The action: Sign up for Learning How to Learn. Just do it.

The long form: Learning is the difference between forgetting what you hear, and being able to use it to your advantage. There is no better foundation to success in life than to learn how to learn.

Instructor Barbra Oakley is a former military linguist. Over the course of 12-18 months, students are taken through one of the world’s most intense education programmes, ending up as quite proficient Russian speakers. I was a student at Norway’s equivalent military language training – albeit in Arabic – and even though I would not like to repeat the ordeal, I was impressed at the unique methods used to make us retain 50-100 new words each day.

Oakley and her colleague Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, have since developed a general programme on how to learn more efficiently. A few of my take-aways:

• Learning is about making changes to your long-term memory. In order to do so, you need to fight the natural tendency of the brain to discard what you don’t use. In other words: Delay the forgetting with spaced repetition.
• Don’t cram. You need to “let the cement dry” – by reading a bit, taking a break, revising etc.
• When learning languages: Don’t correct yourself too much. Memory depends on your ability to chunk – to create larger blobs of knowledge. If you let yourself babble, making mistakes on the way, you get larger chunks that are easier to remember and correct later on.
• Use this for writing as well: Don’t correct yourself. Turn up the font size so you can only see one word at a time, or cover the screen with a blanket. Just vomit the words on the page.
• If you write your to-do list the day before, or read the difficult questions before falling asleep, you can let the zombies in your brain (your unconscious) work on the problem in the background.
• You are not nervous before the test. You are excited!
• You can learn something from everyone and everything. Take 30 seconds after a meeting or after reading something and write down which one thing you learned.

Read more:

The New York Times-article on the programme.

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