How do taught learners actually learn in lectures? You probably know those people that are at every lecture, they're super engaged, they're never falling asleep in class, they are remembering way more than you do even though you both attended the same lectures. How? Is there something that they're doing that you just can't see or are they really just that much smarter?
Well, in this video, I want to talk about how important natural intelligence really is based on the research. and some strategies that you can use to make lectures much more valuable. First things first, how much does your natural intelligence or IQ really matter?
Most people are not really extremely excellent deep processors, but don't worry, it doesn't mean it's the end of the world for you. 50 years ago, that's probably what someone would have said, is that your intelligence can't really be trained, but fortunately that's not the case. Research of the last two, three decades, especially in the last 10, 11 years, has shown that yes, although your IQ is strongly associated with your ability to perform academically, in some cases in the research, this is called the IQ achievement link, there's a lot we can do within our IQ and our IQ can actually grow. But interestingly, some other research on this finds that self-discipline is actually more of an influencer than IQ. And one of the studies even concludes that a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential is their failure to exercise self-discipline.
Which, in my case, my personal experience, is very, very true. If I think about myself back in high school, like, I didn't have really any self-discipline to speak of. Honestly, I just played games all the time.
And then when I entered into university, I was like, really, really, really disciplined. Like, I stopped playing games, I went cold turkey on pretty much everything. I went actually really over the top, but as a result my academic performance was like massively improved. And for a lot of students that I work with, I see a very similar thing. Not in that they necessarily are lacking discipline on a day-to-day basis, a lot of students are studying really hard, but where I see a lack of discipline sometimes is a lack of consistency with improving their methods and learning new skills.
Like they'll have a certain set of techniques or methods of note-taking or handling lectures that they're used to, and they're not going to be able to do that. And even though it's not really working, they're not really consistent or disciplined in working on a new method to replace that. And so inevitably, they just continue to get the same results that they've always been getting.
And one of the things that I've observed is that while it's true that not every student can become like this once-in-a-generation genius, most students can relatively improve compared to their baseline. And that improvement is often surprisingly significant. Like someone that is normally achieving...
you know like 40 or 50 percent in a test in my experience they can go up to 70 80 90 with a bit of training and the reason is because most people in the mainstream have never really been trained on how to learn effectively they're just using like a haphazard combination of techniques and habits that they've picked up over the years and so when you actually start training them they become much more effective at using their intellectual potential and i sort of think of it like learning a new sport Not everyone can become a NBA basketball player, but most people can be relatively better at playing basketball if they actually train and learn the right techniques. So the next question is what are the right skills to use, for example in lectures? Well the easiest way to figure that out is to look at what some top students are doing and then copy them.
If you agree with that statement you'll be wrong. Okay, so to explain why that that would be a terrible idea to just copy success, let me give you an example. Let's imagine that you are a doctor. I haven't put this on in a while. Let's say that a pharmaceutical company comes up to you and says that they've got a drug.
It's called Treatmentol. And Treatmentol is meant to be effective for a disease called disease-itis. And you've got patients with disease-itis, and the pharmaceutical company tells you that 99% of the people that have recovered from diseaseitis took treatmentol.
Do you recommend it to your patients? Think about this. Let's say that there are a million people with diseaseitis and 999,000 of them took treatmentol and only 100 recovered.
So what that means is that yes, let's say that of 100 people that recovered, 99 of them took treatmentol. So 99% of the people that recovered took it. However, so did basically a million other people that did not recover.
See, it's not about how many people that did well. used a certain technique. It's about how many people use a technique and do well versus the people that don't use it and don't do well.
For example, if a hundred people took treatment noll out of a million and 99 of the 100 recovered, then that would be effective. So just because there's a student that's doing really well that uses a certain technique does not mean that that technique is a reason for their success. It might just be a common technique that a lot of people use, and they themselves might have sufficient deep processing to allow them to be successful regardless of the technique that they use. Which is why I'm always saying if you're wanting to become a more efficient learner, you have to understand the principles of learning and do your own evaluation.
What is your level? What are your weaknesses and your strengths? and create a method of learning that is going to be optimized for that, not just taking what someone else does in their own context with their own brain and expecting to get the same results yourself.
