there are four layers of learning that any student or learner of any age should Master when we're able to master all four layers of learning it is genuinely one of the most powerful learning strategies that you can learn it allows us to have a better understanding and better retention it makes learning faster and it even makes learning more enjoyable unfortunately most of the students that I work with aren't able to follow the layers in the correct order when this happens it creates a lot of stress it wastes a lot of time and it can feel
impossible to get the results you want and with enough time we can start thinking that maybe we'll just never be good at learning but that probably is not true for me learning to learn in these four layers is one of the reasons I was able to get top results in both medical school and for my master of education and trust me there's nothing special about me I'm not a genius I've seen similar results with thousands of students and professionals that I've trained over the years and so by the end of this video you'll know exactly
which layer you tend to focus on but most importantly how you can master all four layers of learning now the first layer of learning is called the logic layer and this is by far the most overlooked but also the most important layer because without mastering this layer the other layers will not work which means you'll end up wasting hours of time studying without getting the results that you want why you may ask well as you can see from the diagram that I've I've drawn each layer of learning stacks on the previous layer efficient and effective
learning should always build on itself which means the learning you do initially makes the learning you do later easier and easier I always say the more you learn the easier it should get but most students don't feel that way most students feel like the more they learn the more overwhelming it gets there's more things to try to hold on to in your memory and the reason that happens is because instead of approaching ing learning in the right order where we're going 1 2 3 4 most students do it in the opposite order they go 4
3 2 1 and then they end up with this and if the way you are learning looks like this instead of this then learning efficiently becomes almost impossible and the easy way to think about this is to think of learning like building a house you have to start with layer one which is the foundations and then on top of that layer you bu build the walls and the roof and the overall structure and then you paint the walls and then eventually you decorate and put in your furniture but what you'll see by the end of
this video is that most students aren't doing that what they are doing is the learning equivalent of trying to build the walls without having a foundation and then they're only building like one corner of one room and then they're painting that and then chucking a couch in the corner and then starting to build the foundation of like another room and then build building that wall and somehow trying to make it all come together so really it doesn't matter how long you're spending on building the house it's just going to crumble if you don't have that
good foundation to start with and in learning what a crumbling Foundation actually looks and feels like is hm I've technically covered this content why can't I remember and use this knowledge it probably means that you had weak foundations so when we're working on the logic layer it means that we're looking for the biggest ideas within that topic we're trying to focus on getting a big picture fairly basic understanding of the entire topic what are the main ideas and how do those main ideas fit together in the big picture and spending time to deliberately create this
logic layer is crucial for efficient learning because it helps you build context about what you are going to learn and it doesn't take very long to develop this logic layer for a one to 2our topic it might only take you 10 15 minutes but it is a step that most students skip without even realizing it and this happens because most students believe that context is something that they will just develop as they keep studying it they think okay I've studied this now and I don't really know how to apply the information but I'm sure that
if I keep studying it and then I do more practice papers and more flashcards I'll eventually get to a point where it's all connected together but this is not not true just time passing does not mean the ideas connect together the act of connecting information together developing context is an active process we need to engage in and in fact when we don't actively try to connect it together build the context and develop a big picture understanding first that's when we run into the issue of the more we learn the more overwhelming we get because now
we're just loading up our brain with all these bits of information where we don't know what to do with it we don't know where it sits but somehow we're expecting our brain to organize it process it hold on to it and extract meaning out of it learning and taking in information when you don't have the context and the big picture is kind of like walking into a library but then all the books are just scattered all over the floor without any bookshelves to clearly organize the information so if you've ever studied something and you've tried
to solve a problem but then you feel like hm I kind of recognize some of the concepts that might be relevant to helping me solve this but you can't actually solve it and connect it together and use what you have studied in that way then it means that you probably didn't actively make the step of bringing it together in layer one of learning and naturally that is a very frustrating and annoying and stressful process if that is happening to you constantly while you study but again this can be entirely avoided by doing layer one properly
here are my Pro tips for doing layer one the right way first of all do it UPF front don't try to like I said develop context after you've taken in a huge mass of information and the easiest way to do that is step two list out your keywords take a textbook take whatever you're learning and then just skim through it and collect SCT the main key words and concepts for that topic these could be the titles and subheadings they could be bolded words and new terminology could be from your lecture objectives and by doing this
it just creates a nice clean list of things for you to look through you're not having to just constantly be flicking back and forth between all your resources trying to figure out what exactly is foundational logic layer stuff and then what you do tip number three is look through this list that you've got and then start grouping it together think about what are the main similarities what are the main ways that I might be able to organize all of these different keywords and Concepts there are going to be similar Trends similar purposes similar parts of
a process similar reasons for why it's important enough for you to learn them think about those things and start creating groups and relating these groups to each other and tip number four keep it simple you just need to have a very general surface level simp simple understanding of the overall topic something that you could explain to a 10-year-old and so by the end of layer one you should be able to generally explain what this topic is talking about you can say this topic is about these main types of ideas and they are important because they
