How can we increase our learnability?

Learning has never been so accessible. The amount of content we have available today gives us the opportunity to upscale our skills constantly. Every day we are bombed with so much content in many different formats like e-books, newsletters, articles, e-courses, webinars, just to name a few. Recently I noticed I was developing a FOMO (fear of missing out) in my learning. Every time a friend or colleague mentioned a book, an article or simply a new concept I’ve never heard before a red light switch it on in my brain “How did I not hear about this before? I am getting behind others in terms of knowledge”. 

But my main frustration was not only the feeling of missing out... I realized that reading a book a week, taking 2 e-courses at the same time, signing up for numerous newsletters from my field of work, reading articles my brain was not fixing the new pieces of content I was trying to absorb and, after a few weeks (or even days!) after finishing a book I couldn’t remember much about the subject and key ideas. I was wasting my time, fooling myself and getting anxious about it.  

I had to take a step back and rethink my way of learning. If you can learn how to learn, you can apply it to any other skill and competence you want to gain. So if you want to improve your ability to do anything, learning how to learn is something you should dedicate time to. To improve my ability to learn, I went through the Learning How to Learn Course instructed by Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski. I was a bit skeptical at the beginning, but I must say I got a lot of insights on how to improve my learnability and track some of my learning issues. Here are some of the main highlights I got from the course: 

The reason why you are learning 

As Simon Sinek says: Start with the why. Are you learning something just for the sake of learning? Is the subject something that excites you and connects to a higher purpose?

When you care about what you are learning, you change it from something that drains you out of energy into something that lifts your spirits and makes you more confident. 

Focus Mode vs Diffuse Mode

In essence, people have two fundamentally different modes of thinking, the focus mode, and the diffuse mode. The focus mode involves thinking about things you are somewhat familiar with. But if you're trying to solve or figure out something new, it often cries out for the more broad-ranging perspectives of the diffuse mode. This mode, as it turns out, is representative of the brain's many neural resting states. 

We all access the diffuse mode quite naturally when we do things like go for a walk or take a shower or even just drift off to sleep. When we find ourselves stuck on a problem, it's often a good idea once you've focused directly on the situation. To let things settle back and take a bit more time. That way more neural processing can take place, often below conscious awareness in the diffuse mode. The thing is, it often takes time for neural processing to take place, and time, as well, to build the new neural structures that allow us to learn something new.

After studying, take a walk, have a nap or sit around and do nothing. And don’t feel bad about it. You’re giving yourself the best opportunity to let the diffused mind do its thing.

Focus in the process over the product

Most of the times we tend to focus on the final product of our learning session than in the processes itself. Thinking about the outcome of your learning or in the final product you want to obtain is the quickest way to get discouraged about it. Why? Because there is no end. Learning is a lifelong journey. Now instead of focusing on finishing a chapter or a book in one day or writing a new article every week, I set the amount of time I will dedicate reading and writing during my week. 

Fight against procrastination

Learning is about consistency. Rome was not built in a day, so you can't expect to build new skills and knowledge without taking time, little by little every day. This is why tackling procrastination is so incredibly important. As a students I used to procrastinate my studies until the day before the exam, which led me to cumulative amounts of stress and not absorbing the content in my long-term memory. To understand how to fight against procrastination we need to understand our habits, override parts of them and develop a few new ones.

The trick to overriding a habit is to look to change your reaction to a cue. The only place you need to apply willpower is at the reaction to the cue. To understand this, it helps to go back through the four components of habit, and how we analyze them from the perspective of procrastination. 

• The cue is an event that triggers the next three steps, let's use the example of your phone going off.
• The routine is what happens when you’re triggered by the cue. In the phone example, you check your phone.
• The reward, the good feeling you get for following the routine. Checking your phone, you see the message from a friend, this feels good.
• The belief — the thoughts which reinforce the habit. You realize you checked your phone, now you think to yourself "I’m a person who easily gets distracted".

A simple and effective tool to tackle procrastination is the Pomodoro technique. That brief, 25 minute stretch of focused concentration followed by a bit of mental relaxation and a reward to yourself. 

Practice and spaced repetition 

It's through practice and spaced repetition that we can enhance and strengthen the neural structures we are building as learning something new. We tend to set some timelines to learn new skills when actually is the constancy of the practice and spaced repetition that will fix the subject in our long term memory. Whenever you start learning something new, think of ways you can practice the gained knowledge. If you are learning about data science, for example, you can create your own project using interesting datasets available online. In my case, I decided to create this article to summarise my main learnings on Learning how to learn course and I created a small list of the cues and beliefs I identified in my routine over the week. 

30 seconds recall

We constantly fool ourselves when learning. An effective way to confirm our understanding of the material you just studied is a 30 seconds recall. Writing down all the keywords and concepts can remember is a simple and effective way to evaluate how much did you understand the material. 

Conclusion

Learning doesn't progress logically so that each day just adds an additional neat package to your knowledge shelf. Becoming a more effective learner can take time, and it always takes practice and determination to establish new habits. 

One sure-fire way to become a more effective learner is to simply keep learning and actively using the gained knowledge. In the end, learning is a ”use-it-or-lose-it" phenomenon. Certain pathways in the brain are maintained, while others are eliminated. If you want the new information you just learned to stay put, keep practicing and rehearsing it.

Start by focusing on just a few of these tips, on a daily basis and hopefully you will start identifying the best way to get more out of the subject you are trying to master.