Approaches to Accelerate Your Learning

Take Notes with Pen & Paper

Studies have shown that when taking notes by hand during lecture you retain the information better and learn more.

Although taking notes by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing on e.g. a laptop, the act of writing out the information fosters comprehension and retention through muscle memory. In particular, when reframing the information in your own words it helps you retain the information longer, meaning you will have better recall and perform better on tests.

Apply an Effective Note Taking Regiment

The better your notes are, the faster you will learn. Knowing how to take thorough and accurate notes will improve your ability to remember concepts, gain a deeper understanding of the topic in focus, which in turn may help accelerate your learning. Thus, before you embark on learning a new topic, make sure you learn different methods for taking notes, such as the Cornell Method which is described in great depth in the book How to study in College. Such methods helps you organize notes into easily digestible summaries.

Effective note taking is meant to engage you and involve using the original notes many times over to build memory of the content, rather than seeing note taking as just a one-off copying activity.

Four Stages to Note Taking

1. Note Taking
   • Prepare a page to take notes the same way each time.
   • Put an essential question at the top of the page to bring focus on the key learning objective.
   • Split the page into two columns. The first column taking up about a third of the page. The space on the left is for questions and notes that may be added in later upon reflecting on the notes. The space on the right is to take notes from e.g. the lecture, textbook, video, audio.
   • Listen and take notes in your own words.
   • Leave spaces and lines between main ideas, to be able to revisit them later and add information.
   • Develop a consistent system of abbreviations and symbols to save time.
   • Write in phrases, not complete sentences.
   • Use bullet points and lists where possible.
   • Learn to pull out important information and ignore trivial information.
   • Use highlighters and color to indicate key ideas, changes in concepts or links between information.
     
     
2. Note Making
   • Review and revise the content of the notes.
   • Write questions on the left side near, in close proximity to the answer in the notes on the right side.
   • Connect key parts of material in the notes pages using color or symbols.
   • Exchange ideas and collaborate with others to check for understanding.
     
     
3. Note Interacting
   • Link the learning together by writing a summary that addresses the essential question (at the top) and answers the questions (in the left margin).
   • Learn from the notes by regularly revising the notes for each subject.
   • Cover the information on the right and use the questions as study prompts before e.g. a test.
     
     
4. Note Reflecting
   • Feedback should be provided by a peer/tutor/teacher to check your understanding in the initial learning phase.
   • It is recommended to address the feedback by focusing on one area of challenge you are experiencing.
   • Reflect over an entire topic/subject on a regular basis leading up e.g. a test.

However, please consider that a study published in 2010 by Wichita State University compared two note-taking methods in a secondary English classroom, and found that the Cornell method may be of added benefit in cases where students are required to synthesize and apply learned knowledge (advanced learning), while the guided notes method appeared to be better for basic recall.

Furthermore, another study published in the summer of 2013 “Effects of Teaching Cornell Notes on Student Achievement“, found that “Students who were taught CN (the Cornell Method) did take better notes than those who were not, but they did not have higher achievement results.” This study also stated that “Through analysis of assessment scores, we found no significant difference between the intervention and base classes on achievement.”

Thus, note taking is not enough on its own, it should be combined with other techniques, such as the ones listed below to attain better results.

Form Colloquium Group

Engage with the content your are trying to learn by forming a colloquium group with fellow students/friends/other people who are also interested in learning this topic. Agree on a meeting cadence. Actively discuss the material, and try to view it from different angles or viewpoints. Try to defend why a certain theory is correct and how the originator of a theory reached their conclusion, by following their line of argumentation. Play devil’s advocate on each other. Use as much of the lingo / terminology relevant to the topic at hand as possible. Try to incorporate key terms and terminology into your daily speech. This will help you immerse yourself in the topic, and make it more natural when using the terms in articles, reports, tests/exams, etc. at a later stage.

Try a Mnemonic Device

One of the best ways to memorize a vast amount of information quickly is to use memory techniques like a mnemonic device: a pattern of letters, sounds or other associations that assist in learning something. One of the most popular mnemonic devices is one we learned in kindergarten, the alphabet song. This song helps children remember their “ABC”, and it remains deeply ingrained in our memory as adults. Another is “i before e except after c” to help us remember a grammar rule, or “ROYGBIV” for learning the colors and the order of them in the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet, or counting on the knuckles of your hands to determine how many days each month have.

It has been well documented that the ancient Romans and Greeks knew and valued mnemonic techniques, practicing them to ease the demands of poetry recitations, public speaking, and other tasks.

This concept is also known among indigenous people and have been applied for thousands of years. An example of this is the Aboriginals of Australia who encoded vital maps in their tribal songs to make them easy to remember and shared with the new members of the tribe already from an early age.

