How ignorance can help you learn

In a recent article in New Scientist, a number of examples were given of how knowledge can be a curse as well as an advantage. For example:

• Used car salesmen who knew all of the flaws of a car were more likely to sell it for a lower price than they could have reasonably gotten for it.
• Salespeople selling cellphones grossly underestimated how long it would take a new user to learn how to use it.
• Experts tended to overestimate their knowledge and were over-confident in their answers to a quiz regarding people in their field of expertise.
• Knowing too much about something you want to attempt may undermine your confidence to attempt it, even though you might well have succeeded.
• while being made aware of your ignorance can actually enhance your learning.

Research by Lisa Son and Nate Cornell has demonstrated a number of ways in which ignorance (or perhaps more accurately a clearer awareness of your ignorance) can be a significant advantage.

Your awareness of your ignorance can determine how much time and effort you allocate to learning. If you are over-confident that you know something when in fact you don't this can work to your detriment. So how can you determine whether you are being overconfident?

One example that Son and Cornell use is that of flash cards. If you use flashcards as a way of ,say, learning vocabulary for a foreign language then there are at least two approaches you could take.

One way would be to look at one side of the card and then make a genuine effort to try and remember what the word is on the other side of the card and not turn it over to look until you are really sure that you don't know. Using this approach you are unlikely to feel overconfident that you know the word.

The second way is to look at one side of the card and then make a half-hearted attempt to remember what the word is on the other side of the card and then quickly flip it over to see if you are right. Using this approach you are more likely to feel overconfident that you know the word. Once you see the word you are more likely to tell yourself "Of course...I knew that" and genuinely believe that you really have learned it.

They conclude that withholding an answer, instead of providing it up front, can be a useful way to avoid the peril of too much information.

In another experiment they found that being tested on information (and then being shown the answer) was more effective than simply "being shown the question and answer together, even when the participants could not answer the question sucessfully on their own". In a similar experiment they found that providing a list of questions to someone to answer about information in a text that they had not yet read also had positive effects on their learning once they read the passage.

The key principle appears to be that confronting someone with their ignorance before they learn something is likely to enhance their subsequent learning. Son and Cornell conclude that "To benefit from lacking knowledge the learner must know when he or she does not know"

So how can you use this in your own learning?

Well, firstly, if you are learning something from a textbook then try and answer the questions at the end of the chapter before you read the chapter. If the book doesn't have such questions then you could look at the headings within the chapter and try to list what you know about each of these topics and then as you read the chapter see what things weren't on your list and are thus new to you.

Another way is a strategy used by my friend Michelle, who I mentioned in an earlier post. When she was working on a program involving the language VBA, she kept working at it until she ran up against a problem she couldn't solve. In doing this she ran up against the limits of her knowledge and was thus able to identify the next thing that she needed to learn. In this case, the very thing that she was learning provided the feedback she needed to identify her ignorance.

You learn a lot more from genuinely understanding your own ignorance than by trying to conceal it from yourself.

And if you are teaching someone else then you need to become aware that you may have become ignorant of what it means for the person you are teaching not to know what you are teaching. There may be aspects of what you are teaching that may have become second nature and invisible and thus too obvious (for you) to mention.

In Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Saul Wurman says:

Once you know something, you tend to forget what it's like not to know....As instructions are often formulated for the people who don't know, this inability to remember what it's like to not know results in instructions that don't give essential information to the taker.

And conversely, as a learner you need to be conscious of the possibility that if someone is teaching you something and you don't seem to understand then just maybe there is something they are leaving out and they may need to break it down more so that what that thing is becomes evident.

Spend your time well and on the right things

Time is a precious resource that most of us have too little of as it is. Occasionally, I read advice like "Get up an hour earlier" as a way of pursuing some valued goal. but the reality is that most people don't get enough sleep and that quality sleep is necessary in order to consolidate learning.

So what are we to do?

The most important thing is to squeeze as much productivity as possible out of the time that you do have.

Be realistic and honest about what time you do have. All of us have a lot of waste time between other activities, while we wait in line, commute. whatever, time that we probably just currently use to stare into space and daydream. So making good use of this "between time" over the course of a year can add up to a substantial total. Even 15 minutes a day adds up to 91 hours per year. If you are doing something like learning a foreign language then this can make a huge difference to your progress. So if what you are learning lends itself to using this time then go for it. You can make flashcards to test yourself with or put video or audio information onto your iPod so that you can review it while you wait. Even carrying a book to read or a small notebook with information you want to learn in it can be practical ways of keeping information close at hand for moments that would otherwise be wasted.

