Whether it’s a new technology, a foreign language, or an advanced skill, staying competitive often means learning new things. Being a quick learner can give you an even greater edge. And the good news is that there are ways you can “hack” your brain to accomplish that.
Here are eleven methods that you can try together or on their own:
1. TEACH SOMEONE ELSE (OR JUST PRETEND TO)
If you imagine that you’ll need to teach someone else the material or task you are trying to grasp, you can speed up your learning and remember more, according to a study done at Washington University in St. Louis. The expectation changes your mind-set so that you engage in more effective approaches to learning than those who simply learn to pass a test, according to John Nestojko, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology and coauthor of the study.
“When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure,” Nestojko writes. “Our results suggest that students also turn to these types of effective learning strategies when they expect to teach.”
2. LEARN IN SHORT BURSTS OVER TIME
Experts at the Louisiana State University’s Center for Academic Success suggest dedicating 30 to 50 minutes to learning new material. “Anything less than 30 is just not enough, but anything more than 50 is too much information for your brain to take in at one time,” writes learning strategies graduate assistant Ellen Dunn.
Skill-acquisition isn’t an event, it’s a process. If you truly want to master a new skill, it’s far better to invest small amounts of time over an extended period than a large amount of time all at once. This is what researchers call the “spacing effect,” which refers to the finding that skill-development tends to improve when learning is spaced out over time.
You’re probably thinking, “But wait, wouldn’t this take longer?” Not necessarily. Because the spacing effect has been shown to boost retention, spreading out your learning process over a period of time limits the likelihood that you’ll have to go back to brush up (or start over completely) a week or a month or a year later. Since the late 19th century, psychologists (and anyone who’s ever crammed for an exam) have known that one of the biggest hindrances to learning is forgetting.
While it sounds counterintuitive, you can learn faster when you practice distributed learning, or “spacing.” In an interview with The New York Times, Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, says learning is like watering a lawn. “You can water a lawn once a week for 90 minutes or three times a week for 30 minutes,” he said. “Spacing out the watering during the week will keep the lawn greener over time.”
To retain material, Carey said it’s best to review the information one to two days after first studying it. “One theory is that the brain actually pays less attention during short learning intervals,” he said in the interview. “So repeating the information over a longer interval—say a few days or a week later, rather than in rapid succession—sends a stronger signal to the brain that it needs to retain the information.”
3. STOP TRYING TO STRETCH YOUR ATTENTION SPAN
Learning how to execute any new skill competently takes one crucial factor many of us don’t pay enough attention to: attention. Human attention is complex, with many factors influencing how attentive we can be at any given moment. Still, there’s at least one way to improve your ability to pay attention, and it’s amazingly simple: Just stop trying to stretch your attention span beyond its ordinary limits.
If you find yourself getting distracted while trying to learn something, press pause, then break up the learning process into even shorter segments. It’s called “micro-learning,” and neuroscientist John Medina has summed up the concept in what he calls the “10 Minute Rule.” His research suggests that the brain’s ability to pay attention typically plummets to near-zero after roughly 10 minutes. So focus instead on developing a skill over numerous, short sessions. This can help you give the task your full attention and obtain maximum results in the shortest time possible. Plus, it all but guarantees that you’ll leverage the spacing effect and avoid forgetting everything later.
None of this brain science is especially complicated, but the reality is that each of us often behaves in ways that make it harder for our brains to grasp a particular skill. Short, focused bursts of repeated practice may seem inefficient when you block out all those learning sessions in your calendar. But from your brain’s point of view, it’s the fastest route to mastery.
Neil Starr, a course mentor at Western Governors University, an online nonprofit university where the average student earns a bachelor’s degree in two and a half years, recommends preparing for micro learning sessions. “Make note cards by hand for the more difficult concepts you are trying to master,” he says. “You never know when you’ll have some in-between time to take advantage of.”
4. TAKE NOTES BY HAND
While it’s faster to take notes on a laptop, using a pen and paper will help you learn and comprehend better. Researchers at Princeton University and UCLA found that when students took notes by hand, they listened more actively and were able to identify important concepts. Taking notes on a laptop, however, leads to mindless transcription, as well as an opportunity for distraction, such as email.
“In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand,” writes coauthor and Princeton University psychology professor Pam Mueller. “We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”
5. TAKE A STUDY NAP
Downtime is important when it comes to retaining what you learn, and getting sleep in between study sessions can boost your recall up to six months later, according to new research published in Psychological Science.
In an experiment held in France, participants were taught the Swahili translation for 16 French words in two sessions. Participants in the “wake” group completed the first learning session in the morning and the second session in the evening of the same day, while participants in the “sleep” group completed the first session in the evening, slept, and then completed the second session the following morning. Participants who had slept between sessions recalled about 10 of the 16 words, on average, while those who hadn’t slept recalled only about 7.5 words.
“Our results suggest that interweaving sleep between practice sessions leads to a twofold advantage, reducing the time spent relearning and ensuring a much better long-term retention than practice alone,” writes psychological scientist Stephanie Mazza of the University of Lyon. “Previous research suggested that sleeping after learning is definitely a good strategy, but now we show that sleeping between two learning sessions greatly improves such a strategy.”
6. CHANGE IT UP
When learning a new motor skill, changing the way you practice it can help you master it faster, according to a study at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. In an experiment, participants were asked to learn a computer-based task. Those who used a modified learning technique during their second session performed better than those who repeated the same method.