Mnemonics help you simplify, summarize and compress information to make it easier to learn a new topic or new skill. It can be really handy for students in medical school or law school, or people studying a new language. Thus, if you need to memorize and store large amounts of new information, try applying a suitable mnemonic and the likelihood of remembering the information for a long time will increase.

Setup Your Mind Palace with Travel Routes

The famous Roman writer and orator, Cicero, wrote in his book De Oratore (55 BC) of a memory aid called the “method of loci”, sometimes referred to as the “mind palace” technique. This method of memorization involves using your spatial reasoning brain power to organize and store memory inside a building or geographic space in your mind. The recommended way is to use a geographical space that you know very well (e.g. houses you have lived in, close friends’ or family members’ houses, schools, the route to work) as this will help to store new knowledge in your long-term memory, making it far easier to recall.

This technique is mostly about applying travel routes inside your chosen mind palace. The typical way to do this is to store one or two things to remember at each spot along your travel route. It is also recommended to make the picture in your mind strange or to stand out to make it more memorable. Furthermore, one should also try to picture an activity going on in order to animate or make the memory come to life even more. For instance in order to remember that a certain boxer comes from Australia, one could picture a kangaroo with boxing gloves jumping up and down, while jabbing in the air next to the front door of your childhood home. More details added to this animation will help you to recall it even better, although this will often be a trade-off between spending time on storing all kinds of details for each animation in your memory vs. time spent on storing additional new things into your memory.

In order to recall, you simply walk through the travel route in your mind palace. You will most likely find that you quickly get better at this technique. It allows you to easily go through the travel route backwards, or to jump to spot number, say, 7 along the route to recall what the 7th largest country according to land area would be.

This method was also covered in the TV show Sherlock, which features the young savant Sherlock Holmes using the mind palace technique to quickly recall vast amounts of information that assist him in solving complex mysteries and crimes.

The method is also very well explained, along with author’s journey in the competitive world of people who have trained themselves to have exceptional memory and how to master it in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2012). This book is highly recommended.

Another, great, practical and easy-to-read book on this subject that is also highly recommended is Memo: The Easiest Way to Improve Your Memory

Leverage the Gap Effects

Breaks can also effectively help us learn quicker by taking advantage of so-called gap effects.

There is solid data from several studies on so-called gap effects. Studies ranging from both physical skills and mental skills where people will for instance try to learn the scales on the piano, or a math problem, or a spatial problem, or physical skill. Then at random, every so often, a buzzer will go off and the person will just be told to do nothing. Sit there with eyes closed, or eyes open, and do nothing. Just stopping the learning process for about 10 seconds, and then return to what they are doing after these micro rests.

It turns out that during those micro rests the hippocampus (a brain area that is associated with learning and memory), and the neocortex (another brain area which is also associated with learning and memory), undergoes reply of the thing that the individual is trying to learn at 20 times the speed, also in reverse, just as in sleep. That can lead and has been shown to lead to accelerations in learning.

Take Breaks to Restore Focus

In order to learn something new, our brains must send signals to our sensory receptors to save the new information, but stress and overload (e.g. information overload) will prevent your brain from effectively processing and storing information.

When we are confused, anxious or feeling overwhelmed, our brains effectively shut down. This can be observed when students listening to long, detailed lectures “zone out” and stop paying attention to what is being presented.

They simply are not able to effectively store that information into their memory banks, so learning shuts down. The best way to overcome this is by taking a “brain break,” or simply shifting your activity to focus on something new. Even a 5 min break can relieve brain fatigue and help you re-focus.

Study, Sleep, Continue study

Research shows a strong connection between sleep and learning. It seems that getting proper sleep and taking short breaks are important elements in improving how our brains remember something. Deep sleep (non-rapid-eye-movement sleep) can strengthen our long-term memory if the sleep occurs within 12 hours of learning the new information.

It seems that sleep supports learning in at least two main ways:

1. It protects the formation of new memories.
2. It consolidates memories according to relevance and future expectations of usefulness.

Use Spaced Repetition

Our brains are quite visual and adept at creating associations as “memory palaces / mind palaces”. This can be further built upon through spaced repetition. Using short, spaced-out study sessions over a period of time will encourage meaningful learning, as opposed to long “cram sessions,” which promote rote learning. In such spaced repetition or distributed practice, the gaps (spacing) between occurrences of an item (read: the concept/topic/etc. you are trying to learn) make retrieval effortful, which benefits memory. This is because we learn by the stress placed on neurons during retrieval practice. In massed practice (or rote learning), you just saw the item and it is still on your mind, so there is no need to retrieve it from memory.

