Speaker 1: Hey guys, it's Justin here. I wasn't actually planning on making a video today, but I was sitting here studying. And I have this weird thing now where every time I start studying, I feel like I should be showing other people how I study because, I mean, it's not often that I'm sitting here studying a completely new topic that I have really no prior knowledge of. And in this case right now, I'm learning about artificial intelligence. And I don't know anything about artificial intelligence really at all. So I'm trying to familiarize myself, and it's a pretty dense textbook, and I just want to show you a very simple way that you can immediately upgrade your studying, going from a level where you may have been relatively passive with your learning. So passive learning is when we're not really thinking very deeply about a topic. We're not using our cognitive resources too effectively. We're just not being very active about our learning. The way that passive learning will feel is that we may feel sleepy, drowsy. We may be feeling disengaged and not interested in what we're learning about. We may catch ourselves thinking, what is the point of learning this? And for me, I know that one of those big ones is that I start reading, and I'm getting hazy. I'm losing focus. I'm not really sure what I'm reading or why I'm reading it. I'm just reading because I have been reading. And I get halfway down a page, and then I can't remember what's happening. Passive learning is incredibly inefficient. You can spend a lot of time doing passive learning. And I've just given you an example with reading, but it can also be with writing notes. You can be passive in lots of ways. Listening to someone speaking, you can be passive right now, listening to me, droning on and on. The key first step is you have to have awareness of when you're entering into that passive learning state. So figure out what those cues are. For most people, it is that disengagement, feeling that this is irrelevant, the glazing over and then the drowsiness, the feeling like you're sort of falling asleep as you read or as you listen. So these are the signs of passive learning. And if you do too much passive learning, you're not going to be activating efficient encoding processes. And therefore, you're not going to have good memory of it. You're going to forget very quickly. You're not going to know it very deeply. And partially because of the fact that you're forgetting it so quickly, it means that to get to the point where you are able to use your knowledge effectively, you need to repeat it and go over it again and again and again to fill in those gaps. But obviously, if every time you go over it again, it's still passive. You can see it's like trying to layer on different sort of, it's like a Swiss cheese model. If you imagine a slice of cheese with lots of holes in it, you're trying to layer on lots of these slices to stop there from being any holes. But if every slice is full of holes everywhere, then you're going to have to have a lot of layers. So obviously, reducing the size of those hoses is key to efficiency. On the other hand, active learning is where we are using our energy and our cognitive resources. We're spending a little bit of effort to try and hold on to the information a little bit better. We're increasing the amount of effort that we're putting in so that we can store it into our memory and therefore activate and utilize the information at a higher level of mastery as well. So that's the overall goal of what we're trying to do. So let me just go through exactly what it would feel like as I'm reading through this. Now I know that you're not going to be able to really see what I'm doing so much. But I mean, it's a book and I'm reading a book. And I'll speak out loud in terms of what's going on inside my head. So let's say I'm reading this and I'm just reading it normally. You know, there's a chapter here, there's a chapter heading. And I'm going to read down this page and I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do. Let's say that I just started reading this and I'm starting to feel that passiveness setting in. For a lot of you, this will happen very quickly. For a lot of you, you'll feel that this is just normal. But it's important to understand what those cues are. So I'm feeling, okay, I'm starting to glaze over. I'm starting to feel a little bit drowsy, a little bit sleepy with this. Okay, at this point, I need to create an interjection. Because if I let it go on further than this, then I'm going to, it's going to be harder and harder. I'm going to sort of sink into this pit of inefficiency and I'm going to get more and more and more passive until I just fall asleep. And I don't want that. So as soon as I notice that, I'm going to try to flick into a higher order by doing a few things. Now, the easiest things that you can do to really completely transform the way that you think about this. It takes a long time, but some really easy things that you can just do is skip ahead. Like literally just skip halfway down the page or even to the next page. Your purpose here is to skim through until you land on something that feels a little bit more interesting, just inherently, or that makes you feel a little bit more curious. So I might be reading through and I'm thinking, oh, I'm bored, bored, bored. Okay, I'm going to just skip, boom, boom, boom. Not very interesting. Okay. I see the word cognitive science. Now for me personally, cognitive science, that's interesting for me, but what's just happened and for you, obviously it could be something completely different, but what's just happened is that I've skipped a bunch and then I've landed at this word. I have no idea how cognitive science fits in with the rest of this. So I've got these question marks. Well, I was just reading about this thing before, which I'm kind of hazy on because I was passive and now I'm reading about cognitive science. So now I'm incentivized to read a little bit around the word to see, okay, well, what's the context in which this word is here? And now I can think about, well, how does that fit into what I was reading before? So now I'm going to use that