Here's a situation...
I watch a video.
Its creator synthesizes all kinds of ideas and comes to an interesting conclusion.
I think, “Wow! I know all about that now.”
Then, a few hours later, I can sort of recall its main points,
but if someone asked me to explain it in depth,
I'd fumble for words.
This happens to me all the time.
It happens when I finish chapters of books, episodes of television,
movies, podcasts, articles... you name it.
The story I tell myself is that upon completing
any reading, watching or listening,
I feel like I know what it's all about but the truth is I don't.
I just felt like I knew something without actually knowing it.
I tricked myself into thinking I was competent.
In her course Learning How to Learn,
UC San Diego professor Barbara Oakley points out
many of these illusions of competence:
One: Seeing information in front of you such as reading a book
doesn't mean you know it.
Two: Seeing or hearing someone come to a conclusion doesn't mean you know
how to get to that conclusion or explain their argument.
Three: Searching for something on Google gives you the illusion
that the information is in your brain.
And four: Spending lots of time with material doesn't mean you know it.
Philosopher Mortimer Adler once said,
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it
usually does not know what he thinks.”
This is the fundamental difference
between feeling informed and truly understanding something.
I am as informed as ever.
I can more or less parrot opinions I read, cite random facts,
but when tasked with explaining
what something is all about, why it is the case,
what its connections are with other facts and theories,
and putting it in context, I fall flat on my face.
What an... idiot!
Oh... What a loser!
It's dangerous when I let these illusions of competence slip into my opinions.
I so often feel strongly about a position, but if pressed, I could hardly argue for it.
So much of media now is designed
to make understanding things for ourselves obsolete.
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is a booming business.
Viewers and listeners get hit with persuasive audiovisuals,
professional rhetoric, and carefully selected data.
It all amounts to a nice little package for the viewer to make up their own mind
with little difficulty,
except the packaging is often done so effectively
that the viewer, listener, or reader doesn't make up
their own mind at all.
Instead, people become no better than a human Spotify playlist
that spits out other people's neatly wrapped opinions
without actually understanding any of it.
To continue with Adler, “To regard anyone except yourself
as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man.”
It is from this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name.
Not being able to explain my position or parroting someone else's means
I'm never thinking for myself.
Now, you, me, anyone is
entitled to their opinion no matter what it is.
That's the hallmark of democracy,
but I know that my life would be fuller if I actually understood everything
my emotional brain so adamantly believes I do.
Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner
of legendary investor Warren Buffett, is
famously disciplined when it comes to this idea.
“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything
that I don't know the other side's argument
better than they do.”
So, like any conclusion on getting better at something,
there's a lot of work involved.
I have to do a lot of active reading,
listen to as many arguments as I can,
argue with people smarter than me,
fight against my own emotional bias,
think about as many variables as possible.
It's not the easiest thing to do!
And there's also my problem at the beginning of the video.
How am I supposed to form an opinion or understand something
when I keep forgetting all the information I digest.
One of the many reasons why people have trouble explaining
videos or books or articles
is because they simply don't remember what was said.
It's worth then to understand how the memory works.
There's two main parts: short-term and long-term.
In recent years, we've discovered
that long-term memory is the seat of understanding.
It stores not just facts but complex concepts or schemas.
“By organizing scattered bits of information into patterns of knowledge,”
writes Nicholas Carr,
“schemas give depth and richness to our thinking...
Understanding and intelligence is derived largely
from the schemas we have acquired over long periods of time.”
Think of the long-term memory like an investment portfolio.
As you gather more and more schemas,
you gain intellectual compound interest over time.
They all begin to connect to each other,
increasing your understanding of the world exponentially over time,
but... and here's the key...
for information, to get to your long-term memory in the first place,
it has to go through a part of the short-term memory
called working memory.
Working memory has about two to four slots where we process information.
It acts as a bottleneck for the infinite amount
of information around us.
The problem is what we hold there can quickly vanish
if we don't keep thinking about them or rehearse them in our heads.
In other words, if we don't grapple with the ideas
in our working memory for an extended period of time,
they never get sent to the long-term memory.
They just disappear.
Our current culture makes this process challenging.
We're blasted with new stimuli and information at the rate of a firehose.
This couldn't be worse for our memories.
Once we surpass these two to four slots in our working memory,
once we overload with information, we begin to get distracted.
Our ability to process and retain information begins to plummet.
This is in part why I feel, like, I know so much,
but understand so little,
why I can scroll down my Twitter feed and barely remember any of it.
Info jumps in to my working memory only to be replaced
by the next thing and the next thing.
Very little of it, if any, makes it into my long-term memory.
As Nicholas Carr writes,
“As we reach the limits of our working memory,
it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information
from irrelevant information, signal from noise.
We become mindless consumers of data.”
But it's not just information overload that affects our ability to remember things,
multitasking is just as bad.
Our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time.
When we multitask,
all we're really doing is quickly switching from one task to another
and our brain struggles to commit anything to long-term memory when we're constantly
task switching, tab shifting, and notification checking.
Every switch is like hitting the reset button.
It gives no time for deeper processing.
