How to Memorize/Digest Information Effectively & Efficiently

[TopHatFox]

Have you ever wanted to just learn something the first time you heard it? Say a geology lecture, or a finance theory, or a new philosophy?

I have.

I'm trying to find a book that would give me the tools to learn facts and ideas the first time they're shown to me. The goal is to be able to walk into my classes, learn and understand the information on the spot--the first time it's presented--and not have to rely on studying to get me caught up on what I could've just memorized/understood during class!

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1. Do any of you know of such a book?
2. What techniques did you use to learn lots of information efficiently & effectively in your college courses and life in general?

[TopHatFox]

Found this:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/0 ... -students/

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Check out #8 and #9, he even includes a book suggestion!

[jacob]

The only way I know is the lattice work concept and that requires lots of study. Once you've read about 100-500 books (textbooks, that is) it becomes apparent that even widely diverse fields contain many of the same ideas and concepts but in slightly different forms.

Having grasped that, it becomes much faster to learn a new field because its methods probably has 80% overlap with one of the 10 fields you already know.

If the goal is to avoid studying and just pass a class, I hear study guides and flash cards combined with a pump and dump upload into short term memory the day before the exam will work for most courses. You won't remember anything two weeks later, but you'll probably pass.

[riparian]

Jacob I do that but then it seems like different fields have different names for the things and I never remember to remember the new names.

[Dream of Freedom]

"Say a geology lecture, or a finance theory, or a new philosophy?"

If you want to "learn" a philosophy quickly and move on, then you're missing the point. Its meant to be thought about, questioned, have its ramifications discussed, and mauled over again.

[BW]

I remember reading pavlina's blog back when I was in college. It motivated me to finish up the last three years in two if nothing else - 18 hours, 18cr, 21cr, then 24 credit hours and I never felt swamped.

The memory you're looking for, #9 on that list, is hard to use for complex ideas on the fly. People that win memory competitions by learning and recalling strings of 500 numbers in 5 minutes even say the same thing. There's a memory community you can look into - mnemotechnics.org that deals on that subject and the book Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer is a good introduction.

I think spaced repetition is the most efficient way to learn i.e. Supermemo. Plug what you want to learn into that software and it uses an algorithm to review information in the shortest interval possible when learning by rote.

[mathiverse]

@jacob Any reference to read about the lattice work concept somewhere?

[onewayfamily]

@jacob Any reference to read about the lattice work concept somewhere?

You can start here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/

[conwy]

What jacob said.

Also:

How to Read a Book [Mortimer Adler]

And:

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology [Ayn Rand]