8 Takeaways to Help You Accelerate Learning

Here is a list of eight significant takeaways to help accelerate learning and facilitate recall:

1.There is a general principle that you can learn more through active engagement, independently solving problems, practical experimentation, or participation in a discussion than passive listening. This concept is learning by doing and can sometimes be more effective than simply reading many books. The best is to read and do.

2.Learning by osmosis from more knowledgeable people is another good way to assimilate information. Also, being in a creative environment around other creative people is a potential way to enhance your creativity and productivity. You can improve the quality and clarity of your ideas if you have other people to bounce them off of or try explaining them to (The Feynman Technique).

3.Passion and persistence can beat pure intelligence in the pursuit of success.

4.Exercise such as running can effectively disengage the mind from normal trains of thought and help develop new ideas through the diffuse mode. In essence, it can allow your subconscious thoughts to bubble to the surface.

5.It is of great difficulty, if not impossible, to consciously do or focus on two or more things at once, as they’re likely to become mixed up. Multitasking is more a case of ‘context switching’ between topics.

6.Try not to get hung up on a question you can’t answer in a test environment. Instead, move on to the next question. Often the answer to the problem that was holding you back can mysteriously pop into your brain later on in the test — once again courtesy of the diffuse mode. Our brains can operate with disparate things working on parallel tracks.

7.Neurological discoveries have revealed that the hippocampus (a seahorse-shaped part of the brain that is paramount in learning and memory, located in the middle) continually generates new neurons, even well into adulthood. Studies of rats tell us that having an ‘enriched environment’ such as the freedom to move around and interact with things and people encourages the formation of much stronger neural connections. You ideally want to be surrounded by other people who are stimulating you and have access to events in which you can actively participate.

8.However, independent of such an enriched environment, exercise can also boost the number of new neurons that are born and survive in your hippocampus, aiding you in remembering things.

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