We’ve learned a lot about how our brains process and store information thanks to the field of neuroscience.
The pursuit of knowledge is essential to life. We ought to constantly be trying to advance and pick up new abilities. Studying each lesson takes time, and time is valuable whether you’re learning Spanish or just want to do math quickly. Therefore, how can you maximize your time by hastening the learning process? We now know more about how we learn and the best ways for our brains to process and retain knowledge as a result of advances in neuroscience. Here are 10 tested techniques for being a rapid learner that can help you gain a head start on broadening your knowledge.
Take a class
Most effective ways to learn more quickly and boost your math skills. You can learn in small chunks, which makes it easier to commit to the time required for learning and implement what you’ve learned into your daily life.
Reading books and magazines can also help you learn more quickly and boost your math skills. The reading itself will help you retain more information and understand new concepts, but also the act of reading itself helps boost your brain power—so even if you don’t really like reading, it’s still worth doing!
Here are some simple tips for learning more quickly and boosting your math skills:
Read a book or magazine
- Take notes while you watch videos online. If you take notes while watching a video, it’ll be easier to recall what was said later. This is especially helpful if you want to learn something new and don’t want to spend hours reading through textbooks or articles when there are other resources available online.
- Use flash cards for remembering important information when it comes time for tests or quizzes. Flash cards can be used anywhere—in class, at work, and even when studying on your own! Make sure that the questions aren’t too hard so that they can be easily answered during exams without needing much thought process behind each card’s answer
Get creative
Math isn’t just about math—it’s also about creativity! Try playing with shapes and colors when you’re solving problems, or make up your own math problems using different objects in your environment.
Practice makes perfect
Most of us don’t practice our math skills enough, but that doesn’t mean we should give up on them completely! If you’ve been struggling with a particular problem for a while now, try taking it up a notch by practicing it over and over again until you’ve got it down pat—you’ll be surprised at how much better you’ll get at it this way!
Watch a video series on YouTube with high-quality subtitles
Watching videos from different places around the world is another great way to learn more quickly and boost your math skills, because watching videos allows you to take in information at different rates than if you were reading an article or book. Plus, watching videos gives us something entertaining while we’re learning—we’ll be much less likely to get frustrated with our work if we have something fun going on!
Pen and paper are used to take notes.
Contrary to popular belief, taking notes during a lecture or conference using a laptop won’t make them more thorough, which will speed up your learning. Leave the laptop at home and take notes on paper and a pen to accelerate your learning. According to research, persons who take notes by typing them into a computer less effectively process and remember the material. In actuality, people who write down their notes learn more.
The act of writing out the material through muscle memory helps comprehension and recall even if taking notes by hand is slower and more laborious than typing.
You’ll retain material longer and have greater memory and test-taking performance if you re-frame the information in your own words.
Possess good note-taking techniques.
You’ll learn more quickly the better your notes are. You will recall concepts, gain a greater comprehension of the subject, and develop useful learning skills if you know how to take complete and correct notes. Therefore, make sure you are familiar with various note-taking techniques before learning a new subject.
Whatever approach you choose, here are some fundamental note-taking guidelines:
- Instead of using full sentences, write in phrases.
- Recognize and extract vital information, while ignoring irrelevant data.
- The key concepts should be separated by lines and spaces so you can return to them later and add details.
- To save time, provide a uniform system of abbreviations and symbols.
Spread out training.
This technique entails spreading out many exercises (or study sessions) on a subject over a period of time. Instead of protracted “cram sessions,” which foster rote learning, use short, spaced-out study sessions to promote meaningful learning. Taking careful notes when the subject is being explained is the first step. After that, review your notes carefully, adding any necessary details and revising as necessary to ensure correctness.
Following each class or instructional hour, swiftly repeat this action one or two times. You can gradually start to space out the sessions, starting with once daily and working your way up to three times each week. Because it’s simpler to squeeze in a quick study session and you’ll remain motivated to keep learning, spreading out practice over a longer length of time is quite helpful.
Sleep, then study some more.