Another explanation of its efficacy has to do with contextual variability. When information is encoded in memory, the surrounding context (e.g. what you are thinking of, how you are feeling, how the information is presented) is also encoded and can later serve as a useful cue for retrieving the information. With massed practice, the context surrounding each consecutive occurrence of an item is likely highly similar. However, when spacing out practice, the contexts are likely more variable due to the passage of time. This results in the encoding of different contextual information that is more effective at cueing later retrieval. Also, when you encounter the same item back-to-back (e.g. during massed practice), you become accustomed to it and pay less attention.

According to Nate Kornell, who is an associate professor of cognitive psychology at Williams College who studies learning strategies, the act of forgetting information and then re-learning it, ideally multiple times, is what cements memories in the brain. The process of forgetting, and then repeatedly filling in those memory gaps, makes them stick. You can not add to your knowledge unless you give yourself a chance to forget (make retrieval effortful), which is why massed practice or cramming leads to rapid fading from memory.

This is why solid notes can be quite effective when used in a way that it complements other techniques such as memory palaces. By breaking down the gist of what we are trying to learn based on our notes, we can then assess our ability to retrieve the answer in our heads, using active recall, through e.g. the memory palace technique. Then, based on the results determine how soon we would benefit from reviewing it again.

Although this will depend on setting and vary somewhat from person to person, the chart suggests that the rate of retention can be optimized if you interact (re-read/discuss/write/engage/solve problems) with your notes within 24 hours. A second repetition for a shorter period of time within a day seem to bring recall back up to ~100%. A third repetition within a week for an even shorter time seem to bring recall back to ~100%.

The systematic pattern of spaced repetition has been shown to be one of the most important factors in our ability to remember something.

Stay Hydrated

Drinking water is good for our skin and our immune system, and it keeps our body functioning optimally. Staying hydrated is also key to our cognitive abilities. According to one study, students who took water with them to an examination room performed better than those who did not.

Conversely, dehydration, can seriously affect our mental function. When you fail to drink water, your brain has to work harder than usual.

Modify Your Practice

When practicing and learning a new skill, making slight changes during repeated and deliberate practice sessions will help you master a skill faster than doing it the same way every time. In one study at Johns Hopkins, people who learned a computer-based motor skill, those who learned a skill and then had a modified practice session where they practiced the skill in a slightly different way performed better than those who repeated the original task over and over. The results support the idea that a process called reconsolidation, in which existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge, plays a key role in the strengthening of motor skills.

This only works if the modifications are small, making big changes in how the skill is performed will not help. As an example, if you are practicing a new golf swing or working on your tennis forehand/backhand, try adjusting the size or weight of your club or racket.

Learn Information in Multiple Ways

When using multiple ways to learn something, whether it’s language learning or speed reading, additional regions of the brain will be activated to store information about that subject. This makes that information more interconnected and embedded in your brain. It basically creates a redundancy of knowledge within your mind.

You can do this through spaced repetition or by using different media to stimulate different parts of the brain, such as reading notes, reading the textbook, watching a video on social media and listening to a podcast or audio file on the topic. The more resources of various kinds you use, the faster you will learn.

When it is easy, people typically feel like they are learning more, however you learn more when you are struggling, when you are challenging yourself. This is most likely because you are more engaged in the learning process and it becomes more memorable. It is this ability to embrace continuous discomfort that often separates ultra-high achievers from everyone else. For most people, once they are fairly good at something, they become complacent and comfortable, unwilling to continue to challenge themselves.

Connect What You Learn with Something You Already Know

Brain cells grow when we attempt to remember something that is just at the fringe of our zone of proximal development. In other words, for maximum learning efficiency, you should always be working on things that are just a bit harder than your existing skill level, but not too hard.

The more you can relate new concepts to ideas that you already understand, the faster the you will learn the new information. This is also a shortcut to storing new information in your long-term memory, where what you already know is stored. According to the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, many common study habits are counterproductive. They may create an illusion of mastery, but the information quickly fades from our minds.

Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems we have not encountered before and drawing inferences from facts already known. By finding ways to fit new information in with pre-existing knowledge, you will find additional layers of meaning in the new material. This will help you understand it better, and enable you to recall it more accurately.

If you want to remember the information in a passage you are reading, make connection in the text to as many additional contexts as possible. Pause frequently and think about how what you are reading now relates to what you read earlier. Furthermore, if you really want the material to stick, make personal connections as well by relating the text to events that have happened in your own life, or the life of a friend/acquaintance. The more individual threads you can tie from the material to other, independent realms of pre-existing knowledge, the more likely you are to remember.

This process can be quite time-consuming and mentally straining, however, effective learning is difficult. This may not be the most popular technique, but it really does work.

Elon Musk uses this method, and also says: “To remember, establish relevance.” Be clear towards yourself as to why is it relevant for you to remember this.

Musk views knowledge as a “semantic tree“. When learning new things, his advice is to “make sure you understand the principles, e.g. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to”. When you connect the new to the old, you give yourself mental “hooks” on which to hang the new knowledge.