A GUIDE TO LEARNING QUICKLY

The main thrust of this lecture is learning, the first part of which is simply how to learn efficiently. The second part will be concerned with how learning may take place.

I was required to take a course at the graduate level in Psychology entitled "Perception." I had no desire to take such a course, and I also feared it would be very difficult. However, the time came when I could no longer weasel out of it, so I signed up for same, and went to class.

My worst suspensions were confirmed; this thing was going to be a real horror show. I knew exactly what I didn't want.

The course was instructed by a man who was not known for his easy ways.

First, let's see why such a course would be difficult. Perception deals with how we perceive things; for example, how do you feel cold. Exactly how and where do you feel it? And do all people feel it in the same way? For example, if some receptors are touched with something cold, hot may be reported. Why? And if you think this is bad, the hot receptor over time may become a cold receptor.

Another problem is pain. Exactly how do we feel it, and how much do we feel? A number of people coming out of concentration camps after World War II had their teeth worked on without any pain killers .... they said it didn't hurt too bad. Had they grown insensitive to pain during their ordeal? It didn't seem very likely.

Consider the problem of people feeling pain in a leg which has been amputated. It is very clear they are in pain. It turns out that running warm water over the stump will often give relief. Why? Read on.

There is a theory which says that the nerves form a channel to the brain. And like any other channel, the capacity is limited. So if you send through enough information, then the pain messages can't get through because of a simple traffic jam. Is this true? I don't know, but a few years after learning this I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, against the advice of my Air Force students who claimed you should never do this. But as nobody had gotten hurt in the previous two years, I figured I was safe. Wrong! I landed on some wet grass, cracking a vertebra in my back. So I got to see an emergency room in a hospital, learned how to walk on crutches, and perform other tasks which were no fun. Pain sometime got a little bad, so remembering this, I would get in the shower, letting hot water run flow onto my neck and back. Relief was instant .... the pain messages simply couldn't get through.

So you can see the course could be a little difficult.

My instructor had studied under a man named Pressy (spelling is likely incorrect). Pressy, in the late 20's had simply tried to find out how to learn effectively, not why. He carried out a series of experiments with the aid of good students. Simply put, what were they doing that others were not.

The first thing he found out is that most students spend most of their time learning materials that they already know. Certainly this will help some. If we did not "over learn" our addition and multiplication tables, we would never be able to figure out our taxes. At least the arithmetic can be accurate.

The second major finding was that questions are much better remembered than answers. In fact, the most impressive fact about remembering is how fast we forget. Something like 50% of factual information in a course will be gone in two or three weeks after the course is completed.

One theory says we do not forget anything; it is only that we lose track of where the information is. Maybe that which we learn very well, we build numerous channels to it. For example, a man by the name of Guthrie build a whole theory of learning based on this idea. And his theory makes a lot of sense -- his book on the theory of learning is very readable.

But Pressy wasn't that interested in the why; he wanted to know how. Obviously, if he knew why, then the how would follow very quickly.

So we have three pieces of information. One, most of a student's effort is spent learning the material he already knows. Two, questions are remembered better than answers. And, three, forgetting is impressively fast. Then, to take advantage of these three pieces of information, the following guidelines come to mind.

1.0 Read the text with yellow high lighter in hand. Wherever there is a fact, mark it.

2.0 When this task is completed, take a stack of 3 X 5 cards, and write a question for each fact on one side. On the other side, write the answer. Use mnemonics whenever possible -- for example; All School Teachers Cheat is a simple way to remember that in the first quadrant All trigonometric functions are positive, the second quadrant, only the Sine is positive, the third quadrant only the Tangent is positive, and in the fourth quadrant, only the Cosine is positive. It isn't that you should not know why, but when you need information on a test, you need it to be at your finger tips. Time is of the essence.

3.0 Lay aside the book; it is no longer needed. You are now prepared to learn.

4.0 Read each question slowly, out loud. Turn it over, and read the answer in the same manner. Try to concentrate as much a possible.

5.0 Repeat step 4.0 three times.

6.0 On the fourth pass, read the question, try to give a good answer, and when you turn the card over, if you have given the correct answer, toss that card out. If there is any doubt, err on the conservative side.

7.0 Keep going through the deck until there are no cards remaining.

8.0 Shuffle the cards, and repeat step 6.0

Now let's see what you have done.

1.0 You have put all of the facts in the form of questions.

2.0 You have concentrated all of the material into something that is manageable.

3.0 You have not spent anytime learning material that you already know.

4.0 By talking out loud, you have prevented yourself from skipping over words or phrases you don't really know, both in the questions, and in the answers.

5.0 You have given yourself a finite task, one that you can measure, and one that you will know when you have completed it.

6.0 Reviewing is simple.

Further, the time at which you do this makes a difference. Just before you go to bed is excellent. No new learning will take place (adding confusion), so when you do go to sleep, your mind has a chance to organize what you have learned. And, when you wake up, before getting out of bed, do it again.

Since remembering is so fragile, review time should come once a week. I prefer Saturday, as nothing is due the next day.

All of this should go on seven days a week. You will be astonished how little time is required.

Now, what happened with the perception course? There were two exams, one in the middle of the course, and one at the end. I read and marked the book with a yellow high lighter, the same with my notes (re-written just after class each day), and learned the material in quick order. On the first exam, I made an A. The second exam was a little different; I didn't do anything until late the evening before the exam .... I was now confident of what could be accomplished in a limited amount of time. I had gone up to the lab in the early evening, and about 10:00 pm thought I should get started. By 1:00 am I was finished, and when I got up the next morning, I reviewed the material. The results were the same, another A. Total study time for the course? About ten hours, excluding class and preparing the cards How much of the material do I remember? -- After ten years, I happened to find the cards in a desk drawer: I got a little over 90% correct.

