Thank you for the interesting article. I completely agree that curiosity (“the spark”) is an important component of learning, and no technique will give it on its own.
Have you experimented with learning one textbook or article at a time vs learning several concurrently (alternating between them)? If so, what are your conclusions on this?
I know the relevant results of spaced repetition, the test effect, distributed practice vs massed practice, interleaving… but in practice how does it translate to a sustainable learning routine? How often do you change subjects when studying more than one thing at a time?
Thanks for reading! It’s hard to do a controlled experiment on this. Of course I’ve learned several subjects at once, but I haven’t compared, say, budgeting an hour a day for learning one topic until it’s done, vs budgeting half an hour a day for each of two subjects for the same amount of time. That’s what you’d really need to do to compare.
I’d say that the “multi tower study strategy” concept is an interesting hypothesis, not a settled conclusion :) I wrote it mostly to clarify my own conceptual thinking.
I might be atypical in this respect, but I find that the best time budgeting strategy for me is entirely different: I take 10 days and focus on a single textbook, I don’t do much of anything else except take walks to think about the material and go back to read the textbook. I don’t check the internet, don’t check email, don’t read any other books, don’t go out with friends or work on other projects, I just focus all my time on that one textbook. This works best if I’m not doing this for an exam, but just for my own goals, an exam distorts the way that I read a textbook and makes me constantly think about gaming my grade.
I started doing this by analogy with meditation retreats. It’s very well-known in meditation circles that a 10-day intensive retreat makes you progress dramatically faster than a simple daily practice. So I started doing study retreats on a single topic. It takes about 3 days to really get into a groove with the schedule of studying 10 to 12 hours a day, but after that it gets easier. Really small distractions have a dramatic impact, even just talking to someone else for 10 minutes have a perceptible impact on the feeling of study momentum.
A similar approach has worked for me better than a more split-time approach.
I’m aware of the forgetting curve and I certainly forget a lot of the contents afterwards, but the global structure seems to remain in the brain and changes to the way of thinking or of solving problems after these intense study sessions also seem to remain for longer than the details.
I’ve also tried doing some incremental reading / incremental learning and although the contents stay for longer, I don’t feel the same kind of enlightenment or learning taking place. It feels a bit like wasting time, even if I’m learning.
I don’t know how you’d approach maintenance for skills you acquired but forgot. Sometimes I’ve learnt something which has the skill I want to review as a prerequisite, using the same method, but reviewing the old material as needed, and it sort of did the trick.
Right now, I’m experiencing a miniature version of this. I’m learning about how optogenetics works. This technique depends on an understanding of both neuron action potentials and G Protein Coupled Receptors, which has forced me to review each of those structures. This in turn forces me to review the structures of the various molecules and enzymes involved, which forces mild review of even deeper precursors such as Glutamine-Histidine-Serine structures in active sites of enzymes. I imagine that if you weren’t cramming for an exam, and were genuinely interested in the subject matter, and were consciously trying to develop your “mental movie” to build understanding, this would be the natural approach to take.
In general, I really wonder to what extent our educational system’s need to test and measure students has operationalized “learning” in a way that’s deeply different from what would be optimal for, say, producing competent scientists.
Fascinating. How would you manage this in the context of a romantic relationship, job, or other daily commitments? Is it possible for you to take the remaining 4-6 hours to connect with other people? Or does it demand solitude?
It really wouldn’t be possible to take 4-6 hours to talk to other people, that would completely take you out of it, it would kill a lot of momentum. After 3 days of really spending every waking hour thinking of a subject, it sort of temporarily becomes the new baseline, and the difficulty of thinking about it drops really dramatically, but it is a fragile effect, any context switching at all comes at the cost of a blunting of momentum, and this is especially true of talking to other people. If you’ve spent a lot of time just thinking in silence, 4 hours of talking with others will literally cause a pounding headache. I took about 3 to 4 hours per day of break-time to eat and go walk without feeling the need to think of the material, but in the later part of the 10-day period I usually think about the textbook even during breaks. I’m not sure how you’d manage this with a job and daily commitments, what I do is do one of these 10-day periods every 2 months, but I run a small business that allows me to do that, and I don’t have a romantic relationship.
Very interesting. It seems important to understand the relationship between the “initial contact” with knowledge and maintenance activities later on.
For example, 12 hours/day for 10 days is 120 hours. By contrast, a conventional class demands about 300 hours of work over the course of a semester. If we consider both of these to constitute an “initial contact” with knowledge, the 10 day retreat is much more efficient.
Then we have to ask whether one or the other leads to more efficient maintenance over the long run. Plus, on an instrumental level, we absorb knowledge not only to accumulate it, but also to determine what sort of projects to pursue and how to specialize ourselves.
Figuring out how a 10-day single-subject retreat vs. a half-year spread-out interleaving of learning impact later maintenance and ability to choose and execute projects would be an important aspect of deciding which approach to “initial contact” is optimal.
Since a graduate program basically consists of classes + research, and the classes are pretty much all “initial contact,” it would seem that if the 10-day retreat was more efficient, that you could replace a 2-year grad program with maybe 9 months of retreats. But I’m not sure if that sort of lifestyle seems optimal somehow… (low confidence on all of this!)
As a followup, it does seem like you could test this to some extent. Find out what textbook an upcoming year-long class uses. Take 10 days prior to the class for a retreat, during which you read the entire textbook. Then try to do the homework and exams with minimal review of the textbook, treating the class as a review of material you’re already familiar with rather than a first brush with the content. Since textbook reading comprises the bulk of my studies, it seems possible that this would feel like a net time saving/deeper learning, but I’m not sure. Would be interesting to try it and see!