Most of the time, it doesn't work like that. And there's a lot of research on what exactly is an effective technique, and a lot of researchers have tried to isolate exactly what works and what doesn't. Research is very complicated. Here are a few studies that I would recommend just starting with if you're interested. But if you want to cut to the chase, it's really about managing what's called cognitive load.
That's a central theme of a lot of these effective techniques. So cognitive load is basically your mental effort. It's how hard you have to think and how hard you have to try to organize something or process something or make sense of the information.
If I start speaking to you in some obscure language that you've never heard of before, then you're going to be exerting a lot of mental load trying to figure out what I'm saying. Likewise, if I'm teaching something, and I'm teaching it in a way that is very, very hard to follow and extremely complicated, you're going to be using a lot more cognitive load. It's the same for when you're reading a book. If it's in very, very technical, dense language, you need to use a lot more cognitive load to try to get through it.
And the trick to learning effectively is about keeping your cognitive load in an optimal state. I've talked about this in a lot of other videos before. And the summary of it is that you basically don't want your cognitive load to get too high because then you'll be overloaded, but you also don't want to be too low because that means that you're not really using your brain and therefore you're not actually learning.
And that's kind of like the worst waste of time. A great example of that would be like just reading and rereading and then rewriting notes multiple times. The cognitive load involved in that is very very low and that's something that we call passive learning. And remember kids, passive learning will kill you. Or at least it's pretty bad for you.
Anyway, cognitive load management is something that is not easy to do straight off the bat. And this is partly because cognitive load can happen for multiple reasons. For example, if you're trying to study but then the neighbor's dog is barking constantly, you now have to exert cognitive load to ignore the barking dog. So in this case your cognitive load may be kind of high, but it's not high for a good reason.
It's not high because your brain's trying to make sense of it, it's not high because you're processing it, it's just high because you're distracted. So that's not good increasing cognitive load. Whereas if your cognitive load is high because as you're reading you're trying to piece it together think about it Connected relate compare and contrast ideas.
These are the things that produce high quality learning So in this case cognitive load would be high for a good reason So we want our cognitive load to be reasonably high for good reasons And we want anything that creates cognitive load for a bad reason to be reduced or removed That might have sounded a little bit complicated Hopefully you could follow that. So let me give you some examples. I have some lectures here. I just found a random lecture slide about network security.
Don't ask me why I'm studying network security. It just randomly popped into my head. And there are some free slides that I found here from, I think it was Penn State School.
So if this is a lecture, and let's say I've got my lecture slides available before the lecture. If not, maybe I've got some textbook chapters, maybe I've got previous students notes that I'm using, or a course guide, or something. It doesn't really matter.
Just to give me a basic idea. One of the really effective things that you can do before going into a lecture is to prime yourself. Priming basically just means that you give your brain a little bit more to work with.
So if you're introduced to something really really technical and detailed, you don't need to exert so much cognitive load to make sense of it. So for example, if I was going into the lecture and I'm reading this for the first time, you know for me because I'm a total noob, I don't know what any other stuff really means. So if I, you know, if I look at transport security, I know what an IP address is.
IP protocol stack, I don't really know what that is. IP layer security protocol, like again, I don't really know what that is. These acronyms, I like know what they are, but again, don't really like understand.
And that's like just the intro. And if I go in and start learning this for The very first time at this level of detail, I'm going to be very overloaded because I'm not going to really know what's going on and I'm going to be overwhelmed very quickly. In other words, my cognitive load is going to overload probably almost immediately within the first few minutes. And then for the rest of the lecture, I'm... of dead you know like my brain's not really doing anything and i'm going to leave the lecture feeling more confused than when i came in and so we've really lost to begin with and so the idea with priming is we want to give ourselves just enough knowledge so that when we look at this it's not so unfamiliar now there's There's lots of ways that we can do this.
I've talked about how you can do this with non-linear note taking. If you want to check that video out, you can have a look over at this one. But there's also much simpler ways that you can do it if you're not really too comfortable with non-linear note taking yet. But it all comes down to isolating down what are the key words, what are...
pieces of terminology, get a general understanding of those keywords and terminology and start thinking to yourself how they all fit together. You could do this by writing out a list of questions that you want to prompt yourself with during the lecture. So for example, if I have a word that says IPSec processing here, and I've got another word that's like IPSec implementation, then I might ask the question, how are IPSec implementation and processing related to each other or dependent on each other? You take the keywords, you think about it, and then you about how they might be related to each other. If you can represent that on some nonlinear notes, great!
