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Psychology of Intelligence: Learn Anything So Fast It's Almost Unfair — Transcript

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0:00You can learn almost anything at twice
0:01the speed you're learning it right now,
0:03and the reason you're not has very
0:04little to do with your intelligence.
0:06That's not a motivational line. It's one
0:08of the most repeated findings in
0:09cognitive psychology, and it's been
0:11sitting in the research for 50 years
0:13while almost nobody outside of
0:15university lab has heard about it. Two
0:17people sit down with the same material,
0:19same book, same course, same brain, same
0:23number of hours. One of them walks away
0:25a month later with almost nothing, while
0:27the other one has it for life and can
0:28use it under pressure, in a
0:29conversation, in an exam, on the job.
0:32The gap between those two people is
0:34enormous, and here's the part that
0:36should make you uncomfortable. That gap
0:38has almost nothing to do with talent and
0:40almost nothing to do with effort. It
0:42comes down to what each of them did with
0:44the material in hours they were both
0:46already going to spend. Most people
0:48explain this the same way. Some people
0:50are just wired for it. They have a good
0:51memory. They pick things up. And when
0:54that story stops working, they reach for
0:55the backup story, you just need more
0:57hours. Read it again. Grind harder. Stay
1:01up later. But the truth is quite
1:02stranger. The people who learn unfairly
1:05fast are not processing information
1:07faster than you. Their memory is not
1:09better than yours. Actually, a lot of
1:11them are putting in fewer hours than you
1:13are. What they're doing is running the
1:15material through a completely different
1:16set of conditions, and those conditions
1:18feel worse while they're happening. They
1:20feel slower. They feel like you're
1:22failing. They make you look dumber in
1:24the moment than the method you're using
1:26now. And that is exactly why almost
1:29nobody does them. Welcome back to Psych
1:31Tunes. Today, we're breaking down the
1:33psychology of how a human being actually
1:35acquires a skill. The five laws that
1:37separate people who learn things
1:39permanently from those who have to
1:40relearn things repeatedly, and why
1:42almost every study method that feels
1:44productive is quietly stealing years of
1:46your life. Let's start with the research
1:48that reorganized this entire field. At
1:51UCLA, a memory researcher named Robert
1:53Bjork spent decades studying a pattern
1:56that kept showing up in the data and
1:58that nobody wanted to believe.
2:00Conditions that slow you down during
2:01learning very often produce better
2:03long-term retention and better transfer
2:06to new situations. Conditions that speed
2:08you up during learning very often
2:10produce worse. He gave this idea a name
2:12that sounds like a contradiction.
2:15Desirable difficulties. Difficulty is
2:17not the price of learning. In many
2:19cases, difficulty is the mechanism of
2:21learning. To understand why, you need
2:24the model underneath it. In 1992, Robert
2:27Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork proposed what
2:30they called the new theory of disuse.
2:32And it splits memory into two separate
2:34things that most people treat as one.
2:37The first is storage strength. That's
2:39how deeply a piece of information is
2:41wired into everything else you know. How
2:43many connections it has, how well it's
2:45built. The second is retrieval strength.
2:48That's how easily you can pull it up
2:50right now in this moment with the cues
2:52currently in front of you. Here's what
2:54makes this so counterintuitive. Only
2:57retrieval strength shows up in
2:58performance. When you feel like you know
3:01something, you're feeling retrieval
3:03strength. But only storage strength is
3:05actually learning and the two move
3:07independently. You can have something
3:09sitting at high retrieval strength and
3:11low storage strength, which means it
3:13feels completely solid today and will be
3:15gone in nine days. That is the exact
3:18experience of cramming and it's why
3:20every fact you ever memorized the night
3:22before an exam evaporated by the
3:24following month. Now the part that
3:26changes how you study forever. When you
3:28successfully pull something out of
3:29memory, the gain in storage strength is
3:31larger when retrieval was harder. The
3:33more faded and buried the memory was at
3:35the moment you dragged it back up, the
3:37more that act of dragging strengthens
3:39it. Think of a trail through a forest.
