How To Remember Everything You Learn
A few months ago I ran into this awesome video that made me think a lot about how I’ve been learning for the past decade.
Instead of watching and doing what it advises against, here is the transcript for my future self to revisit and recall.
Here’s a situation. I watch a video where its creator synthesizes all kinds of ideas and comes to an interesting conclusion.
“I think, wow! I know all about that now.”
Then a few hours later, I can sort of recall its main points, but if someone asked me to explain it in-depth, I’d fumble for words. This happens to me all the time. It happens when I finish chapters of books, television episodes, movies, podcasts, articles, you name it. The story I tell myself is that upon completing any reading or listening, I feel like I know what it’s all about.
But the truth is I don’t.
“I just feel I know something without actually knowing it.”
I tricked myself into thinking I was competent. In the course Learning how to learn, UC San Diego professor Dr. Barbara Oakley points out many of these Illusions of competence:
- Seeing information in front of you, such as reading a book, doesn’t mean you know it.
- Seeing or hearing someone come to a conclusion doesn’t mean you know how to get to that conclusion or explain their argument
- Searching for something on Google gives you the illusion that the information is in your brain
- Spending lots of time with material doesn’t mean you know it.
Philosopher Mortimer Adler once said:
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it, usually does not know what he thinks.”
This is the fundamental difference between feeling informed and truly understanding something.
I am as informed as ever. I can more or less parrot opinions I read and cite random facts. But when tasked with explaining what something is all about, why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts and theories, and putting it in context, I fall flat on my face.
It’s dangerous when I let these illusions of competence slip into my opinions.
I so often feel strongly about a position, but if pressed, I could hardly argue for it.
So much of media now is designed to make understanding things for ourselves obsolete. The packaging of intellectual positions and views is a booming business. Viewers and listeners get hit with persuasive audiovisuals, professional rhetoric, and carefully selected data. It all amounts to a nice little package for the viewer to make up their mind with little difficulty.
The packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader doesn’t make up their mind at all. Instead, people become no better than a human Spotify playlist that spits out other people’s neatly wrapped opinions without actually understanding any of them.
To continue with Adler:
“To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is from this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name.”
Not being able to explain my position of parroting someone else’s means I’m never thinking for myself.
Now, you mean anyone is entitled to their opinion no matter what it is. That’s the hallmark of democracy. But I know that my life would be fuller if I understood everything my emotional brain so adamantly believes I do.
Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner of legendary investor Warren Buffet is famous and disciplined when it comes to this idea.
“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
So like any conclusion on getting better at something, there’s a lot of work involved.
I have to do a lot of active reading and listen to as many arguments as I can. Argue with people smarter than me, fight against my own emotional bias, and think about as many variables as possible. It’s not the easiest thing to do, and there’s also my problem at the beginning.
How am I supposed to form an opinion or understand something when I keep forgetting all the information I digest?
One of the many reasons why people have trouble explaining videos, books, or articles is because they simply don’t remember what was said.
It’s worth then understanding how memory works.
How memory works
There are two main parts, short-term and long-term memory.
In recent years we’ve discovered that long-term memory is the seat of understanding. It stores not just facts but complex concepts or schemas by organizing scattered bits of information into patterns of knowledge.
Nicholas Carr writes:
“By organizing scattered bits of information into patterns of knowledge, schemas give depth and richness to our thinking…”
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/9778945-the-shallows
Schemas give depth and richness to our thinking. Understanding intelligence is derived largely from the schemas we have acquired over long periods.
Think of long-term memory as an investment portfolio. As you gather more and more schemas, you gain intellectual compound interest over time. They all begin to connect, increasing your understanding of the world exponentially over time.
But here’s the key, for information to get to your long-term memory in the first place, it has to go through a part of the short-term memory called working memory.
Working memory has about two to four slots where we can process information. It acts as a bottleneck for the infinite amount of information around us. The problem is that what we hold there can quickly vanish if we don’t keep thinking about them or rehearse them in our heads. In other words, if we don’t grapple with the ideas in our working memory for an extended time, they never get sent to long-term memory. They just disappear.
Our current culture makes this process challenging. We’re blasted with new stimuli and information at the rate of a firehose. This couldn’t be worse for our memories. Once we surpass these two to four slots in our working memory, once we overload with information, we begin to get distracted. Our ability to process and retain information begins to plummet. This is, in part, why I feel like I know so much but understand so little. Why I can scroll down my Twitter feed and barely remember any of it. Info jumps into my working memory only to be replaced by the next thing and the next thing. Very little of it, if any, make into my long-term memory. As Nicholas Carr writes:
“As we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data.”
Multitasking
But it’s not just information overload that affects our ability to remember things.
Multitasking is just as bad. Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time. When we multitask, all we’re doing is quickly switching from one task to another, and our brains struggle to commit anything to long-term memory. When we’re constantly switching tasks, tab shifting, and notification checking, every switch is like hitting the reset button. It gives no time for deeper processing.
So what’s the fix?
The first thing is to eliminate multitasking, distractions, and information streams that cause overload.
Easier said than done, I know. We’re all aware at this point that these services exploit our psychology, and it’s hard to resist the addicting dopamine surge that comes from checking them. But once you have that one source of information, a book, for example, it’s the only thing you’re paying attention to.
How do you remember that? How do you get the arguments of the book into your long-term memory to the point where you can explain them back to someone.
