AbdulSalamFor years, I have been involved in learning days and nights. Starting my days by reading spiritual books to kickstart my day, followed by university lectures and podcasts, reading at least 50 pages a day, one book summary, and one Informational video from the watch later section of my youtube. I used to dedicate 20 minutes to watching NETFLIX documentaries in the evening. My philosophy was simple “The more you Learn, the More you become valuable”.
Things changed when I learned memory in depth. I learned that although you can learn so much, you can only absorb a little because of several factors. Today, in this blog, I will show you the evidence of why so much learning leads us to no learning at all and how much we can learn in a day.
Our daily capacity to learn depends on several factors: the following are the major ones.
1-Attention:
If you are focused, you will learn more. But here in our world, we are not focused at all. We think, we overthink, and we repeat. Every second, we go through a single thought, showing us how attentive we are. One major reason for the less attention of students today is their distracted minds.
2-Motivation:
The second key reason for limited learning is your “Why” of learning. Why do you want to learn something? What makes you invest your time in that particular task? Is that your fear of failing exams (mostly we are driven by this), or do you want to learn something new? Your motivation largely defines your learning capacity.
3-Prior Knowledge:
if you have enough knowledge about a particular subject, it would be easy to associate your prior knowledge with your new knowledge. For example, if you don’t know what hydrogen is, it would be hard to understand what H2O is. Associations are the building blocks of memory and you should learn associations if you are looking forward to learning the basics of memory.
4-Complexity of Knowledge:
If I explain chemical formulas to a kindergarten student, how well he will encode them? will he be able to understand them even partially? Though it largely depends on the teacher, receiving end plays a key role. You will learn little or nothing if you learn something beyond your intellectual level. In My case, it was “Forty Rules of Love” when I first tried to read it. I failed miserably.
Our Limitations
Research shows that, on average, we can only remember seven pieces of information at a time, and as we move forward, we will start forgetting things we learned earlier. With such a limited capacity, how we will be able to learn so much in this fast-paced world?
How can we do that?
I have designed a complete FREE Course on Memory Techniques comprising 50 lectures articulated in animated style. You Can access this course by clicking “here”
For Now, I will recommend you following ways to Increase your learning capacity.
1-Hyperfocus:
Hyperfocus is the best book I have read on “focus and attention” and you can also access my course on “focus” by clicking here. Hyperfocus allows you to limit your distractions and allows you to be more focused on a specific task.
2-Chunking
Learning the Chunking technique is about creating small chunks of information and remembering it by repeating it several times.
3-Repetition
Repeat what you learn after following intervals
After 1 Day
After 1 Week
After 1 Month
After repeating any information on similar patterns, you will save it in your long-term memory and never fade away.
4-Find your “Why”
If you are not interested in something, think, why so? What is keeping you away from that particular subject? Explore the interesting part of that subject to make yourself more interested in that subject.
That’s all for this topic. Explore this site to find more Interesting Topics. Also, check out abdulsalamurdu.com if you want to read my articles in the Urdu Language.
