Science-backed techniques to learn faster and more effectively.

Learning is too essential a skill to be left in the classroom. To succeed, you will need to learn throughout your entire life.

In this article, I will lay out my takeaways from one of the most popular online courses of all time, Learning How to Learn [1], and teach you a few modern insights into school-craft from years in the trenches as an engineering student.

Fundamental Techniques for Learning

The critical aspects of learning are spaced repetition, deliberate practice, and procrastination busting.

Learning is the process of manipulating larger and more complex chunks in your memory. A chunk is a group of information connected through meaning or use, and physically is a group of neurons that fire together. Some examples of chunks include:

Cooking a meal
Driving a car
Playing basketball
Solving a quadratic equation

When you first learn to drive, your senses flood your brain with information about the road, your feet placement, steering, etc. Over time, you learn how to drive and can group the data into a neat chunk into your brain called "how to drive." These chunks become automatic after a while. Once you've chunked driving, you barely think about it while you're doing it. Your brain does this to save energy and free it up for other tasks. Chunks are a lot like habits in this, though there are some specific differences. Experts can hold in their minds the most significant and most complex chunks at once. Experts also have the most extensive library of chunks.

As we become experts in a domain, we can build up a library of chunks and manipulate larger and larger chunks. The chunks you first create will be unconnected to each other, lacking hooks and connection to the big picture. It's important to step back while learning to reframe the big picture and notice how the puzzle pieces fit together. Stepping back will help you understand the knowledge you are learning and when to apply each chunk to solve each different type of problem in the field.

Expertise comes from manipulating large, diverse, and complex chunks in a domain to the degree of value. Thus, it is also essential to keep in mind that the benefits of learning will not come immediately. When learning in a new domain, it will take time to build up this library of neural chunks to the point you can do exciting things, earn money, or have a sense of satisfaction while applying them. Naval Ravikant, a silicon valley investor, states that "All rewards in life are from compound interest [2]." He's saying that each year of learning builds off the previous year. In the fourth year of your education, you may learn and earn more than the last three years combined. So, if you are looking for something new to learn, try to find a domain that you may already have some chunks in, or can transfer chunks from another discipline. Perhaps you did it for a few years as a child and are now picking it back up in adulthood. Be wise not just about how you learn but also why and what you learn.

At the same time, don't be afraid to branch out if that aligns with your mission. Learning completely new domains can be a rewarding and challenging endeavor. Learning for its own sake may improve your life by growing new neurons in your brain and enhancing your executive functions. Professor Sue Barry taught herself stereo vision long after scientists thought the brain could develop the skill [1]. Once you've figured out the why and what of learning, here are the fundamentals to how.

Spaced Repetition

Would you prepare for a marathon by running a marathon the day before?

No! It takes time to build up the neural scaffolding and chunks required to learn new things. As you learn, you change the neural structure in your brain by growing new synapses and dendritic tendrils. These take time to develop. Spaced Repetition allows your brain to slowly learn and reinforce the chunks over time, building a solid foundation for your comprehension that is much sturdier than if you crammed. Spending fifteen minutes four days a week learning is much more effective than one hour learning something once a week.

While you are learning, make sure you quiz yourself repeatedly. Using recall and self-quizzing are some of the best ways to learn something. After you read a section of your notes, ask yourself, "What did I just read? What were the main ideas?" Write questions in the margin that will prompt you to recall and manipulate the chunks in your memory. I use the Cornell notes method [3] for reading and lectures. This method involves splitting the page into two columns, and on the left, you write small prompts to recall the concepts. On the right side of the column, you write brief notes, definitions, and other things you need to learn the material. I like taking notes on my computer because I can embed images, links to further reading, and other related sub-notes.

Also, metaphors and analogies are great tools to transfer knowledge from one domain to another.

Another fun fact about learning is that dreaming about a subject will increase your comprehension of it the next day [1]. You can even increase your chances of dreaming about something by studying it right before sleep and consciously telling yourself, "I will dream about this."

Deliberate Practice

Would your muscles grow as fast if you never increased the amount of weight you were lifting?

