How to learn faster: 5 ways to tune your brain for new things
Learning quickly gives you a great competitive edge for personal and professional development. Learning aids in acquiring critical thinking skills and discovering numerous ways in which we can relate with people from different cultures. It is the only way to deal with the continuous change in our life so that we can move forward with ease. And as science proves, there are five ways that help you learn and remember new knowledge faster. Enjoy!
1. Teach others (or just pretend)
The University of Washington in St. Louis states that if you imagine that you need to explain to someone else the material you are learning it can speed up your learning. This method lets your brain learn more efficiently than when you just have to take a test.
Thus, If you are struggling to learn the Polish language, try to teach it to your friends who have a lower level of language knowledge. It will help!
2. Make breaks. Refresh your brain!
Researchers at the University of Louisiana advise taking 30-50 minutes to study new material. Shorter periods of time could not be enough, on the other hand, more than 50 minutes is already too much. Therefore, take breaks of 5-10 minutes. It is hardly possible to learn new material with a burning head. Take care of yourself, student! :)
3. Take notes by hand
Taking notes on a laptop is usually faster, but using pen and paper helps you learn and understand the material better. Researchers at Princeton and UCLA have found out that when students take handwritten notes, they listen more actively and are better at recognizing important concepts. Pam Mueller, a professor at Princeton University, says that note-taking on a laptop is worse because students usually tend to write lectures copying word-by-word, rather than process information and formulate it in their own words. This is bad for the results of learning.
4. Don't be afraid to take a nap!
To remember what you have learned, it is crucial to periodically shut down. A study in the journal Psychological Science shows that sleeping in between classes helps to better remember the material. In an experiment conducted in France, participants were taught to translate 16 French words into Swahili over two sessions. Participants from one group studied in the morning and then in the evening of the same day, and participants from the second group studied in the evening, then slept, and in the morning they came to the second lesson. Those who slept were able to recall an average of 10 out of 16 words, and those who did not - only 7.5.
This shows that sleep in the learning process is doubly beneficial - it shortens the time it takes you to master the material.
5. Use different study methods
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say that as you learn new skills, it's helpful to change the way you train them. In their experiment, participants had to master a task on a computer. Those students who used a different, modified method during the second session ended up performing better than those who used the same method a second time. According to Pablo Selnick, it is better to slightly modify your approach to learning in different classes than to practice exactly the same way several times in a row.
Our team also recommends you reading such books to learn how to make your studying more effective:
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey
- The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast! by Josh Kaufman
- Accelerated Learning Techniques for Students: Learn More in Less Time! by Joe McCullough
- The Only Skill That Matters by Jonathan A. Levi
We hope you found this information useful :) Have a nice rest of the day!
Photo by Dmitry Ratushny, Annie Spratt, Ben White via Unsplash.com