About a year ago Mark Rober (a former NASA engineer) asked his YouTube followers to play a simple computer programming puzzle that he made with his buddy.

He told them that he wanted to prove that anyone from any background could learn to code. Fifty thousand of them took the challenge. But the truth was he didn’t care about proving that everyone could learn to code.

He was trying to figure out the role of fun factor in the learning process.

To be able to do that he added a little bit of stress for half the participants. He randomly served two slightly different versions of puzzles.

The only difference between the two versions was that in one version if they failed they didn’t lose any points but in the other version they lost five points. In both versions, the participants were given 200 points to start with.

When he analyzed the data he discovered that the success rate for those who were penalized for failed attempts was around 52%. But the success rate for those who were not penalized was 68%.

A difference of 16% was too much to believe.

But the answer came to him when he analyzed another piece of data  — the number of attempts to solve the puzzle.

Those who were penalized gave up after 5 tries but those who were not penalized tried 12 times or more. 

In other words, those who didn’t see failure in a negative light tried two and a half times more to solve the puzzle. As a result, they got more success and therefore learned more.

This was an astounding discovery. They had accidentally stumbled upon something significant. The trick to learning more is finding the right way to frame the learning process.

How to frame the learning process to learn more?

There are three things you can do:

1. Make failure a part of the learning process.

2. Shift the focus to fun.

3. Make the environment conducive to learning.

1. Make failure a part of the learning process. 

If you canframe the learning processin such a way where failure doesn’t bother you can learn much more and have a lot of fun in the process.

There is real evidence of that in real life. Toddlers are constantly trying new things. When they learn to walk they don’t think about how dumb they might look if they fall. They fall, again and again, and they don’t get scolded by their parents either. Instead, the parents encourage them to try again and again.

Toddlers’ focus is on learning to walk. By constantly trying, failing, and retrying they learn to walk.

2. Shift the focus to fun

When Super Mario Bros. came out, people were obsessed with it. They wanted to get to the castle and rescue the beautiful Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. Kids will get to school and ask each other, “What level did you make it to? Did you pass the game?”

They never asked each other about the different ways they might have died.

When playing these games, after jumping into a pit, no one thinks, “I am so ashamed; that was such a failure, I am never going to try again.”

What really happens is that they make a mental note, “I’ve got to remember there’s a pit there; next time, I’m going to come out with a little more speed and jump a bit later.”

By shifting our focus on the fun we can trick our brain and learn more. Science supports it too.

Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too.

Judy Will calls it the RAD effect in her paper The Neuroscience of Joyful Education. RAD is the acronym that explains the science behind the fun factor.

R stands for Reticular Activating System, A for Amygdala,and D for Dopamine. It happens in three steps.

● Novelty promotes information transmission through the Reticular activating system.
● Stress-free learning propels data through the Amygdala’s effective filter.
● Pleasurable associations linked with learning are more likely to release more dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the memory centers and promotes the release of acetylcholine, which increases focused attention.

You can add novelty by creating a stress-free environment for learning. 

3. Make the environment conducive to learning.

For some reason, most of the learning environments are designed like classrooms. Whether they are workshops, seminars, or group learning sessions; they are set up is like a school, demanding conformity and rigidity. Something that language teacher Michel Thomas renowned for his unconventional but successful ways of teaching is trying to break. 

If you look at Michel Thomas’s video on YouTube, you’ll notice something quite odd. He has been given a bunch of very challenging students (a mixed bag in other words) and his job is to get them started speaking French. The video starts with students in the classroom but they are not learning the language. 

Instead, Thomas gets them to do something entirely unexpected.

He gets then to move furniture. The students move sofas, tables, chairs and screens to create an atmosphere that is more like a lounge room rather than a classroom. Once the barrier between the teacher and student is broken, the conversation starts. Add food and coffee to the mix and students will be using French words and remember them much more easily. There will be no shame in incorrect pronunciation or not remembering the new words. The mistakes will be laughed off real learning will happen.

Thomas says, “learning should never be work. Instead, it should be a pleasure”.

You can change the environment for self-learning too. Rather than sitting in a library (or classroom) go to a park or cafe. Rather than reading alone, take along a friend. Explain to your friend what you have just read. You will read with more concentration and you will never forget what you have explained to someone in your own words.

I have covered a lot, lets recap.

The trick to learning more is finding the right way to frame the learning process.