Learning is no different! You have to push your boundaries when you learn to truly grow. You want to avoid overlearning. Overlearning is the process by which you practice the same material repeatedly after you've already learned the information. It wastes time.

On the other hand, overlearning is great for automaticity, like public speaking or muscle memory. For example, the average TED talker spends 70 hours preparing for the 15-minute talk.

When you devote time to learning, make sure you're pushing hard at the edges of your understanding. It takes more effort, and you'll learn much faster than if you continue to swim in the shallow end. A fun way to facilitate deliberate practice is to set a project goal for your learning! A project will push you to learn the concepts required to complete this goal and deliberately practice when you sit down and learn.

Procrastination Busting

If you had to learn a piece of music for a concert, could you do it by saying "I'll start tomorrow?"

Of course not! Procrastination and learning are mortal enemies. As stated in spaced repetition, we need time to learn. Our brain grows new neurons and dendritic tendrils when we learn. We have to chunk in the concepts and build up a library of neural chunks over time. This problem is where procrastination busting comes in.

Let's explore what procrastination is. Procrastination is a three-step process:

It involves thinking about something we know we have to do but don't feel like doing.
We shift our focus from that unpleasant activity to a more pleasant one.
We spend time on the more pleasurable activity and feel better temporarily.

However, science shows that the negative feeling we feel about doing an activity may disappear once we start the action [4]. "We show that, when anticipating an upcoming math task, the higher one's math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions associated with visceral threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself…Interestingly, this relation was not seen during math performance, suggesting that it is not that math itself hurts; rather, the anticipation of math is painful." Students with math anxiety had their brains scanned, and the researchers found that actual pain centers in their brains light up before doing math.

We physically experience pain when we think about doing something we would rather not, akin to stubbing our toes. Our brain simulates this task and responds with pain, a negative simulation. However, once students started doing the math, their pain centers were no longer lit up. The pain was just from math anxiety! Procrastination may be an illusion for two reasons. When the brain focuses on a task, like solving a mathematical equation, there are fewer cognitive resources to light up the pain centers in the brain. Secondly, during the procrastinated activity, the brain might realize that the simulated pain is imaginary. There is evidence that just starting a procrastinated activity will make the pain go away!

There is also good and bad procrastination [5]. Paul Graham, another silicon valley investor, writes, "The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad? … There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination."

We have to make sure that we're not wasting our time on less critical procrastination, and if we procrastinate things, it's only to work on more important things, whatever that means to you.

When we're trying to overcome procrastination in our workday, we can use the Pomodoro Technique.

Pomodoro Technique

Get rid of all distractions - Silence your phone
Set a timer for 25 minutes and work
Reward yourself after you're done!

Think about what rewards will work best for you. This Pomodoro technique takes advantage of inner zombies, habitual responses in our brains. By rewarding ourselves after we've completed a small study session, we're releasing dopamine in our brain and making the desired behavior, working, more habitual. A smartwatch is an excellent Pomodoro timer.

Anxiety Busting

Cortisol - The Mind Killer

Look at the cortisol molecule. This small collection of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon will make your palms sweat, heart race, and decisions worse. Anxiety is the most common mental illness, with 30% of humans destined to be impaired by anxiety [9]. Medication plus therapy was the most effective treatment for anxiety disorders. However, exercise, mindfulness, and therapy are all effective for treating it.

Anxiety will make it harder for the brain to utilize its working memory. Also, test anxiety is often the cause for a student’s misfortune. There are a few techniques described in the class to fight it:

Breathe. Place your hand on your stomach and take a deep breath, feeling it expand. Try this during a test.
Reframing anxiety in your mind. When you get anxious, tell yourself, "My brain is excited to try its best on this task."
Have a Plan B. Write down a plan for your backup if you fail miserably. Knowing your life will still be great even if you fail gives you the freedom to attack your problems and obstacles head-on without any fright, thereby increasing the probability of achieving your Plan A.
- Will Ferrel was thankful he had a college degree when starting comedy and credits his fearlessness on stage to his success [6].
- The youngest UFC champion, Jon Jones, partied a week before fights to give him the mental safety net to perform without fear or anxiety [7].
Some thought leaders prescribe an opposite approach, burning the boats behind you and thus making victory the only option. Elon Musk may have apocryphally subscribed to this philosophy for his first business venture where he said his mind was that of a samurai, and he would either succeed or die [8].

