Prologue

Hey! Thanks for stopping by. This will be the first in a series of blog posts, in which I will be documenting and sharing my journey of learning.

In the chapters that follow, I will be attempting to learn something that I have been putting off for a long ass time now. And I will be emphasizing the use of ‘correct methods’ to learn it, which will result in the most optimal and robust learning possible (for me at least).

Before I begin telling you about these ‘correct methods’, I’m gonna have to give you some background on learning in general.

The ideas I’m presenting here (which are backed by research) are from the book “Make It Stick”. I would highly recommend you read the thing later if you’re curious about the specifics.

What Have We Been Taught?

To answer that question, not much. When was the last time you took a class on how to learn something? Probably never (if you did though, I would love to know how it was). We generally tend to learn a thing or two about learning here and there, but never in any formal or structured manner. You can begin by evaluating your understanding of learning by trying to think of the process and how you think it works before proceeding further.

What We Do

Imagine this: You’re in 7th grade. Your Geography teacher has taught the class about Indian Rivers and then asks you to learn the chapter and be prepared tomorrow. You go home and remember (by some stroke of luck) that you have homework for tomorrow. You need to learn about Indian Rivers. What would you do? Probably read the textbook chapter once. Or if you wanted to impress the teacher for social validation you would read it twice. Maybe you’re feeling it today and decide to look at the text and create your notes. I mean, why not just read notes in your writing than reading the textbook again? So you re-read the notes and keep them safe to read them again if you ever want to revise. And if you were just super motivated to know the chapter thoroughly, you would go and solve the revision questions at the end of the chapter.

Let’s break this example down. We decided to:

  1. Read the chapter twice.
  2. Make notes and read them.
  3. Solve the revision questions.

The bad news is that 50-60% of this effort was not necessary. Here’s why:

  1. Reading the chapter once is required to understand the content, but reading it multiple times provides very little value.
  2. Making notes is cool, but is effective only once when we’re processing the information to get it down on paper. It helps with the understanding when you paraphrase the content in your own words. Re-reading the notes is not very efficient and provides little value, same as re-reading the textbook.
  3. Solving the revision questions is perhaps the best thing that we decided to do.

I’m going to discuss what we should be doing instead shortly, but before that let’s try and understand why what we were doing was suboptimal. What we engaged in with the re-reading is something along the lines of mindless repetition. Let’s elaborate.

But Practice Makes Perfect, Right?

Well yes, but no. How you practice something plays a role in learning it. Repetition by itself isn’t that great. Mindless repetition is even worse. So when someone decides that reading the textbook 5 times in a row is going to make them an expert, they couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reason behind this is that re-reading in succession (and other forms of plain repetition practice) triggers your short-term memory and stops there. And you don’t need me to tell you this, but that’s not good. Sure, you feel like you can recite the entire chapter word for word after you read it thrice, but what about tomorrow? Or the day after tomorrow? Will you still be able to do it then? I know I wouldn’t. I’ve crammed for exams the night before and have witnessed myself transition into a blank slate rapidly after the exam is over. Now imagine this happening for something that you genuinely want to learn and master. Pretty heartbreaking, isn’t it?

One of the other major problems with massed practice (as the authors of Make It Stick like to call it) is that it gives you a false sense of mastery. That feeling of being able to recite the entire chapter word by word? Yeah, that doesn’t mean you’ve learned the material. It just means that it’s sitting in your short-term memory - for now. Unfortunate, but true.

So What? I Quit Reading Then?

You’re a grown adult, I can’t tell you what to do. But what I can tell you are the methods that get rid of the downsides of repetition. They are:

  • Active Recall - As the name suggests, actively trying to recall the material during practice.
  • Spaced Repetition - Repetition, but there’s a time gap in between two practice sessions.
  • Interleaved Practice - Mixing up different topics/subjects during your practice sessions.

You don’t have to take my word for it, let’s see why these methods work.

Why It Works

Active Recall, Spaced Repetition, and Interleaved Practice work because they work in tandem with how the brain processes new learning. There are three stages of learning:

  1. Encoding: The part where the brain tries to “encode” the new information into a mental representation.
  2. Consolidation: Here, the brain strengthens these new representations for long-term memory. During this process, the brain reorganizes and stabilizes these nascent representations. This occurs over a long period (several hours, or even more) during which scientists believe that the brain rehearses the learning, gives it meaning, fills in the blank spots, and makes connections with the prior knowledge we have.
  3. Retrieval: The stage where we retrieve the learning for use. After all, learning is more than just committing things to memory, we need to be able to recall it on demand as well.

Think of your knowledge as an infinite jigsaw puzzle. Encoding is like acquiring a new piece of the puzzle, consolidation is like trying to understand what the piece is like, which side is up, what’s printed on it, and finding an appropriate spot for it in the already solved portion, and retrieval is like being able to point at the part where the piece fits and identify what the picture on that part of the puzzle looks like now. This process should also be able to explain why when you start out learning something new, everything feels very disorganized, but over time it just starts making sense.

