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. Go to audible.com/will
or if you live in the U.S., text “will” to 500-500
for a free 30-day trial. Your first audio book is free. I've had Audible for two years
and it's been my companion on countless road trips
and runs and days when I just do this. You get a free audiobook every month, which, in my opinion,
makes the subscription worth it on its own as well as 30% off
all regularly priced audiobooks. I encourage you to join me
by going to audible.com/will, or if you live in the U.S., text “will” to 500-500. Happy listening, everyone.
I'll see you in the comments.