If you can change your learning process in such a way that the failure is part of the learning process (a child learning to walk), your focus is on having fun (like saving the princess in a game) and your environment stress-free and novel (from a classroom or a library to a loungeroom or a cafe) you can enhance your learning many folds.

There you go. 

Add some fun to your learning process and you will learn much more.

Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash

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And why gobble-gobble learning is not such a good idea.

In 1954, Toru Kumon, a high school maths teacher in Japan, found his son struggling with math in elementary school. To help him practice, he started giving him simple maths problems to solve every day.

He discovered that when the degree of difficulty was only slightly high, his son did well. But when the degree of difficulty was high by several notches, not only that his son couldn’t solve the problems but he didn’t want to do the practice work anymore.

That was the origin of the Kumon system of teaching maths. Toru Kumon went on to create a maths curriculum of daily practice by increasing the difficulty factor by tiny increments. Over the next seven decades, using his system, millions of students have learned maths and excelled at it beyond their own wildest dreams.

My own daughters, who hated the subject in early elementary school started loving it after a couple of years on the system and became top maths students in their respective classes.

What made Kumon such a successful system?

Just two elements — tiny increments and daily practice.

When learning, our tendency is to gobble up as quickly as possible and be a master in no time. Initially, when the material is easy, we progress well, but as soon as the difficulty increases, we start getting frustrated and learning stops.

Learning in tiny increments on a consistent basis beats learning in large chunks over a short period of time. Here are three core reasons why:

1) The sleep factor
2) The tiredness factor
3) The mistake factor

Let’s start with the sleep factor.

Our brain processes each bit of information it receives and decides what to do with it. It literary makes the decision whether to store it or discard it. If the information is important, our brain stores it in short-term memory. If repeated several times, it qualifies to go the long-term memory. Things stored in the short-time memory get deleted constantly if not used. This processing happens mostly while we are sleeping.

Believe it or not, sleep plays a big role in learning.

But then, can’t bulk learning make us smarter? Surely the brain can absorb a lot more information at one go.

Yes, it can, but there’s a problem called tiredness that steps right in.

The tiredness factor

Bulk learning is plainly ineffective when compared with daily learning — and you don’t need a research scientist to tell you that. If you’re learning a new skill, the brain is under tremendous pressure. It’s trying to absorb all the new information and associating it with what you already know. Think about the amount of glucose it is going to need to be able to do that.

Now multiply that with the number of hours you are going to spend learning in a day and you know why you feel like throwing the book out of the window.

When we get tired we start losing the little chunks past the first few minutes of reading. As the tiredness increases, we start losing bigger chunks.

And yet most of us believe in bulk learning.

And this is because we’re in a hurry. Yet, the best way to learn something is to slow things down considerably. Slowing down gives the opportunity to detect more mistakes.

Let’s have a look at what role mistakes play in learning.

The mistake factor

If we do something every day, we learn from new mistakes we make every day. When we are bulk learning the mistakes are all a blur. But daily mistakes get highlighted.

When our learning pace is slow and we learn in tiny increments we have more time and inclination to fix those mistakes. Many mistakes are made due to a gap in our learning as well. The slow pace allows us to fill those gaps.

So we get to learn — and more importantly, revise what we know. And what we don’t know. Bulk learning is not as efficient, because the mistakes are made en masse. Every mistake gets its own spotlight and hence we get the chance to eliminate those mistakes systematically.

That is what talent is, the systematic reduction of errors.

It takes most people years to become extremely proficient at writing. Yet with the right teacher and the right system, this can be shortened.

And the right system is the system that Toru Kumon discovered seventy years ago. The system of tiny increments and daily practice.

Contrary to what people believe, it’s tiny victories that work, not big leaps. The big leap comes from tiny movements.

Next week another factor of learning — the fun factor.

Photo by Sheri Hooley on Unsplash

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Picture this, a teenage boy comes to a grocery store on his bike, parks his bike outside the store, walks in, buys what he needs, and then walks back home completely forgetting about his bike.

Not only that, but it also doesn’t occur to him that he left his bike outside the grocery store until the next day.

Now imagine this, the same boy memorizes a 1944 digit number on TV in front of a large audience and repeats it correctly. He then continues to memorize and recall 7 decks of cards, a 1200 digit binary number and makes a new Guinness world record by memorizing 100 colors shown in random sequence and recalling them without a single mistake.