So, what's the fix.
The first is to eliminate multitasking, distractions,
and information streams that cause overload.
Easier said than done. I know.
We're all well aware at this point that these services exploit our psychology
and it's hard to resist the addicting dopamine surge
that comes from checking them.
But, once you have that one source of information,
a book for example,
and it's the only thing you're paying attention to,
how do you remember that?
How do you get the books arguments into your long-term memory
to the point where you could explain them back to someone.
There are a lot of methods that help commit things to long-term memory
and I'm going to go through the three big ones:
recall, the Feynman Technique,
and spaced repetition.
Recall.
After you've read or watched any material,
simply look away and see what you can recall
from the material you've just taken in.
In one experiment,
students who studied a text and then practiced it
by recalling as much information as they could
and repeated that process learn far more than their peers
who either went on to something else or reread the text over and over again.
Practicing recall is counterintuitive to most consumers of content.
You finish a chapter and you go to the next one
or you finish a video and move on to something else,
but spending as little as 30 seconds after finishing a chapter or video
and recalling its key points vastly improves your understanding of a topic
and commitment of it to long-term memory.
Then, there's the Feynman technique.
World-renowned physicist and teacher Richard Feynman codified
this method of learning.
It's probably the best if you want to understand something
but it's also the most work-intensive.
One: Take something you wanna understand.
Two: Write out an explanation as if you were teaching it to someone
who didn't understand the subject.
Three: Whenever you get stuck, go back to the material and relearn.
Eventually, you'll fill in the gaps in your knowledge
until you can write an explanation without needing the source material.
Four: Finally, attempt to simplify your explanation,
getting rid of technical terms and convoluted language.
Simplify it to the point that a kid could get what you're saying.
To do this, Feynman recommended the use of analogies.
Analogies connect complex ideas to something more relatable,
making it easier to understand.
I used two earlier.
Understanding and intelligence is like an investment portfolio;
it gains compound interest as complex schemas connect with each other,
and the other, working memory acts like a bottleneck to long-term memory.
And finally, there's spaced repetition.
LeBron James has undoubtedly put in tens of thousands of hours
shooting hoops over many years.
The Beatles practiced music for years before they became masters of the craft.
Why don't we do that with information and arguments?
There are a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is
that people assume the brain is a computer.
Once you get the information, it's there forever,
but the brain functions much more like a muscle
and like any muscle, it needs to be exercised;
its neural connection strengthened.
There's the famous saying: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
In other words, the more often you use the neurons grappling with
the information you want to commit to memory,
the stronger those connections will get and the stronger your memory
and understanding of that information will get.
Spaced repetition does this by firing the neurons over a long period of time.
If you read, recall, or do the Feynman technique
on the key concepts from say... Kant's Philosophy
and spaced them out by three days over the course of a couple weeks,
it results in the highest amount of memory retention.
Much better than if you were to do it all at once.
You may be thinking,
“Read the same thing again? Recall the same thing again?
Do the Feynman technique again? Over a long period of time?”
Unfortunately, that's the reality if you wanna understand something long-term.
We are strapped for time most days of our lives.
Doing all this work outside of our jobs
or other responsibilities of daily life sounds like an awful task,
so we turn to others to do it for us.
It makes plenty of sense.
And I'll also add that life isn't the book report.
You don't need to be memorizing and understanding
everything that comes your way.
That's absurd.
What I wish I did more often, however,
is spend more time thinking about one important thing at a time
instead of trying to absorb as much information as possible
only to forget most of it.
As Charlie Munger has said,
“Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do,
not keep up with every damn thing in the world.”
It's a call to increase the quality of the information you receive
rather than the quantity and to spend more time with it.
Union College Psychologist
and Nobel Prize winner Christopher Chabris says,
“The internet plays to our natural tendency
to vastly overvalue what happens to us right now.”
Our bias towards novelty is strong
and forces us towards the trivial rather than the essential.
No matter what amount of work anyone does
people will continue to hold different opinions
and that's when intellectual humility becomes important.
To recognize the limits of your knowledge
and to appreciate others’ intellectual strengths is
one of the best things a person can do.
It's not only where learning happens
but it's also where disagreements become more constructive.
I think Kal Turnbull,
founder of the Change My View Subreddit
sums it up well.
“It seems to be in our nature to focus on how we were wrong
over the fact that we're now smarter as if we can't be works in progress
and we often attach our egos to what we believe.
A view is just how you see something.
It doesn't have to define you
and trying to detach from it to gain understanding
can be a very good thing.”
“Real knowledge,” as Confucius once said,
“is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”
The trick is not to be fooled by illusions of superiority
and to learn to accurately reevaluate our competence each day
because in Adler's words,
“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
What's on trial is not just the weight of our opinions
but our entire understanding of the world.
This video has been brought to you by Audible
and if you're as interested as I am
in how our brains interface with the internet,
how prone we are to know a large breadth of information
but understand very little of it,
then I highly recommend The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.
He goes into philosophy, neuroscience history, and media theory.
Mm! I love this book.
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Happy listening, everyone. I'll see you in the comments.