influence and relate to each other in this way you won't be able to explain any of those Concepts in detail you won't really remember all the little subconcepts and terminology that fits within that you're not going to be able to recite anything from memory necessarily but in the later layers when you go to learn that level of detail you will be able to understand where it fits in the big picture and you'll have ideas on why it's important and relevant to learn so this process of making it a bit more specific and adding on extra
detail onto that first layer the logic layer is Layer Two and Layer Two is called the concepts layer this is where we're taking those big groups of ideas and we're actually splitting them out into the more specific major Concepts within them and Layer Two is important because this is what gives that topic depth it's what gives it more substance it makes it a little bit more specific during Layer Two we're developing the ability to actually explain things in detail and we should be able to answer a lot of those questions that might come up in
an exam and because in layer one we generally figured out how these big Ideas relate with each other it means that when we come to a more complicated problem which requires us to connect different concepts from different parts of the topic and use them together we know how they connect and we can actually do that now Layer Two is where we need to spend the majority of our studying time around 60 to 70% of all the time we spend studying a topic should be spent in Layer Two if we want to get top results however
there is something that holds a lot of students back from being able to do this correctly which I will talk about later in the video but right now I want to make it clear that this entire process especially during layer 2 where we are adding on those extra details and our big picture understanding is starting to get more and more accurate and more specific this is something that takes time for me if I'm learning a large topic this can take me multip study sessions across multiple days and if you've never tried learning in this way
before it can feel very confusing and even quite frustrating sometimes just knowing whether you're doing it right or wrong but just like for learning any new skill those feelings are completely normal and expected as part of just improving your skills and I'll mention here as well that as an extra resource I also have a free Weekly Newsletter where I go through through more evidence-based tips and strategies that can help you work through this process I talk about this layers of learning a little bit more detail with a few more examples as well and I also
talk about a lot of other strategies as well that can help you get top results so if that's something that's interesting for you I'll leave a link in the description again it's totally free now at this point of our layers once we've done layer one the logic and Layer Two the concepts we have a generally pretty good understanding of the topic we see how it fits together we can talk about the big picture of things why what we are learning is important how we can use it you can see how the ideas are connected together
and you can explain these Concepts in pretty good detail as well so what we're missing at this point are those really specific details these could be like very particular pieces of terminology or the name of particular Catalyst and molecules or uh particular types of dates or locations that an event happened these are the very fine granular details you might get tested on or you need to use it as part of your essay or writing and this is where layer three comes in layer 3 is what we call important details and the reason it's called an
important detail is because these are the specific pieces of information the details that are important for helping us to understand layer 2 and this is actually really important because it's saying that this very specific piece of information that when you first look at it you might think that's just something I need a wrote memorize is something that is actually connected is related to a concept that you've learned there is a reason for you to learn that detail which means from your brain's perspective there is a place for it to fit there is a way it
can organize it in relation to everything else you've been learning so figuring out what is in layer three is actually kind of simple all we have to do is look at that piece of information and ask ourselves does this help me understand something from Layer Two or make something from layer two more concrete and if the answer is yes then it fits into layer three if the answer is no then we'll talk about that in the next layer but even though it's technically very straightforward to figure out what is in layer three here is the
issue the reason so many students feel overwhelmed with learning especially for big topics and the more they learn the more overwhelmed they get is that they jump into layer three without having done layer 1 and Layer Two first and that is actually disastrous and as soon as you've done that you can say goodbye to your efficiency because think about this when you ask yourself this detail is this important for me by helping me to understand the concept or making it more concrete how can you know the answer to that if you haven't actually figured out
the concepts in the first place and how do you know whether it's going to be important if you don't know how you're going to use those Concepts which is something we figure out during logic layer layer one spoiler alert the answer is that you can't so when you start with just layer three just ramming through all the details as much as we can like there's so much to learn I better just go through trying to memorize absolutely everything from start to finish then everything becomes irrelevant because there is nothing to connect it to and we
end up with a disorganized mass of disconnected isolated facts and and individual Concepts and explanations and processes which means our retention is not going to be very good and our understanding is not going to be very deep and we can't use the knowledge the way that we need to and we have to compensate by just trying to memorize all of that more like just doing more repetition more flash card spending more time studying and the key to avoiding that and making it so that learning does get easier the more you learn and you're not getting
overwhelmed and falling into a trap of endless repetitive memorization is to understand that learning in the right order makes learning build on itself ler three is the perfect example of this because when you first go through a textbook on a topic you've never studied before everything is very detailed Everything feels very specific like there's no other way for you to learn it other than memorizing and maybe that's what everyone else is doing but you know just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's good but common and widespread does not mean desirable uh after all