Making use of those snippets of time is important. But equally important is to focus during those brief interludes. Half hearted inattention is almost as bad as wasting those moments entirely. Focus for that brief period on whatever it is you wish to learn during it, so that there is actually some lasting effect from that transient effort.

Make it easy to become engaged immediately in your learning session.

Make sure that the supplies and equipment that you need to use in your learning session are conveniently placed together for easy access. If necessary, list the excuses that you use to put off your learning session and then change your environment so that those excuses no longer apply. You must learn not to let yourself off the hook but instead reel yourself in to get stuck into your learning.

Don't assume that once you've learned something you've learned it forever

Knowledge atrophies the less frequently it is used and the more superficially it was acquired in the first place. Consequently, it pays to take the time to learn things properly and in depth the first time around and to revisit your knowledge on a regular basis, both to keep it fresh and to become aware of the extent to which it is slipping away and needs to be recaptured.

Acquire principles

When you are learning something focus on acquiring principles which you can generalise and use to generate novelty rather than just brute facts, which you cannot. The more you understand the deeper structures of what you are trying to learn, the easier it becomes to learn more, to see how new knowledge relates to knowledge you already possess, and to discover new things for yourself. So don't just learn what works, learn how and why and when it works.

Be clear on what you want to achieve with this block of time

If your objective isn't clear, then your efforts are likely to lack direction. Set aside some time at the end of your session and examine whether you achieved what you set out to do. If you didn't then seek reasons why you failed to do so: were you distracted, did you lack relevant materials or supplies, was the working environment less than ideal? Work out what you can do better next time to better ensure your objective is met.

Be sensitive to the natural rhythms of your learning

There is a time to expand and grow but there is also a time to consolidate your gains. Focusing solely on expansion results in spreading yourself too thin and having no depth in any one area. Focusing only on consolidation leads to stagnation. It is by alternately extending then consolidating, extending then consolidating tat your capacities grow in a sustainable way.

If you follow these basic principles then you will learn more in the available time and have more time left for the rest of your life as well.

Commonplacing

Back when I was a kid, my family didn't have a huge number of books, but we did have access to a good local public library. So every couple of weeks we would go to the library and I would get out three or four books to take home with me. Because I was reading interesting things and I had to return the books, I would copy the interesting bits into little notebooks so that I could keep them and read them later when I wanted to.

I didn't know it then but I was following a practice honored by time from an earlier era when books were rare and expensive and scholars travelled large distances to read a manuscript copy of a book that interested them. The notebooks that they kept were called 'commonplace books' and the practice of note-taking was called 'common-placing'.

The 16th century Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, wrote in his De Copia:

Prepare for yourself a sufficient number of headings and arrange them as you please, subdivide them into the appropriate sections and under each section add your commonplace and maxims; and then whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is rather striking, you will be able to note down immediately in the proper place, be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a maxim or a witty remark or a remark notable for some quality or a proverb or a metaphor or a simile. This has the double advantage of fixing what you have read more firmly in your mind, and getting you into the habit of using the riches supplied by your reading.

Nowadays, you can use a software package like Microsoft OneNote to keep a collection of things that you have encountered in your reading on the Web, and it will also track the website where you read it should you wish to find it again or to reference it, and even allow you to search for things within what you have collected. Yet one of the advantages of copying something down in your own handwriting is that it forces you to think about it more and remember it better than it would if you had just highlighted a passage and copied and pasted it.


Of course now, I have a lot of books and I tend to highlight and underline things that really stand out for me. But I can still recommend the practice of commonplacing for a number of reasons:

• Convenience: You have a lot of interesting things you have read in one place and at your fingertips, rather than having to remember which book you may have read something in and the find it.
• Accessibility: If your commonplace book is small enough you can carry it with you for dipping into when you are between appointments or waiting in a queue or simply bored.
• Recall: The very act of copying may help what you have read stick in your memory.
• Self-knowledge: If you look back through the passages that you found interesting enough to copy, then you may get a better feel for what attracts your attention and this may also tell you something about what you may be missing.
• Insight: Reading the same passage at different times under different conditions may lead to you finding things in it that you missed on your initial reading. Over time you may have had more experiences that have changed your perspective so that now a passage says something different and perhaps deeper to you.

So get yourself a notebook and experiment with commonplacing.

Like most things, it won't work for everyone, but if it works for you then you will have found yet another way to enhance your learning.