Fundamental Technique for Learning

Spaced Repetition
Deliberate Practice
Procrastination Busting

The Neuroscience of Learning

When we learn, we are changing the structure of our brains.

Take a look at this image of a rat's neuron pre and post-training.

New dendritic tendrils, synapses, and neurons are formed in our brain. In just one day! Isn't that amazing? This image is proof that learning builds up the brain's structure, requires time, and that we can fundamentally change our brains for the better through education. Just as we build musculature, we must build neural scaffolding through long-term practice and regular sleep.

Exercise

Exercise is the best learning drug on the market. Exercise is so important, among other reasons, because it helps the neurons in your brain that are newly formed after you learn to stay alive.

The hippocampus is the part of the brain where scientists think our brain creates memories. When you learn new things, you stimulate neurons growing in the hippocampus. These neurons will die if you do not do anything. Then, when you exercise, you prolong the lives of these neurons and help your brain hold onto the new material. Scientists have shown evidence of this process in mice.

Some studies show high blood pressure and obesity can lead to memory problems, even in younger patients [10]. "Physical inactivity and high blood pressure increased the likelihood of memory complaints in younger adults (ages 18–39), middle-aged adults (40–59) and older adults (60–99), the researchers found."

If you're looking to boost your brain function in a way that is absolutely 100% proven to be safe and effective, the answer is clear: get some exercise.

Stimulants

I think it's important to briefly touch on this topic because many great leaders, scientists, and engineers throughout history have been powered, in part, by stimulants. Einstein famously smoked a pipe, and Obama chewed nicotine gum. Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world. More than 70 percent of adults regularly consume caffeine [11]. Stimulants come in many forms: Caffeine, Adderall, and Nicotine, among others. They all have different therapeutic mechanisms. I believe that longevity is the most crucial aspect when deciding what stimulants to take for learning and work in general. If you don't need a stimulant, more power to you.

Nootropics

A fad in the personal supplement industry is nootropics to increase cognitive abilities. A few compounds have scientific data to support the theory that they improve cognition. For example, L-Theanine has been proven to increase sleep quality in boys with ADHD [12]. Also, Alpha-GPC has been shown to enhance cognitive abilities in a small study [13]. Alpha-GPC is a supplement that may increase brain levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter ****that is important for memory and learning. Other neurotransmitters we learned about include dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine affects decision-making and the value of sensory inputs. Serotonin affects our social lives and risk-taking behavior. To take control of our decisions, we need to modify our brain's neuroscience to work for us by rewarding good behaviors.

Sleep

You can't learn effectively without adequate sleep. Nothing else will matter if you don't get enough sleep before a test. Rest is fantastic for our brains because it:

Removes neurotoxins that build up while we are awake
Allows us to dream
Solidifies neural patterns created during the day
Consolidates important memories and throws out unimportant one

Mice that were deprived of sleep had functional deficiencies in their hippocampus, a key region for creating new memories [14]. While it may feel hard to get an adequate amount of sleep in today's world, there are strategies you can use to facilitate better sleep. They include:

Blocking blue light one hour before bed. Blue light from computers tricks your brain into thinking it's still daylight and not time to sleep. Blue-light-blocking glasses and orange mode on your screens can mitigate this.
Wearing Earplugs
Wearing Sleep Masks
Exercising (shocker)
Refraining from drinking or eating up to 2 hours before bedtime
Tracking your sleep with popular sleep apps to find conditions like snoring or sleep apnea.

Don't be tricked into sleeping less to study or work more. Those extra hours you spend studying or working are net less productive than if you simply slept a full 6-8 hours.

The Neuroscience of Learning

Exercise
Sleep

Modern school-craft

You can skip this section if you are no longer are in school. Here are some quick tips, in my opinion, to get good grades in today's modern school environment in the most efficient manner. They worked for me, and the most important thing to get good grades is following the system that works for you. Warning - follow them at your own risk.