you know Co was also pretty widespread but there are lots of detailed specific pieces of information that become relevant become logical become intuitive and easy to understand and remember when you know a little bit more about the topic and that fact that seemed irrelevant and detailed and the only way you could learn it was memorization now when we look at it we think oh yeah that makes sense I can see how that fits in you can only get to that feeling by learning the layers in the right order so let's say we have gone through
layer one then Layer Two and now we're at layer three we've identified which details seem to be important important for Layer Two which things make that concept more concrete what do we do with that well first of all we can add them into our notes if you're using mind mapping then you can add them into your mind map and we can also add those into something like flash cards flash cards are great for helping us remember those detailed specific pieces of information and so we're covering both of our bases we're making sure that we're not
going to forget those details we're documenting them we're using flash cards which gives us the benefit of pretty decent queued recoil and space repetition but but we're also making sure we know how to use that information in the right way by connecting it through something like a mind matat and so while I will say that flash cards are a great tool to use during this layer layer three they are a very ineffective way of trying to learn the bottom two layers and so by the end of layer three we have a big picture understanding of
how things are connected to each other with specific Concepts and we also have specific details that make those Concepts more concrete at this point we are 80 90% on our tests and exams or more so what could possibly be left well what's left is layer four and layer four is a major source of confusion and overwhelm for a lot of students and that's because layer four is what I call arbitrary details and arbitrary details are the types of details that are just not important they don't help you to understand a concept they don't seem to
fit into the big picture anywhere it's kind of like there's no reason to really learn this if you are not going to get tested on it it's basically just all the stuff that's left over after you've done layer 1 2 and three but here's the reason why layer four is the thing that trips up so many students is that you can only figure out what is layer 4 what is an arbitrary detail if you've already figured out out what is layer three in important detail you can only figure out what's important if you've done Layer
Two which is the concepts and you can only figure out the concepts if you know where they fit which is layer one the logic and so at the start of this video I said that the reason why a lot of people struggle and get overwhelmed with learning is because they're not learning in this order they're learning in the opposite order this is exactly what I'm talking about this is the major trap you need to avoid if you want to be more efficient and get the results that you looking for when you open up a textbook
the information as it's given to you biases you into starting at layer 4 and that's because when we open up a textbook the majority of that information is very detailed it's in this layer three or layer 4 and because we feel like there's so much we have to learn we get on with it we spend that time trying to get through all of these details to remember and understand every single detail but remember if we start this way we don't know what's important we don't have context we don't know how we're going to use that
information we don't know where it fits and so now our brain is trying to do multiple things it's trying to not only understand what you're reading and just comprehend it it's trying not only to just desperately hold on to and remember that information and it's also trying to figure out why the heck it needs to hold on to that information in the first place why is it relevant where does it fit how does it relate to anything else and we spend hours and hours just churning through inside this detail layer over enough time we can
get a sense for oh some of these things seem to be a little bit more important and so the layer three important details become a little clearer and then as we see these important details we start thinking hold on a second maybe these are related to this particular concept and those Concepts become clearer and we start to be able to understand in more depth and then eventually maybe if we have enough time to do enough practice questions and test ourselves we might see how they all connect together and get that light bulb moment of understanding
the purpose of why we were learning everything and how to actually use it and that is when we reach layer one and sometimes we never reach that because we run out of time so then the question is how do we avoid that experience and how do we learn in the right layers in the first place if we're hid in the face with so many of these details to sift through well the solution is to actively filter the information in these four layers to begin with so if you have a single page on a textbook you're
no longer going to look at it as one page of information you're going to see that that page has four layers of information it becomes a process of skimming the information to to deliberately look for the things that for you feel like it belongs in layer one and focusing our attention on just the layer one information and once we've gone through our material defined all the layer one information and built our lay one with a strong Foundation we're going to go through all the stuff again a second time this time filtering and looking for the
things that feel like Layer Two and remember Layer Two takes the longest and once we've done that we can go through it again to filter out the things that are layer three or layer four and you usually you can do those last two layers in the same step and if you are in the unfortunate position where you do need to actually learn these layer four things as well that's also when you might just put them into some flash cards but on top of doing this you also need to be able to detect when you're doing
it in the wrong order and one of the telltale signs red flags that you're going in the wrong order is that you are very early on in your studying Pro ESS and already you are making flash cards or you are in your mind just trying to remember and hold on to what you're learning that's your mindset and that's what you're doing that's a very clear sign that you're focusing on the wrong layer and if you do want to be a top learner or even if you just want to make learning a little bit easier than
it is now I can promise you I can guarantee it if you start thinking of learning in layers you will find that you are more efficient you your memory gets better your understanding is deeper you're getting better results and you'll start feeling more confident in the way that you learn so if you want more specific strategies and tips on how to navigate these four layers then remember my free Weekly Newsletter the links in the description and if you want to learn even more learning strategies and techniques then I recommend checking out this video here I
think you'll like it