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For an interesting take on commonplace books, have a look at:

Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet

How long is a piece of string?

The usual answer to this question is: twice as long as half its length. And I guess asking a similar question "How long does it take to learn something?" could be equally uninformative.

But is it?

If you think about it, there are some things you struggle to learn and others that you learn effectively instantaneously.

Consider the following examples:

• You go to see a movie and a friend asks you what it was about. Even if you have seen the movie only once, the chances are that you will be able to give a coherent summary of the movie and the main events in the plot, almost without giving it a second thought.
• A friend tells you that a man and a woman you both know are having an affair. No effort to remember this, right?
• You go to a restaurant and decide to try a dish you have never tasted before. It tastes terrible. You don't need to have the experience more than once to know not to order that dish again.
• You are in a department store and are trying to find out the price of something. You see another customer go and use a price scanner mounted on a nearby wall. So you go and do the same thing. No need for multiple exposures to the experience to know what to do in future.

There is a tendency to think that learning is hard, but as these examples show sometimes it is remarkably easy.

What do these examples have in common that makes them ready sources of learning?

They are vivid, personal, advantageous (either in terms of gaining or avoiding something), they are interesting and (generally) simple.

Of course some of these things are in the eye of the beholder. You aren't likely to remember anything about an affair between two people you barely know. Conversely, a mathematician shown a new way to solve a particular kind of equation may find it easy to remember because of the huge amount of background knowledge that they bring to the party.

So when you are trying to learn something, see if you can find something in it that fits the pattern of "things that are easy to remember". And keep track of the things that you find easy or difficult to remember so that you can experiment with applying the properties of the things you find easy to learn to the things you find difficult to learn.

By acquiring and using this kind of self-knowledge, you can make your learning journey a lot easier and a lot more productive.

Your Brain Can't Read Your Mind: the SAID Principle

In Sports Medicine, the acronym SAID stands for: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. The SAID principle basically says that all training is specific to a particular task. While this principle concerns the physiological adaptation of the human body to the specific loads placed on it (e.g. weight training, aerobic training, endurance training), recent research suggests that a similar principle may apply in relation to more intellectual matters.

What this research showed was that, at least in science learning, practicing retrieving and reconstructing knowledge works more effectively than elaborative study with concept mapping. Effectively, if you want to remember something then practice remembering it. This is the principle underlying flashcards: you repeatedly test whether you remember the answer to the question on one side of the cards and practice more the ones you have the most trouble retrieving.

The lesson here is that if you want to learn something you need to keep in mind how you are going to use the information. If you need to recall it, then you need to practice recall, if you need to apply it in some way then you need to practice applying it.

The fact is that your brain can't read your mind. It can only respond to the stimuli to which you expose it. So if you practice recall as part of your study then your brain will take it that the critical thing is recall and build connections accordingly. Target your practise for intended use.

This implies that two people learning the same thing may focus on different kinds of practice. For example, if a person is learning a dance move so that they can freely incorporate it into their social dancing then they will need to practice it as a precursor or follow on to a variety of different moves to permit that flexibility. But another person learning the same move for a routine need only practice it as part of that specific sequence.

It also means that you learn more by doing than you do by watching, partly because by doing we are practicing what we want to do and partly because doing involves greater sensory input.

The other thing the brain needs to know is: what is important? And it works this out by what you focus on, and on the strength of your emotional response. This is one reason why paying attention is important and why it is also of value to find something interesting in what you are learning. The brain also takes into account effort (which to a great extent is a product of attention, and repetition.)

In The Owner's Manual for The Brain, Pierce Howard remarks:

It's funny, when we were in school, we made a point of trying to remember. As adults we casually read or observe without similar efforts at remembering, such as taking notes or reviewing, and then we lament that we are "losing our memory" when we can't remember ... Balderdash. We're expecting results like those from our school days without exerting a similar effort.

So the key principles to keep in mind are:

• practice for intended use
• maximise brain stimulation through focused attention, emotional engagement, and repeated effort.

By employing these principles, you will make your learning more effective by making your brain's job easier.

Logging learning

It can be really easy to deceive yourself about how much time you are spending on your learning unless you track it since our memories are notoriously unreliable. We can remember doing something a few days ago when in fact it was a few weeks ago.

So if you genuinely want to make progress then it can be a good idea to maintain a learning log.

