Methods for learning quickly
1) Subconscious assimilation
- Find a model of excellence
- Forget everything you know and just play
- Mimic until you get the same results
- Simplify model & teach
2) Immerse, consolidate, test
- Find models of excellence / Books / Ideas
- Synthesise a model of excellence
- Split down skills and practice till you can get results.
3) Memotechnics - remembering facts
- Use specific memory techniques like Loci or the peg system to remember
4) Accademic learning - Visualise, Synthesise, Analogolise, Prophesise
- Take the concept and turn into a 3D visual model something you can move around and use.
- Combine the idea with others or take it back to first principles, understand why and how it works not just the process.
- Create metaphors / analogies for what you have learnt.
- Prophesise - teach others (or imagine teaching others) this helps consolidate and re-frame what you have learnt into something new
Other techniques which are useful:
- Copy, Analyse, Replicate
- Rhetoric used to be taught in 3 steps. First you would learn great speeches, then you would analyse them - labelling the various different techniques so that you had a working bank of these techniques in practice then you would replicate them in your own speeches
- Isolation
- Enhanced Feedback
- Tasking
- Gamification
- Isolation
Moais and bluezones
http://www.bluezones.com/live-happier/thrive-centers/
Moais are New Zealand groups of people who go together dedicated to helping each other out and pursuing a common goal/ interest.
Part of the meta-learning mission is to establish these Moais around the ice of meta-learning
Socialisation impact on Neurogenesis
A recent study with rats found that rats who exercised together developed more neurons than those who exercised in isolation.
While this experiment can’t be repeated on humans it possibly suggests that having an active social circle whilst conducting exercise and learning activities may increase our ability to make new neurons and therefore acquire skills more rapidly.
All the more reason to set up a social community around meta-learning.
A school for Meta Learning
The British govenrment has just announced that 55 free schools have now been created. The idea is that groups of parents or charities can get together and create a new school and get state funding. Freed from bureaucracy and driven by people with a desire to innovate and a passion for their kids they should allow new ways of learning to develop.
I would love to set up a school founded on meta-learning principles. Where the primary goal isn’t to drill kids with loads of knowledge (that they can and will simply Google anyway), but instead to instill them with a passion for learning and the skills to learn quickly.
Alexander the great had achieved a phenomenal ammount by the time died in his 30s, but his success started with his father who brought together the best teachers and created a learning community amongst his peers. The wold is so much faster and more fluid than it was in Alexander’s time. Imagine what the kids of today could do with with a similar education.
Structure for meta-learner wiki
Waiting to be Taught vs. Seeking to Learn
Waiting to be taught is:
- Only listening to what you are told
- Waiting to be corrected
- Putting all of the control in the hands of the teacher
- Learning only what the teacher knows how to explain - not what the teacher knows how to do
Seeking to learn:
- Is actively observing
- Self correcting with an active curious focus on what more you could learn
- Puts the respsonsibility for learning back in the hands of the learner
- Allows you access to learn what the teacher does so naturally, they don’t even know how they do it.
Curiosity & performance
In the book - the inner game of tennis a familiar learning strain is heard.
You need to get your Ego out of the way of your ability to perform. One great way of doing this is to encourage curiosity. Rather than focussing on how can I make this movement, or score this point. Ask what if, allow yourself to experiment with different movements and get curious about what happens. It will increase the range of things your experience, help develop flexibility, prepare you for situations standard training wouldn’t present you with.
This is akin to how the Systema martial arts system is taught - not fixed rules but principles and free flow experimentation and how Wing Chun used to be taught forms+ flexibility drills and sparring - no fixed repetitive combos or patterned drills, instead curiosity and experimentation.
Sensory Accuity
Practising sensory acuity heightens the accuracy and range of your senses. Drawing perspective is a great way of improving your ability to judge proportion accurately. We seemed hardwired for speed rather than accuracy, the brain naturally emphasises the features that are most important. Frequently in experienced sketchers draw a head with the top chopped off and half the width it should be, because the emphasise the size of the features and de=-emphasise the rest of the features.
Learning to draw portraits you have to develop the discipline to observe the true width and height and position of features. Suddenly these aspects of human anatomy that I have been looking at every day for entire life suddenly pop into focus and I find myself amazed that noses know how to stay aligned to ears without any act of concentration on behalf of their owners.
Sleep and performance
Sleep can have a massive effect on learning performance. As we get more tired our ability to make good decisions declines, there has been a strong correlation shown between lack of sleep and poor eating decisions. This has been tied to the idea of Ego Depletion, we only have so much energy for making good decisions.
Practice skills just before you go to sleep, wake yourself up and re-hearse skills in the middle of the night if you like, but whatever you do, make sure you get enough sleep to make good decisions and perform well the next day.
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