How did he manage to do that? How did he convert his lousy memory to a memory machine?

Memory has always been my problem. Ever since I was in school I had trouble memorizing ‘stuff’ for exams. Now in middle age, my memory is becoming more of a problem. I struggle with remembering people’s names. While writing I struggle with remembering words. The right words always seem to be on the tip of my tongue but elude me and I give up in frustration. I invariably forget scenes and the storyline from the movies that I have watched on TV, sometimes multiple times.

One of my all-time desire is to improve my memory so that I am able to remember whatever I read so that I am able to recall it when I need it. If I can retain only a fraction of the information I consume, I will be ecstatic.

I wanted to learn how memory worked.

If I can retain only a fraction of the information I consume, I will be ecstatic. My quest led me to Nishant Kasibhatla, the boy in the above story.

Nishant Kasibhatia spent his life learning to sharpen his memory. He has come up with a formula which goes like this:

The first thing we need for developing good memory is input.

Luckily Input is easy. We are all very good at it. But there lies our problem.

We go to seminars, we read books, we watch videos, we follow blogs, we listen to podcasts. It is input… input… input…and more input. But it happens to us so many times that we read a book and a few days later we forget what was in it.

By jumping from one book to another, one article to another, one podcast to another, we are only encouraging shallow learning.

The shallow learning is when we can’t even recall what our take away points were. The purpose of reading is to learn and the purpose of learning is to benefit us in some form.

What’s the point of reading something if we can’t implement it and benefit from it.

Learning without implementation is pure intellectual entertainment, nothing else.

Here are 3 things we can do to improve our input.

1. Remove distractions. When we are learning something, we need to make sure that our full attention is towards that learning. If we pick up the phone or take a peek at the emails or go to the internet we kill the momentum of learning.

2. Do Single-tasking. When we are multitasking our brain is dealing with mutiple things at the same time. It then makes the executive decision what to keep in the long time memory and what to discard. Most of the time it discards everything becuase it think it must not be important enough since you are not paying full attention to it.

3. Make sure the quality of input is really really high. Our brain has inbuilt filter to discard the poor quality information. If you don’t believe try remembering rubbish movies you have seen and rubbish books or articles you have read. Your brain has instantly thrown in the rubbish bin.

The quality of input determines the quality of retention. It also determines the quality of recall.

Add to INPUT some REFLECTION and our retention increases many folds.

We all rush to learn new things. Lerning new things is fine, but the problem is we don’t take time to reflect which is extremely important for retention.

When learning something new we need to pause for a while and ask ourselves, what is my takeaway from this. How can I use this information in my life? How can this information benefit my work, my family, my life?

When we pause, reflect, and ask these questions the learning solidifies.

Now add the third ingredient IMPLEMENTATION to the mix and the magic happens.

Unfortunately, many people (myself included), in our haste, miss this step.

What do we do? We go out, learn something new, get excited, feel good, get inspired, and then go on to learn something new.

When we continue to learn without implementation, we get the illusion of competence. We feel we are competent but it is not competence at all.

What we need to do is, stop, write down what are the few things we can take action on, schedule it in our calendar, and take some action.

Even a lousy action is better than no action because it is the implementation that internalise the learning.

Now comes the most important ingredient, SHARING.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. Teaching is a way to OUTPUT. Sharing can also happen when you explain things to others or write an article about it or make notes and share them with a buddy. When you do that you are helping your brain to pay more attention. This is when you are on the path to master the topic.

No one becomes the master of something just by INPUT. They all became master by taking in better quality INPUT and doing more OUTPUT than INPUT.

For true mastery, you need to focus more on the OUTPUT than on the INPUT.

Nishant Kasibhatia

It all depends upon how much time you spend on learning something and how much time you spend on reflecting, implementing, and sharing. Nishant recommends, if you are spending x amount of time on INPUT, you should spend double the amount of time on OUTPUT.

REFLECTION, IMPLEMENTATION, AND SHARING are all ways of output.

In today’s fast-paced information age, maximizing our memory power is not an option but a necessity. We use our memory all the time and the way we use it affects what we achieve in our lives.

No matter what your profession or occupation, mastering information, and memory management skills will prove essential, and will help you to increase your productivity and profitability.

PS: I am not in any way associated or affiliated with him. I found him quite accidentally while researching for a way to improve my memory and retention ability.

I intend to write more articles on the topic in the comings days. Stay tuned.

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

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