Learn Anything So Fast It’s Almost Unfair

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you love this podcast and you wanna get some mindset tips and tricks delivered directly to your cell phone and you live in the United States or Canada, text me right now, 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, I'm gonna teach you how to learn anything so fast that it almost feels unfair from what you've been doing in the past. Because what if the reason why you struggle to learn isn't lack of time or intelligence or focus, but the way that you've actually been taught to learn?

0:49Because here's the truth. Most people are stuck in outdated school methods and ignore how the brain actually wires knowledge neurologically inside of your head. And then meanwhile, there's people like elite performers and memory champions and special ops units that are using psychological and neurological tricks that make learning faster and deeper and nearly permanent in your brain. And the best part about all of that is that you can use them too. So this isn't about just like reading faster or cramming harder. Really what it's about is about understanding your brain and understanding how to flip a switch in your brain that makes learning your superpower instead of your downfall.

1:32And so let's dive into it. The first thing that you need to really understand is that you have to actually dismantle the thought that learning is just about input. Like when I was in school, I thought it's like reading and watching and listening and writing it down and being like, okay, I've got to memorize this. And so there's a difference between memorizing something and mastering something. Usually when you memorize something for like a test, it's gone right after the test. I'm talking about how do you get something so encoded into your brain that you remember it years from now. And so real learning is knowing how your brain learns and holds information in it and then how to do it in a way that makes learning sticky.

2:14And so the first thing that we really need to dive into is to understand that your brain learns what you believe it's supposed to learn, which sounds weird, but there was a study done at Stanford in 2007 that showed that the beliefs about intelligence change how people's brains light up during mistakes. And so people who had a growth mindset, which are people that believe they can improve, like they're like, I know I can improve. I know I can get better. Had what's called longer neural engagement after errors, which means they literally stayed more present longer through discomfort, which made their learning even deeper versus people who have what's called a fixed mindset, which is like, oh, I can't really get better.

3:00This is just how I am. I'm going to try to force this information into my brain. Those people actually disconnected after mistakes, which means that they disengaged instead of staying engaged like the people who have growth mindsets. And so you have to understand that making mistakes actually triggers a neurochemical cocktail of acetylcholine and norepinephrine. And those heighten your focus, they heighten your engagement, and they heighten your neuroplasticity, which is the actual changing and rewiring of your brain. And so making mistakes actually makes your brain more ready to learn. And so if you think about this in layman's terms, when you mess up, your brain focuses more.

3:41And most people who have a fixed mindset shut down. You need to go, okay, hold on. My brain is about to get focused, so I don't need to shut down. I need to push forward a little bit more. If you stay focused and keep pushing through after you mess up after some sort of mistake, instead of shutting down, you can actually learn faster and more deeply than if you had actually gotten it right the first time you did this. And so instead of thinking to yourself like, oh, I'm bad at languages. I'm not really a great learner. You need to actually believe like, I know I'm going to learn this language.

4:17And if, if I get pissed off because I'm making mistakes, my frustration means that my brain is more engaged. I need to push through. And now your brain goes, ah, mistakes are a good thing. Let's keep going. So that's the first thing you need to understand. The second thing that you need to understand is that you can use what's called state dependent learning so that you can actually prime your brain to learn like they do in special operations. You don't learn very well when you're bored and you're just like sitting on the couch and you're like, okay, I'm going to take out my textbook and try to learn.

4:50You learn when you're actually alive. Like, and what I mean by that is like, you're in a prime state. And so what you want to do before you go into a learning session, whether that be, I'm going to read a book, whether that be, I'm going to journal, or whether that be you're in college and you want to make sure that you retain as much information as possible. What you want to make sure that you do is you want to make sure that you prime your body in your brain to encode this knowledge faster. And so what you want to do is activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, just a little bit.

5:21You raise your energy and then you drop down into your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the calm. And so there's a real quick priming protocol you can go through. First thing is you want to do one to two minutes. You could do more if you'd like, but if you're just trying to shorten it, you can go with this one. One to two minutes of intense movement. That could be like burpees or air squats or running up and down the stairs, intense movement, not like, oh, I'm just going to sit here and, you know, do a squat or something like, it's like, no, I need to get my heart rate up. So you go to intense movement and then you get about three minutes of deep breathing.

