This is how to learn anything: three science-backed tips to level up your learning

Humans create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day.

But our attention spans are so bad, you’re probably about to stop reading this article.

We have all information we could ever need about any topic ever — the step-by-step guide to wealth; the playbook to crush your career; in-depth (in-deeeepth) resources for better sex.

But most of us don’t possess the skills and the process to learn it.

Luckily, there’s a science to learning.

And it’s not what you might’ve been taught. Among the fantastic research of learned learners about learning, you won’t find any suggestions to highlight, re-read, ‘chunk it into bite-sized bits’, or ‘just Wikipedia it!’

Instead, the science is pretty clear, and we’re going to break it down. In this article you’ll learn:

1. How to remember where you put your keys (hint: it’s not about memory)
2. The number one hack for learning
3. How to make boring stuff interesting for your brain

1. Use intense focus to lay the foundations of memory

The other day I forgot where I put my keys. Well actually, I didn’t exactly forget, I just never made a memory.

I’m bumbling around, juggling the shopping and my tyrant toddler’s demands, and paying absolutely no attention to where I put my keys (in the laundry — makes total sense).

So when I started to rack my brain to remember where I put them, I came up empty. This situation happens to us all the time, and it’s not a failure of memory: it’s a failure of attention.

The thing is, our brain only stores information with the following equation:

Input + Attention

That means to learn you need to apply deep focus, zero in, become lost in the moment, get in the zone, find flow, vibrate on the right frequency, and become completely indistractible.

But It has never been harder to do that when we’re constantly interrupted…

A quick note on phones

I know it’s hard to separate yourself from your one true love. But the reality is your phone is destroying your ability to learn new stuff. Here three scary stats about distractions:

1. Distractions are making you dumber. Research at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that people distracted by emails and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, twice that found in studies on the impact of smoking marijuana.
2. Distractions are stealing your time. According to a University of California Irvine study, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to deep focus on a task
3. We are always distracted. In August 2018, research from the UK’s telecoms regulator, Ofcom, reported that people check their smartphones on average every 12 minutes during their waking hours.

Add those three facts together and it’s a miracle if you get ANYTHING done.

If you realize how important this is, you don’t need me to dwell on the solution. If you want to get stuff done and if you want to learn new things, you need to put your phone away. End of story.

Level up your focus

You’re phone-free and ready to go. How can you enhance your focus to you remember what you learn? Here’s what science has to say about that.

1. Use breathwork to narrow focus. Research shows that paced breathing exercises can focus attention and regulate the nervous system. Next time you sit down to read something important, start with a few minutes of paced breathing to a set rhythm, such as box breathing.
2. Schedule time for Deep Work. IF you need to learn something important, you need to allocate an exclusive block of time for it, says Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, Professor at Georgetown University, and all-around Guru of Productivity. Otherwise, we will miss the few, critical opportunities we have to engage in the kind of deep attention that learning requires. Check out Newport’s free time blocking resource for more info.
3. Practice, practice, practice. Focus is a muscle and it’s getting weaker with every scrolly, every extra tab, every quick tweet peek. Citing the research of the late Clifford Nass, Cal Newport explains that attention switching and multitasking are killing our attention. Instead, the more time you spend in focus, the more focused you’ll be.

With these techniques, you’ve set the scene to learn. But what does it take to really remember what you’ve learned?

2. Use strategic testing to improve memory

“ One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know” — ‘Make It Stick’

The one thing I wish I knew during law school

I wish I had known that re-reading is way, way less effective than taking practice tests…

Throughout my time in law school, I was always fascinated by this one girl. Not because she was pretty (*not just because…).

I was interested in big exercise books, which were stuffed full of color-coded, highlighted, beautifully hand-written study notes.

When I finally got my hands on them, (I think pity came through in the end), I noticed something astonishing: The notes were mostly copy + pasted sections of the textbook, paragraphs, sections, and pages of the text replicated word for word.

I spent late nights in the law library, pouring over these lovely notes. But it didn’t help me in the exam. I didn’t do very well and no amount of pity could help me by then.

The reason, it turns out, is that re-reading was our primary study method. And the science of learning says that if we really wanted to learn, we should’ve spent less time re-reading and more time taking tests.

Quiz yourself

There are two fascinating studies that prove the power of quizzes.

In the first, college students studied paragraphs about science. Then, they either took a quiz or re-read the material.

After a delay of two days, the students who took the test recalled more of the material than those who simply re-read it (68 v. 54 percent). Even better, the quizzing improved memory a week later (56 v. 42 percent).

A single quiz gives you a significant learning advantage — and that advantage continues over time.

Another experiment found that after one week, a study-only group forgot 52% of what they read (damn! That’s half!)