It's gonna be more convenient for you. Alternatively, if you're not super comfortable with nonlinear note-taking yet, you can just write down some keywords, write the definition in the simplest terms that you can possibly do. You don't want to be writing down definitions but then the definitions are so complicated that you're now exerting cognitive load to just remember the definition.
If you're gonna write definitions, you want to make sure that it's simple enough that when you read it, you're like, yep, I pretty much understand what it means. And even if it's not at the technically best level, it's still better than not having anything. And it will be better than having one that's really, really technical, but so complicated that you can't actually understand. So write down the key words, write down some key questions.
And then during the lecture, you can look at the questions and now you've got certain milestones of thinking to help your brain sort of process that information. And because you've already familiarized yourself with some of that terminology, terminology, the lecture is less confusing. And if you've done well, you've also thought about some of the relationships between them. So when the lecturer talks about some of the relationships, again, it's a little bit more familiar.
So again, this is all about priming yourself. So now the second thing that we can do is to take that concept of asking questions, and we can actually extend on that a little bit further. There's a really effective part of learning that comes from having to elaborate on something.
But elaborating on something doesn't explaining it more, going in more depth, a big part of elaboration is about figuring out how a concept is shaped. What are the edges? Where does it apply?
Where does it not apply? And what are the relationships that are less obvious? And so an easy way that we can try to trigger this is by asking non-obvious questions. So an example, if I use information, network security as an example might be this term that says authentication header. So.
An obvious question would be usually something like, what is authentication header? Or what is the importance or significance of an authentication header? What is the advantage of an authentication header? These are things that are usually very factual and very discreet.
They may ask about how it relates to other concepts as well. However, the answer is usually relatively simple, and it's something that most people will be expected to know. Asking these questions is valuable as well, but most of the time you're going to learn that anyway.
If we are going to the effort of thinking of questions to ask that are really going to help us with our learning, it's worthwhile thinking about the questions that people might not be asking. And a very quick and, you know, like kind of reliable-ish way of doing this that I do, you know, pretty often, is I try to look for the things that don't seem related to each other at first glance. For example, it could be something at the beginning of the lecture, like IPSec implementation, and I might scroll all the way down to something that seems a little bit less relevant, like hub and spoke VPN, right? So I might look at those two things, and again, I don't actually know if those two things are actually related to each other, but I might say, well, how are those two things related?
And for most topics, any concept is related to any other concept. Even if that concept relationship is indirect and somewhat distant, There's some kind of relationship. And forcing yourself to think about that also forces you to revise all the different relationships and interactions along the way.
Whereas when you ask about questions that are very, very obvious and the relationships between the ideas are like super, super apparent, then it's so easy that it's not really... or challenging you. Whereas if you ask about a relationship between two concepts that are pretty far apart, then you have to go through multiple different hypotheses to figure out which path actually makes sense. It's kind of like solving a maze.
You know the entrance is here, you know the exit is here, but you're not really sure how to go from the entrance to the exit, so you have to go through multiple paths in the middle to try to figure it out. And in doing that, it actually makes sense. reinforces and consolidates the knowledge and it also allows you to, whether it's before a lecture, during a lecture, or after a lecture, hit that topic from multiple different angles. And all of these things help to improve your memory and your ability to apply that information. This is a really good one because it really doesn't take very long.
You could think of maybe four or five non-obvious questions in just like one or two minutes usually. Even if there's no real answer to that question, just the fact that you're trying to answer the question is valuable because it's making you explore all these different options. If you've watched some of my other videos, you might see some similarities between this and interleaving. And indeed, this can also be a method of interleaving. If you haven't checked out my interleaving video, you can check that one out here.
Now, I mentioned that all of these things relate back to cognitive load. The first one, priming, it's obvious because that's taking dense pieces of information. breaking it down, simplifying it, and giving your brain a little bit more to work with so that it's not so overloaded during a lecture.