There aren’t a lot of methods that help commit things to long-term memory, and I’m going to go through the three big ones:
- Recall
- Feynman Technique
- Spaced Repetition
Recall
After you’ve read or watched any material, simply look away and see what you can recall from the material you’ve just taken in. In one experiment, students who studied a text and then practiced it by recalling as much information as they could and repeated that process learned far more than their peers who either went on to something else or reread the text over and over again.
Practicing recall is counterintuitive to most consumers of content. You finish a chapter and go to the next one, or you finish a video and move on to something else. But spending as little as 30 seconds after finishing a chapter or video and recalling its key points vastly improves your understanding of a topic and commitment of it to long-term memory.
Feynman Technique
Then there’s the Feynman technique. World-renowned physicist and teacher Richard Feynman codified this method of learning. It’s probably best if you want to understand something, but it’s also the most work-intensive.
- Take something you want to understand.
- Write out an explanation as if you were teaching it to someone who didn’t understand the subject.
- Whenever you get stuck, go back to the material and re-learn. Fill in the gaps in your knowledge until you can write an explanation without reading the source material.
- Simplify. (Get rid of technical/convoluted language).
Simplify it to the point that a kid could get what you’re saying. To do this, Feynman recommended the use of analogies. Analogies connect complex ideas to something more relatable, making them easier to understand.
I used it earlier, understanding and intelligence are like an investment portfolio. It gains compound interest as complex schemas connect with each other. And the other, working memory acts like a bottleneck to long-term memory.
Spaced Repetition
And finally, there’s spaced repetition. LeBron James has undoubtedly put in tens of thousands of hours shooting hoops over many years. The Beatles practiced music for years before they became masters of the craft.
Why don’t we do that with information and arguments?
There are a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that people assume the brain is a computer. Once you get the information, it’s there forever. But the brain functions much more like a muscle, and like any muscle, it needs to be exercised, its neural connections strengthened.
There’s the famous saying:
“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
In other words, the more often you use the neurons grappling with the information you want to commit to memory, the stronger the connections will get, and the stronger your memory and understanding of that information will.
Spaced repetition does this by firing neurons over a long time.
If you read, recall or do the Feynman technique on the key concepts from say, Kant’s philosophy and space them out by three days over a couple of weeks, it results in the highest amount of memory retention. Much better than if you were to do it all once.
You may be thinking, reread the same thing? Recall the same thing again? Do the Feynman technique again? Over a long time?
Unfortunately, that’s the reality if you want to understand something long-term. We are strapped for a time most days of our lives. Doing all this work outside of our jobs or other responsibilities of daily life sounds like an awful task.
So we turn to others to do it for us. It makes plenty of sense, and I’ll also add that life isn’t the book report. You don’t need to be memorizing and understanding everything that comes your way. That’s absurd.
What I wish I did more often, however, is spend more time thinking about one important thing at a time instead of trying to absorb as much information as possible, only to forget most of it.
As Charlie Munger has said:
“Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not keep up with every damn thing in the world.”
It’s a call to increase the quality of information you receive rather than the quantity and to spend more time with it.
Union College Psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Christopher Sabri says:
“The internet plays to our natural tendency to vastly overvalue what happens to us right now.”
Our bias towards novelty is strong and forces us towards the trivial rather than the essential. No matter the amount of work anyone does, people will continue to hold different opinions, and that’s when intellectual humility becomes important.
To recognize the limits of your knowledge and appreciate others' intellectual strengths is one of the best things a person can do.
It’s not only when learning happens, but it’s also where disagreements become more constructive.
I think Cal Turnbull, founder of the Change my view subreddit sums it up:
“It seems to be in our nature to focus on how we were wrong over the fact that we’re now smarter (as if we can’t be works in progress). And we often attach our egos to what we believe. A view is just how you see something. It doesn’t have to define you, and trying to detach from it to gain understanding can be a very good thing.”
As Confucius once said:
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
The trick is not to be fooled by illusions of superiority and to learn to accurately reevaluate our competence each day.
Because in Adler’s words:
“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
What’s on trial is not just the weight of our opinions, but our entire understanding of the world.
Personal notes
- The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
- To go past working memory and retain knowledge, in the long run, I have to keep it in the working memory for an extended time. And build schemas and connections to it.
- Eliminate multitasking, distractions, and information streams that cause overload (perhaps reduce twitter consumption, remove slack from a mobile phone).
- Use Recall, Feynman technique, and spaced repetition
- Nurture the topics I want to master
- “Let it go” attitude to all stuff that seems fun but you don’t want to commit to it
- True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.
Recall
After you’ve read or watched any material, look away and see what you can recall from the content you’ve just taken in. For instance, spending as little as 30 seconds after finishing a chapter or video and recalling its key points.
Feynman Technique
- Take something you want to understand.
- Write out an explanation as if you were teaching it to someone who didn’t understand the subject. You can try to write a blog post, tutorial, or video about one particular subject.
- Whenever you get stuck, go back to the material and re-learn. Fill in the gaps in your knowledge until you can write an explanation without reading the source material.
- Simplify. (Get rid of technical/convoluted language).
Spaced Repetition
The more often you use the neurons grappling with the information you want to commit to memory, the stronger the connections will get, and the stronger your memory and understanding of that information will.
Pick your fights
Don’t try to learn everything. You can spend a bit of time grasping a subject just to open your mind to it. But that won’t mean you know it. I have to start being intentional about the things I want to learn. It’s like nurturing a plant. It’s not just putting seed and earth in a vase. I have to water it every once in a while, put it in the sun, and remove any bad weeds. By this, I mean that if I want to pick an area of interest and master it, I have to stick with it for a very long time, and since I don’t have unlimited time, well just pick the most important things to grasp.