Two groups of students read the same passage about sea otters. One group read it again and again. The other read it once, then closed the book and wrote down everything they could remember. The rereaders felt more confident. A week later, the group that had tested themselves remembered much more.
The way of learning that feels best often works worst. Learning is a skill in its own right, and school rarely teaches it. Ahead: the popular label that makes no difference to how well you learn, why a gap between sessions beats a long cram, the shuffle that looks messy and works, why the mistakes you were sure about are the ones you fix for good, and why someone else's screen can lower your score.
1. Drop the learning-style label
You've probably been told you're a visual learner, or an auditory one. When reviewers went looking for proof that teaching people in their "style" helps them learn more, they found almost none. The few tests designed well enough to check found no benefit, and some found the opposite.
The myth is everywhere. In a survey of 242 British and Dutch teachers keen on brain science, more than nine in ten believed in learning styles, and the teachers who knew most about the brain believed more of these myths overall.
What matters is the material. Maps are learned best by looking, music by listening, and a tennis serve by doing, whoever you are.
Choose how to learn something by what it is, and leave the label out of it.
2. Space it out
Cramming fills your head for tomorrow and empties it by next month. When the findings from 317 experiments were pooled, spreading the same learning time over several sessions beat doing it all at once, and the longer you wanted to remember something, the wider the best gap between sessions.
Spacing was one of the first discoveries in the science of memory. From 1879, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus spent years memorising lists of made-up syllables with no meaning, then testing himself on how fast he forgot them. He drew the first forgetting curve, and found that spreading his repetitions out slowed the forgetting.
The gains last for years. Four members of one family spent nine years learning 300 foreign words, relearning them at gaps of two, four or eight weeks. Years later, 13 sessions eight weeks apart had kept as many words as 26 sessions two weeks apart.
Split your next hour of learning into three twenty-minute sessions on different days.
3. Test yourself
Rereading feels productive because the page looks familiar. Recalling it from memory is harder, and that effort is what makes it stick. In the sea-otter test, rereading won when people were tested five minutes later. Two days and a week later, self-testing won clearly. Henry Roediger, who ran that test, explains these methods with two colleagues in .
It works at any age. Testing yourself helped adults aged 55 to 65 as much as it helped students aged 18 to 25, both straight away and two days later.
Pen or keyboard matters less than once claimed. The famous finding that handwritten notes beat laptop notes has been hard to repeat. The likelier key is putting ideas in your own words, which copying a lecture word for word skips.
After you read or watch something, close it and write down the main points, then check what you missed.
4. Mix it up
Practising one type of problem at a time feels smooth. Shuffling different types together feels clumsy, and it teaches you which method fits which problem. Students who practised mixed maths problems did worse during practice than those who practised one type at a time, and far better on the test a week later.
It works on the field too. College baseball players who practised against a random mix of fastballs, curveballs and changeups went on to hit better than players who faced one type of pitch at a time.
Practice counts for less than the famous 10,000-hour rule suggests. When the findings on deliberate practice were pooled, it explained about a quarter of the differences in skill at games, a fifth in music and less in sport, but only 4% in education and under 1% in professional work. Spacing, testing and mixing are how you get more from each hour you put in.
When you practise, mix old material in with the new, so you have to work out what each question needs.
5. Welcome the mistakes you were sure about
Being confidently wrong is a gift. When people answered quiz questions and rated how sure they were, the errors they'd made with the most confidence were the ones they were most likely to correct after seeing the right answer. The surprise grabs your attention.
Even a wrong guess helps. People who answered questions about an essay before reading it remembered the answers better afterwards than people given extra reading time, even for the questions they had got wrong.
The line credited to Winston Churchill, "Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm", appears nowhere in anything he wrote or said. The earliest version Quote Investigator could find is anonymous, in a 1953 book on public speaking. Even quotes about mistakes can be mistakes.
Guess before you look up an answer, and notice how sure you were.
6. Guard your attention
Learning needs your attention, and other people's screens take it too. Students who did small online tasks on a laptop during a 45-minute lecture scored 11% lower on a test of what it covered. Students who merely sat where they could see a classmate's busy screen scored 17% lower, and felt barely distracted.
Music with lyrics takes its share too. Students did worse at memory and reading tasks with songs playing than in silence, and they could tell. Instrumental lo-fi neither helped nor hurt.
Put the phone in another room, keep only the tab you're learning from open, sit where other screens are out of sight, and choose silence or music without words. A keeps it out of reach for as long as you set.
7. Follow your curiosity
Curiosity primes the brain to remember. When people were curious about the answer to a trivia question, they remembered that answer better, and they also remembered unrelated faces shown to them while they waited. The brain's reward and memory areas were more active in those curious moments.
Before you start, write down the question you most want answered. Let it pull you through the dull parts.
8. Move, rest and sleep on it
Hard exercise may help before you start. In a small test with 27 people, new words were learned 20% faster straight after intense sprints than after gentle running or rest.
A short rest helps afterwards. People who sat and rested for ten minutes after hearing a story remembered more of it a week later than people who spent those minutes on a spot-the-difference puzzle.
Sleep finishes the job. During deep sleep, the brain replays what you learned in the day and moves it into longer-term storage. Learning and then sleeping protects memories in a way that staying awake does not. Benedict Carey's tells the stories behind spacing, shuffling and sleep.
It can even be nudged. People who learned where matching cards lay with a rose scent in the air, then smelled it again during deep sleep, remembered more the next day. The scent helped only in deep sleep.
After a session, take ten quiet minutes before you reach for your phone. Learn new material in the evening and review it briefly the next morning.
9. Teach it
Expecting to teach changes how you learn. People who studied a passage believing they'd have to teach it to someone else remembered more of it, and more of the main points, than people who studied for a test, even though nobody ended up teaching.
Seneca saw it two thousand years ago: "men learn while they teach."
A cartoon pupil works too. Schoolchildren who taught what they'd learned to a computer character called Betty read for longer and worked harder than children learning for themselves, and they seemed to learn more.
Learn your next topic as if you'll explain it to a friend tomorrow, then explain it.
10. Find someone a few steps ahead
A guide speeds things up. Across mentoring at school, at university and at work, people with a mentor did a little better than people without on almost everything measured, from motivation and health to relationships and careers. The gains were largest at work and in education.
Ask someone a year or two further along in what you're learning for one conversation a month.
Keep learning
"Learn" comes from the Old English leornian, from a root meaning a track or a trail. To learn was once to follow a path someone had worn before you.
The students who closed the book felt less sure of themselves and remembered more. Learning well often feels like that: a little harder, a little odd, and much better a week later. The psychologist Robert Bjork gave this a name in 1994: desirable difficulties, the kinds of effort that slow you down today and pay you back later.
It pays beyond the skill. Among older adults in England followed over several years, those who kept learning reported higher wellbeing, and it was the informal kind that counted: a music or art group, an evening class, a sports club. Formal courses showed no such link. Fittingly, "school" comes from the Greek skholḗ, spare time.
Start with whatever you're learning now. Close the book, and write down what you remember.
Want to know what learning does to your brain? How to Rewire Your Brain and Change Limiting Beliefs — how practice changes the brain, and how much a growth mindset helps.
Struggling to get started? Why Your Brain Sabotages You Every Time You Try to Start — why you put things off, and eight ways to get going.
Know someone still rereading their notes? Send them this, and ask them to explain it back to you.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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