You have a large assignment or presentation due tomorrow, but you’re unprepared. Like many of us, you stay up too late attempting to prepare for the test. Even if you’re fatigued the next day, your efforts will undoubtedly pay off, right? However, our brains don’t process information most effectively that way. There is a clear link between sleep and learning, according to research. Sleeping well and taking little breaks appear to be key factors in improving how well our brains recall anything.
If we have a good night’s sleep within 12 hours of learning anything new, it can help our long-term memory. Additionally, pupils who study and get enough sleep not only do better in school, but they are also happier.
Change your methods.
Avoid doing the same thing repeatedly when mastering a skill. You will acquire a skill more quickly if you make little adjustments during focused practice sessions that are repeated frequently. In a study of persons who had learned a computer-based motor skill, those who had learnt the skill and then underwent a modified practice session, where they exercised the ability in a slightly altered method, fared better than those who repeatedly carried out the original job.
Small improvements are necessary; making significant changes to the way the skill is used will not assist. So, for instance, if you’re honing your tennis serve or learning a new golf swing, experiment with changing the size or weight of your club.
Utilize a mnemonic.
Using memory techniques like a mnemonic device—a pattern of letters, sounds, or other associations that help in learning something—is one of the best ways to quickly memories a huge quantity of information. The alphabet song, which we first learned in kindergarten, is one of the most widely used mnemonics.
To make learning a new word or skill easier, mnemonics assist you to condense, summaries, and simplify information. Students in medical or law school, as well as those learning a new language, may find it to be quite helpful. Therefore, if you need to memories and retain a lot of new knowledge, consider using a mnemonic. You’ll discover that you recall the material long after the test.
To regain focus, take mental rests.
The problem of information overload exists. Stress and overload will impede your brain from efficiently processing and storing information, which is necessary for learning new things because our brains must send signals to our sensory receptors to save the new knowledge.
Our brains essentially shut down when we are perplexed, anxious, or overwhelmed. Students who are listening to lengthy, in-depth lectures can experience this when they “zone out” and cease paying attention to what is being spoken.
Learning stops because they can’t successfully transfer that information to their memory banks. The best method to deal with this is to take a “brain break” or simply change the focus of your attention to something else. You can recover your focus and ease brain tiredness with even a five-minute rest.
Keep yourself hydrated.
We are aware that drinking water is healthy for us and will benefit our skin, immune system, and overall health. But maintaining proper hydration is also important for our cognitive functions.
We can become wiser by drinking water. One study found that pupils who brought water into the test room performed better than those who didn’t.
On the other side, dehydration might negatively impact our ability to think. Your brain works harder than usual when you don’t drink enough water.
Various methods of learning are available.
You will employ more brain regions to store information about a subject when you use different methods of studying it, whether you are fast reading or learning a language. As a result, your brain becomes more ingrained with that knowledge. It essentially produces a redundancy of knowledge in your memory, assisting you in actually learning the material rather than simply memorizing it.
Spaced repetition or the use of various media to engage the brain’s various regions—such as reading the textbook, taking notes, viewing a video on social media, and listening to an audio file or podcast on the subject—can help you do this. You’ll pick things up more quickly if you use more resources.
Identify a way to apply what you have learned.
You will learn new knowledge more quickly if you can tie it to notions you already understand. Many typical study practices are ineffective, claims the book Make It Stick. Although the information may give the impression of mastery, it swiftly leaves our memories.
Our capacity to perform difficult cognitive activities, such as applying knowledge to issues we haven’t encountered before and drawing inferences from previously known facts, depends critically on our memory. You’ll uncover deeper layers of meaning in the new content by figuring out how to integrate it with your prior knowledge. You’ll be able to remember it more clearly and will have a better understanding of it overall as a result.
This approach is employed by Tesla and SpaceX creator Elon Musk. He claimed that knowledge is a “semantic tree” in his eyes. When learning new topics, his suggestion is to “be sure you understand the principles, i.e., the trunk and broad branches, before you go into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.” You provide yourself mental “hooks” on which to hang the new information when you relate the new to the old.
