- Before you can learn, you need to convince your brain that the content is useful and interesting. If your brain thinks it's boring, it will squirm and wiggle, doing its best to think about something more useful and interesting, filtering out what it deems "crap".
- Use 3 "why do I care" questions to convince your brain that it's useful. "So? Why would I care? And?"
- When learning new concepts,
- experience them. Visceralize them. What would they look, sound or feel like? visceralizations are squishy and respond to new information. This is the same as building a model for what you are learning.
- If this fails, connect them to new concepts using metaphors. E.g., "the universe consists of a fabric of space-time". Play the "this reminds me of...." game.
- Explore your network of concepts through stuby or testing. Exploration allows you to fix errors or plug holes. Don't study too long - if you have to reread something many times before remembering it, you don't have a proper construct of it in your network of concepts. See Holistic Learning ebook, and a blog post on the subject.
- The optimal distribution of learning sessions is every (0.1)T, where T is the length of time you want to remember what you are learning. see article about most effective ways to learn.