But the group who was quizzed repeatedly forgot just 10%. So if you want to increase your advantage, don’t just take a single quiz; quiz yourself over and over again.

Practical in practice

Testing isn’t just for the classroom.

Self-quizzing should become your key habit for learning anything. And you can do it anywhere, anytime.

Here are three practical ways to implement self-testing:

1. Pause halfway through your reading and ask yourself ‘what have I learned so far?’ Doing this multiple times throughout a text will help you consolidate your memory. For bonus points, try quizzing yourself on the material a few days (or weeks) after you’ve read it (more on spaced repetition later).
2. Summarize what you’ve learned in your own words, or write down everything you can remember once you’ve finished. Then go back and check to see whether that matches up with the key points.
3. Before you start reading, ask yourself what you think the article is about and what you already know about the topic. Studies show that correction via feedback is one of the most effective ways to learn, and you can take advantage of this by creating a hypothesis before you read and then getting feedback as you go — a bit like quizzing on the fly!

So next time you find yourself re-reading the same stuff over and over again, STOP. You’re wasting your time.

Instead, take a chill, then take a quiz. Ask yourself what you’ve read so far and quiz yourself on the key points.

And if you’re still struggling to remember what you’ve read, you can use one of the techniques below to make it meaningful.

3. Manufacture meaning to create sticky memories

Think back to a time when you absolutely crushed a memory task.

Maybe you’ve rapped every single line to an old favorite song perfectly — five years after you last heard it. Or maybe you successfully navigated through backstreets to that amazing noodle place you’ve only been to once.

Why do we remember seemingly unimportant facts like this, but not the details of a client brief, our boss’ feedback, or those hot exam tips the lecturer gave us in the last week of class?

The answer is this:

Meaning → memory

We remember what is meaningful.

Our brain takes meaningful information and meshes it into a web of past experiences, emotions, and knowledge. It’s like meaningful information is covered in velcro, and it just straps right in.

But without meaning, new information is way too slippery. In fact, even Masters of Memory like professional chess players can’t grab hold of new info if it isn’t meaningful.

How to mess with a Chess Master

In one study, chess players were given five seconds to look at a chessboard set up with pieces placed in realistic game positions. Then, the players were given an empty board and asked to replicate what they just saw.

The chess players who were masters and grandmasters could replace an average of sixteen pieces correctly on the board. Novices only got three pieces. Pretty impressive, right?

Plot twist:

The pieces were then arranged on the board randomly, with no playable meaning. In that situation, the masters completely lost their memory advantage. In fact, they remembered the piece positions just as poorly as the novices did.

Even chess masters don’t have amazing memories for everything. They have amazing memories of what is meaningful to them.

Making meaning in practice

Okay, so I can remember every line of Andre 3000’s rap in Roses because it meant something to me at the time (trying to impress a Year 6 crush, I guess…)

But not everything you read is meaningful, right?

Well, that doesn’t mean it can’t become meaningful.

We have the power to create meaning for just about anything. And the following techniques can help:

1. Learn to teach. Stuff suddenly becomes more important if we know we have to teach it to someone else. If you imagine translating new information into relatable concepts your friend or spouse can understand, you are much more likely to retain that information. Learn as if you are going to teach, and your learning will have meaning. (Don’t forget to actually back someone into a corner and go on a diatribe about all the cool new stuff you just learned).
2. Make it about you. Are you more likely to remember the last time you cleaned the kitchen, or the last time your spouse did? Psychologists call this the superiority illusion, and it shows that our brains store more information about ourselves than others. You can leverage this effect to give meaning to new information by making it about you. Neuroscientist Lisa Genova suggests that you “make what you’re learning personal. Associate it with your personal history and opinions, and you’ll strengthen your memory. If you play a starring role in what you’re trying to remember, you’ll be more likely to remember it.”
3. Elaborate. Scientists suggest that good learners leverage the power of elaboration. Elaboration means connecting what you’re learning to what you already know, which enhances its meaning. Visualization is a powerful way to do this. For example, you might try and learn the structure of an atom by imagining the solar system. Elaboration is all about making connections between what you’re learning and what you already know, and if you can make those connections visual, you’ll strengthen the ties.

Becoming a meaning-maker will turbocharge your learning. And it works for everything — from trying to remember important course material to the lyrics to a new song. Meaning matters.

The Wrap-up

To turbocharge your learning:

1. Strengthen your attention muscles with breathwork, deep work time, and focus practice.
2. Test yourself on what you’ve learned, rather than re-reading or highlighting massive chunks of text. Test yourself quickly in the middle, and at the end, of learning anything important.
3. Make new info meaningful by teaching it to others, finding ways to make it about you, and making connections — especially visual ones — to stuff you already know.