I watched this short video on Steve job and his lecture at MIT, and within this video, he focuses on several quotes, one of which grabbed my attention throughout the day.
To learn anything fast, put yourself in a situation where you stand to gain or lose by your actions.
Interesting quote, but is there science in this?
I believe so.
It’s transitive on such notion that we learn languages faster by directly speaking instead of reading its morphology.
We reframe the learning quote within the bounds of education theory, specifically categorizing it as an active learning experience, where learning is more controlled rather than a passive experience. For the sake of diagrammatic reasoning, we look within the model called the triangle of retention learning, which provides us an intuitive metaphor of effectiveness in learning.
Of course, we shouldn’t take this model seriously, as its origins was not built through scientific research, nor projects accurate quantification for each learning activity. This model primarily establishes the fact that there exist many activities in which an individual learns.
In my perspective, learning itself is the dance of memory and problem-solving. We chug whatever information we perceive from our seven senses into our short term memory, do a bit of problem solving within our prefrontal cortex, then commit it into our long term memory, ready to duplicate whenever that certain experience pops up once more.
Yet, the amount of “learning” we achieve is dependent on our we experience it. I find it funny that our culture prioritizes audiovisual, reading, and lectures a big chunk to our learning, but they’re simply passive events that only subside in our mastery journey.
Learning by doing is an active learning experience, where we utilize all our brain regions to perform whatever task we ought to perform. It has been said that diving straight into an event head-on without any expertise is the best act of learning, as stated in the quote: “put yourself in a situation where you stand to gain or lose by your actions.”
This time, our learning is now within an economic stance, a little game theory of risk-taking. Such experience will engrave emotions into our learning experience, which is by far the best way to remember such a particular event. In fact, we tend to remember experiences better through emotions rather than some semantic fact, such as the formula of the linear regression we learn in lectures.
To conclude,
a simple approach to learning something quickly is to dive straight in without any prior knowledge and integrate emotions into that experience. Participating in competitions, asking questions in lectures, being utmost in TA sessions, being in testing groups (where students prioritize problem-based learning models), attempting exercise problems in a textbooks before reading the chapter spearheads the retention longer, or in my case: elaborating ideas in layman’s term through blog writing to my awesome audience. The key idea is to drive retention by active participation.
Of course, we ought to understand the mistakes and bias truths into our learning to gain mastery; one must quantify and reflect one’s process, such as the time it took to do a problem, the root cause of one’s mistake, and the metacognition that occurred during the process. Supervising such experience allows you to take further progressive steps into mastery. Still, of course, one must consider the fact that learning itself is a journey that cannot be hastened.
