I've been a learning coach for over a decade. And in this video, I'll show you how you can absorb textbooks like a sponge. I'll teach you a four-part method that allows you to learn, remember, and use any new information in a way that feels effortless.
This method works by overcoming a biological barrier that's hardwired into our brain that actually prevents it from absorbing new information more quickly in the first place. So, we need to address this barrier first if we want to make any progress. So what is this biological barrier?
Researchers have actually found that there seems to be a limit on how much new information your brain can store at any given time. In learning science, this process of taking information and then storing it into our memory is called encoding. If someone's able to learn information like a sponge and hold on to all of this information in their memory, you're basically saying, "This person has really good encoding.
" Whenever we encode new information, we think that your brain is probably physically remodeling itself at a microscopic level. And so, one theory is that our brain has an inbuilt defense mechanism that stops it from making too many changes too quickly in case some of those changes are harmful to us. After all, the human brain did not adapt to learn this much information in one go.
So that feeling you get when you're reading something really dense and really detailed and you feel overwhelmed and you feel like that information is just leaking out of your brain and you cannot hold on to it. That's basically you realizing the biological limit of your brain. So while it is difficult to increase the raw power of your brain, there are some things that we can do that help our brain process this new information which makes encoding easier.
And doing these things is the trick to faster encoding and absorbing information like a sponge. And there are three things that I want you to remember. Your brain finds it easier to encode information when these three things are met.
Number one, intention. Number two, relevance. And number three, familiarity.
When all three of these conditions are met, your brain is able to encode more easily and more quickly. Intention just means literally wanting and trying to understand and remember something. This is really obvious.
Reading this book without even intending or trying to learn it means that it's going to be less effective than trying to learn it. The second one is relevance. Relevance is how important we think this new information is.
And there are two ways it can be relevant. It can be relevant because it influences and impacts something we already know or it influences and impacts other new pieces of information that we're learning. And familiarity is about how similar what you are learning now is with what you already know.
When you are intending to learn something and it feels significant and impactful to something else and it is familiar to what you already know, then this is easier for your brain to store into your memory. You can remember these three points with the pneumonic I remember fast. But here's the problem.
Normally, when we're trying to learn something, we only control our intention. When we're struggling to learn or remember something, we just try to remember it harder. Whether something is relevant or familiar is almost just up to luck.
Sometimes what we're learning might seem more familiar and may seem more relevant and sometimes it doesn't. And especially when you're reading from something like a thick textbook, often the details are very dense and it's hard to see how this is relevant and most of it is new and unfamiliar. And so because we are only trying to increase our intention and we rarely ever try to increase the relevance or try to increase familiarity, there is a hard limit on how much we can encode and how quickly we can do it.
Now, you may ask, "But Justin, how can we make something more relevant and more familiar if we're learning it for the first time and we just don't see how it's relevant? " The answer is by using this four-part method. You can remember this method with the acronym L2R2.
The first L is layman's. Now, if you're not familiar, the word layman means to describe something really simply without using special terminology. So if I said to you, active learning involves higher intrinsic cognitive load, that's hard to understand unless you're already familiar with this topic.
The lay man's explanation for it would be effective learning means thinking harder. The first part of this method is for any new information you're learning, especially if it's dense. And it doesn't just have to be in a textbook.
It could be reading journal articles. It could be lecture slides. Whatever you're trying to learn, try to learn it in just layman's terms.
Simple language first. Remove all the terminology. Anything that's tricky or complicated to understand, rewrap it in a way that you could explain it to an average everyday person.
Taking the time to learn something in layman's terms first dramatically improves your ability to learn and understand this new topic. Why does that work? This is because learning it in layman's terms increases our familiarity.
We are not familiar with all this new terminology and all these dense new concepts. We don't know what this new detail means and why we need to learn it. But by turning it into simple language and simple ideas that we're already familiar with, it also becomes easier to see how this can influence and impact something else.
In other words, by making it more familiar, it also makes it easier for us to see how it is relevant. So, how can you do this? When you first go to open up a new chapter and you're reading through, point out and look at the headings and the bold words first.