The utility of a GPA above 3.5 for students not interested in higher learning, medical school, or other such endeavors is dubious. Make sure you understand why you need a high GPA. Most material you'll be studying will not help you after you graduate. Every hour you spend studying is an hour you don't spend playing a chess game, developing your app, or learning more relevant material.

With that out of the way, if you'll permit me some unabashed bragging and a cheap ploy to Ethos, here's why I think I'm qualified to speak on the topic of how to achieve good grades:

3.8/4.0 GPA for a double engineering major
99th percentile on the SAT

There are a lot of great resources on this topic already. I read Dean's List [15] before my first year of undergraduate education, and it contained a lot of great material. Allow me to focus on more modern techniques to save time that I've seen applied successfully.

Index, Always Index

Instead of "Invert, Always Invert," my motto is "Index, Always Index." If you're taking open-note or open-internet tests, focus on indexing where everything you need is. If you can learn during the test, you can get an A with minimal studying. My methods were to prepare a searchable document of all the relevant concepts, solution methods, and problems the test covered. I would spend the night before the test reading over this document, focusing on big picture concepts and how the puzzle pieces of this material fit together. When you read a question on test day, try to tease out keywords that will point you in the right direction. Then Control+F your way to victory.

Critical ingredients to ace a test you barely study for:

Indexing the material in your head beforehand
Searchable notes - could even be the professors material
Ability to synthesize solution methods in realtime
The Control + F keys

The paradigm of indexing a large corpus of information and then applying the crucial parts when you need them is a critical skill for the real world. If you don’t know how to Google effectively and don’t know where to locate the material you need online to solve a problem efficiently, it would pay dividends to improve this skill.

Office Hours

Everything optional in college is important. Go to office hours and do your homework there, it will save you hours. If you’re a busy student trying to juggle extracurriculars, staying healthy, a job, research, etc., then not understanding homework for a class irrelevant to your future is fine. However, if you want to understand the material, wrestle with the problems yourself beforehand, then go to office hours.

Read the syllabus

I’ll repeat. Read the syllabus. This small and unassuming document contains the secrets to achieving good grades with minimal effort. The essential information to note includes:

Weighting of assignments and tests. These are critical factors students often overlook. Focus your efforts on the assignments and tests that will most affect your grade during the semester.
Due dates
Office Hours and TA information

Read the syllabus. Note if you can afford to miss a few homework assignments and make it up with a great exam. The 15-minute investment will pay off in hours saved for the rest of the semester.

Tools

Magoosh is great for studying for standardized tests.

Grammarly is an indispensable proofreader and an order of magnitude better than regular spellcheck.

Quizlet for flashcards.

Please let me know if you have any tools you like to use!

Modern school-craft

Index material
Office Hours
Read the Syllabus
Tools

Quantifying Learning

Let's try and quantify learning. Learning, psychologically, is chunking. Therefore in this course, we are trying to maximize the ratio:

(new chunks learned) / (time spent learning)

Neuroscientifically, learning is growing new dendritic tendrils in the brain. In that case, learning becomes maximizing the ratio:

(# new dendritic tendrils) / (time spent learning)

Our lives are short, and our learning lives even more so. Trying to quantify learning is important, and perhaps there will be ways in the future to measure and optimize these more rigorously.

Learning after Neuralink chips everyone

Conclusion

The learning process is trying to build up chunks of information in your discipline. Concurrently, develop a big picture of where the chunks go and how they fit together. The most effective way to build up chunks is by spaced repetition, deliberate practice, and diligent efforts. To build up the context, stop frequently and recall the material, as well as ask yourself questions like, "Where does this concept fit into my big picture understanding of the topic?" and "Where would I apply this concept in the future?"

Neuroscience suggests focusing on your sleep and exercise. Sleeping and exercise both will improve your brain function, help new neurons survive, and cement the learning you do into a solid foundation.

Thank you, Dr. Barbara Oakley, Dr. Terrence, and the rest of the team for the great course.

Thanks for learning how to learn.