as a springboard to come back. And now when I come back to where I was before, my mindset is a little different because I'm thinking how is that leading to cognitive science? How did it connect the dots? What was the flow? What is it saying here that allows me to connect it to that? So you see in doing that, I've created a little bit more curiosity. And so I'm giving myself a pathway towards higher order learning. In this case, it's that relational level learning. So that's one technique that you could do. You can just skip through until something catches you, read a little bit about that, and then come back to where you were to see and connect the dots between them to see how it all fits together. Another thing that you can do if that's not working for you, or sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, another trick that you can pull out of your tool belt is to just start skimming through keywords and just write down some of those keywords. And as you write down those keywords, think about what you already know about that keyword and then how you think maybe it's going to be explaining it. So for example, it says natural language processing here. Now natural language processing, I actually do generally understand what natural language processing means, but for example, knowledge representation, I don't know exactly what that means, but the words knowledge representation make me think about certain things and I can at least guess what that might mean. So I could write down, I've got my tablet here, I'm using an infinite canvas, I use the concepts app personally because it's got infinite canvas. So here I could write down knowledge representation, natural language processing, I could write down the next few keywords and I can try to think about how I think this book is going to be linking those ideas together. I'm creating a hypothesis. So again, it's activating that relational level of thinking, it's creating a scaffold for me. And I could be completely wrong in my idea, but it doesn't matter because what matters is that I tried, I expended effort to build a schema that I think could work and whether I'm right or wrong is kind of irrelevant because if I'm right, good, I've got a scaffold that I can keep building on and that's going to create a stronger knowledge schema that deepens my knowledge and improves my memory. Or if I'm wrong, that's all good because now I have more data points. Okay, I thought it was this way, but it's not, I'm wrong. Why am I wrong? Where did I go wrong? Well, what is it saying instead? So do you see now it's a little bit more relevant and with that relevancy, that again builds a stronger schema to improve our memory and our depth of knowledge mastery. So those are two very quick techniques that you could use skimming through until something catches you. This is using your prior knowledge innately to find areas of relevance that you can use as a springboard. You can almost think of it kind of like if you're at a party and then you meet a bunch of new people and these people are irrelevant to you initially, you don't know who they are, they're total strangers, but then you meet someone and you realize that they have a mutual friend with you and now that person is a little bit more relevant. Maybe they came from the same country as you or they have a similar hobby and so this person as an entity is becoming more relevant through something that was already relevant to you. So when you're studying anything, you're bringing in with you a prior set of knowledge and that is diverse. It's not just about AI or whatever topic you're studying, it's about your hobbies, it's about your culture, it's about random things that you have read online, it's about anything. Your prior knowledge that you bring in with you is an important tool that you need to learn how to leverage off of. And so finding ways to tap into your prior knowledge, like looking for relevance and looking for points of interest and then using that to connect back to the parts that feel less relevant through this relational thinking, that's an important skill. And if you really can't think of something that's innately relevant, like you've gone through four or five pages, six, seven, eight, nine pages worth of material and you're thinking, man, there's nothing on this that feels more interesting and more innately relevant to me at all. Well, in that case, we can't use that as a springboard. So we have to use the alternative, which is to write down at least the key concepts, the key keywords that we have covered. Maybe there's a few more later that you can see that you might put down as well. And we're going to try to form a web based on our logic and our reasoning and that forces us to, again, use our prior knowledge to build a hypothetical web, we're creating a hypothesis using our prior knowledge because we're not letting ourselves read every single thing about it. We're just writing down the keywords. So we've got very, very little to work with. We barely know what the words even mean. And therefore, the only way that we can possibly create some kind of relationship or network between them is by using our logic, intuition and prior knowledge. And again, that helps to build that scheme. Basically, you do both of these techniques at the same time. You find the relevant areas and use it as a springboard when you can and when you can't. You create a network just within what you've got. And, you know, there might be certain points within that network that become more relevant to you as you learn. And you can continue to build out from that very, very simple techniques that you can do. Very easy to implement. There's not really much of a learning curve here. It's actually kind of hard to do it wrong, really, as long as you follow the instructions. But it trains your brain to thinking relationally. And it's a great stepping stone towards even more effective, more advanced higher order learning strategies, which obviously I talk about in other videos as well. But I just thought I'd share a very quick tip before I get back to studying myself. So thanks for joining me on this random little video and I'll see you in the next one.