While studying my Biomedical Science degree, I was nominated to work as a Student Learning Assistant to help students with laboratory work. Part of that role involved being a mentor to the earlier years.
Although I was able to help others revise course content, no one had taught me exactly how to learn at any point in my life (even during the training for the job itself). It was only once I started delving into the world of psychology, where I learned techniques to make learning incredibly quick (and easy!)
I’ve summed up the following techniques I’ve been using to accelerate the learning process.
Prepare yourself and find your flow.
Find a quiet place, then clear your mind with mindfulness meditation. A lot of people don’t like the idea of meditation because it sounds like a waste of time akin to watching paint dry, but research shows it’s incredibly beneficial and has a wide range of physiological and psychological benefits, including reducing blood pressure, anxiety, stress, enhancing mood, and when it comes to learning, crucially, it can enhance focus and attention, and reduce distractability.
Attention is necessary for many forms of learning, as well as for regulating one’s thoughts and actions- it is inversely correlated with distractability. Both of which helps bring you closer to a ‘flow state’.
In simple terms, flow is where you’re in a state of hyperfocus; you’re paying so much attention to a task that interests you, that you forget about your place in space and time. It’s not just beneficial to learning, but also when completing other (sometimes mundane) tasks. It’s a desired effect in game design, sports psychology and other fields.
Many people, including myself, find that using noise-cancelling headphones to listen to non-lyrical ambient/electronic music with a steady beat can help increase immersion and reduce distraction when doing an activity.
Flow comes easier after mindfulness meditation and music. It also comes easier with the occasional use of coffee/caffeine.
Use caffeine, but not regularly
There was a time I was drinking 8 cups of tea a day, and the occasional red bull. Red bull didn’t really work for me, but I would often have it anyway- I had no idea that tea contained caffeine, let alone how the quantity of caffeine I was consuming was keeping me awake- just.
If you’re a habitual coffee/tea drinker, chances are your body has built up a physical tolerance to the effects, and has depended on caffeine to feel ‘normal’. With chronic/daily caffeine use, a person’s baseline energy level is reduced, so the stimulating cognitive and physical effects are rendered inert. The fix? A two-week (or longer) caffeine holiday to re-sensitise yourself to the effects again. It’ll probably feel horrible (especially for the first 3 days), but sticking through the entirety of the break it is definitely worth it.
Caffeine has a plethora of effects that can help improve learning and general productivity. It helps alleviate fatigue, and also helps enhance focus and motivation- both of which enhances the ability to access flow.
Additionally, it can help temporarily inhibit acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Acetylcholine plays a critical role in the maintenance of arousal, attention, motivation (which promotes a flow state), and also plays an important role in the formation of new memories.
The downside? The more you use it, the less it works. Tolerance to caffeine builds up relatively quickly with repeated use.
Preventing caffeine tolerance build-up is relatively straightforward- simply limit your intake to one day every 3-5 days (whatever works best for you personally). By having rest days in between, you’ll be able to feel the superhuman-like effects every time.
Read through the content, then teach an imaginary class.
Teaching an imaginary class is a modified form of the self-explanation technique.
Rather than reading through a textbook over and over again, attempting to teach content helps you internally organise information you’ve learned, encode it into symbolic information that is closer to how you relate to the world, and understand the “gist” of how a concept works, which helps make learning faster. It also helps you recognise when you don’t exactly understand the content or the material, so that you can attempt to find other explanations or strategies to learn a concept. If you can’t teach it or explain it, it’s unlikely you really know it.
Whether you’re using a whiteboard, creating a mindmap or diagram while pretending to instruct a lesson or teaching a friend, the imaginary class technique is a powerful and effective way to verify the integrity and acquisition of recently encountered conceptual knowledge.
Prepare notes with Anki.
Anki is a free, open-source, flash card app that implements a spaced-repetition learning algorithm that uses the testing-effect.
In layman’s terms, the app will learn what you know and learn what you don’t, so it shows you weaker concepts and knowledge you’ve forgotten (or are close to forgetting) more often than asking you concepts or knowledge that’s incredibly easy, such as “what is your name?” or “what country do you live in?”
Reseach into the spacing effect demonstrates that learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out. It’s easier to encode information into long-term memory when information is presented to the mind at gradually increasing periods in between, rather than ‘massed presentation’ (i.e. cramming).
The process of trying to remember what’s on the flip-side of a flashcard also exploits a cool psychological phenomenon- the testing effect. In essence, you learn more and form stronger memories trying to remember something you’ve previously studied rather than trying to store something again into memory (such as by repeatedly reading notes or watching videos).
It’s brilliant. Magical. Fantastic. Anki is absolutely a 10/10 piece of software that I’d recommend to everyone.
It has Windows, Mac, Linux, Android/iOS and web apps so that you can learn wherever you are, whatever your device.
Ideally, you’ll be creating thousands of cards with little question and answers, or prompted facts about everything you’ve learned- you’ll then try to guess the flip side and rate how well you remembered it- If in doubt, just hit “Again”; It’s better for the algorithm to underestimate rather than overestimate how well you know a card.
The algorithm helps you identify weaker areas of knowledge to focus your revision time more- You’ll be spending less time studying or learning more content in the same period of time.
A couple of quick tips if you’re planning on using Anki: It works best if you understand the content before making the cards- Prepare your anki decks after you’ve gone through the “teach an imaginary class” step. Additionally, don’t make the answers on the back of the cards too long- keep them as short and as concise as possible. It’s difficult to remember several paragraphs of content especially when you’re starting to learn something new.
Anki is incredibly useful when cementing knowledge you understand to form stable, long-term memories.
I wish someone taught me these ‘secret’ strategies growing up, when studying at university, or before I was expected to mentor others as a Student Learning Assistant. But alas, time only moves forward and we can only make use of the information we know now.
I hope this can find you some benefit in the future.
Ariya
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