5:55You want to get it really, really heightened and then slow everything down. And then you want to speak out loud to yourself so that you say it, but you also hear it. Today I'm smart and I retain everything I learn. whatever your affirmation for learning is. Today I'm smart and I'm going to retain everything I learned. Today I am smart and I retain everything that I learned. Say it out loud to yourself 10, 15, 20 times. Then sit down, start learning whatever it is. What you've done is you've set up another neurological cocktail of learning. And what that means, you get a surge of dopamine, you get norepinephrine, and you get acetylcholine, which is the holy trinity of focus, motivation, and memory.

6:36And so this mix kind of puts your brain into a high alert, high reward state, making it easier to absorb and then lock in new information faster. So that's the next thing that you want to do. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. Next thing that you want to do after this is you want to actually start to encode whatever it is that you learned as fast as possible. And how you do this is you teach it immediately. Not next week, not tomorrow, right after you learn it. So as soon as you learn something, whether that's I just went through an hour session or two hour session, whatever it might be, you're going to teach it.

7:17And there's a reason why, because teaching forces your brain to retrieve the information, to organize it, and then to translate your knowledge into your own words, which creates multiple neuropathways around the concept. And so this is actually called the retrieval effect. and it encodes the knowledge into your brain faster. You don't, now I prefer to teach it to somebody else. So my wife tends to be the person who just learns all this stuff. I'm like, oh my God, I should learn this thing. I have to teach it to you. And then I go and I try to teach it to her. And if she looks confused, I'm going, I don't know it very well.

7:52But if she goes, oh, wow, that's awesome. I really get it. I'm like, okay, I think I understand it now. If I can teach it and I can teach it simply, then I really understand something. And if you don't have somebody to teach it to, like sometimes my wife isn't here or sometimes she's taking a nap or something, you don't need an audience. Like talk to your couch, talk to your cat, talk to the wall, just speak out loud. There's sometimes where I'll just learn something. I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then I'll take out my notepad and I'll start talking out loud to myself as if I'm teaching it on a whiteboard to a group of people.

8:26This simple act of doing this solidifies your memory. and then what's really good about it is it also will expose the gaps in your understanding because when you're trying to teach something and then it doesn't fully connect, you're going, oh, hold on. Yeah, I don't fully understand this part right here. Maybe I should learn a little bit more about this. And so it exposes the gaps in your knowledge and your understanding. And so when you teach something right after you learn it, what you're doing is you're stacking active recall. There's another thing that's called self-generated elaboration and another thing which is called contextual encoding.

9:03And so you're stacking those three things and those are three of the most powerful memory enhancers that are known in neuroscience. So it's active recall, self-generated elaboration, and contextual encoding. And so talk to yourself. It's not weird. It's a brilliant thing that you can do to actually start to get something encoded into your brain faster. The next thing is I want you to forget the idea of cramming. Like when I was in college, I would just cram and cram and cram. And then I would take a test. And then a week later, I feel like I had none of that stuff in my brain. What you want to actually do is use something that's called the spacing effect and then use your sleep.

9:42And so I'll explain what that means. Okay. There was a study that was done at UC San Diego in 2012 that showed that spaced repetition not only increases your retention, but it actually alters the physical structure of your hippocampus, which means that you're literally rewiring your brain when you use space repetition. And so you don't learn while you're studying, you actually learn deeper when you're sleeping. And so like you learn it and then you like fully encode it and really get locked into your brain when you sleep. So if you're trying to learn something really well, you need to get a lot of sleep.

10:18So if you're trying to memorize something, this is what you would basically do, right? So what you're going to do is day one, you're going to learn something for 30, 45 minutes with 100 % focus, like take your phone, put it in another room, whatever it is you're trying to learn, nothing else in this world can exist. You've got to try to bring 100 % of your focus to this thing. Then what you want to do after your 30 or 45 minute session is then teach it to yourself or teach it to somebody else. Now, if you're done and that's all you needed to learn, cool, you'll go on to the next thing. If you're not done, then you'll need to do another round.

