.

Main Points In The Classroom

The definition I’ve just given applies to all aspects of life, but might not be what a teacher in a classroom is looking for from you.

It may be that you need to give a specific answer. This is why I say that “context is god.” In order to pass a test or get an A+ on a paper, the right answer might not be in your control no matter how much evidence you provide.

I’ve personally suffered situations several times where in multiple choice exams, the wording of the question made it impossible to give the best possible answer.

That’s why I’m glad that I used to follow a few simple steps:

Read the textbooks thoroughly and answer any section or chapter quizzesTalk to my teachers to make sure I knew exactly what they were looking forGo through sample exams from previous yearsAttend study groups to discuss possible exam questions in advance

Once in the exam setting, if I could not figure out what answer the person grading the exam considered correct, I took a detour.

I would handwrite on the exam that I could not give an answer in good faith. Then I would write on the back of one of the pages a full explanation of why I thought the question was worded poorly. Finally, I gave the answer in prose that I felt was correct.

Although I cannot advise you to do the same, this strategy saved my skin in several exams. I always passed and did complete most of my degrees with honors, something that would have been impossible if I followed the “rules.”

In my case, my main idea paragraphs (or what I sometimes called “paragrowls”) saved my skin many times.

The Best Way To Identify A Main Point

At the end of the day, the best way to know the main point is to question everything.

Ask yourself:

What is the author trying to tell me?What are the words the author uses?How is the topic introduced and concluded?What do any diagrams or illustrations tell me about the main points?What references to other research does the author make?What do commentators on the author say about the main points made by the author?Can I find where in the book or article those commentators drew their conclusions?

By asking and answering questions like these, in combination with the strategies I’ve shared for how I used to pass exams, you should feel confident that you can find the main points much easier now.

What Are Subpoints?

Subpoints are easier to define.

Remember how I said that we need to validate our opinion about what counts as a main point?

Authors of books and articles need to do this too. And subpoints is how they do it.

A subpoint typically involves:

Giving an exampleProviding evidence in order to substantiate a claimParaphrasing another sourceQuoting a sourceAnalyzing a secondary textProviding a variation on a key pointPerforming historical or theoretical analysis on a main point

For a quick example of a subpoint, just scroll up.

When I mentioned that I’ve passed all my exams so well that I’ve earned the highest degrees you can get at a university, that was a subpoint. It is providing evidence to support the claim that my strategy is valid.

I could actually make the claim even more valid by providing proof that I have a Ph.d., such as by giving you this link to the alumni page of York University’s graduate program in Humanities.

Are subpoints more important than the main points?

In many ways, yes. They are often the evidence that substantiates the main point. Or they provide the nuances or historical background that help explain what makes the main point important.

How to Find the Key Points in an Article in 3 Steps

Now that we have defined main ideas and subpoints, let’s talk about some powerful ways to find them. 

The following steps do not have to be followed in any particular order, though I do suggest always starting with the first one.

Step One: Know Your Goal

As I mentioned, a teacher or examiner may have a definition of what counts as the main point. I’ve given you some strategies for figuring that out.

All you have to do after determining what counts as a main point in your particular context is to read the books with that definition in mind.

If you’re completing a doctoral dissertation or writing a book like I often do, the burden is a bit heavier. Your goal is to have a research question before you start reading.

Answering this question, and any sub-questions you may have, is your goal.

Step Two: Keep Detailed & Moveable Notes

Because it’s not always possible to know the main idea of a story or scholarly book I’m reading, I take notes on cards.

I shared a detailed tutorial on how I do this in How to Memorize a Textbook.

As I discuss in that post, there are several benefits to taking notes on cards, but one of them is that you can constantly reshape your “deck of notes.”

The more you read, the more your idea of what counts as an important point might change, as will the subpoints you notice.

Keep in mind that subpoints don’t always have to come from the same source. As a former university professor myself, I can tell you that one way to make sure you get an A+ on your essays is to cross-reference several articles.

By doing this as much as possible in your writing and when answering exam questions, you’re demonstrating reflective thinking. This impresses your graders and will later impress hiring managers too.

Step Three: Test For Validity

One of the best things you can do is test your assumption that a point is as important as it seems.

You can test the validity of what you’ve decided are the most important details in your reading by:

Checking introductions and conclusions again for confirmationLooking through the index for the terms you’ve selectedFollow-up reading online and in other booksAsking your teacher or professor if you’ve understood the reading correctlyTalking with others to see if they’ve reached similar conclusions

Ultimately, having your test, submitted assignment or the things you write yourself graded or scored by others is the ultimate validation. You need either the feedback of your teacher or comments from the court of public opinion to know if you’ve hit paydirt.

