Sign in Subscribe

Remember, learn and understand

Remember, learn and understand
The chapter of your "Brain Manual" on growing as a person.

Learning, remembering and understanding are entirely different things. I'm convinced people can level up the way they live by remembering faster, in turn making it easier to learn things - which will eventually lead to understanding things better.

If you're like me and you're in love with learning new things, then this post was made for you. Below I outline what I think remembering, learning and understanding mean to me - and how to get started with optimizing each step of the process so you can remember more, learn faster and understand things deeply.

Remembering

Remembering. Being able to recall or recite things from memory. No understanding required. Remembering is completely hackable.

Unless you have a medical or genetic issue, you're probably capable of remembering an absolutely astounding amount of things in no time flat. You just need to learn how to remember the right way and then practise, practise practise.

I could rave on about mnemonics, the journey method, the mind palace, major peg system or musical rythms - but it's much better you absorb information from the sources which actually use, research and distill these techniques:

Learning

Learning is a process in which we acquire strands of knowledge, and weave these strands together with other strands we already posses, strands we've already woven in the past. When learning something new it is crucial that we can connect it to something we've already woven. I believe this process is lifelong and lots of fun. It's also not something you can take shortcuts in.

You can, however, optimize what and how you learn so it is most useful to you. So in that regards it is possible to accelerate the speed of learning above what many people consider normal.

I won't go into too much depth in this post, but here are a few things to help you on your journey:

Understanding

When it comes to the hardest of all – understanding – I firmly believe Richard Feynmann hit the nail on the head. Pretend you're explaining the concept to a 10-year old. If you can do that well without using any jargon, you'll probably in the realm of understanding.

To explain what truly understanding something means, I think excerpt from "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" says it best.

“For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”

I thought, “I know what it is: They’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.”

It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining.” And then we would have fun discussing it:

“No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up,” I would say.

“How did the spring get wound up?” he would ask.

“I wound it up.”

“And how did you get moving?”

“From eating.”

“And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving.” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.

I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the boy on the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”

Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “Wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word!”

“What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind “energy.” Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.

It’s also not even true that “energy makes it go,” because if it stops, you could say, “energy makes it stop” just as well. What they’re talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it’s just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.

But that’s the way all the books were: They said things that were useless, mixed-up, ambiguous, confusing, and partially incorrect. How anybody can learn science from these books, I don’t know, because it’s not science.”

The hardest part of truly understanding something is recognizing when you don't truly understand a part of the thing you're trying to understand. This is also where writing about the thing and teaching the thing come in as a means of coming to a deeper understanding of the thing yourself.

In summary

If you're like me, optimized remembering and properly sequenced and distilled learning will ignite an unquenchable thirst for life-long learning and understanding.

As with everything keep in mind that all the knowledge in the world is worthless if it's just stuck in your brain and you don't use it to teach someone, act on it or undertake actions yourself.

Let me know if any of this helped you by dropping a message to me on twitter.