This is a collection of resources I have found regarding this topic, focusing on self and lifelong learning. Sort of what I would need for a research career.

How to Easily Learn Difficult Things

Elizabeth Filips

Elizabeth describes a 6-step process:

  1. Context-Broadening
  2. Dopamine Priming
  3. Singular Deep Dive
  4. Challenge Sandwich
  5. Getting Broody
  6. False Deadlines

Context-Broadening

  • Place the topic in the appropiate context (ie, the world)
  • Purpose: To make more sense and evoke excitement (make it interesting)

I have to understand the world, you see. Richard Feynman

  • Optimize Curiosity and Emotional Investment around the topic

Concretely, search info that make it interesting for you both from the intellectual and the emotional. Ie, a story of a person (maybe a famous one).

Another purpose of this is to connect this new topic to your world-model. “Situar el tema”.

Dopamine Priming

Optimize emotional-investment specifically by:

  1. Understand the consequences and benefits of learning of it.
  2. Frame the topic in such a way that makes it interesting (almost itching) to you.

[the-power-of-emotional-investment]

The scarcest interest is desire. ??? maybe Elizabeth herself.

The Singular Deep Dive

  • Aka the bottom-up approach.
  • First narrow into the specific thing and let your curiosity naturally expand from there (by questions).

I find overviews tiring, even if Im excited about something… I would get bore.

The specific as it focuses on a concrete problem grants more interest? [problem-solvingly]

Also, deepness is attractive??? There is an [aesthethic-of-deepness].

Let you curiosity branch naturally into the whole. [por-las-ramas]

The combination of intense curiosity + emotional investment is the fuel for this infinite branching trees of questions.

Challenge Sandwich

A challenge motivates you an defies your knowledge. Challenges are questions and/or projects/problems to do/solve. Which depends on the kind of topic, math is problem-based, fact topics like medicine is more question-based.

You can come up with challenges that could appear on your evaluation goal (an exam, or maybe life itself?).

As you solve these challenges solidifies knowledge.

Experienced academic readers usually read a text with questions in mind and try to relate it to other possible approaches, while inexperienced readers tend to adopt the question of a text and the frames of the argument and take it as a given. Sonke Ahrens

“Inteweave the challenges and the knowledge” Elizabeth Filips

The ability to use one own understanding is a challenge not a given Sonke Ahrens

You can related these challenges and new knowledge to the first context broadening you did… Relate it to the world, kind of like a new placement of the topic, which is a more informed version of the first one you did.

Getting Broody

Tradeoff between familiarity and unfamiliarity.

Familiarity has one danger–> the [mere-exposure-effect]

So doing many challenges is not the same as improving.

Brooding–>Recognize that learning will take more time than what the illusory familiarity is suggesting. In a sense, is resting from the topic [focused-and-diffused], and then go back to it. Is related to spaced repetition. [memory-retention]

To sediment is to rest and retest the knowledge in spaced cycles.

False Deadlines

Academic or nonfiction texts almost always take significantly more time than expected: If you ask academic or nonfiction writers, students or professors how much time they expect it would take them to finish a text, they systematically underestimate the time they need. Kahneman 2013,245ff

My interpretation is that by creating false deadlines you create a sense of urgency that facilitates memory retention. You would put the deadlines nearer to assure that later the knowledge will be assimilated (as you tend to underestimate the real time, you pressure yourself to do it quickly).