Thank you for the interesting article. I completely agree that curiosity (“the spark”) is an important component of learning, and no technique will give it on its own. Have you experimented with learning one textbook or article at a time vs learning several concurrently (alternating between them)? If so, what are your conclusions on this? I know the relevant results of spaced repetition, the test effect, distributed practice vs massed practice, interleaving… but in practice how does it translate to a sustainable learning routine? How often do you change subjects when studying more than one thing at a time?
Thanks for reading! It’s hard to do a controlled experiment on this. Of course I’ve learned several subjects at once, but I haven’t compared, say, budgeting an hour a day for learning one topic until it’s done, vs budgeting half an hour a day for each of two subjects for the same amount of time. That’s what you’d really need to do to compare.
I’d say that the “multi tower study strategy” concept is an interesting hypothesis, not a settled conclusion :) I wrote it mostly to clarify my own conceptual thinking.
I might be atypical in this respect, but I find that the best time budgeting strategy for me is entirely different: I take 10 days and focus on a single textbook, I don’t do much of anything else except take walks to think about the material and go back to read the textbook. I don’t check the internet, don’t check email, don’t read any other books, don’t go out with friends or work on other projects, I just focus all my time on that one textbook. This works best if I’m not doing this for an exam, but just for my own goals, an exam distorts the way that I read a textbook and makes me constantly think about gaming my grade.
I started doing this by analogy with meditation retreats. It’s very well-known in meditation circles that a 10-day intensive retreat makes you progress dramatically faster than a simple daily practice. So I started doing study retreats on a single topic. It takes about 3 days to really get into a groove with the schedule of studying 10 to 12 hours a day, but after that it gets easier. Really small distractions have a dramatic impact, even just talking to someone else for 10 minutes have a perceptible impact on the feeling of study momentum.
A similar approach has worked for me better than a more split-time approach. I’m aware of the forgetting curve and I certainly forget a lot of the contents afterwards, but the global structure seems to remain in the brain and changes to the way of thinking or of solving problems after these intense study sessions also seem to remain for longer than the details.
I’ve also tried doing some incremental reading / incremental learning and although the contents stay for longer, I don’t feel the same kind of enlightenment or learning taking place. It feels a bit like wasting time, even if I’m learning.
I don’t know how you’d approach maintenance for skills you acquired but forgot. Sometimes I’ve learnt something which has the skill I want to review as a prerequisite, using the same method, but reviewing the old material as needed, and it sort of did the trick.
Right now, I’m experiencing a miniature version of this. I’m learning about how optogenetics works. This technique depends on an understanding of both neuron action potentials and G Protein Coupled Receptors, which has forced me to review each of those structures. This in turn forces me to review the structures of the various molecules and enzymes involved, which forces mild review of even deeper precursors such as Glutamine-Histidine-Serine structures in active sites of enzymes. I imagine that if you weren’t cramming for an exam, and were genuinely interested in the subject matter, and were consciously trying to develop your “mental movie” to build understanding, this would be the natural approach to take.
In general, I really wonder to what extent our educational system’s need to test and measure students has operationalized “learning” in a way that’s deeply different from what would be optimal for, say, producing competent scientists.
Fascinating. How would you manage this in the context of a romantic relationship, job, or other daily commitments? Is it possible for you to take the remaining 4-6 hours to connect with other people? Or does it demand solitude?
It really wouldn’t be possible to take 4-6 hours to talk to other people, that would completely take you out of it, it would kill a lot of momentum. After 3 days of really spending every waking hour thinking of a subject, it sort of temporarily becomes the new baseline, and the difficulty of thinking about it drops really dramatically, but it is a fragile effect, any context switching at all comes at the cost of a blunting of momentum, and this is especially true of talking to other people. If you’ve spent a lot of time just thinking in silence, 4 hours of talking with others will literally cause a pounding headache. I took about 3 to 4 hours per day of break-time to eat and go walk without feeling the need to think of the material, but in the later part of the 10-day period I usually think about the textbook even during breaks. I’m not sure how you’d manage this with a job and daily commitments, what I do is do one of these 10-day periods every 2 months, but I run a small business that allows me to do that, and I don’t have a romantic relationship.
Very interesting. It seems important to understand the relationship between the “initial contact” with knowledge and maintenance activities later on.
For example, 12 hours/day for 10 days is 120 hours. By contrast, a conventional class demands about 300 hours of work over the course of a semester. If we consider both of these to constitute an “initial contact” with knowledge, the 10 day retreat is much more efficient.
Then we have to ask whether one or the other leads to more efficient maintenance over the long run. Plus, on an instrumental level, we absorb knowledge not only to accumulate it, but also to determine what sort of projects to pursue and how to specialize ourselves.
Figuring out how a 10-day single-subject retreat vs. a half-year spread-out interleaving of learning impact later maintenance and ability to choose and execute projects would be an important aspect of deciding which approach to “initial contact” is optimal.
Since a graduate program basically consists of classes + research, and the classes are pretty much all “initial contact,” it would seem that if the 10-day retreat was more efficient, that you could replace a 2-year grad program with maybe 9 months of retreats. But I’m not sure if that sort of lifestyle seems optimal somehow… (low confidence on all of this!)
As a followup, it does seem like you could test this to some extent. Find out what textbook an upcoming year-long class uses. Take 10 days prior to the class for a retreat, during which you read the entire textbook. Then try to do the homework and exams with minimal review of the textbook, treating the class as a review of material you’re already familiar with rather than a first brush with the content. Since textbook reading comprises the bulk of my studies, it seems possible that this would feel like a net time saving/deeper learning, but I’m not sure. Would be interesting to try it and see!