And the second one reduces cognitive load because when you ask these non-obvious questions, it helps your brain think in a certain direction. Instead of saying, how does everything fit together? It gives it a little bit more of a purpose, a little bit more of a focus. Your brain likes having a narrow focus.
So that also helps to reduce cognitive load because it means that you can do productive, relational thinking. which is good for building knowledge, without as much of the confusion of just kind of mindlessly looking for relationships. But there's probably nothing that helps quite as much as this third thing, which is to filter and screen information much more critically.
So most top learners are pretty selective about what they're gonna learn and when they're going to learn it. Well, most top learners are not going to study absolutely everything at the maximum level of depth from the very beginning. And if they are, and that's how they're able to be successful, their natural deep processing level is probably completely off the charts. And I can guarantee you that that's just not going to work for the vast majority of people. What we mean by filtering out information is that when you read through something, there are certain pieces of information that are going to be more suitable for your current level and what makes sense to you right now.
And then there are going to be some things that are so detailed that you're just not ready to learn it yet. And the way that you can tell. It's very, very simple, which is you simply ask yourself, do I know enough about this to make it simpler?
So when you read it, if you read something and you don't understand it enough to even make it simple, you probably don't have enough knowledge about it to really consolidate it into your memory and organize it. So you're probably gonna then study it and that knowledge is gonna fade away and you're gonna wonder where all that knowledge went. So for me, a complete noob knowing nothing about this, when I read this slide, actually I can probably simplify that, but if I read this slide, it's complicated enough for me and I know so little that I don't really feel like I can simplify this and make it easier to understand while keeping it accurate. And so as a result, it means that the information on this slide for my current level is not appropriate. It's too detailed.
What I need to do is I need to find an easier version of the same concept Or, I mean in this case, because I've literally not studied this before, it would be maybe to go back to some of these fundamental ones and make sure that I understand some of the more fundamental concepts. But the way that it works is that knowledge is like building blocks. They build on each other. So when you start with a building block that is right at the very top, at the top level of detail, there's nothing for it to stack onto. then you're going to have to spend more time rebuilding it again and again.
But it doesn't matter how many times you put the block at the top. If there's no foundation, it's going to fall every single time. And that's what causes a lot of unnecessary repetition and learning.
If you know that as soon as you try to put it there, you don't even understand it well enough to simplify it, then you may as well just dial it back to the version of that information that is simple enough for you to make sense of it. And once you've locked that in, you can go up. one level of detail and up one level of detail. And so on a single slide, there might be multiple different layers of detail. Some things are easy to understand, some things are difficult to understand, and your job is to filter out what is...
It's easy enough for me to learn now and what is harder, so I will come back to it later. You can keep a list on the side, you can use post-it notes to remind you of the things that you have skipped so that you do come back to them. But it's very, very important that the first time you learn something, you do not learn everything the first go. Because some of that detail is going to be too much for you to handle right now. And it is much more efficient for you to come back to it later when your foundation's...
are stronger. And the reason this is so good for lectures is because if you've been doing the other methods I told you about just now and you've primed yourself, that means that during the lecture you already have some foundations. There is a mid-level that you know is going to be appropriate for you and then there is a extra level of detail that the lecturer might talk about that you know straight off the bat is too much for you to hold on to. And so instead of exerting your precious cognitive load and trying to understand that, you say, okay, that's the stuff that I can come back to later when I'm studying this later.
And you can direct your focus on the stuff that you think is at the right level of detail for you at that time. And you can come back to it instead by looking at lecture recordings or like lecture notes or slides or whatever it is that you've got available. One thing that can help you is if you are recording the lecture, you can look at your watch to see what time it is. when you decide that something is too detailed and you can make a log of all the times so that when you're going through the lecture you can actually go back to the particular moments that you skipped which is probably a lot more effective than just like watching a lecture at triple the speed because again just because you can listen to someone three times as fast doesn't mean that you can learn three times as fast in fact most people probably can't learn fast enough to catch up to one time speed so you know again that's kind of a misnomer Watching a lecture faster does not actually make you learn faster.
Yeah, there's a little bonus tip for you. So next time you're in a lecture, give these a go. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.