In this log (which can just be a simple notebook), you can record:

• the duration and frequency of your learning sessions and what they covered
• what you have mastered, what confuses you, what questions you would like answered
• if you are learning from a book, the pages you read, the exercises you worked through
• the things you are finding hard that you might want to spend more time on
• a rating of how you felt the session went, along with the time and date
• whether the gaps between learning sessions are causing you to spend too much time re-learning material already covered in earlier sessions. 

A learning log can help you become more mindful of what might otherwise remain below the threshold of your awareness. And once you are mindful of something, you can do something about it.

Once you have been keeping a learning log for a while, you may begin to see patterns in your activity, the days and times when you seem to learn best. Or the times best for learning versus the times best for active practice or doing exercises. In this way your learning log can become, not just a record, but a tool for refining your learning process.

And one more powerful thing your log can do is act as a source of encouragement and motivation. So often we are tempted to measure our progress in relation to our ultimate goal, which can seem discouragingly far away. But far more motivating is to see how far you've come, to look back and see how things you once found difficult and confusing have now become clear and easy.

And this gives you the confidence to persist with your learning because if you've achieved this once, you have every reason to believe you can achieve it again.

Flow and the benevolent tyranny of practice

You have probably at some point in your life had the experience of 'flow' - where you are doing something that you are completely absorbed in, when time seems to stop and there is no awareness of anything except what you are doing. It's an experience that can happen when you are deeply involved in a sport, or playing a game like chess, or perhaps gardening or playing a computer game or dancing or singing or...well pretty much you name it.

Sounds like a great experience, right? Wouldn't it be good for learning to be like that?

Well, no.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the foremost researcher into flow) in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

So flow generally occurs during performance. It may be what an Olympic gymnast or figure skater experiences when they nail their routine in competition. However, it is unlikely to be what they experience in practice.

The reason is that in practice, top performers focus on the things that they find difficult, that lie beyond their current ability to do easily. And they try to do these things over and over again, regardless of the discomfort that it causes them until they master them. They fall down, they pick themselves up and they try again. And they continue to practice these things until they can reliably perform them whenever they need to.  It is repetitive and frustrating and uncomfortable...and the only path to increasing their capabilities in their chosen area.

Whereas flow works at the edge of, but within, your current capabilities, deliberate practice works at the edge of, but just outside of, your current capabilities.

In Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin, puts it this way:

...great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice - avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behaviour impossible.

This doesn't mean that nothing great performers do is automatic. Rather, they are constantly assimilating new skills and it is the skills that lie at the edge of their capacities that are not automatic.

If you only focus on achieving the experience of flow then the chances are that,while you may get a lot of enjoyment from your chosen activity, you won't actually get any better at it.

But if you deliberately practice the things that you find hard, then over time they will become less hard and ultimately effortless. And in your desire to become even better you will find more hard things to practise.

That doesn't mean that it always has to be hard. If you reach a point at which you are satisfied with the level of your performance then you can stay at that level and just enjoy the experience of flow.

Like a lot of things in life you set your level of aspiration according to the price you are prepared to pay, and the higher that price, the greater your potential for excellence.

Love the questions

We tend to link action with answers and inaction with questions. But it might be that questioning is the most truly active way to be and that answers allow us to disguise our inertia in habitual actions

~ George Myerson 101 Key Ideas Existentialism


Learning is to a great extent finding answers to questions. And to learn effectively may mean asking the right questions at the right time. The right question is the question that invites an answer that builds on your existing capacities. The right time is generally the time when you would understand the answer. You can only ever start from where you are. As Robert Fritz says: current reality is always your new starting point.

Questioning is about the recognition of a gap between where you are and where you want to be. One approach to learning anything is to make list of all the questions to which you want answers. This creates a focus for your learning activities.

Firstly, it guides your search for information – if you know what you want to know then you can begin to search for it. While what you desire to learn is nebulous and vague, you have no clear direction. Questions promote clarity of intention.

Secondly, it provides a sense of progress. As each question is answered, you gain a greater sense of mastering what it is you wish to learn, of making progress, of covering territory.

Thirdly, it provides a basis for further exploration. As each question is answered, more questions arise that demand answers. More importantly, answers to your initial questions help you sharpen what further questions you need to ask. When you are completely ignorant of a subject, you don’t know what is important and what is irrelevant. However as your knowledge grows, you gain a more refined sense of the lie of the land, of the relationship between different concepts, and a greater sense of what you still find obscure. 

This applies not just to conceptual knowledge but to practical knowledge as well. If you are learning a practical skill then initially your questions may relate to the skill as a totality – how can I do this thing at all? However once you have answered that question, deeper questions may arise: how does the way I hold this tool affect the results I get? How does the way I move affect the visual effect of what I am doing?

