4 ways to get smarter, learn faster, make better decisions, and build a healthier brain
Even though research shows luck plays a surprisingly important role, ask people which factor contributes the most to success and many will point to intelligence. Judgment. Decision making. The ability to learn quickly and retain and use what you’ve learned.
Want to be able to increase your learning speed, make smarter decisions, and increase your overall intelligence? Science to the rescue.
Retain more by spacing out your study or practice sessions.
Most of us wait tend to wait until the last minute to learn what we need to know. A presentation. A pitch to investors. A new product sales demo.
But not only is waiting till the last minute more stressful, it’s also a much less effective way to learn. The better approach? What psychologists call “distributed practice.”
Say you want to nail a presentation. Run through it once. Take a few minutes to make a few corrections or revisions.
Then walk away for at least a few hours, or even for a day, before you rehearse again. Do that, and research shows retention improves dramatically. Why? Go over your presentation repeatedly and it’s still “top of mind.” You don’t have to retrieve it from memory.
Spacing out your sessions lets you tap into the power of study-phase retrieval: Each time you try to retrieve something from memory, that memory becomes harder to forget — even if you initially struggled to retrieve it.
Spacing out your sessions also increases contextual variability. When information gets encoded into memory, some of the context is also encoded. (That’s why listening to some songs can cause you to remember where you were, what you were feeling, etc., when you first heard that song.) That context creates useful cues for retrieving information.
Bottom line? Give yourself enough time to space out your learning sessions. You’ll learn more, and in less time.
Speaking of less time…
Test yourself to speed up the learning process.
While it can be frustrating to fail, considerable research shows that frequently testing yourself as you learn — especially if you get something wrong — is an extremely effective way to speed up the learning process.
Again, it’s all about additional context. Imagine you’re trying to remember the five most important benefits of a new product. Test yourself, fail to remember a few, and then check your list and not only are you more likely to remember those things the next time, but you’ll also remember that you didn’t remember those things. (I know, sounds meta. But it works.)
So don’t just read and highlight and re-read. Test yourself as you go. See if you can list the three main points you want to make. See if you can cite key statistics. Sales figures. Profit margins. You’ll gain confidence in how much you know, and you’ll more quickly learn the things you don’t remember the first time around.
Keep modifying the way you practice and double your learning speed.
When you want to gain expertise, how much you practice matters. But what matters even more is the way you practice.
Say you’re trying to learn a physical skill. Don’t just repeat it over and over again and hope you’ll eventually master that task. The better approach? Mix it up a little. The authors of a Johns Hopkins study found that practicing a slightly modified version of a task you want to master lets you learn more, and learn faster, than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.
That’s the power of reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.
A simple example is trying to improve your tennis serve. The conditions are fixed. The net is always 39 feet from the baseline. The net is always three feet high. In theory, serving from the same spot, over and over again, will help you ingrain the right motions into your muscle memory and improve your accuracy and consistency.
And, of course, that does happen — but a better, faster way to improve is to slightly adjust the conditions in subsequent practice sessions.
Maybe one time you’ll stand a few inches to one side. Another time you might use a slightly different grip. Or new, or old, tennis balls. By making the conditions different each time, you’ll prime your reconsolidation pump and improve more quickly.
Just make sure you only modify the conditions slightly. Change things up too much and you’ll create brand-new memories, not reconsolidated memories. As the researchers write, the modifications need to be subtle.
And practice sessions need to be spaced out. Researchers gave the participants a six-hour gap between training sessions, because neurological research indicates it takes that long for new memories to consolidate.
Practice slightly differently too soon and you don’t get enough time to “internalize” what you just learned. You won’t be able to modify old memories, and therefore improve your skills, because those memories haven’t had the chance to become old memories.
Bottom line? Don’t do the same thing over and over. Slightly modify the conditions in subsequent practice sessions and then give yourself the time to consolidate the new memories you make.
That’s the fastest path to expertise.
Exercise to prime your brain to learn faster and retain more.
You probably know that exercise can help you perform better under stress. That exercising for 20 minutes can elevate your mood for up to 12 hours. That exercise can even make you a better leader.
But what you probably don’t know is that exercise can help you better retain important information and more quickly learn a new skill or technique.
Say you want to improve your ability to remember certain things. A study published in Scientific Reports found that moderate intensity workouts — keeping your heart rate between 50 and 80 percent of max — dramatically improves recall and associative learning and increases your brain’s ability to absorb and retain information.
Or say you want to learn or improve a task where motor skills are involved. According to a different study published in Scientific Reports, 15 minutes of cycling at 80 percent of max heart rate (“intense” exercise) resulted in better memory performance than 30 minutes of moderate exercise, which was better than no exercise at all.
In other words, exercising hard for 15 minutes “fired up” participants’ brains and allowed them to learn motor skills better and faster. To a lesser degree, so did 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise.
And then there’s this. Research shows exercise can increase the size of your hippocampus, even if you’re in your 60s and 70s, helping to mitigate the impact of age-related memory loss. Yep: Exercise helps make your brain healthier, too.
Which will not only help you be smarter, but also stay smarter.
Can’t beat that.
