How to Read Smarter, Faster, and Better – According to Science
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Loading... - CHLOE COOPER
- 18 Aug 2020
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1) Make it personal and relevant.
In Brain-Based Learning , Eric Jensen notes that for our brains to truly learn something, that something needs to have meaning, and meaning is best conferred by giving the topic you’re studying personal relevance. Consider what you’ll remember better: if someone tells you a forest in China is on fire, or that the field near your childhood home burst into flame. Why this works is simple: relevance evokes emotions, and new knowledge sticks best when it’s attached to something you already know.
2) Get the big picture first.
How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren was one of the very first manuals out there on what to do with a book. In it, they tout a preliminary kind of reading called “inspectional.” This entails sampling pages throughout the book, but “always looking for signs of the main contention, listening for the basic pulsebeat of the matter.”
Here’s why the pulsebeat’s your key: Brain and learning theory pioneer Leslie Hart found that contrary to what many educators believe, presenting information in fragments doesn’t actually make learning more manageable. Getting the basic outline of a concept, however, will. While it’s true that the brain simultaneously perceives parts and wholes, without any idea of what the whole should look like, you won’t be able to assemble it from the disembodied parts that make up a concept. Only once it has a general lay of the land can your brain correctly place and interrelate all of the hillocks and meandering rivers of new insight and knowledge.
3) Formulate questions
In the face of new material, it’s curiosity that gives us that attitude of awe that primes our brains for absorption. When there is a gap between what you want to know and what you already know, you’re driven by the desire to close what we call the “curiosity gap.” Curiosity gaps, which you can read more about in Chip & Dan Heath’s Made to Stick, are key to attentive reading. Whit’s clicked into full curiosity mode, your brain doesn’t follow its tendency to be lazy and switch to autopilot. Instead, it trains full, undivided focus on the book.
4) Create your own structure.
Researchers who studied the use of personal organization techniques like mind mapping have found that these tools do indeed help with learning and retention. They work not only because they stimulate the visual part of the brain, but also because in creating such a mind map, a learner is organizing information based on how he or she has attributed relevance. Of course, books already come with structures, but they belong to the author or the editor. Your brain, however, will have a much easier time remembering a new concept from your reading if you devise your very own.
5) Record key insights
This is the part where you actually start reading that book you’ve been casing. But grab a pencil: you’re going to have to take notes. And to get the full benefit, they need to be truly yours.
Psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel from Washington University in St. Louis recently released Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning . In it, they reveal that we’ve been wrong about the smartest techniques for learning – among them, highlighting. It turns out that highlighting and, by extension, writing down word-for-word notes straight out of the book, isn’t effective because you aren’t creating and enforcing original neural pathways. The good news is that your brain will take the smaller chunks of information that you write down in your own words and connect it to knowledge you already have – particularly if you contextualize that information by placing it in your structure.
6) Review what you’ve read.
Neurons are linked by synapses to create a unique path that describe what you’ve learned. In much the same way that wandering pedestrians wear down informal footpaths through a park, the more often you recall a certain piece of information, the stronger and deeper you’re impressing its unique “footpath” in your memory. Conversely, if the information is never recalled and reviewed, the pathway fades and disappears. If you want to keep something you’ve learned, you’ve got to dredge it up and look at it. Often.
In Brain Based Learning, Jensen recommends reviewing material within ten minutes of learning it, then again 48 hours later, and again in seven days. But the worse your memory, the more you’ll benefit from repeated activation of the pathway.
7) Share what you know
Nothing is better for your memory than telling others about what you’ve learned. Whether you talk about the three broader topics the book covers or share some of your key messages via social media, make sure you don’t keep your knowledge in a dusty cabinet. Knowledge is sexy, and people like knowledgeable folks (unless, of course, they’re easily threatened competitive jerks). And hey, readers are supposedly the best people to date, anyway.
Now, you’ve got our secrets. We hope they serve you well as you strive to change, grow, learn, and read even more in the new year. You can have a look at the Blinkist library for a few examples of how a book looks when it’s transformed using the strategies above. And once you’ve tried it yourself, drop us a line to let us know how it went!
