How To Learn Better: Transmissions From the Realm of Cognitive Science

It took me over a decade of seriously studying Japanese before I was comfortable calling myself fluent.  Part of the reason it took so long is that Japanese is hard.  The rest of the reason is that I had never read this book:

                                          

This is an amazing book.  I think that anyone who is interested in learning anything should read it, which basically means that I think everyone should read it.  Learning should be meaningful.  Life is still short, which means that time is still precious, which means that nobody wants to waste it doing boring or painful things.  A waste of time is perhaps the worst kind of waste there is.  This is my main operating principle as both a student and an educator.  But what kind of learning is meaningful?

Learning that sticks.  What kind is meaningless?  The kind that is evacuated from memory as soon as you have been tested on it.  I don’t think you can even call that learning.  That kind of learning is like a Snapchat; you can only look at it for like ten seconds before it disappears.

I don’t know about you but I don’t want to waste time sending myself mental Snapchats.  When I lay down a memory, I want it to remain available for a while.

But how do you lay down a memory?  The authors of Make It Stick suggest that most of us have been doing it all wrong.  Are your textbooks streaked with highlighter?  Do you spend time reading and rereading the same passages of text over and over again?  Do you take notes in class or meetings, or download Power Point presentations and laboriously commit them to memory?  Do you repeat phrases in your head a hundred times until you’ve got them memorized, and never think about them again?  If you do, then chances are good you aren’t remembering nearly as much as you feel like you should.

Why?  Most of the above study habits end up doing one thing and one thing only: loading material into short term memory.  You may come out the other side of a study sessions able to fluently recite a passage or rattle off a string of vocabulary words, but you will run into (at least) two problems: 1) you might trick yourself into thinking you understand the material better than you actually do, and 2) if you don’t keep reviewing you will soon forget it all anyway.

The Fluency Illusion

The authors of Make It Stick point out something called the Fluency Illusion.  Once I learned about the Fluency Illusion, I realized I had been falling for it my entire life.  The Fluency Illusion boils down to this pithy phrase (which is not mine): fluency with the material does not necessarily indicate mastery of the content.  Just because you can recite something from memory does not mean you know what you are talking about.

    This realization was revelatory for me.  I don’t know how much time I wasted trying to accurately represent a given author’s phraseology in my mind when I didn’t actually understand what he or she was trying to say.  There are no magic words, merely more or less expressive ones.  Make It Stick taught me to stop worrying about memorizing other people’s words, and to start worrying about getting through them to what they were trying to say.

Incessant Forgetting

Everybody forgets.  Forgetting is (at the moment) a neurobiological inevitability.  Sometimes it is good.  You have to forget some things (what you ate for lunch yesterday, for example) to live a normal life.  Many times it is bad.  Forgetting is bad when you find yourself forgetting things you have spent hours slaving to learn.

How can we combat this kind of unwanted forgetting?  There are ways.  There are techniques to beat forgetting, and if you buy Make It Stick you can learn them.  Or, if you don’t read books (you should read books), then you can just keep an eye on this blog.  I will have some tips for you in the upcoming days.