And that’s a very good thing. External validation is a huge part of how we grow.

Yes, it takes some courage and sometimes you might get things wrong. Being willing to admit that and then commit to improving in the future is the best response. And so long as you commit to doing that, you cannot lose.

A Final, Powerful Way To Find Main Points

There’s an ancient technique for finding out what really matters in any given text.

It involves using a Memory Palace.

Basically, you memorize a few details, or entire quotes. Then, you analyze them from within memory.

By doing this, you’re able to consider them in a way that is much deeper than if they are only partially absorbed in your mind.

If you’d like to learn more about this technique, consider going through my Free Memory Improvement Kit:

This approach has helped me many times throughout the years, not only for academic goals, but also personal progress in other areas of life. I’m talking about health, mindfulness and professional matters.

Give it a try, and let me know:

What questions do you still have about identifying the main points in the texts that you’re reading? I love updating posts and answering questions in the comments.

And that’s another strategy you might consider:

Online discussion. It’s a great way to figure out what matters most to yourself and others.

 

Am I Naive? How to Tell (And Fix It)

We are all naive sometimes.

And make no mistake:

That can be a very good thing in the right context.

Why?

Because the core of scientific, philosophical and personal progress requires the ability to see the world with fresh eyes.

By the same token, being naive can also be incredibly destructive.

It can force you to miss out on so many of life’s pleasures because it can make you:

Irrational when rationality is neededSkeptical when active participation is requiredEmotionally destructive when only reason can save the day

But here’s the very good news:

When it comes to learning how to be less naive, the improvement process could not be simpler.

And this post covers how to increase your wisdom in precise terms. 

Ready?

Let’s get S.M.A.R.T.E.R together!

(I’ll tell you what the acronym means later. I promise!)

Am I Naive? The Top Seven Signs of a Naive Person

Scientists have shown that being naive is essential to our cognitive development as kids. We literally cannot tell the differences between things without allowing curiosity to help us distinguish the difference between things.

For example, as kids we scientifically test the world. We learn to avoid hot surfaces by being naive about what they are and how they harm us.

This means that the number one way to know if someone is being naive is pretty simple.

One: Lack of Experience

If you want to know how to stop being naive, ask this simple question every time an opinion floats to your mind:

Do I actually have the experience required to make my opinion valid?

Questioning everything in this way will instantly make you a smarter person. You’ll certainly stick your foot in your mouth much less often.

This is true because intelligent people ask questions – or at least acknowledge that a topic is in question – before making final statements about it.

But naive people?

Not so much. You can often tell by the speed of their answers that they simply lack the background knowledge required to give an intelligent response.

Two: Lack of Self-Awareness

Some people suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. 

This takes place when a person is not smart enough to know that they aren’t educated in a particular topic area. It’s very destructive, and one need only look at the comments on various social media sites to see how rampant this problem is. 

Three: Poor Vocabulary 

Did you know that scientists have warned that the vocabulary of our young people is rapidly shrinking?

This connects to our first point about how experience helps us differentiate different things in the world.

We rarely do this through experience alone. Our language helps us process the experience and deepen it through communication with others. 

But if we don’t know the words for objects and experiences, our ability to understand and connect them with other aspects of reality shrinks.

Four: Gullibility

Having a larger vocabulary has been shown to help you read faster, which helps you avoid being easily cheated or deceived. The more you know, the more you can know.

Yet, there are people out there who talk for hours about things like the Mandela Effect with zero evidence that it exists.

Watch out for people who misuse scientific-sounding terminology to take advantage of the gullible.

They don’t realize that other people exploit their lack of scientific literacy.

They do this by showing them ads to sell them products packed with other sensational material. Entire industries direct themselves at consumers with limited mental processing power.

Five: Lack of Critical Thinking Skills

Now, I don’t mean to put only a few people on the spot. Incredibly smart people also display gullibility from time to time.

Desperate health situations, lack of time to think and other situations can cause even people with very high IQ scores to blunder.

However, people with critical thinking abilities often realize their mistakes much quicker. Often, they’re able to reverse course before any significant damage has been done.

They can do this because they’ve had some training in critical thinking, like the kind you can get on this blog. Here are some resources if you’d like to beef up your brain so you can think through important issues faster and make fewer mistakes:

9 Critical Thinking StrategiesAnalytical ThinkingAbstract ThinkingConcrete ThinkingLogical vs. Rational Thinking14 of the Best Critical Thinking BooksSix: Lack of Willingness To Change

They say that the only constant is change. But one of the top signs of a naive person is inflexibility.

Nietzsche put it best when he said that asking someone else to change is like asking the entire universe to change. But isn’t that often what naive people do?

