Learning to Learn - 3. Reflection

Now for the final step of the three part series. We’ve covered how important it is to maintain a consistent mindset, and how we can make and implement systems to help with that process. Now for the final step that will bring it all together: reflection and memory. This is what will allow us to iterate on and refine our system. It is also what will allow us to commit what we have learnt into long term memory, so we can draw from it in the future.

My Experiences with Brute Force Memorisation

This chapter is a long ramble about my own personal experience. I think it’s a meaningful story that I want to share, but feel free to skip it if you’re just here for the actual meat and potatos.

I’ve always been really bad with true memory. This never really showed up academically, because ironically enough, I was great at memorising. While I was doing HSC, I was able to memorise not just one by multiple thousand word essays word for word to regurgitate them during the exam. During university, I was able to study almost half the semesters content in the final couple weeks leading up to the exam, and as a result, I was able to score very well on all of my exams. It wasn’t easy by any means, it was truly many hours of pacing around the house like a drone, reading out the words on my page over and over until it was drilled into my brain, but hey it worked. The problem was what happened after the exams, because afterwards, I had absolutely no incentive to keep any of it in my head.

In the past, I would be rewarded for this sort of memorisation. My exam marks were all fantastic on paper, I was scoring better than all my peers, and I was getting all sorts of internship opportunities as a result. As time passed though, I realised that this “strength” was truly holding me back. The reality was that 2 weeks after an exam, I felt like I still had a good grasp of the concepts, but probably wouldn’t be able to confidently solve the problems in the exam anymore without refreshing myself on the concepts. After a month, I would be forgetting key aspects of the course, and 6 months, I couldn’t even tell you what the main topics were in the course, let alone any of the details of what I learnt (and that’s not an exaggeration). I hadn’t truly learnt the content, I had crammed it into my short term memory for exam week, and ejected it as soon as humanly possible while I binged watched shows in celebration after my final exam.

Because of this I really started losing faith in my memory. Obviously I was still a perfectly functioning human, it’s not like I’d just forget my own name, or forget that I had an appointment coming up in the day or anything like that. It was more so that every time I learnt something, it felt like it was only a matter of time before it was forgotten again. So what was the point of learning? It just felt like I couldn’t keep anything that I wanted in my head. Whenever I was tested in my life on knowledge that I should have known, knowledge that I had studied before and even scored highly on for it’s corresponding test, I would inevitably fail and feel like a loser for it. It got to the extent where I stopped even critically thinking. I subconciously stopped forming opinions on things because I knew that by the time I would have to share them, I would have forgotten them anyways. I couldn’t read the news, because by the time it came up in conversation with friends, I would have forgotten the details and probably completely misremembered what even happened in the first place.

Luckily, over time, I began to question this stance a little. I was clearly good at other things. Competitive programming and digital art being two among those. Both of those were skills that require remembering alot of things. And I wasn’t just remembering them short term for an exam or test. I was remembering them long term as well. So well, that even after a year off of informatics and coding in C++, I was still able to pick up, solve and code questions that were just as difficult as when I left off. I clearly had no problem remembering all the esoteric big O notations of C++ standard library data structure methods, so why did I seem to struggle with remembering basic details of my literal job while I was working there? This brings us to the following question:

Why can we remember some things, but not others?

If you’re someone who also feels like they just struggle to remember basic things, like a person’s name, it might be worth asking yourself this question. When you’re in an exam and that little bit of knowledge that you know you’ve studied before seems impossibly out of reach, but if someone were to ask you your phone number (a sequence of 8 or more essentially random numbers), we can say that no problem? How about vividly remembering a childhood memory, despite forgetting the entire contents of the educational youtube video you just watched?

And the answer is this: We remember things that we think about alot. Think about this. Remembering a person’s name after they’ve just told you is difficult. It’s often quite likely that you’ve forgotten about it quite literally a few seconds after they just told you. Yet a common piece of advice you might hear when it comes to remembering names is simply to repeat it back to them as soon as you can. “Hey my name’s Robert, nice to meet you”. “Hi Robert, it’s nice to meet you too!”. Then ideally, as you’re saying goodbye as well, sneak in the name one more time as well (and if you’ve forgotten, that’s fine, you can ask one more time). Just by doing this one simple thing: repeating the name once immediately after, and once again when you exit the conversation, your chances of remembering Robert’s name shoot up astronomically. Same for the other examples I gave. Your phone number might have been difficult to remember at first, but after years of writing it down to forms, and reading it out to bored receptionists in lobbies, you’ve memorised it back to front. A childhood memory is a great example of how having a strong emotional tie with a memory will cause you to dwell on it over and over again. Even long after the event has passed, your emotions and environment may resurface the memory, thus refreshing it in your mind. One of the key ways we can help do this is reflection:

What is reflection and why is it useful?

