11 Scientific Tips That Can Help People Learn Anything Faster

If children want to achieve goals, they need to practice the skill of learning. There are people who keep studying as well as thinking, in the same way, all the time without trying to improve their methods.

Cognitive science decided to find out how humans learn, and the findings are excellent as well as helpful.

1. Learn Skills Step by Step

For instance, if you want to learn how to play guitar, you should not think about doing everything at once. You should start learning several easy chords, then, learn how to strum, and how to combine those chords.

So, learning step by step will lead you to the ability to play guitar. This technique applies to machine learning and fact-based lessons.

2. No Use of Multitasking

Many people are aware that multitasking is not real, that the human brain cannot pay attention to two things at the same time. However, only several people apply this insight to learning.

When you break a task into individual parts, you need to pay full attention to every task. Distractions take about 25 minutes to get back your focus to the task.

In fact, multitasking means that you are acquiring a partial understanding of several skills of concepts, but you do not have complete knowledge of any of those.

3. Writing Helps

Use a pen and paper to write down what you have learned in order to remember it better, as the research recommends. In one study back in 2014, those students who took notes by writing by hand learned more than those who typed on laptops.

Also, those who wrote by hand could remember facts more, synthesize information, and sort out complex ideas. According to the researchers, pen and paper make a stronger cognitive link to the material than typing which happens very quickly.

With writing, the ideas stick with you as time goes by.

4. Celebrate and Study Mistakes

Perfection does not exist. The point of learning is trying, failing, and learning about the things you did wrong. The study from 2014, revealed that the human brain has reserved space for mistakes. So, we can use those resources to be better.

Parents should let children make mistakes because if they do not, then, the children will miss a lot of knowledge.

5. Optimism is Useful

Negative reinforcement stresses children, so they get stuck in a mental rut. They are filled with anxiety and self-doubt which are not helping the learning process. Professor Alison Wood Brooks says that anxiety does not let you explore and find solutions.

An open mind and room for improvement can help us be more successful, as positive psychology research says. Learning should be presented to children as an exploration.

So, when the going gets tough, kids will be able to manufacture determination into grit. Teach your children to love learning and see it as an adventure.

6. Exciting Topics Are Better Learned

It is in the nature of children to like wacky and weird, but when they have to learn hard facts, all the fun disappears. Parents should not let that occur.

Children should know why they can remember their father’s yellow shorts or the specific smell in their grandma’s house. They remember it because it is special and unique.

Interestingly, Joshua Foer who is a former US memory champion managed to remember a full deck of cards in less than 2 minutes. He did it by relating every card to some weird image. Children can use the same technique with presidents and times tables.

7. Reading Faster Means Learning Faster

You may think that speed reading needs a lot of effort, there is a program, Spreeder that picks up the pace gradually. You can train your brain to process words more rapidly, so you will be able to read entire strings of words.

8. Practice makes it Perfect

One study conducted in 2004 revealed that people who do juggling produce more gray matter. So, in the study, when people stopped juggling, the gray matter vanished.

The repetition was what made the change. It is a process of ‘pruning’ as neuroscientists explain. It is a new pathway of doing something again and again, and it can stick with you forever.

9. Use Previous Knowledge

If a child has difficulties in learning something new, the parents can help them to understand how the new thing is connected to something they have already learned, and it is called associative learning.

For example, if a student likes football, but has difficulties in learning differential calculus, they can learn much better if they see there is a similarity between a slope of a curve and a spiraling pass.

10. Look Up What You Cannot Remember

Children should learn how to deal with difficult problems. However, evidence reveals that spending too much time on a problem may make it worse. Back in 2008, it was found that tip-of-the-tongue moments that were not resolved can turn into an ‘error-state.’

So, when you know that you know something, but you cannot recall it, use Google to remember.

11. Teaching Others is Helpful

When you are teaching someone else by putting into your own words what you know, showing mastery of an idea, and explaining how you understand it.

When you are dividing information into smaller pieces, it means you know the subject enough. As a study from 2007 suggests, older siblings are smarter because they pass their knowledge to their younger siblings.