As I suggested in my TEDx Talk, which centered on a naive passage of my own life, we know that we can’t change others:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvtYj...

But we can change ourselves.

So if you want to stop being so naive, make sure to check out the various ways that you can change yourself in the section below.

Seven: You Do Not Put Time Aside For Thinking

Believe it or not, thinking is not a natural activity. We descend from animals and our autopilot instincts are geared for survival.

This means that thinking not only has to be learned, but in order to keep it sharp, it also has to be practiced.

A sure sign of a person being naive is when they say that they made a “snap decision.” Some people will even brag that they are “impulsive” or like to “rely on intuition.”

True, life sometimes forces us to make choices on the fly. We may have to listen to our gut.

But it’s never ideal and it’s naive to think so. As Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book, Decisive, much research shows that not taking a time to think things through harms us much more than we think.

Yet, societies around the world are so collectively gullible that we valorize impulsive celebrities and spend hours following the trainwrecks of their lives.

Luckily, you can avoid belonging to the herd, so let’s turn our attention to simple ways to get more experience, become more intelligent and enjoy reality at an increasingly mature level.

How to Stop Being Naive in Eight Steps

Fortunately, there are many ways to reduce gullibility and become an accurate thinker on a quest for constant improvement. 

Let’s have a look at some of the best.

Step One: Take Time To Analyze Things Thoroughly

Snap decisions are deadly. And once you’re in the habit of making them, it can be hard to change. 

However, it actually doesn’t take that long to make intelligent decisions. But you do need to take the time it requires to think things through.

One model I love is the W.R.A.P. technique in Decisive. This approach applies to many situations where you will benefit from thinking things through. It works like this:

Widen your optionsReality testAttain distancePrepare to fail

To give you an example, let’s say you hear about repressing your subvocalization from a so-called speed-reading expert.

Before you take this expert at his or her word and plunk down your hard earned cash on their training, you can widen your options by looking up what credible scientists say about this issue.

Then, you can reality test the person’s claims by seeing what they’ve accomplished in life with their approach. 

Finally, you can take a break to get some distance between yourself and the topic and let your brain ruminate on autopilot through a process called diffuse thinking.

If you decide to go ahead and invest in the idea after taking time to deliberate, be willing to fail.

By the same token, you should accept that in some areas of self-education, it pays to fail. If you don’t go through a course or two created by charlatans, you risk not sharpening your BS-detection skills, which also requires you to prepare for failure.

In sum, taking time to think in a structured manner is a great way to suffer less from being naive in life.

Step Two: Take Personal Responsibility

Gullible people often avoid seeing how they steered themselves into harm’s way. But that’s an avoidance strategy and one that prevents you from growing.

Even worse, you can wind up trapped in learned helplessness. As researcher Martin Seligman has shown, it’s easy for humans to accept and even come to love the things that hold them back. But it’s also readily possible for anyone to learn to reject the limiting factors in our lives. Studies have shown that feel good dopamine increases when you take actions that increase your mental strength.

In order to become more resilient and learn from your naivety, you need to acknowledge its presence in your life, accept it and then plan to do better.

Getting some time on the calendar to study critical thinking or improve your memory through a program like the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass is a great way to do that.

Step Three: Reduce Screen Time & Mindless Consumption

There was a time when people thought that intelligence was fixed. But research that identified what has come to be known as the Flynn Effect showed that in the 20th century, people were in fact getting smarter and smarter in each and every generation.

This trend continued until recently, but now some researchers think that intelligence may be spiralling downwards. They even call this a reversal of the Flynn Effect in some areas of human knowledge and skill.

One explanation for why this downward trend is taking place is digital amnesia. As the Internet moves closer and closer to creating zero latency online environments, people become increasingly hooked to their devices. Indeed, the CEO of Netflix once said that their only competitor is sleep.

By spending more time reading books, even if you’re a slow reader, you’ll give your mind for reflective thinking that fast-paced online environments usually train your brain to avoid. They are designed to keep you clicking without thinking, whereas reading offline is all about connecting with the thoughts of others in a sustained way.

Step Four: Improve Your Vocabulary In More Than One Language

A lot of people will tell you to travel to give you more life experience. But let’s face it: the beaches and areas of historical interest around the world are packed with as many naive people as your hometown.

A better way to gain world perspective is through language learning. This is because working with languages is what James Hordern calls knowledgeable practice.

The best part is that memorizing vocabulary is fast, easy and fun. I regularly review my copy of Word Power Made Easy to keep my English sharp and read in other languages at least 3-5 times per week.

Step Five: Design Your Own Long Term Learning Projects

A lot of people randomly pile books into their Amazon shopping cart, or collect suggestions on Goodreads.

