Learning How to Learn

Pulling information back out is what builds memory. Not putting it in. Closing the book and trying to summarize what you just read, even when you do it poorly, outperforms re-reading the same chapter three times. Re-reading feels smooth because it's easier, but offers a false sense of productivity. Retrieval feels frustrating because it requires more mental energy. Frustrating is what works. Frustrating makes you remember. The act of retrieving is what installs the memory. It's why many people use flash cards (like Anki) for studying, it tests their retrieval.

Mixing related skills in the same practice session beats drilling one at a time. Your brain hates it in the moment. Your future self thanks you. The cleanest study in the literature is on college baseball players — control group +6%, blocked-drill group +25% (practiced one skill repeatedly), interleaved group +57% (alternated practicing multiple skills in the same session). Same total practice. More than twice the improvement for the interleaved group. Interleaving mimis real life situations more, helps build familiarity and fluidity, which in turn helps improve long-term memory.

Watson and Friend documented this in 1969 as Fear of Negative Evaluation or the fear of looking stupid. It's a real neuroendocrine response, cortisol rises when you anticipate social judgment. For many, the fear of looking dumb in front of others can be a life or death situation, especially true with younger kids in school. That fear can be what's preventing many from asking a simple question for clarification and that clarification may be all that we need to learn something new. This instinct could stem from our history from early tribal life, where being exiled from the group meant not surviving the winter. That instinct is wrong now. And it's exactly what stops adults from doing the thing that builds the skill, being wrong in public, often, on purpose.

You cannot consent to fear & still do the work.

Kruger and Dunning at Cornell figured this out in 1999 called metacognition. 93% of Americans rate themselves as above-average drivers. Mathematically impossible. The skill required to do a task and the skill required to assess your performance on that task are the same skill. Example: you don't know that your driving is bad so you don't realize you are a bad driver. The worse you are at any new thing, the more confident you feel. Once you compare yourself to someone else and see how better they are at a skill versus, then your metacognition catches up and you realize how much you were missing. We don't learn further until we know there is more to learn.