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September 8 - September 15, 2019
“If it’s not in the hands, it’s not in the head.”
the whole of human knowledge is connected in some way. By making this powerful mindset shift alone, you will almost instantly become a more effective learner.
This is the basic idea behind Hebb’s Law, which is often summarized as “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Surveying the Situation When we pre-read a text, we’re essentially skimming.
The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, is once again very helpful here. In pre-reading, we’re looking for that 20 percent of details that give us an 80 percent understanding
Question Everything The next step in the SQ3R framework is no less important in pre-reading: questioning.
Adult learners must harness prior experience.
They need to understand how it connects to their existing knowledge.
confirmation bias. This is the tendency to pay extra special attention to things that confirm our beliefs.
How will I use this information? As you pre-read the text and begin to get a feel for its contents, try to envision scenarios in which it could affect your life.
your initial pass-through of pre-reading, you’ll have a lot of questions you’re eager to answer. This has a massive effect on concentration, comprehension, and retention.
one of the keys to reading faster is to eliminate subvocalization.
Each time your eyes focus lock focus on something, that’s a fixation.
fast, precise movements from one fixation to another are known as saccades.
learning to capture a line in just two or three fixations, with two to four words per fixation.
progressive overload means training just at the cusp of your capability and adjusting as soon as you are comfortable at a certain level.
“Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.” —Jewish Proverb
learning anything helps you learn everything.
Cross-pollination states that learning one subject will have significant, unforeseen benefits when learning another.
Brute force learning, on the other hand, means learning something from as many different perspectives as possible to try and gain complete understanding.
Being able to “lie” to ourselves that everything is going to be okay, that things happen for a reason, or that some seemingly bad occurrence will turn out for the best is a huge part of emotional resilience. Psychologists call this “cognitive reframing,” and it’s one of the best techniques out there for being a happier, more grounded person.
Benjamin Bloom and his team began developing a hierarchy of learning.
“remember,” the ability to recall something from memory at a basic level.
the next step is to actually understand it.
the step after that is to actually apply it.
Next up on the taxonomy is “analyze.”
Can we examine it in enough depth to break it down to its essential parts and come up with unique ways of thinking about it?
Are we able to evaluate it?
The utmost level in Bloom’s Taxonomy, and the reason for the big shakeup in 2001, is “create.” It’s one thing to understand the thinking or ideas of another, or even to criticize and evaluate them. It’s an entirely different thing to create your own original thoughts.
theoretical physicist Max Planck. After winning the Nobel Prize, Planck toured Germany, giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics. After a while, his chauffeur
Knowles discovered, adults learn much more effectively when we have an immediate application and a pressing need for whatever it is we’re learning.
Irish polyglot Benny Lewis, author of the book Fluent in 3 Months.
“Once taught, twice learned.”
Roman philosopher and Stoic Seneca the Younger, who said “docendo discimus,” or “by teaching, we learn.”
the act of teaching causes observable increases in both learning and IQ.
Albert Einstein, who was himself a professor at Princeton, once said on teaching, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Feynman is known for his four-step model of learning,
Pick a topic you want to understand, and start studying it.
Pretend to teach your topic to a classroom.
Go back to the books when you get stuck.
Simplify and use analogies.
teach those around you what you’ve learned in this book!
First and foremost is sleep.
napping nearly every single day.
One common method is called The Pomodoro Technique,
In this method, you study or learn for twenty-five minutes, followed by a five-minute break.
the “Zeigarnik effect.” This effect states that our brains can better remember and retain things that are unfinished or incomplete.
Another one of the recurring themes among the top performers I’ve interviewed is nutrition.
The third major theme for brain performance is also no surprise: exercise.
three foundations upon which brain health is built: sleep, exercise, and nutrition.