3:41Reading your notes again is looking at a
3:42map of the trail. Pulling the
3:44information out of your own head is
3:46walking it and a trail you have to find
3:48again when it's half overgrown gets
3:50widened far more than a trail somebody
3:52freshly mowed for you 5 minutes ago.
3:54The struggle to find it isn't the
3:56obstacle in front of the learning. The
3:58struggle to find it is the learning,
4:00which brings us to the uncomfortable
4:01part of this video.
4:03If difficulty builds memory and ease
4:05doesn't, then the feeling you have been
4:06using your entire life to decide whether
4:08studying is working has been pointing
4:10you in exactly the wrong direction. You
4:13reread a chapter and it feels smooth and
4:15familiar, so you conclude you know it.
4:17You watch a tutorial and follow every
4:19step effortlessly, so you conclude
4:21you've learned it. You highlight a page
4:23and the words feel obvious, so you move
4:25on. Psychologists call this the fluency
4:28illusion. Your brain uses the ease of
4:30processing something as a shortcut for
4:32"I know this." And the shortcut is
4:34wrong. It measures how accessible the
4:36material is at this exact second,
4:38sitting right in front of you with every
4:40cue available. It tells you nothing
4:42about whether you'll have it on Thursday
4:44without the page. This isn't a small
4:46effect at the margins. In 2006, Roediger
4:49and Karpicke had students study prose
4:51passages, then either restudy them or
4:54take a recall test on them. 5 minutes
4:56later, the restudy group did better. 2
4:58days later and 1 week later, the testing
5:01group did substantially better. And the
5:03restudy group was more confident in how
5:05much they'd remember. They felt better
5:07and knew less. Now, before we get to
5:09what actually works, I need to take
5:11something away from you. You have
5:13probably been told at some point that
5:15you are a visual learner or an auditory
5:17learner or a hands-on learner, and that
5:19your job is to find the format that
5:21matches your type. In 2008, a group of
5:24cognitive psychologists, including
5:26Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug
5:29Rohrer, and Robert Bjork went through
5:32the entire literature on this.
5:34Almost none of the studies had even used
5:36a design capable of testing the claim.
5:39Of the ones that did, several found
5:40results that contradicted it outright.
5:43Their conclusion was that there is no
5:45adequate evidence base to justify using
5:47learning style assessments in education
5:49at all. So, here it is and this is the
5:51one hard thing I'm going to say in this
5:53video. If you have spent years searching
5:55for your learning style or the perfect
5:57app or the right note-taking system, you
6:00have not been looking for a method. You
6:02have been looking for a version of
6:03learning that doesn't feel bad and that
6:06thing does not exist. You have been
6:08selecting your study methods by comfort
6:10and comfort is the single most reliable
6:12signal that nothing is being stored. And
6:14no, more hours won't rescue it. This is
6:17not a willpower problem and adding four
6:20more hours to a broken method doesn't
6:21make it a working method. It just makes
6:23you tired in the same place. Effort
6:26volume was never the variable. Effort
6:28direction is. So, let's fix the
6:30direction. Five laws. Law one, retrieval
6:35not review. This is the highest leverage
6:37swap available to a human being and
6:39almost nobody makes it.
6:41In 2008, Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry
6:44Roediger published a study in Science
6:46that should be taught in every school on
6:48the planet. Students learned
6:50Swahili-English word pairs. Once a
6:53student had correctly recalled a pair
6:55even once, it was handled in different
6:57ways. For some students, it stayed in
6:59the study rotation. For others, it
7:01stayed in the testing rotation. A week
7:04later, the students who had kept
7:05retrieving the pairs recalled roughly
7:0780% of them. The students who had only
7:10kept re-studying them recalled about a
7:11third. Repeated studying after you
7:14already know something added essentially
7:16nothing. Repeated retrieval was nearly
7:18the entire effect and there's a detail
7:20in that paper that I find genuinely
7:22unsettling. The students' predictions
7:24about how well they do were uncorrelated
7:27with how well they actually did. Not
7:30weakly correlated. Uncorrelated. Even
7:33university students sitting inside the
7:34experiment had no idea which method was
7:37working. So, the practical move is this.
