To Learn Something New, Make Things Hard On Yourself

Everybody wants to take that one shortcut that will bypass all the hard work needed to reach their goals. Trying to learn a new language? I’m sure you’ll be able to find dozens of products in the Internet that will promise you fluency in under 2 hours. Or 1 hour. Or 30 minutes. There’s an entire line of books predicated on the idea that you can learn a new programming language in 24 hours, which prompted legendary computer scientist Peter Norvig to write a response to this inane idea by proposing a tantalizing syllabus which, if you follow, will turn you into a good programmer in under 10 years.

That’s not too much time, is it?

Of course people want shortcuts, why wouldn’t they? It’s only rational to want to get the same results in the shortest amount of time possible. We even have a name for this: efficiency. The trouble is, most people taking shortcuts in the name of efficiency end up working against their own goals. In their attempt to learn new things in such a short time they end up learning next to nothing. What usually happens is that despite some initial success, whatever it is that they’ve learn is quickly later forgotten. We’ve all crammed for some test, right? It somewhat works in that we’ve “learned” something for the test, but once we turn the test in it’s like a timer goes off in our heads that sweeps away all that crammed knowledge we worked so hard to get, never to be remembered again.

There is not getting around it. Learning is hard. In fact, Learning should be hard. Confused? Let me explain.

For close to three decades now memory researchers have made the distinction between how accessible a memory is versus how well stored it is in your brain. You can quickly remember what you had yesterday for dinner since not much time has passed and you haven’t had dinner since, but it is unlikely that you’ll store that knowledge for much longer. What was it that you had for dinner two weeks ago? It doesn’t come as easily, if at all. Yet you do remember things well into the past, we all do. This means that memories can differ between one another based on their retrieval strength, a measure of how accessible they are, and their storage strength, a measure of their endurance in your brain. Cramming, for example, works by increasing the retrieval strength of memories at the cost of their storage strength, making it so that while we can recall those memories when the test arrives, we won’t be storing them for a lot of time.

Since our goal is to learn in a way that is effective, not to cram for some test and later forget everything, do you figure we would want our new memories to have high retrieval strength or high storage strength? Ideally we would want both to be strong. Being able to quickly recall something that is holding onto our brains by a thin thread is useless in the long run, which is what cramming ends up doing. Yet holding onto memories for a long time without being able to access them seems wasteful. Ideally, we would want a good mix of both, but as students we’re drawn towards increasing retrieval strength, that is, making things accessible, because we equate accessibility with learning. It’s a mental bias that we have ingrained in us, the idea that because knowledge comes easily it must mean that we know it.

Legendary learning researcher Robert Bjork has written many influential papers on this idea. He notes that, as learners, our goal is to learn something, to understand the relevant ideas and connections behind whatever it is that we want to learn and have that knowledge maintained in our long-term memory, ready to use when we need it. Yet during our learning process, instead of measuring success by the amount that we’re learning, which is hard to do introspectively, we use a metric that is much easier for us to access: performance. We routinely conflate short-term performance with long-term learning, thinking they’re one of the same when in fact they have almost nothing to do with each other.

You’re sitting there, reading this article, and if I’ve done my job correctly, you’ve understood the points that I’ve made so far. “Interesting,” you say, “we conflate performance with learning. I didn’t know this before and now I do.” And there’s the bait and switch. Because you have made sense of what it is that the article is about while you were reading it you presume that from now you’ll continue to remember this new knowledge. This foresight bias, that we’ll know something in the future that we know now, is the core of the performance/learning dichotomy. Because we live in the present, while learning is something that happens in the long-term, we are not able to distinguish one from the other and so we take a mental shortcut, taking one to be the other. Since I know this now it means I’ll know it in the future. If it sounds hard to imagine that you haven’t learned anything from this article when you feel so certain that you have, think on how many articles you’ve read in your life and the percentage of them where you still remember what they were about, the points that they made, their arguments.

This is why products selling quick and easy recipes to learn something new will forever be something we’ll have to live with. Not only do we want to learn new things as fast as possible, our very usage of those products, while only delivering short-term performance, will feel like long-term learning. “See this Mary, the Spanish word for dog is perro, I learned this in this book! I am so looking forward to my trip to Argentina next week, I’ll feel like a local speaking the language!”

So, if there is no easy path to learning, and if we’re easily fooled into thinking we’re learning something when we aren’t, how do we go about actually learning something? Well, if by making things easy we’re fooling ourselves, one way to make sure we’re putting our time to good use is to make things harder. Yes, you’ve read that right. Harder. This is another idea put forth by Robert Bjork, that by making things hard on us, by introducing desirable difficulties, we’ll have much more success in learning something than if we do not.

Let’s use an example. Let’s say you must learn the ideas within a scientific paper and you’ve already read the paper once. You’re not content with only reading the paper that one time however, maybe you don’t think you’ve quite grasped its finer points, so you decide that you’re learning journey is still not over. You figure you have two options: you can either read the paper one more time, perhaps discovering some connection you hadn’t notice before, or you could write a short freeform essay on what the paper is about. Which one would you choose? Most people would decide to read the paper one more time, and it’s likely that we would too. I know I have done this many times, even when I know it’s not a good use of my time. For starters, it’s just so much easier. Instead of writing something out the top of your head, all you have do is read. And it does feel like you’re getting something done, you really do notice something you hadn’t before, an idea that you hadn’t quite grasped, a connection you hadn’t yet made. Surely this means you’ve learned something new. Right?

Maybe, but it’s highly unlikely and you probably will only be fooling yourself. Performance and learning aren’t the same thing. While you may have noticed something you hadn’t before, this does not translate into you knowing it in the future, when you need it for, say, an exam.

A much better strategy would have been to write an essay on what the paper is about. Sure, it’s hard. You’re feeling lazy and writing is mentally taxing. But again and again, what the research has demonstrated is that by recalling memories from your mind is a fantastic technique that improves how well those memories are stored. Consider the following study from Larsen, Butler, and Roediger. They wanted to investigate whether retrieval practice, i.e., testing a subject’s memory by having him complete an actual test, enhanced the long-term retention of medical information. They divided subjects into two groups that were to study material on neurological disorders, but one group would take a series of three short-answer tests on the material every two weeks while the other would study a review sheet in that same interval. After 6 months of this, a final test was given to both groups. Can you guess which group performed better on the final test? The one who did the tests! In fact, the difference in performance between both groups was almost one standard deviation, a sizeable difference.

The essay that you would write about the paper’s topic would be like a kind of test for you. Without any aids, you write as much as what you know about it without censuring yourself (there’s no grade in the end after all). Afterward, you compare what you wrote with what the paper actually said, and you can improve afterward by noticing slight differences between what you wrote and what the paper said, or by noticing that you left something out.

The idea is that by introducing desirable difficulties in your studying methods you’ll achieve much better learning performance than just taking the easy way out. Sure, it’s harder than the alternative, but on the other hand, it’s how you’ll be able to achieve your own goals.

Knowing why making things hard on yourself by introducing desirable difficulties will lead to more effective learning will help you devise and implement better learning strategies that will get you the results you want. Follow the ultimate learning adage, first coined by Robert Bjork: Input Less, Output More. Spend more of your time producing content rather than consuming it. Write an essay on what you’re currently learning instead of spending yet more time going through your notes. It’s hard work but it pays off.