How to Learn Anything Fast: Teach Your Brain to Focus

I'm sure I'm not the only one who hates being told just focus and I know it's important I made this in 12 hours and I also made this in 12 hours the only difference being just how much I was paying attention when we focus we are clearly much more intelligent the problem is no one teaches us how to do it and they should better focus is probably the single quickest way to improve our learning and performance and unlike our genes and knowledge it's actually pretty easy to change simple adjustments to what we're thinking when we are being taught things especially difficult or boring things can up to 15x hour speed of absorbing and applying that information today I'll break down what I wish I was taught from day one a three-part scientific framework on how to laser focus and therefore become immediately much smarter reasons our brains don't focus is because things are just too boring maybe they're too hard or they are presented in a boring way or we're just not interested in them and more scientific terms however we can say that these activities all hoverboards that are either too small too few too far apart too far away or too non-opius anything with this low anticipation or future reward will produce less dopamine and therefore lead to less Focus you might have experienced a stitching in a droning University lecture or reading a biology chapter on the layers of the leaf you just don't care and no matter how much you bribe yourself with future things or force yourself and threaten yourself to work rewards are just not enough you cannot focus we found a solution for these boring cases for human brains ironically using AI we know that AI in general is so much better at games it beats humans almost every single time but there was one game that AI sucked at Montezuma's Revenge no matter how long they ran this game for and how hard they tried it just could not get past the first level it was shockingly terrible the special thing about Montezuma's Revenge was that it was very similar to our lectures and things we want to learn rewards were scarce and non-obvious and so the system didn't know what to do it was programmed to seek rewards and as there was not enough there it didn't know what direction to go in and how to progress the programmers overcame this by trying to make the learning model more human-like instead of seeking traditional rewards in the terms of points and wins it actually programmed it to seek novelty and Novelty became its reward when the program was incentivized to seek new things that I hadn't seen before it ended up going 15 times farther in the same amount of time in those cases in our life where traditional rewards are not enough to get us focused it's better to switch to novelty based rewards instead of thinking how is this interesting or why should I care instead we can think how is this different to what I currently know how is this new the slight shift in mindset unlocks endless more Focus we are evolutionarily hardwired to be rewarded for novelty seeking behaviors giving us dopamine and increasing see our Focus even when they're otherwise is non-newness means Focus even in the absence of other rewards a phrase by Mae West captures this beautifully when she says when I'm quote between two evils I tend to choose the one I haven't tried before one of the strongest ways to increase our focus on something is to be shown we are wrong in a fun experiment toddlers were given two different types of building blocks some were normal wooden ones some had magnets in them so they stacked up in weird ways the children spend much longer playing with the ones with magnets in them because they violated their rules of how these blocks should behave the simple element of wrongness or surprise creates huge amounts of extra Focus information theory states that people have an intrinsic desire to learn and to make simple predictions about our environment to make models of the world this is because a better understood world is more compressible and this makes our brain happy therefore when we see something that violates these rules we want to check it out and compress it again we give its focus well the babies in the experiment are doing is that they're using what they already know about the world to motivate what they need to pay attention to when younger babies who had never seen building blocks before were given the two types they focused on both of them equally because there was no element of surprise both of them were completely the way they can use this to increase our focus is that as we are trying to learn something instead of just passively trying to absorb or understand the information we try to come up with conclusions as the lecture is going on as soon as the lecture starts for example we start to try to protect and conclude how it will end what will be said next how things work and how things connect and how they will go then as the lecture progresses we are continuously adjusting these conclusions based on the new information that will tell us where we are right and where we are wrong a great way to train yourself to do this is to think of that very annoying thing that people sometimes do when you are trying to say a story and someone interrupts you and says oh and then they said this and you have to go no no that that's not what happened and they just don't let you finish your story because they keep interrupting you with wrong things yeah okay you you need to do that in your head as someone is talking try to create these conclusions in your mind for what they are saying and you will be proven wrong a fair bit in this way when the rules that we already knew about the world are being violated by new information that we are trying to learn or when the conclusions that we are making as the lecture progresses are being violated by new information we can benefit from the extra focus of having to be surprised and readjust our conclusions and if our predictions for what will happen are proven to be true then we can benefit from the pleasurable dopamine of getting something right so it's a win-win in both situations if this sounds familiar it's because again it's a way machine Learning Works cheating temporal difference learning is how machines teach themselves things like how to play chess they make predictions for what the opponent or will do or what will happen next and then they adjust these predictions based on information and therefore they can cover huge amounts of data and super quick very thorough and effective learning especially fast this is what we're trying to replicate before I get to my last point I just want to State something that I noticed preparing this video which is it sounds like there's so much work to be done and intention is taken