Learn Faster

Learning something new is the best investment I know. It costs nothing, nobody can take it off you, and it pays out for the rest of your life.

It’s also slower than it needs to be, because the way most of us were taught to learn is wrong. Cram late, read it again, hope.

I’ve spent years trying to learn things faster. Thai, code, how to write. Most of the hacks on the internet are rubbish. A few hold up in a lab, and I still use them.

This is those few, then the bit nobody likes to admit to.

• Things you can do.

• Things you can take.

Don’t. Go to bed and finish it in the morning. That’s not laziness, it’s the single best-evidenced trick in this post.

Stéphanie Mazza and her team in Lyon tested it in 2016. Forty French adults learned sixteen Swahili words. Half learned them at 9pm, slept, and had another go at 9am. The other half learned them at 9am, stayed awake, and had another go at 9pm.

The people who slept walked into the second session remembering about ten of the sixteen words. The people who’d been awake remembered seven and a half. The sleepers got all sixteen back in about three goes. The others needed six.

That’s the sandwich. Half the effort for the same result on the day.

The bit that got me is what happened after. A week on, the sleepers still had fifteen of the sixteen words. The awake lot had eleven. Six months on, the sleepers had nearly nine. The others had three.

So the all-nighter isn’t just miserable. It’s the version that forgets. Your brain, and your boss, will thank you for the early night.

If sleep is the thing you can’t do, I wrote up what fixed mine in How to fall asleep faster.

Everyone thinks it’s practice, practice, practice. The lab says it’s mostly the gaps.

In 2019 Marlene Bönstrup’s team at the National Institutes of Health had people type a number sequence with their left hand. Ten seconds typing, ten seconds rest, thirty-six times, under a brain scanner. Almost all of the improvement arrived during the rests, not the typing.

My version is forty-five minutes on, fifteen off. Past the forty-five I’m reading the same line three times and pretending it counts. In the fifteen, no screen. Water, a walk, ten minutes on the Sam Harris app if my head is loud. That’s the only meditation I’ve stuck with, and it isn’t voodoo, it’s sitting still.

Benedict Carey put it best in How We Learn, the one book on this I’d hand you.

Here’s one that costs nothing. Before you start, decide you’re going to explain it to somebody afterwards.

John Nestojko and colleagues at Washington University in St Louis tried this in 2014. Everyone read the same passages. Half were told there’d be a test. Half were told they’d be teaching it to another student. Then everyone got the test, and nobody taught anyone.

The ones expecting to teach remembered more, the main points in particular, and in the order a teacher would use. Nothing changed except what they thought was coming.

Half the reason I write these posts is that writing one forces me to understand the thing well enough to say it plainly. If I can’t, I didn’t learn it.

Typing is faster. That’s the problem.

Pam Mueller at Princeton and Daniel Oppenheimer at UCLA showed students lectures in 2014 and had half take notes on a laptop and half with a pen. The laptop lot typed more, closer to word for word. The pen lot had to pick what mattered, because you can’t write at talking speed. On the questions that needed understanding rather than facts, the pen won.

The typist is a stenographer. The one with the pen is already learning.

Good notes, from someone who took bad ones for twenty years: your own words, not theirs. Phrases, not sentences. Gaps you can add to later. The note is not the lecture, it’s what you’ll need to rebuild it.

My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets. You’ll have that for the rest of your life, and you learned it in one go.

I before E except after C. Thirty days hath September. The alphabet, which every adult in the country can still sing.

Mnemonics feel like primary school because that’s where you last used them. Shame, because they’re the fastest way I know to get a list into your head. A rhyme, an acronym, a stupid sentence. The sillier the better: the brain keeps what surprised it.

Nootropics, smart drugs, whatever you want to call them: substances that sharpen focus, alertness and memory. The strong ones are prescription only. Modafinil, Adderall and Ritalin, in roughly that order of how much I’d touch them.

Modafinil

Sold as Provigil, approved in the US for narcolepsy in 1998. Made to keep people awake.

I LOVE Modafinil.

It keeps you awake and pointed at one thing, which is the whole appeal. No jitters, nothing like a coffee rush. Just a quiet, even focus.

The catches are the obvious ones. Take it late and you won’t sleep. And the focus doesn’t care what it’s pointed at, so if the first thing you open is Twitter, that’s your day gone.

Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Coffee man, has been open about taking it for years.

The US Air Force gave it to ten F-117 pilots kept awake for thirty-seven hours in a simulator, in 2004: on the drug their flying stayed within fifteen to thirty percent of rested, on the placebo it fell by sixty to a hundred.

It also sits in the pharmacy on the International Space Station, which tells you who else wants it to hand.

Adderall

Amphetamine. The American students’ drug of choice, and the star of the Netflix film Take Your Pills. It’s the most addictive of the three and has the worst of the side effects: poor sleep, dependency, aggression, and in the worst cases psychosis. I’d leave it alone.

Ritalin

Methylphenidate, in medical use since 1960 for ADHD and narcolepsy. It blocks the reuptake of dopamine and noradrenaline, so the signal between your neurons gets louder. Stronger than caffeine by a distance, softer than Adderall, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration keeps it in Schedule II, the same drawer as cocaine.

Insomnia, headaches and stomach aches are the usual complaints; too much and you’re into a racing heart and hallucinations.

The legal cupboard

If you want a nudge without a prescription, three that I’ve actually used.

• Caffeine. The one you already take, and still the best legal stimulant going.

• L-theanine. The thing in green tea that takes the edge off the caffeine, so you get the focus without the shake.

• Choline. The raw material for the neurotransmitter your memory runs on. Eggs are full of it.

I don’t take Modafinil anymore. Not because it stopped working. Because the sandwich works nearly as well and I sleep.

Study it. Sleep on it. Study it again in the morning, and tell someone what you learned.

That’s the whole trick, and it’s free.