If your aim for 2020 was to learn a new skill, you may be at the point of giving up. Whether you are mastering a new language or a musical instrument, or taking a career-changing course, initial enthusiasm can only take you so far, and any further progress can be disappointingly slow.
From these struggles, you might assume that you simply lack a natural gift – compared to those lucky people who can learn any new skill with apparent ease.
However, it needn't be this way. Many polymaths – including Charles Darwin and the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman – claimed not to have exceptional natural intelligence. Most of us have more than enough brainpower to master a new discipline, if we apply it correctly – and the latest neuroscience offers many strategies to do just that.
Much research in the field hinges on the idea of , pioneered by Profs Robert and Elizabeth Bjork at the University of California, Los Angeles. The aim is to deliberately create a slight feeling of frustration as you learn, which leads the brain to process the material more deeply, creating longer-lasting memories. It's like physical exercise: you need to feel a bit of resistance to make significant long-term gains.
Unfortunately, many of our preferred learning techniques – such as reading and highlighting textbooks, or the drawing of colourful "mind maps" to summarise material – don't offer enough mental challenge to make the information stick, leading to disappointing results. "Our judgment about our learning is often biased towards strategies that feel easy and effortless," says Dr Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow and member of the website. "But they don't translate into long-term retention of knowledge."
The following strategies will help you overcome these bad habits. Whatever you plan to learn, they will make your memory the envy of others.
Fail productively
Let's begin with the pre-test – a strategy that is perhaps best explained with an example.
How do you say "thank you" in Finnish?
The answer is "kiitos" – and I'm guessing that most readers who aren't Finnish won't have had any hope of answering this correctly. But thanks to that initial struggle, you will now be more likely to remember the answer in the future. Psychological studies show that a "pre-test" quiz – taken before you have studied the material – , even if you failed to answer a single question correctly.
This is true for both the memorisation of simple trivia and the deeper understanding of . In one study, participants were quizzed on the neuroscience of vision before reading an Oliver Sacks essay on the subject. They ended up learning 10 to 15% more than students who had instead been given extra time to read the text. Whatever you are learning, try to gauge your current understanding of the topic – even if it is nonexistent.
Teach it to someone else
After taking the pre-test, you also want to continue quizzing yourself on what you've just learned. To psychologists, this is called and it is one of the most reliable ways of building stronger memory traces. In carefully controlled studies, retrieval practice vastly outperforms other strategies such as the material as you study.
As Dr Kuepper-Tetzel explains: "Testing is usually seen as a way to assess knowledge. However, testing in itself is a potent learning strategy and has been shown to increase long-term retention of knowledge."
This may be one reason why flashcards – a common form of self-testing – don't work as well as they could. If you think self-testing is purely a means of assessing your recall, you may peek at the answer too soon – whereas you need to truly rack your brain before giving in, if you want to form the stronger memory. "The harder retrieval is, the more the memory for the information is enhanced," says Prof Mirjam Ebersbach at the University of Kassel in Germany.
