How We Learn summary

If you’re a busy person, you might feel that sleeping just gets in the way of getting things done. But this is completely wrong!

Getting enough sleep is essential for your brain to form and consolidate new memories. While we still don’t completely understand how sleep affects our bodies and our brains exactly, research suggests that sleep can help us better understand and memorize information.

In school, a teacher may have suggested that you set aside a certain time of day where you could study in solitude, free from distraction. However, distractions aren’t the only things that influence our ability to learn.

It is true that our surroundings during a study session generally affect our ability to remember what we’ve learned. Your brain picks up on all kinds of environmental cues while you study – a room’s musty smell, your chair’s hard, uncomfortable seat, and so on.

Are you someone who crams in all the information you need to learn a day before an exam? Does this strategy actually work for you?

It might be effective for the test, but you probably won’t remember the material for much longer. In fact, only by breaking up your study time can you be sure that you will retain information over a long period of time.

You probably know that when you have to explain a certain subject to someone, that process helps you better understand the subject yourself.

This is because reciting information is more effective for memory retention than simply reading information. If you want to get the most out of what you’ve learned, then you need to actively test your knowledge, rather than simply rereading passages from a book.

Procrastination plagues almost everyone. We dawdle before a task, easily distracted, until we’re forced to hastily complete it. As you’ll see, this habit is easily avoidable.

Some people believe that it’s most efficient to start and finish a project right away; this way, it’s done and they don’t have to think about it anymore.

If you’ve ever taken tennis lessons, then your coach has probably drilled the importance of repetition: to master a backhand drive, practice it again and again – and again.

But is this really the most effective way to learn? In short: no.

How does a baseball player decide so quickly whether to swing at a fast ball?

There is so much information to take in at once: how high is the ball? How fast is it traveling? Is it curving? The secret behind this ability is called perceptual learning.