I learnt an interesting thing recently about learning itself. It’s common experience that when we go over something new, there are perhaps a lot of lessons that we’d think that we could take from it. For example think of an interesting marketing lecture you attended in college (you’d note that I have this habit of referring to marketing lectures every now and then, I think that’s probably because those were the lectures I most enjoyed during my MBA). Okay so once you go back from the lecture, you’d probably mull over it and find that there were a lot of new things that you learned during that lecture, and if you’re me you’d probably even feel quite happy about it. The question is, would you retain and recall all of those things the next day?
Well, maybe you’re that awesome and exceptional and would perhaps recall all of those new things to the last detail. But then most of us would find it somewhat difficult to remember all of those new ideas, and which would progressively fade out of our memory (which makes me think, it would be an interesting research topic to understand the variables that affect the rate of fading or decay of ideas, and maybe even derive a certain formula to calculate the average half-life of a certain kind of idea). Sorry for drifting away there for a bit. So, you see the point that ideas, by virtue of their dynamic nature, have this tendency to evolve and metamorphose into something big and entirely different from the original stimulus that triggered them in the first place, to the extent that sometimes you may even forget what the starting point of it all was! The point is that it is but natural that you tend to lose out on a lot of apparently valuable ideas over a period of time (unless you relentlessly jot all of them down, and refer to those notes every once in a while).
Now coming to what I learnt recently, when you go over a large amount of content in a relatively short period of time, it’s helpful to follow a simple process, which as my trainers from whom I learned it would call it the ‘Two Things’. Just think about the session and imagine that if you were to retain just two things from this session what they would be. Remember the key is to do this as soon as the session gets over, and framing your two things in a way that broadly capture all of your learning from that session. And the good thing is while you’re framing those two things, your brain sets-up all the necessary connections in the background, which would at a later point in time help you to recall most of what you learnt that day. That sounds really simple but is actually very effective (as most simple things are!).
Try that out and share your experience here in comments, also if you have a similar simple method that you think works great for you do share it with us.
© Jayant Rana 2012-Present
Well, maybe you’re that awesome and exceptional and would perhaps recall all of those new things to the last detail. But then most of us would find it somewhat difficult to remember all of those new ideas, and which would progressively fade out of our memory (which makes me think, it would be an interesting research topic to understand the variables that affect the rate of fading or decay of ideas, and maybe even derive a certain formula to calculate the average half-life of a certain kind of idea). Sorry for drifting away there for a bit. So, you see the point that ideas, by virtue of their dynamic nature, have this tendency to evolve and metamorphose into something big and entirely different from the original stimulus that triggered them in the first place, to the extent that sometimes you may even forget what the starting point of it all was! The point is that it is but natural that you tend to lose out on a lot of apparently valuable ideas over a period of time (unless you relentlessly jot all of them down, and refer to those notes every once in a while).
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Now coming to what I learnt recently, when you go over a large amount of content in a relatively short period of time, it’s helpful to follow a simple process, which as my trainers from whom I learned it would call it the ‘Two Things’. Just think about the session and imagine that if you were to retain just two things from this session what they would be. Remember the key is to do this as soon as the session gets over, and framing your two things in a way that broadly capture all of your learning from that session. And the good thing is while you’re framing those two things, your brain sets-up all the necessary connections in the background, which would at a later point in time help you to recall most of what you learnt that day. That sounds really simple but is actually very effective (as most simple things are!).
Try that out and share your experience here in comments, also if you have a similar simple method that you think works great for you do share it with us.
© Jayant Rana 2012-Present
Jayant, it is truly mentioned that recall of ideas periodically helps to retain the matter for longer time & dividing the whole subject in parts will certainly cover the entire matter to understand very easily & effectively.
ReplyDeleteRana Sahab, excellent techniques for retaining the matter and learning's thereof.
ReplyDeleteIf you allow me to add my two cents to this technique would be to disseminate the idea in a story format and to use more media in the content.
A story is well retained for longer durations due to the stronger connections it develops between different data sets using a link (called storyline) and creates a related data.
Efficient use of media like text, images, animations, sound, movies etc. integrates a lot of ideas into crisper visually appealing formats that helps to retain the schema.
Another learning that I had from my college days is that not everyone is good at delivering a new complex idea. The transference of cognitive load between humans requires a lot more skill than just knowledge!
Thanks Abhinav for sharing your very interesting and practical advice, and I absolutely agree that a storyline goes a long way in establishing useful associations which help you retain for much longer.
DeleteWell written & explained.. But the method mentioned by you is based on this premise that you remember that particular marketing lecture on the first hand. There are many "marketing lectures" all the time & two things from each of these itself will take a lot of storage space,which ironically we have but can't use it completely. Deriving solution to this problem from your method, one can choose two most imp "marketing lectures" of the day. But then the reference frame of time will keep on extending and it will loose its significance. So I think more work required on this.
ReplyDeleteAny way, nice idea towards solving specific learning issues..
Flawless logic RAM! Thanks for building on that idea. I completely agree that as the reference time frame would increase there's a positive risk that a lot of those memories would fade away, and I believe perhaps the only way then to minimise that risk would be to enable your brain to build very strong associations in the first place, and then fix the learning on some kind of media and review it from time to time. :)
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