The findings suggest that reconsolidation—a process in which existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge—plays a key role in strengthening motor skills. Basically, if you try using your new skill in a different way, you’ll learn it faster than just repeating the same tasks over and over.
But keep the chances small: Research shows making the task too different doesn’t help with mastery. For example, someone learning to switch between guitar chords could try playing them in a different order or pattern.
7. TRY PROJECT-BASED AND IMMERSIVE LEARNING
You may think you’re a quick learner, but Scott H. Young sets the bar. He learned MIT’s four-year computer science curriculum in less than 12 months, and four languages in a year, both of which he writes about on his blog. Young says that directness is often overlooked when it comes to learning.
“A lot of us are working under the wrong metaphor,” he says. “Most people think the brain is like a muscle. The muscle metaphor says when you go to the gym and do barbell exercises, you’ll be stronger when you go to lift in real life. The problem is that the brain learns in specifics. You’re stuck in the context when you learn something.”
Transferring knowledge and applying it in real life won’t work if it doesn’t match the context under which it was learned. What matters are the cognitive features of what you’re trying to master, and the way you practice must be substantially similar. Young suggests project-based and immersive learning.
Consider Bennie Lewis, one of the ultralearners Young profiles in his book, Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. Young was in a student exchange program in France and was struggling to learn the language. Then he heard that Lewis became fluent in three months.
After meeting Lewis, Young realized that although he had submersed himself in French culture, he had inadvertently created an English bubble, picking classes that were taught in English and making English-speaking friends. Lewis, on the other hand, hadn’t relied on traditional language learning techniques. He’d dove in, using a phrasebook to get started, speaking to strangers, and using visual mnemonics to memorize vocabulary.
The scope of ways we have to learn hard skills is broader than we think, says Young. “We think school is the only way to learn, but language classes are not optimal because you get nowhere near enough practice,” he says.
8. TEST YOURSELF
Young says that another overlooked aspect of learning is retrieval. “Students often study by reading and rewriting their notes,” he says. “The problem is that the brain is a cognitive miser. If I don’t have to recall something, I don’t store it in my memory.”
So instead of reviewing, the better way to learn is to practice recalling something, testing yourself before you think you’re ready. Young suggests taking sample tests or using flashcards to recall what you’ve learned, then identify the areas where your retrieval is faulty.
9. TRAIN YOUR BASAL GANGLIA
Most of us focus on comprehension when we’re attempting to improve a skill. That may seem sensible enough, but science shows that while understanding is vital to heightening proficiency (it’s hard to improve when you don’t know how), it isn’t enough to obtain mastery. Turning any newly acquired knowledge into an actual skill requires engaging a part of your brain that heavily impacts learning and movement, known as the “basal ganglia.”
There are two things you’ll need to know about your basal ganglia: First, it learns slowly. Unlike other regions of the brain–such as the neocortex, which deals with the executive functions of the brain and learns quickly—the basal ganglia takes much longer to absorb new experiences and information. Second, it learns by repeatedly performing the behavior. For instance, when teaching a kid to ride a bike you can explain how to steer and pedal the bicycle in a few minutes. But while she may understand conceptually how to operate the bike, her initial attempts will probably be pretty unsuccessful. Why? Because riding a bicycle, like all skills, requires training the basal ganglia, which takes repetition and practice.
As you attempt to master a skill, intentionally engage in repeated practice sessions that allow you to fail, adapt and try again. It’s this process that will enable you to improve and eventually become competent in the skill. Because when it comes to training your basal ganglia, repetition is the key to mastery.
10. BREAK IT DOWN TO SUB SKILLS
In a previous article for Fast Company, founder and CEO of Ripe Sean Kim suggested breaking down any skill you want to know into all of its components. For example, if you want to learn how to be a stronger writer, you might break the skill down into “sub skills” like organization and structure of information; tone and word choice, sentence structure, and grammar. It’s okay if you don’t know all the components before you start. You can always add to the list.
Once you have your initial list, think about which sub skill is most important for you to master in order to reach your goal. Going back to the writing example, maybe you want your emails to be more easily understood. You might identify “organization and structure” or “grammar” as the most important based on your current skill level. Focus on learning this most important sub skill first, then move onto another. Focus on one sub-skill at a time to avoid the slowing down that comes from multitasking.
11. TRY THE FEYNMAN TECHNIQUE
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was famous for his academic accomplishments in a wide range of scientific fields. But he attributed his achievements to his method of learning rather than his innate intelligence. Fadeke Adegbuyi of Doist summarizes the Feynman Technique in four steps:
- Choose a concept to learn. Choose the topic you want to learn about and write it at the top of a notebook page. This forces you to think about what you don’t know and choose an area to study that’s small enough to fit on a page.
- Teach it to yourself or someone else. Write everything you know about the topic out as if you were explaining it to yourself or someone else. Don’t consult your notes or any resources. This forces you to face how much you actually do or don’t know. Alternatively, you can actually try to teach it to someone else.
- Return to the source material if you get stuck. Go back to whatever you’re learning from—a book, lecture notes, podcast—and fill in the gaps in your explanation. You’ll probably have to go back and forth between steps 2 and 3 a few times. This is good and helps with your learning.
- Simplify your explanations and create analogies. Refine your notes and explanations until they feel clear and obvious. Distilling what you know into its simplest form—without relying on jargon—is key to truly learning and understanding something, rather than just memorizing it. See if you can incorporate analogies that feel intuitive to you as well.
David Hoffeld and Charlie Sorrel also contributed writing, reporting and/or advice to this article.