Scan and skim through everything that you need to learn and actually pick out what you think are the most important key concepts and write them out separately. Then and this is really easy these days just go to your favorite AI program and say I am learning this topic here are the key words that I will have to learn about explain these to me in layman's terms so it is simple for me to understand this entire process can take you less than 10 minutes and after 10 minutes this chapter will suddenly feel very approachable and very familiar to you. you will feel ready to go and learn about each of these concepts because you already understand how they work at a simple level.
Another tip is to use something like Google images. For any keywords that represent a process or a cycle or a sequence of events or a framework, type them into Google and then go straight to Google images and just look for images that seem simple to understand. This is leveraging off of our visual processing ability, which is tens of thousands of times more efficient than our reading ability.
Simply seeing an image of a concept being explained can help us to understand it much more efficiently than even a really simply explained AI generated summary. Now, one thing I always try to do as much in layman's terms as possible is teaching you about learning science. And one place that you can see me trying to do this is in my free weekly newsletter where I share tips and tricks and techniques like the ones I'm sharing with you now, but to your inbox every single week.
I take the things that I wish I had known that made a difference to my learning efficiency over the years, and I distill them into these quick emails that you can read in 3 to 5 minutes in layman's terms, but potentially saving you dozens of hours a month through just efficiency. Again, if you're interested, it's completely free. The link's in the description to join.
But anyway, that was the first L, learning it in layman's first. Once you've done this, you should move on to the second L. The second L stands for layer.
Layering your learning is one of the most powerful methods you can use. When you're covering really dense information like in a textbook, like reading a journal article, it's really difficult to get all of that information in in one go. Even when you have gone through a layman's explanation of it, it can be easily overwhelming, but only if you learn it the way it tells you to.
Layering your learning is about you taking control of how you think this information will make sense for you and your brain. And it's actually very simple. All you do is when you're reading through it, deliberately look for the things that feel more relevant or feel more familiar to you.
Spend time trying to learn and understand and connect that information. And if you read something that you can't see how it's relevant, it's very detailed, it's very unfamiliar, and you're struggling to see how it connects with anything else, just skip it and put a little sticky note next to it. note it down somewhere so you can come back to it later.
Go through your chapter or your readings with this mindset, picking out the parts that are relevant and then building your knowledge first with what is already relevant and familiar and then go back to the parts that you skipped. Now the magical thing happens which is that those things that you didn't see why they're irrelevant. They were very unfamiliar.
You didn't see how they connected the first time around. It might have taken you 15 minutes to figure out that paragraph. When you look at it now it's going to be much easier because you have more information about the topic.
Now you're one step closer to expertise than you were before. anything complicated. It's just a lot of simple things put together.
If it feels complicated, it just means you don't know all the simple things yet. So instead of trying to figure it out now, just learn the simple things first and come back to it. Layering your learning massively increases how relevant what you're learning is.
And it ensures that you're not wasting time right now on something that you should just come back to later. So that's the L2. And now we move on to the R2 of this four-part method.
The first R stands for relevance framing. Effective learning is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. You're getting new information from a lecture or an article or a textbook, wherever, and you're looking at this new information, trying to see it, trying to understand it, and asking yourself, where does this fit in the big picture of the jigsaw puzzle I'm building, aka the knowledge I'm trying to build?
When you find the right place for it to fit, it helps to complete the big picture. When you find the wrong place, it means that the picture becomes incomplete, inaccurate, and if you don't know where it fits and you're just trying to hold on to it, that's the stuff that you inevitably just forget. Now, the problem is that, like I said before, most of the time we're just thinking about increasing our intention.
We're not actively thinking about how we can make this new information, each new jigsaw piece, more relevant and more familiar. So, this is kind of like two people solving a jigsaw puzzle. One person all they do is pick up pieces out of the board, look at it, and then just throw it at this other person who desperately has to see where this fits constantly.
And between the person whose job it is just to pick pieces out of a box and throw it at someone versus the person who has to actually make the picture, you can see who's got the harder job. This is basically what happens when we learn. we are just forcing all of this dense information into our brain and just hoping that this picture will be formed.