7:39Close the book, put the notes face down,
7:42then write out or say out loud
7:45everything you can dredge up on the
7:46topic, not recognizing it, producing it.
7:49It will feel awful the first few times
7:51because you'll discover you have far
7:53less than you thought. That discovery is
7:55not bad news. That discovery is the
7:57point where the actual learning starts.
8:00Law two, space it out until you almost
8:02forget. Most people when they finally
8:04get serious do the opposite. They block
8:07out one enormous session and go through
8:08the material five times in a row. But,
8:11go back to the trail. If you walk the
8:13same path five times in one afternoon,
8:15nothing widens after the first pass
8:17because you never lose it. There's
8:19nothing to find.
8:20Storage strength grows on the gap, not
8:22on the repetition. This falls straight
8:24out of the Bjork model. The gain from
8:26retrieval is biggest when retrieval
8:29strength has dropped. So, the delay
8:31between your sessions isn't a scheduling
8:32inconvenience. The delay is the active
8:35ingredient. Letting a few days pass so
8:38the material gets slightly foggy, and
8:41then forcing it back up does more for
8:43permanent memory than reading it six
8:44times in one night ever will. The rule
8:47of thumb, if recalling it feels easy,
8:49you waited too little. If you can't
8:51recall it at all, even with a hint, you
8:53waited too long. You want that state
8:55where it's on the tip of your tongue and
8:56you have to fight for it. That is the
8:58sweet spot and it feels like struggling
9:01because it is. Law three, mix what you
9:03practice. Almost every textbook, course,
9:06and workout plan is organized in blocks.
9:0910 problems on one method, then 10 on
9:12the next. It feels organized and it
9:14produces a beautiful sense of mastery
9:17because after problem three, you don't
9:19even read the question anymore. You
9:21already know which tool to use. The page
9:23told you. Interleaving means shuffling
9:25them. So, every problem arrives without
9:28a label and you have to work out which
9:29approach it even needs.
9:31Doug Rohrer and his colleagues have run
9:33this in real classrooms. In one study,
9:36seventh grade students got either
9:38blocked or interleaved practice over 9
9:40weeks, followed by an unannounced test 2
9:43weeks later. The interleaved group
9:45scored 72%.
9:47The blocked group scored 38%.
9:50But, here's my favorite finding in this
9:52entire body of research because it
9:54captures the whole thesis in one line.
9:56In an earlier experiment, interleaving
9:58tripled scores on the final test. And
10:00during the practice sessions themselves,
10:02the interleaved group performed worse.
10:0560% accuracy versus around 90. The
10:08method that looked like it was failing
10:10while they used it was the method that
10:11nearly tripled what they walked away
10:13with. Sit with that.
10:15If you had been that student halfway
10:17through practice, you would have quit
10:18and gone back to the blocks. Law four,
10:21explain it with the source closed.
10:23Reading an explanation and understanding
10:25it are two different events, and your
10:26brain is very bad at telling them apart.
10:29Understanding someone else's clear
10:31explanation feels almost identical to
10:33being able to produce one. So, close
10:35everything and explain the concept out
10:37loud in plain language as if to someone
10:40who has never encountered it. No notes,
10:42no glancing, just you generating it.
10:45Within about 90 seconds, you will hit a
10:47wall, a place where the sentence starts
10:50and then dissolves, where you find
10:52yourself using the technical term
10:53because you cannot say the thing
10:55underneath it.