away from the main lecture or the thing we're trying to learn and that's not technically true one because these things become so much quicker and second nature the more we practice them so they don't actually take that much time and two it's not about doing all of them all the time a lot of these things are things that we probably intuitively do ourselves in some shape or form I definitely did it way before I knew the theory and it's more about recognizing that aha this is a good thing this is why this works and we lean into it more intentionally and become better Learners rather than trying to do something completely new and lastly if you actually try to do this you will intuitively find the pauses or the times where you can come up with predictions and conclusions in your mind and there's definitely space whenever someone is teaching in order to do this Russian bartanian I think identified flexible Focus which is basically much more scattered Focus than we think we need when he was studying the way that Nobel Prize winners would do work so there's a lot more distraction and flexibility bringing in from yourself rather than just focusing 100 on what the other person is saying that actually makes perfect Focus so just wanted to state that and also again if you want any of the resources and a summary of this video so you don't have to re-watch it there's one for free that you can download as a PDF in my description the ultimate boss of focus far more than novelty or surprise are individually is the combination of both which in a way is Intrigue in another study children were given a toy with two lovers and while they struggle hadn't figured out how the toy worked or which lever actually made the toy make sounds and noise and lights they refused to exchange it for another toy no matter how shiny and big the new ones were they stuck to their own because whenever we are intrigued or confused about how something works and we want to figure it out nothing compares to the amount of focus and attention we give that specific thing a way to generate artificial Intrigue in what we are being taught or trying to learn is to think about conclusions that we came to that were not addressed questions that we had that are not yet answered contradictions to what we already know that were not clarified and gaps in the information that the lecturer gave so using the conclusions that we were creating before until the lecturer proves that they are right or wrong or addresses them in some sort of wait our attention will be dragged throughout and kept all the way because we are now invested and intrigued with how these things work and what the actual answer is Intrigue or discernment is actually a different type of focus David Gross in his essay notes on virtue actually identified different types of attention of which focus is only one he identified mindfulness awareness focus and discernment as a type of attention so when we can't generate short Brokers we can actually really well use its sister which is discernment isolating a specific element and thinking how is this getting me to where I need how does this connect with this question I have in my mind is a very good way to actually be invested in what's happening and try to understand it a lot better this way of thinking almost guarantees that our Pure attention will be held all the way to the end of the lecture as our brain is trying to tie up all of these loose ends and if they're not then we are left with some brilliant and insightful questions to ask of all of the methods I mentioned today this is the one that I was unintentionally doing every single lecture in my first year of medical school I'd write down all of my wrong predictions and conclusions or the things that were not answered and would go to the lecture in the end and ask why what I thought previously was wrong and what were the things that I felt that were not clarified or that I hadn't understood properly it's such a great way to learn as helpful as all of this is nothing beats genuine enjoyment in what you do having to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to and so picking the right career making the right choices in life as much as we can is incredibly powerful we all sadly have just one life and therefore cannot test out every single career to make sure it's the perfectly right one for us and so proper research and insight on the difficult to ask questions on careers are absolutely invaluable and there's one resource which is absolutely free which does this in the best way possible 80 000 hours the sponsor of this video is a non-profit that wants to help people make a positive impact on the world and part of this is each of us finding the right calling or the right thing for us to do and spend our time and focus on if it takes us six minutes to pick a restaurant to spend two hours on for our birthday it should take us 4 000 hours to find the thing that we are going to do with the about 80 000 hours that each of us will spend working during our life which is therefore quite difficult to do although to be fair I think I might be getting close to considering my career for that much but anyways I have a link in my description which will give you a free copy of their in-depth career guide which I recommend everyone should read no matter what stage in your career you are in and also there's a bunch of so many other helpful resources and Frameworks and ways of thinking and research and podcasts up on their website I would definitely definitely give them a lesson it's actually unbelievable and I'm genuinely so grateful that this information is out there for free it makes this segment one of the easiest for me to ever do in my videos as you've probably noticed in this video for more than I'd actually like to admit I've been fascinated and terrified by Ai and I tried to spend as much time as I can learning about it reading about it testing it here and there and trying to keep up with the changes and what's going on in this field just as a little personal side note I feel that 80 000 hours have some of the best and most balanced research out there and conversations about the human impact that these sort of technologies will have in our lives so I love their podcasts on this I would just definitely recommend them if you've already seen the above and um you don't have anything new from ATK this is what I would definitely recommend so if you made it to the end of this video thank you so much for responding this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind yourself and others and don't believe everything you think bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 358,031

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Id: brInNApdbL4

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2023