Relevance framing is stopping that and it's about communicating between these two people. It's about saying okay what piece are you looking for? What does the picture look like?
What kind of pieces with what kind of edges should I hunt for? And then once you know that you then go into the box, you go into the textbook to look for those pieces to look for that information. So how do we actually create these relevance frames?
Well, one very easy way is to just look at test questions or end of chapter questions before you start properly going through all the content. You can do your layman's explanation first. You can go through and just pick out the parts that are really obvious to you to begin with if you want, but before you really sit down to properly go through all the little detail, just go through and test yourself.
Get a sense for how you're going to need to use this knowledge in professional or real world settings. Think about how you are going to use this knowledge in the real world. What type of problems would it solve?
How can I apply this? Why is this important and significant for me to know? And if you're struggling with this, use chatbt, use Google, ask it, why would I need to know this?
And once it's clear to you why it is relevant, write it down. Put it on a separate piece of paper while you're studying so that as you're reading through, you can constantly check back to it to see, is this relevant? And if so, how.
It's the equivalent of having the jigsaw puzzle image next to you. So when you look at each piece, you have an idea about where it might fit. And this isn't something that you just do once and it's done.
You can continue trying to create new relevance frames with each layer that you go through. So, as you get more and more detailed, ask yourself, which parts of what I'm learning still feel like it doesn't quite make sense? Which parts are harder for me to understand?
Which are the ones that feel less relevant and less familiar? And ask yourself clear, explicit questions about those. Don't just say, "I generally feel less comfortable with this part of the topic.
" Ask yourself why you feel less clear. What information are you missing? It's looking at your half complete jigsaw puzzle.
Noticing that there's a part that isn't complete instead of just generally knowing that there's something there. It's looking at it clearly and saying, "Okay, what type of pieces should I be looking for to fill that? " that.
And so relevance framing boosts your ability to encode information through obviously improving your relevance. Now the final R of R2 is real estate. And I've done this in blue because this is actually something that you do throughout the entire process of L2R2.
It's not something you just do at the end. You should be applying this throughout the entire process of learning. Real estate refers to your mental real estate.
Basically, your mental capacity to hold on to information and to process it. You only have so much mental capacity. Like all humans, not just you.
The human brain can only handle so much information. And we have to protect our mental resources. If we start using our precious mental resources to just try to track on and remember every single idea that we're learning through a textbook, we're going to get very very quickly overwhelmed.
It doesn't matter how smart you are, how experienced of a learner, it's just a matter of time before you feel overwhelmed. What you want to do is make sure that your effort, your mental effort, those cognitive resources are used only for processing, understanding the ideas and trying to fit it into the big picture. You want the figuring out the jigsaw puzzle part of your brain to be very uninterrupted because the faster they are solving the puzzle, the faster you can learn.
When they get stuck, everything stops. And the easiest way to protect that mental real estate and to just let your brain focus on just encoding that information is to think on paper. Write your thoughts down, document it, use your note-taking as a cognitive offload.
Do not try to hold on to all the ideas of how you think things are connected and where your gaps might be mentally. Write it down. Look at your notes.
Use your notes to help you think about it. Look at your notes and see where there might be gaps and things that you're missing. If you think these two things influence each other, but you're not sure, it doesn't matter.
Just write it down first. Don't bother your brain capacity by trying to just hold on to this idea. When you look at the notes of an efficient learner who has their processes tuned in, their notes should be a reflection of their thinking process.
You should be able to see the process of how ideas initially start scattered and disorganized and how slowly they start organizing together to form a cohesive picture. And so protecting your mental real estate doesn't by itself increase the familiarity or the relevance or your intention, but it just makes all of this stuff much much easier. So this is the L2R2 fourpart method that you can use to help your brain absorb information like a sponge.
And if you want some more tips on how you can learn more effectively, then you might be interested in this video here. I can never tell which side of the screen it's I I should just memorize this. Which side of the screen the video play cards pop up on.