10:56That wall is the single most valuable
10:59object in your entire study session. It
11:01is a precise coordinate of what you do
11:04not know, delivered for free, and you
11:06cannot get it any other way. Rereading
11:09will never show it to you because
11:10rereading hands you the words and lets
11:12you feel like you produced them. Find
11:15the hole. Go fill exactly that. Then
11:17close the book and explain it again. Law
11:19five, build chunks, not facts. This is
11:23where the unfair speed actually comes
11:25from. So, stay with me. In 1973, William
11:29Chase and Herbert Simon ran an
11:31experiment with chess players. They
11:32showed masters and beginners a position
11:34from a real game for a few seconds, then
11:36asked them to reconstruct it. The
11:38masters were far better, which surprises
11:40nobody. Then they did the same thing
11:42with pieces scattered randomly on the
11:44board, and the masters' advantage almost
11:46entirely disappeared. They performed
11:48close to the beginners. Their memory was
11:50never superior. Their working memory was
11:53as limited as everyone else's. What they
11:55had was thousands of stored patterns,
11:58clusters of pieces that meant something
11:59as a unit. A beginner sees 25 separate
12:02objects and can hold about seven. A
12:04master sees five familiar shapes and
12:06holds all of them easily. Take away the
12:09meaning and the master is just a person
12:11again. That's the whole secret of the
12:13people who seem to absorb new
12:14information at an impossible rate. They
12:17are not moving faster through the same
12:1825 pieces. They have larger pieces.
12:21Every new fact in their field arrives
12:23with a hundred existing hooks to attach
12:25to, so it costs them almost nothing to
12:27store, which means stop hoarding
12:30isolated facts. Ask what this connects
12:32to. Ask what it's an instance of. Ask
12:35why it's true rather than what it says.
12:38Every connection you build turns two
12:40things into one thing, and one thing is
12:43much cheaper to carry. And this is the
12:45part I want you to actually take with
12:47you because it changes the arithmetic of
12:49your whole life.
12:50Learning fast is not a starting
12:52condition. It's an output. Every time
12:54you retrieve instead of review, every
12:57time you let the gap open before you go
12:58back, every time you close the book and
13:01hit that wall and go fill the hole, you
13:03are widening a trail, and trails
13:05connect. After a year of this in one
13:07domain, new material stops arriving as a
13:10stranger. It arrives as a variation on
13:12something you already have, at which
13:14point people will start telling you that
13:15you have a gift, that you were always
13:17quick, that it comes naturally to you.
13:20They'll be wrong, and it won't matter
13:21because from the outside, the two things
13:24look identical. The person who built the
13:26network and the person who was born with
13:28one both learn the next thing in an
13:30afternoon. You just have to be willing
13:32to spend a season being slower and more
13:34uncomfortable than you have to be.
13:35That's the entire trade. Everyone who
13:37looks unfair to you right now made it at
13:39some point, quietly, without an
13:41audience.
13:43Herbert Simon, the man behind that chess
13:44study, won a Nobel Prize and helped
13:47invent the field of artificial
13:48intelligence, and he spent a good part
13:50of his life thinking about how people
13:52come to know things. He put it about as
13:54plainly as it can be put. Learning
13:56results from what the student does and
13:58thinks, and only from what the student
14:00does and thinks. Not from what you
14:02watched, not from what you highlighted,
14:04not from what was explained beautifully
14:06to you, only from what you did and what
14:09you thought while doing it, which
14:11honestly includes this video. Nothing I
14:13just said becomes yours until you close
14:15this tab and try to say it back without
14:17me. So, tell me in the comments, out of
14:19the five laws, which one have you been
14:22getting wrong the longest? Be honest.
14:24Mine was law four for years. And if you
14:27recognize yourself somewhere in this,
14:29you're in very good company. Almost
14:30every person who has ever studied has
14:32been fooled by the same feeling,
14:34including the researchers before they
14:35ran the experiments. There's nothing
14:37wrong with your mind. You were just
14:39handed a broken instrument for measuring
14:41your own progress. If this gave you
14:43something you can actually use tomorrow,
14:44hit like and share it with the person
14:46you know who studies for eight hours and
14:47still panics before every exam. They're
14:50not lazy and they're not slow. They just
14:52don't have this yet and one video could
14:54give them years back. Subscribe and turn
14:56on notifications so we can keep pulling
14:58apart the hidden machinery of the mind
14:59together. Goodbye and see you next time.

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