10:5430 minutes, 45 minutes, 100 % focus, teach it to yourself. 30, 45 minutes, 100 % focus, teach it to yourself. So that's day one. Then you're gonna wanna get a really good night of sleep because that's when your brain actually starts to hardwire it into your brain. Day two, what you wanna do is review briefly in the morning. So 10 to 15 minutes, read through everything that you read, write everything that you wrote down, talk out loud to yourself, take 10 or 15 minutes. That's day two in the morning. Day two in the afternoon, you want to try to quiz yourself cold. And so how could you do that? Well, you could take everything that you learned, you could copy and paste it, throw it into chat GPT and say, come up with 20 questions and quiz me on this information and see how you do.

11:43And then day three, you want to then go out and teach it to somebody else. And so when you do this, what's called your synaptic consolidation goes from really shallow roots to like deep roots, like it's deeply anchored into your brain. You're repeatedly wiring this knowledge into your brain. A bonus tip on this is after you learn, take a 10 minute, 20 minute nap or do a quick meditation right after learning. The hippocampus starts consolidating new memories in that nap window, but it also consolidates memories during meditation when you're doing nothing else with your eyes closed. And so this is like the ultimate cheat code.

12:23This is one thing that I wish I would have known when I was in college. Like learn for 30, 45 minutes, take a 10 minute meditation. Learn for 45 minutes, take a 10 minute meditation. And you're actually in this meditation time. Your brain, your hippocampus is consolidating all these new memories. And then if you want to take a nap, a nap is even better than the meditation. Okay. Next thing that you want to do and how you can actually get it encoded into your brain faster is to trick your brain with word hooks. And this is basically like, like mental glue, like raw repetition, which is what I always thought that I was supposed to do.

12:59It's so exhausting and it's so inefficient. And so if you're out there and you're like, well, my memory's not that good. You don't need a better memory. You need like mental glue. And what it is, I've been using these for years and like it's really, really helped me memorize stuff is what's called mnemonic associations. So this is where you link something new with something that you already know that's familiar, usually through visual similarity or sound or emotional charge. Your brain loves patterns and it loves shortcuts and it loves things that are novel and weird. So just try to give it something.

13:35I'll give you an example for me. When I was going through my pilot exam to get my pilot license, I could not get in my brain the difference between latitude and longitude. I was like, my entire life, I've like, which one's which? Latitude, longitude? Like, I don't know what is what. And then I looked at it and I was like, latitude goes from left to right. And it kind of looks like a ladder going up the earth. And so I was like, wait, latitude, ladder. Okay. I'll never forget that. And it like locked it into my brain. Now, if you're listening to this, you'll probably never forget which lines run east and west.

14:13Yeah. Latitude. Cause it's like a ladder. And so you want to do stuff like that. You know, if you're trying to remember like that, the hippocampus is responsible for memory, visualize a hippo sitting on campus, reading flashcards or reading a book. right like that's how you remember the hippocampus is responsible for memory a hippo on campus reading a book is it absurd yeah it's completely absurd is it effective extremely effective and so this is the reason why it works hooks for new info to known pathways make the retrieval of that information easier. So the key to it is this, the more bizarre or ridiculous or vivid the images that you create in your mind, the more your brain will flag it as important.

15:05Your brain loves novel stuff. So I've said this in an episode before, but let me just give you a quick example. The reason why if you go on vacation for a week, time feels like it's way slower than if you're a week at home and you're going through a normal routine is because the week vacation, you're doing things you've never done before, places you've never been before, and it's novel. So your brain actually seems like it slows down time because it's actually processing that information in real time. When you're doing something in a routine that you've done over and over and over again, it's just normal.

15:40Your brain doesn't even like to store it. And so your brain loves novel. How can you give it the most bizarre, ridiculous, novel image so that your brain remembers that thing? And so what you're doing is you're stacking semantic encoding, which is meaning, with visual imagery, which is just basically like a double win for your memory. And so when you're learning something hard, don't just try to memorize it. Try to associate it with something else. Turn the abstract into something silly or familiar or visual, the weirder the better, because the brain loves, like, it doesn't love boring, it loves weird.

16:20And so make it meaningful, make it strange, try to make it visual or try to make the words match up like latitude or ladder, whatever it might be. So I want you to understand your memory is not bad. It just might be that you haven't been taught to really learn based off of how your brain holds information. And so these are the strategies that you want to use every single day, which makes learning faster and almost unfair compared to the way they used to do it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr.

16:53R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of this podcast, go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.