Reflection is a key part of any learning system. Quite simply, all you have to do is think about whatever you just learnt, and crystalise it into a couple key takeaways for you remember. These should be done once after every session, and ideally should be written as a couple dot points of lessons that you’ve learnt through-out your sessions. There are a few reasons why this is incredibly necessary for any learning approach:

1. The act of simplifying what you just learnt is inherently difficult. That’s good.

Often times when people study, they try to find the easy way out. Often times, there are ways which feel like you are being productive, when in practice it doesn’t really help. A classic example is note taking. Some students (myself included) will go through a study session by literally writing down almost word for word what the professor is saying. Or perhaps just every second sentence. This feels fantastic in the short term. You’re working hard, you’re listening to all the material, and you even have a a nice set of notes to show for it at the end. Funnily enough though, there is an inverse correlation between the amount of notes taken and the actual amount learnt. This is because the brain learns the best when it is constantly juggling information. Making connections, trying to sympathise information in a way that makes sense to you. Often, it’s a great exercise to take as little notes as possible (or if you can’t do this live during the lecture, do a second past on your longer notes and try to condense to be as short as possible). The reason is that by trying to write it down in as few words as possible, you are really forcing yourself to underestand the material and find connections between ideas. It’s very much like that quote “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”. Learning is inherently hard, there is no shortcuts around it. Your brain will feel tired afterwards, but that’s how you know you have actually learnt something.

2. You are triggering the spaced repetition.

I’ve already talked in my last post about systems about spaced repetition. The reflection is an extension of that. It’s the equivalent of slipping in the person’s name as you wrap up your conversation.

3. They allow you to iterate on your system

Ideally, you are using this in tandem with the idea of systems in the previous chapter. The whole point is that with your current training session you are applying your system, and hopefully if the training session has gone well, you’ve found out something new about your system. Perhaps you were trying out something and it worked better than expected. Perhaps you’re doing something and realise that it completely doesn’t work in this new situation. During training might not be the optimal time to think about this sort of stuff since you’re still focusing on performing, but the post-game reflection is fantastic time to… well, reflect. This is why in the next session, you may find bullet points that are reminiscent of the systems chapter: because the lessons that we write down are implictly tied to the systems that we created before.

What can I do to make a good reflection?

Not just a record of results
- They should focus on your decision making and what lead to those results
Lessons should be short and pithy
- Ideally, each lesson should be 1 sentence, at most 2.
Lessons should have a trigger and action
- E.g. “When I see this, I should try this”
Don’t overthink your reflection
- It should take less than 2 minutes every time
Each time you write a reflection, read your last couple of reflections
- This is how you can forced spaced repetition without relying on friends or using anki.
Focus on whether you made the right decision in the moment, with the information you could reasonably have at the time
- Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy to just tell yourself to have “made the right decision” in the moment, even if you couldn’t reasonably be expected to do so reliably.

Authors Note: This post is definitely the worst post I’ve written structurally. It starts of with a huge ramble about my personal experiences only to use it to prove a small part of my overall point, and ends with 5 dot points with minimal explanation. I’m not going to fix this because I want to prioritise blog posts being as easy for me to write as possible, but it’ll be something I keep in mind as I write future posts.

Conclusion

And that concludes the series on learning to learn! There are plenty of other smaller things that I haven’t covered here, and things that definitely deserve their own blog posts, but I’m pretty happy to have gotten a significant amount of knowledge out onto paper (or ASCII bytes?) in this series. As one final quick summary, I’ve included a summary of all the lessons so far below:

Consistency
1. Understand that your performance on any given day is random
2. Be honest about your expectations
3. Minimise randomness
4. Set up systems for when you’re at your worst
5. Recognise tilt early, and quit if needed
Systems
- Why are systems good?
  1. They are a fallback that you can use to guarantee a certain amount of results.
  2. They allow you to iterate on your skills.
  3. They complement the Adult Learning Model by reminding you of the skills that are in level 3.
- What makes a good system?
  1. Systems are organic
  2. Systems are short and simple
  3. Use Triggers and Actions
- How should you use your system?
  1. Break work in to small chunks
  2. Reflect on your system before and after each chunk.
  3. Review your system with spaced repetition.
    - You may use anki, logs, or friends as a means to do this.
Reflection
1. To be done after each training session
2. Lessons should be short and pithy
3. Lessons should have a trigger and action
4. Don’t overthink your reflection. It should take less than a couple minutes
5. Each time you write a reflection, read your last couple of reflections
6. Focus on whether you made the right decision in the moment.

Thank you very much for sticking through this overly long and rambly series. I know for me personally, the idea of learning was something that I kinda just expected would “figure itself out” and so I paid it no mind, and it was only after years if not decades of butting my head against a wall that I realised that just like any other skill, learning was something that I could invest time into to understand better and apply to my own life. I hope that over the course of the series I’ve been able to impart some knowledge for you, or at least inspired you to think about the way you learn in a slightly different way.

Peace!