Rapid learner skills(6)——How to learn subjects above your level

How to learn subjects above your level

Nobody likes to feel stupid. Unfortunately, when you try learning something above your level, that is exactly how you feel.

Tackling subjects above your level boils down to just this:figuring out what are the pieces you are missing, and matering them until they can be used automatically. Once you have all the missing pieces a subject is not difficult any more.

This theory-of-missing-pieces is based on something cognitive scientists call “chunking”. Chunking is an incredible process by which well-rehearsed pieces of information get fused together into a single chunk, which can be manipulated in working memory as single unit instead of component pieces.

I tried to encapsulate this into a method I call the Feynman method. It is very simple:

1. Take whatever idea/subject/problem you don not understand.

Try to be as specific as possible and focus on whatever you understand the least.

2. Try to write an explanation for the idea, as if you were teaching it to someone else.

This requirement forces you to be explicit in your thinking, forbidding you from skipping over something you have not properly thought through in your head.

3. Whenever you get stuck, you know that you are missing a piece of understanding.

Now go back to the book, your notes, a peer or a teacher and ask them what your missing. Very often you can do this entirely on your own and it will become obvious what you missed. The Feynman technique helps you locate the pieces of your cognitive chunks that you are missing to solve a problem. But it does not usually, by itself, allow you to master those chunks. Just knowing what you need to learn, in a step-by-step fashion, is half the battle for tackling hard subjects.

Words:

• chunk:n.
  a large part or amount of something
• incredible:adj
  extremely good, large, or great
• encapsulate:vt.
  to express or show something in a short way
• peer:n.
  your peers are the people who are the same age as you, or who have the same type of job, social class etc

Phrases:

• boil down to:
  If a long statement, argument etc boils down to a single statement, that statement is the main point or cause