Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

by Scott H. Young

Outcome Feedback: Are You Doing It Wrong?

This tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse. This kind of feedback can come in the form of a grade—pass/fail, A, B, or

C—or

Outcome feedback can improve how you learn through a few different mechanisms. One is by providing you with a motivational benchmark against your goal.

Another is that it can show you the relative merits of different methods you’re trying.

Informational Feedback: What Are You Doing Wrong?

This feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.

Speaking a foreign language with a native speaker who doesn’t share a language with you is an exercise in informational feedback.

Corrective Feedback: How Can You Fix What You’re Doing Wrong?

The best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it.

The main challenge of this kind of feedback is that it typically requires access to a teacher, expert, or mentor who can pinpoint your mistakes and correct them for you.

can indicate what to improve but not how. However, it can also be unreliable. Tristan de Montebello would often get conflicting advice

How Quick Should Feedback Be?

immediate feedback being superior in settings outside of the laboratory.

when it assists in identifying and correcting mistakes and when it allows one to execute a corrected version of their performance revised in response to the feedback.

Though short-term feedback can be stressful, once you get into the habit of receiving it, it becomes easier to process without overreacting emotionally.

Retention Don’t Fill a Leaky Bucket

A decent casual player quickly learns all the valid two-letter words, including unusual ones such as “AA” (a type of lava) and “OE” (a windstorm in the Faroe Islands). To perform at tournament level, however, requires memorizing nearly all of the short words, as well as longer seven- and eight-letter words, since if a player uses up all seven tiles in one turn, there is an extra fifty-point bonus

“The cycling helps,” he explains, “I can go through lists in my mind.”

he focuses on memory, not anagramming (rearranging the tiles to create words); he works forward and backward, starting from small words, going on to big ones and back again; he claims to recall the words visually, as he cannot remember words when they’re spoken.

Why Is It So Hard to Remember Things?

Decay: Forgetting with Time

The first theory of forgetting is that memories simply decay with time.

There are flaws with this theory being the complete explanation,

Many of us can vividly recall events from early childhood, even if we can’t remember what we ate for breakfast

Even if there is a component to our forgetting that is simply decay, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is the only factor.

Interference: Overwriting Old Memories with New Ones

Interference suggests a different idea: that our memories, unlike the files of a computer, overlap one another in how they are stored in the brain. In this way, memories that are similar but distinct can compete with one another.

Forgotten Cues: A Locked Box with No Key

The third theory of forgetting says that many memories we have aren’t actually forgotten but simply inaccessible. The idea here is that in order to say that one has remembered something, it needs to be retrieved from memory.

Cue forgetting as a complete explanation for our memory woes isn’t without its problems, however. Many memory researchers now believe that the act of remembering is not a passive process. In recalling facts, events, or knowledge, we’re engaging in a creative process of reconstruction. The memories themselves are often modified, enhanced, or manipulated in the process of remembering.

How Can You Prevent Forgetting?

Forgetting is the default, not the exception, so the ultralearners I encountered had devised various strategies for coping with this fact of life. These methods roughly divide into tackling two similar but different problems. The first set of methods deals with the problem of retention while undertaking the ultralearning project: How can you retain the things you learned the first week, so that you don’t need to relearn them by the last week?

The second set of methods, in contrast, has to do with the longevity of the skills and knowledge acquired after the project has been completed:

You need to pick a mnemonic system, which will both accomplish your goals and be simple enough to stick to.

Memory Mechanism 1—Spacing: Repeat to Remember

Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run.

during the MIT Challenge. After my first few classes, I switched from doing one class at a time to doing a few in parallel, to minimize the impact that the crammed study time would have on my memory.

Space your study sessions too closely, and you lose efficiency; space them too far apart, and you forget what you’ve already learned.

This has led many ultralearners to apply what are known as spaced-repetition systems (SRS)

little more performance. SRS is an amazing tool, but it tends to have quite focused applications. Learning facts, trivia, vocabulary words, or definitions is ideally suited for flash card software, which presents knowledge in terms of a question with a single answer. It’s more difficult to apply to more complicated domains of knowledge,

simply printing lists of words, reading them over, and then rehearsing them mentally without having them in front of you is an incredibly powerful technique.

Memory Mechanism 2—Proceduralization: Automatic Will Endure

Why do people say it’s “like riding a bicycle” and not “like remembering trigonometry?”

There’s evidence that procedural skills, such as riding a bicycle, are stored in a different way from declarative knowledge, such as knowing the Pythagor...

This difference between knowing how and knowing that may also have different implications for long-term memory. Procedural skills, s...

are much less susceptible to being forgotten than knowledge that requires expl...

advantage. One dominant theory of learning suggests that most skills proceed through stages—starting declarative but ending up procedural as you practice more.

A perfect example of this declarative-to-procedural transition is typewriting.

heuristic. Instead of learning a large volume of knowledge or skills evenly, you may emphasize a core set of information much more frequently, so that it becomes procedural and is stored far longer.