I hadn't suddenly become brighter, nor was I working harder. But I was working smarter.

Nurses and airline pilots have one thing in common; both have to learn large amounts of material in a hurry. Cards, as described above, can be purchased.

A common mistake students make in preparing for exams is to stay up all night. The most important thing to know about this is simply that it doesn't work. Yet every generation of students, myself included, have done exactly that. Why doesn't it work? Well, for most people the body has a time at which it wants to go to sleep. Temperature drops, and efficiency goes down. Can you reverse this by a simple act of will. No! What about a complex act of will? That doesn't work, either. What can you do? Not a damn thing except go to sleep. From about 1:00 am until about 4:00 am, you are going to be operating at about 25% efficiency, so why not just cooperate with inevitable, and go to sleep.

So you think you can out stubborn it. This won't work with a cat, and it won't work with your body. But you say, "I have to study, period." Doesn't work. If your body doesn't get to sleep at night, it is just as content to go to sleep during the exam. Think this cannot happen? One of my brother's friends not only went to sleep during an English exam, he fell out of the chair. This could not be considered a diplomatic act; the professor looked over the situation and gave him an F. Do you really think your body has any interest in your mathematics exam?

Let's look at another arena in which the body simply has had enough, and just goes to sleep. And that is in warfare. Dale Cargenie reports in "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living," reports cases of this taking place in fire fights! You would think your body would really be interested; for no other reason than self-preservation. Nope. When sleep time comes, it goes to sleep. I might add that it would be well worth your time to read both this book and another one he wrote, "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Only a few million copies of the first book have been sold, but more than fifteen million copies of the second. He has a lot to say, and he says it very well.

If you do assume your body will simply flake out on you when it has had enough, then it behooves you to see that it doesn't pull this stunt at an inopportune moment, such as when you are taking an exam, or on a long drive. So what do you do? Simply make sure you sleep between about 1:00 am and 5:00 am. You are going to be so inefficient that you just as well be asleep anyway. Further, you will be much more alert during your exam, something of great importance.

What happens during sleep is not well understood. But it is common knowledge that the first ninety minutes of sleep are the most important as far as being able to function is concerned. When you go into REM (Rapid Eye Movement), you are dreaming. Dreaming turns out to be very important to us; without this we may have rested but we feel tired. Some sleeping pills interfere with REM, the result being the person has slept, but feels tired. So if you sleep a few hours a night, then you will be able to function reasonably well, for maybe four or five days, at which time your body will say, "The hell with this, I am going to get a good rest." But by that time, your exams will be over.

Studying too much can also be hazardous to your grades. For example, you tend to remember the beginning of a book (or lecture, or whatever), and the end of the book. The middle seems to get lost somehow. Suppose, as one theory suggests, there is an information buffer, which is finite. Assume there is such an information buffer, which is used to store information for a short time so that your brain can process it and file it into memory. If you "pour" information in too fast, it will simply get lost. You are not surprised that when you water the grass, if you pour water on too fast, it makes a puddle. It takes time to absorb information, just as it takes time for the ground to absorb water. In either case, pouring it on too fast results in a runoff.

For some reason, the academic hour has come to mean fifty minutes. The adult has an attention span of about fifteen minutes (The lookouts on privateers during the days of sail watched for their prey for only about fifteen minutes before being relieved.). So assume that you have an attention span of fifteen minutes, followed by one of ten minutes, followed by one of five minutes, each period separated by five minutes, you almost get the academic hour. How long you concentrate seems to be less important as to how hard you concentrate. The five minute space between each period gives your brain a chance to organize the information it has received. Just sitting quietly and thinking about what you have been doing is the best approach.

You can learn to concentrate; this is a skill, which can be nurtured.

The actual taking of an examination is an art. The students in the United States are poorly prepared compared to other countries in this art, the reason being that we use "continuous" evaluation (a test every few eeeks) rather than a single test at the end of the year. For example, when I first went to Australia (the University of Wollongong), the first notable difference I found in the manner in which students took an examination was that there was a 10 to 30 minute reading period. During this reading period, you could only read the examination and make notes -- no questions were answered. The reading period was not considered to be part of the examination time. If it were a two-hour examination, with a ten-minute reading period, then the actual amount of time spent in the examination was two hours and ten minutes.

The examination was not given by the instructor, nor was it usually given in the class room. It was given by professional test givers called invigelators. The instructor would be present during the reading period, answer any questions (I never got any), and then would leave. The examination papers were then coded with a number (the invigelators removed the names of the students from the examination booklets and replaced them with a code number). The following day the booklets were turned over to the instructor. The instructor would then grade them, and return the results for decoding. A review committee would then go over the results to see that all was in order -- no mistakes and had been make and high standards had been maintained.

I have tried, without any success, to have a reading period during examinations given here. Students want to grab that pen and start writing. And you would not believe how many points I have taken off because the student had started to answer the question before completely reading it!

So, if you want to improve your grade, consider giving yourself a reading period .... it works.

One of my friends gave a test in which the last question said nothing except the first three people handing it in were to have a 100 and that no question were to be answered, because the test was a joke. It was almost thirty minutes into the test before anyone noticed what the last question said.