How To Learn

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I’ve written on other pages that learning to increase my focus has been one of my biggest struggles. In the last half-year I had to do plenty of self-directed studying, which was incredibly difficult for me to learn.

My other page, How to Focus, Learn, and Feel Motivated | Managing ADHD | The Role of Dopamine, has almost everything I think is helpful for building focus on it. Other relevant pages are the Tolerating Boredom and Increasing Willpower pages.

This page is great - HealthyGamer Wiki: Learning
I met with my anatomy professor to ask how to learn the material more efficiently and effectively. He recommends students learn slowly, make sure to completely learn one learning objective at a time. Write it down in a notebook or whiteboard several times, say it aloud, repeat it, and then attempt to explain it to other people. If you read my anatomy notebook, you might think I’m crazy. You would see sentences like, “The biceps brachii muscle has these actions: Elbow Flexion, Supination, Shoulder Flexion” written 4 times in a row. The goal was not to passively read it repeatedly, but instead write it from memory multiple times. I would say the sentence out loud, and explain/demonstrate it to a friend nearby.
It’s difficult and honestly a little painful to get your brain to start doing active engagement, if you’re used to passively reading your learning material. It’s helpful to expect that pain, but also realize it’s a hump you can get over with practice.
Optimal Protocols for Studying & Learning - Andrew Huberman podcast. One of the biggest takeaways from this podcast was the importance of constant self-quizzing, being able to reproduce the information, and that any effort to actively engage with the information and reproduce it is far more effective for learning than passively re-reading multiple times. Although I have notes on this, I think it’s best to listen to it. There are surprising results to studies, such as the finding that reading material once while being tested several times on that material vastly outperforms (in terms of accuracy and higher volume of recall) than re-reading the material several times. This is covered in the video from 42:54-55:39, and other sections.

This thread with ChatGPT expands on active learning decently.