Metacognition

Metacognition: thinking about thinking

If you really want to learn, and you want to learn more quickly and more deeply, pay attention to how you pay attention. Think about how you think. Learn how you learn.

Most of us did not take courses on metacognition or learning theory when we were growing up. We were expected to learn, but rarely taught to learn.

But we assume that if you’re holding a book, you want to learn something . And you always don’t want to append a lot of time on it.

To get the most from any book or learning experience, take responsibility for your brain. Your brain on that content.

The trick is to get your brain to see the new material you’re learning as Really Important and crucial to your well-being. Otherwise, you’re in for a constant battle, with your brain doing its best to keep the new content from sticking.


How do you get your brain hungry?

There’s the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. The slow way is about sheer repetition. You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics, if you keep pounding on the same thing. With enough repetition, your brain says, “This doesn’t feel important to him, but he keeps looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be”.

The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. The things on the previous post (Reader as a Learner) are a big part of the solution, and they are all things that help your brain work in your favour. This is out of my personal experience. :-)

For example, studies show that putting words within the pictures they describe (as opposed to somewhere else in the page, like a caption or in the body text) causes your brain to try to makes sense of how the words and picture relate, and this causes more neurons to fire. More neurons firing is equal to more chances for your brain to get that this is something worth paying attention to, and possibly recording.

A conventional style helps because people tend to pay more attention when they perceive that they’re in a conversation, since they’re expected to follow along and hold up their end. The amazing thing is, your brain doesn’t necessarily care the “conversation” is between you and a book! On the other hand, if the writing style is formal and dry, your brain perceives it the same way you experience being lectured to while sitting in a roomful of passive attendees. No need to stay awake.


But pictures and conversational style are just the beginning. There’s a lot to explore on this. This should be done by yourself. Be creative at drawing pictures, writing stories about the content you are going to remember. Link at any stage , your content to pictures, stories, etc.

I talked much about pictures, because our brain is tuned for visuals, not text. As far our brain’s concerned, a picture really is worth 1024 words. And when text and pictures work together i.e, we need to embed the text in the pictures because our brain works effectively when the text is within the thing the text refers to, as opposed to in a caption or buried in the text somewhere.

We need to use the concepts and pictures in unexpected ways because our brain is tuned to novelty, and we use pictures and ideas with atleast some emotional content, because our brain is tuned to pay attention to the biochemistry of emotions. That which causes you to feel something is more likely to be remembered, even if that feeling is nothing more than a little humor, surprise, or interest.