Six ways to learn faster to learn new knowledge

Translation of a note on how to make the brain learn faster.

The publication "Ideonomika" published a translation notes FastCompany publication, which explains how to use their abilities to the full power of learning.

When you learn quickly, it gives you a great competitive advantage. As science proves, there are six ways that help you learn and remember new knowledge faster.

1. Teach others (or just pretend)

If You imagine that you need to explain to someone else the material that you are currently studying, this will allow you to quickly remember more information, according to a study by scientists from the University of Washington in St. Louis.

One of the co-authors of the study, John Nestico, writes: "When teachers are preparing to teach, they usually look for key ideas and organize information, giving it a distinct structure. Our results show that students also begin to apply such effective teaching methods if they think that they have to teach this material. "

1. Bring on training short intervals of time

Researchers from the University of Louisville are advised to allocate 30-50 minutes for studying new material. Shorter time intervals may not be enough, and in 50 minutes the brain will tire of constantly perceiving new information, experts say.

They are also advised to take short breaks of 5-10 minutes in length, and the education specialist Neil Starr offers to conduct short training sessions at any free time: for example, to make small cards describing the subject of the study and periodically to take them when you have a break.

1. Take notes by hand

Researchers at Princeton and the University of California have found that students more actively listen and better recognize important information when they make notes by hand. And those who keep notes on the computer, the records turn into a thoughtless transcript, besides, people behind computers are more distracted, experts say.

Professor of Princeton University Pam Mueller writes that those who print and do not write down information get worse at conceptual questions: they tend to write verbatim literally instead of processing information and formulating it in their own words. This is bad for the results, she concludes.

1. Stretch the mastery of the material

This may seem paradoxical, but we learn faster when we distribute and stretch the training. Author of How We Learn Benedict Carey compares learning with lawn watering. "You can water the lawn once a week and a half hours or three times a week for half an hour. If you do this three times a week, the lawn will be greener, "the author writes.

To remember the material well, it's best to repeat it in a day or two after the first time you've read it. "There is a theory," Cary says, "that if you try to learn something quickly, the brain gives less attention to learning. If you repeat the information in a few days or a week, and not immediately, it sends him a signal that the information still needs to be remembered. "

1. Do not be afraid to take a nap

To memorize the learned, it is important to periodically "shut down". As the study published in the journal Psychological Science shows, a dream in between sessions helps to memorize the material better. In an experiment in France, participants learned to translate 16 French words into Swahili for two sessions.

Participants from one group studied first in the morning, and then in the evening of the same day, and participants from the second group studied in the evening then slept, and in the morning they came to the second lesson. Those who slept could recall an average of 10 or 16 words, and the "sleepless band" remembered only 7.5.

"This shows that building asleep in the learning process is doubly useful: it reduces the time that you will take to re-master the material, and helps to remember the material longer," writes the study author, Lyon University psychologist Stephanie Mazza. "Previous studies have shown that sleeping after school is useful, and now we see that it's even better to sleep between two classes."

1. Practice in different ways

When you master new skills, it is useful to change the approach to their training, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University write: it helps to learn faster. In their experiment, participants had to master the task on the computer, and those who during the second session used a different, modified technique, eventually performed better than those who used the same method a second time.

As the head of the research of Pablo Selnik writes, it is better to at least slightly modify your approach to learning in different occupations than to practice exactly the same way several times in a row.