The Science of Self-Learning: How to Teach Yourself Anything, Learn More in Less Time, and Direct Your Own Education (Learning how to Learn Book 1)

by Peter Hollins

Self-Explanation

Self-explanation sounds simple, but there is a method to the simplicity. It’s more than thinking out loud. It involves explaining and articulating information to establish a baseline of knowledge and blind spots.

with self-explanation, you will quickly learn what you don’t understand, and it might be far more than you expected.

Simply put, elaborative interrogation is an effort to create explanations for why stated facts are true. This is what drives home comprehension, as well as what you don’t comprehend.

In elaborative interrogation, the learner inquires about how and why certain concepts work. Nothing is safe from this inquiry.

“Why” questions are more significant than “what” questions, which primarily relate to the natures of identification and memorization. A line of “why” questions elicits a better understanding of the factors and reasons for a given subject.

The overall point of elaborative interrogation is to make sure there are no holes in your understanding. If you can survive your own questioning, it’s likely you can survive tests, exams, and when other people ask you to teach them.

You can start with the journalistic questions (who, what, where, when, why, how), then move on to contextual questions (how did this happen and what happens after) for a good, thorough start to understanding.

The Feynman Technique

Feynman prided himself on being able to explain the most complex ideas in the simplest terms.

Write down an explanation of the concept in plain English.

Explain it as simply, yet accurately, as you can in a way that someone who knows nothing about the concept would also understand.

Whatever you are unable to explain, this is a blind spot you must rectify.

If you can’t summarize it in one sentence, or at least in a brief and concise manner, you still have blind spots you need to learn about.

Finally, create an analogy for the concept.

Making analogies between concepts requires an understanding of the main traits and characteristics of each.

This step also connects new information to old information and lets you piggyback off a working mental model to understand or explain in greater depth.

The Feynman technique is a rapid way to discover what you know versus what you think you know, and it allows you to solidify your knowledge base. When you keep explaining and simplifying to yourself and discover that you can’t, you’ve just discovered that you don’t know as much as you thought you did.

Takeaways:

Interaction with information—in other words, how to take something that’s on the page and screen, understand it, and make it usable to yourself at a later time. That’s learning in a nutshell, but there are best practices you should embrace outside of the traditional classroom setting.

First is the SQ3R method. Use it. It stands for survey, question, read, recite, review.

Second is Cornell notes. Use them. Cornell notes split your note-taking into three parts: taking notes, writing cues, and summarizing.

Finally, self-explanation. Do it. When we are forced to try to explain concepts through self-inquiry, we will quickly discover what we do know and what we don’t know at all. These are called blind spots, and they are far more common than you might like to think.

The Feynman technique is an offshoot of self-explanation that helps find blind spots as well, with an added component of using an analogy to explain what you think you know.

whatever you learn, you will eventually have to read about it. The more you read, the better, which means the faster and more efficiently you read, the faster and more efficient your learning will be.

You can often make yourself an expert on an intellectual subject just by reading enough in that area.

The average adult reads at a speed of 300 words per minute. You can take various reading and comprehension tests online to test your current abilities

This chapter will be about teaching you how to read faster, as well as retain more.

What’s ahead are the following: how to stop subvocalizing, training your eyes to widen and spread, how to strategically skim for important information, and how to maintain better focus and attention.

Stop Subvocalizations

To move to a new level you need to stop sounding the words inside your head. Subvocalizing takes time—more time than is necessary to comprehend the words you are reading. It is almost impossible to go much beyond 400 or 500 words while subvocalizing.

Since most people currently can’t separate the subvocalization from comprehension, they are locked in at a rate of about 400–500 words. Moving beyond that rate requires you to embrace that your mind and eyes read faster than your mouth.

Look at it, and instead of repeating the word mentally, think about what it represents and means. Think about its meaning.

by merely observing words without the desire to pronounce them, the new habit will begin to form on its own.

First, picture it visually in your mind.

Second, hum to yourself as you read it, so you literally can’t read it because of the humming.

Third, in the same vein, you can practice reading while chewing gum on the same premise that it makes it difficul...

Train Your Eyes

train your eyes. Your eyes are muscles, so they need to be trained and prepared for reading faster.

Eye-tracking studies have shown that your eyes actually quiver and move around considerably. These are called saccades. And every movement away from your position in text requires a few milliseconds to readjust and refocus. All of these minuscule readjustments in locating your place in a book add up to be very costly to your reading speed.

you are training them to move less and in a more controlled way to not waste energy and effort.

use your finger, or any other object, as a pointer.

strengthen your peripheral vision and learn to focus on chunks of words rather than individual words.

An eye fixation is a location on the page where your eye comes to a stop. Readers who make fewer eye fixations read faster because they take in more words with each fixation.

Acquiring the ability to see many words at a time is essential for speed-reading. The goal is to stop looking at a single word at a time and instead start learning how to look at chunks of words.

When you look directly at something, you see with your macular vision. Peripheral vision is what you see less distinctly in the area outside your macular vision.

your peripheral vision needs to improve to read faster and reduce eye fixations, so exercise your eyes to do this.

And just like other muscles, there are specially designed exercises that help build eye muscle strength and flexibility.

this act of stretching and working your eye muscles will widen your sphere of vision.

if you only double yourself by seeing two words at a time, you have effectively doubled your reading speed just by training your eyes.