But savvy lifelong learners are curators of their knowledge. They may read broadly, but usually within highly concentrated areas of interest for dedicated periods of time.

I took so many courses at university, my brain has been trained to think in terms of semesters.

To this day, I search the Internet not for lists of the best books on a certain topic, but for university syllabi put together by experts. I try to find the biggest and most authoritative textbook on a topic that I can, and then read at least 2-3 of the books it discusses within. 

This style of learning allows me to lean on the curation process of experts as I develop my own expertise. Then, when I throw in wildcard discoveries along the way, I automatically read them at a higher level and avoid falling into gullibility because a critical foundation for understanding the topic has already been established.

For any topic I’m studying, I seek to include books from at least these categories:

History of the topicTheory of the topicPractical applications of the topicCritical biographies related to the topic

If you seek the best possible books from each of these categories and spend 3-6 months focused on them and supplementary materials, you won’t be naive about that topic for long.

And stick with your reading plan. Remember: Variety definitely is the spice of life, but the truth in the cliche won’t help if you keep changing disciplines. You can dive deep into topics and connect them a lot better if you spend periods of focused time on fewer topics in more detailed ways.

The best part is that your focus will compound in value because you’ll have learned the meta skills of how to learn and see many more connections thanks to your depth of study.

Step Six: Carry A Notebook Everywhere

I can think of few things that have helped me more than carrying a notebook 99.9% of the time.

Although it’s true I use memory techniques, there’s nothing better than working thoughts out on paper and planning with my hands. Plus, having a journal is very helpful for quickly creating Memory Palaces (a powerful tool for remembering things quickly).

Besides planning and keeping track of ideas that emerge, notebooks are great for self-assessment, gratitude journaling and generally expanding your mind.

Step Seven: Practice Objectivity

One of the hardest things for chronically naive people is to realize that reality exists independent of their thoughts and opinions. 

This mistake happens because they are primarily subjective when they would benefit from being objective thinkers.

No doubt about it, being objective is hard.

Fixing this issue starts by understanding that your brain practically forces you to be emotionally invested in everything you see and do. We are driven to navigate the world by the laws and forces of evolution in the same way that gravity holds us fast to the earth.

To become more objective despite having the chips stacked against you, you can make objectivity one of your first learning projects. Study the sciences of psychology, decision making and game theory. Make a concerted effort to become a philosopher.

As part of this project, build a network of people around you who can help stress test your ideas. I suggest joining paid groups rather than free ones. Whereas many of the free ones are filled with low quality posts that will trap you in naive thinking, a solid investment in a discussion group based around deep dives into challenging content will serve you very well.

If you’d like to be part of one of my upcoming groups, consider letting me know!

Step Eight: Know Your Personality Type

One of my own experiences of being gullible revealed a lot to me about an area I’d never thought about in the context of investing.

For years, I’d been so focused on academic matters and later developing this blog, I had spent almost no time thinking about or studying the different ways I might retire one day.

Because I practice what I preach, I followed a lot of the steps I’ve discussed above. For example, I looked for the foundational books on investing and spent months focused on reading them thoroughly.

I also took courses and spent time with a topic expert to go over my plans.

He said something very interesting to me:

“If you invest in a way that goes against your personality type, you’ll always be miserable.”

I listened deeply to what this expert had to say about personality types when it comes to investing. I journaled about it in my notebook, talked with yet other people and these processes helped me make the right decisions. I know now that I avoided being gullible around a lot of decisions that so-called experts in the field call wise investing, but what actually amounts to uneducated greed.

This particular topic is not very interesting to me, but I’m glad I planned time for it and spoke directly with the experts themselves to help formulate my plans. To make sure you avoid the traps of naivety, I suggest you do the same.

You Don’t Have To Stop Being Naive 100%

As I mentioned in the introduction, we benefit from keeping an open mind and cultivating curiosity.

By the same token, we don’t want to keep our minds so open that our brains fall out.

Instead, we want to strive to be what I call S.M.A.R.T.E.R or serious, mature and ready to embrace reality.

This is important because the wisest people amongst us know one thing to be true above all:

None of us know what we don’t know.

In fact, the most intelligent person alive is still shrouded by monumental ignorance. That person must be because the future is not and cannot be known. Plus, so much of the past was never recorded, and mountains of human knowledge that was preserved at one point has since been lost.

But we can learn to think logically and develop problem solving models. It just takes a willingness to get started and keep going.

And it helps to be able to remember the steps that we’ve discussed today. If you’d like help with that, please register for my FREE Memory Improvement Kit.

It will help you rapidly create and use the tools memory experts employ to help them learn faster and remember more.

And when you can do that, you can kiss being destructively naive goodbye. For good.