Thus questions provide an entry point to experimentation. Once you have asked a question then you may try different things in order to try and find an answer. Each ‘experiment’ is an attempt to answer the question. While some of these answers may be ‘wrong’ in the sense that they don’t answer the question you are asking, they may still yield useful information that extends your knowledge. And sometimes the answers they yield may lead to more interesting questions than the ones you originally asked.

Children ask questions all the time and as a result their knowledge grows quickly. They aren’t afraid of displaying their ignorance because they haven’t yet become aware of the social stigma attached to ignorance. If you want to learn you need to become more like a child and let your curiosity dominate your fear and fuel the questions that will lead to your ultimate mastery of your chosen area of interest.

Experimenting with how YOU learn

When we speak about teaching, it is simply someone else's experience. Your teacher has walked the path ahead of you, and you look at their tracks in the dust. They might provide you with some hints about where to go next. But these 'tracks' are somebody else's past, they are not your future. All the books and courses are simply maps other people's pasts. Absorb and use them, but always remember that your path will be different, and it is this personal path you must travel. Don't try to exactly copy another person's path; use their knowledge, but remain aware that the particular 'landscape' of your own path is unique.

~ Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall The Invisible Actor

Everyone learns differently:

• some people like to rush ahead to be able to do things however poorly and then refine their skills 
• other people prefer to master one stage before moving on to the next 
• for one person, a single focused session a day works 
• for another short sessions throughout the day spread over time work better 
• for some people mornings are best but for others evenings work better 

And similarly with sleep patterns, what and when you eat, patterns of activity, exercise etc. All of these things may impact to some degree on how effectively you learn.

Get to know what kinds of things make it easier for you to learn and what kinds of things block or hinder learning. Then play to the conditions that are optimal for you. However you also need to know yourself as well. It may feel like you are learning something when you read a book while watching TV, but you need to test how much you actually learn in this way.

You also need to test whether your habitual way of learning is working for you. You may be comfortable with it, but it doesn’t mean that it is the most effective or efficient method you could use and other methods may work better if you try them. And it is important that you give them a chance before concluding that they aren’t for you. Any new behaviour may feel odd or uncomfortable at first. The ways you learned to learn as a child or adolescent may no longer work for you (if they ever did.). So experiment to see what is true for you:

Be aware of the process of experimentation and experiment with your approaches. As part of your adaptive experimentation experiment with experimentation itself. Be careful not to become too set in your ways of experimenting. Continue to challenge both your understanding and the approach you use to gain it

~ Yoram Wind et al. The Power of Impossible Thinking

In Counter-Clockwise, Ellen Langer makes the point that research in any area whether medical, psychology or whatever can only ever deal in generalities, and that individuals may experience results different from what research would predict. And she suggests that we be attentive to when things work well for us, so that we can encourage the conditions that will permit things to go well for us more often. This applies especially to learning. Each of us brings to any learning situation the accumulated experiences and knowledge of our lifetime so far. So it would be naive to expect that all of us would learn in the same way.

In Uncommon Genius, here’s how Denise Shekerjian describes Lester Brown’s process for discovering what works for him:

Biography and India set him to wondering about his own limits. And so, as a young boy, he started to pay attention and stopped letting things slide…. As he met challenges, he examined all the angles. He asked himself how he felt about this or that, and why he was afraid in certain situations, and how much risk he thought he could handle, and how he felt about competition, and how much could be accomplished in the space of an hour, and how a decision about this would affect something else…He was interested in seeing what he was made of. He started testing and probing and he never stopped. The result is he knows himself very well and that inner knowledge is what he relies on in trying to avoid mistakes and in managing defeats.

And in doing this he was following a practice that goes back more than 2000 years:

Can a man be said, do you think, to know himself who knows his own name and nothing more? or must he not rather set to work precisely like the would-be purchaser of a horse, who certainly does not think that he has got the knowledge he requires until he has discovered whether the beast is tractable or stubborn, strong or weak, quick or slow, and how it stands with the other points, serviceable or the reverse, in reference to the use and purpose of a horse? So, I say, must a man in like manner interrogate his own nature in reference to a man's requirements, and learn to know his own capacities, must he not?
~ Socrates

The point is that by becoming aware of our strengths, weaknesses and propensities we become better able to tailor our strategies both for learning and for life in general to accommodate this knowledge and achieve success. And in doing so, we enlarge those very capacities.