When you practice active recall and spaced repetition, you retrieve the consolidated memory, make slight modifications (or not) to it (if you got it wrong the first time, maybe misunderstood it, or just learned something new about it, you get the point), and initiate the process of consolidation again. This makes the memory even stronger, leading to better long-term retention, and a deeper understanding of the topic. You can think of active recall like this: it strengthens the connections in your brain that facilitate recalling of the knowledge, thus making it easier to do as time passes.

Interleaved practice, on the other hand, leads to a more diverse and robust mental representation in the encoding stage.

What We Should Do

Continuing the 7th-grade Geography example from before, the entire process could be condensed into two steps and it would’ve saved a lot of time while ensuring maximum output:

  1. Read the chapter once and understand the content (very important)
  2. Solve the revision questions without immediately looking at the solution

Understanding the content is the first step. Take as long as you want with this, because without understanding, all of what we discussed is kinda pointless. After that, repeat the 2nd step for all the questions you get wrong or don’t remember (assuming that the questions cover all the key points in the chapter) until you get them right. Please note that repetition is still involved, it is not completely ostracized from society. The difference here is that we use active recall in addition to repetition. And to finish off these two steps, once you get all the questions right, you could just go to sleep, and revise the questions again before school the next morning, thus incorporating spaced repetition as well.

One might argue that the examples I’ve provided simply assume that people study/practice something just once and then forget about it, which is not true in many cases. People do practice/study things for long terms. What is the merit of putting in extra effort to use these methods then? The argument is indeed logical. But think of it this way, these methods immediately give you a long-term plan (when to study what, and how to go about studying it), because the gain in using these methods cannot be experienced immediately. So if you have an exam tomorrow, cram your heart out. But if you need to learn something for the long term, these methods can never do you any harm. They will ensure stronger retention and understanding as opposed to blind practice.

A Word Of Caution

One thing to watch out for is that massed practice might make you feel like you know the material better as opposed to when you use active recall, spaced repetition, and interleaved practice. This primarily happens because we are bad judges of when we’re learning well and when we’re not. In several studies, the participants using active recall and spaced repetition did objectively better than those not using it but still felt that they learned better when they were using massed practice. This is why I would recommend having a test metric or something objective that will let you measure how well you’re doing if you’re just starting. For example, you could create a test for yourself and see how well you do on it. I’m sure you can find better ways to do it.

Another thing to take note of is that understanding the topic of study comes first. Active recall and spaced repetition might help you retain your learning better, but it is not a substitute for understanding. If you just memorize everything with no understanding of it, you’ll simply become a fact book. You won’t learn anything.

Alright, But Why Are You Telling Me All This?

The main topic of interest here was me using ‘correct methods’ to learn something that I had been putting off for some time now. Now that I’ve introduced these fabled ‘correct methods’, I’m going to mention what it is that I will be learning.

I’m going to be focusing on this small subdomain of Artificial Intelligence called Deep Learning. I’ve known about it and have been loosely using it for about a year now, but it always felt like I lacked the fundamental understanding that is required, especially when I had to come face to face with some scary research papers. So, I decided I would learn Deep Learning from the ground up this time, leaving no loose ends.

Resources I Will Be Using

I’m primarily going to study the book Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. I found this book last year and was amazed by the quality of content in it. It had everything, from foundational math, to the basics of machine learning to modern neural networks, everything. It was all I ever needed to get started. And so, I immediately put it in my reading list and forgot about it. Fast forward to last week, I rediscovered this gem just sitting in my reading list and finally decided it was time to pick it up.

For any supplementary information that I require, I’ll just google it and read a random blog or watch a video on it.

How I’m Going To Do This

I’ve broken the process down into 2 phases:

  1. The initial reading.
  2. Creating a Recall Sheet.

Essentially, I will skim through a chapter once, and then go through it once more to create a “Recall Sheet”, i.e. a set of questions from the chapter that covers every concept I take away from it. Then, it’s just a matter of using active recall and spaced repetition along with interleaved practice. Here’s how I ensure that:

  • Understanding: The initial reading as well as creating the recall sheet.
  • Active Recall: Answering the questions from the recall sheet.
  • Spaced Repetition: Tracking the dates when I revise a particular chapter, and ensure I leave some gap between two revision sessions. This helps me decide when to revise what chapters/topics.
  • Interleaved Practice: Instead of revising one chapter at a time, I’ll just pick random questions from any Recall Sheet and answer them in no specific order until all the sheets that I need to (or decide to) revise on that day is done.

Disclaimer

I’m not saying that this is the only way to study (notice how I’ve mentioned ‘correct methods’ in single quotes everywhere?). Everyone is different, and what works for you, may not work for someone else. What I’ve stated here are merely guidelines from a well-established system that has worked wonderfully for me. If you agree with the ideas I mention but don’t like the way I go about using them, you’re free to modify the process as you like. And if you don’t agree with the ideas, that’s fine too. You know what works for you best.

The methods I introduced here are quite elementary, but more importantly, are very simple to implement. We just scratched the surface of learning with this post. If you want some more resources on the topic, I would highly recommend videos by Ali Abdaal about Active Recall, Spaced Repetition and learning something for the first time, alongside Make It Stick of course.

Thanks for reading to the end! See you next time.