Here's a situation...

I watch a video.

Its creator synthesizes all kinds of ideas

and comes to an interesting conclusion.

I think, “Wow! I know all about that now.”

Then, a few hours later,

I can sort of recall its main points,

but if someone asked me

to explain it in depth,

I'd fumble for words.

This happens to me all the time.

It happens when I finish chapters of books,

episodes of television,

movies, podcasts, articles... you name it.

The story I tell myself is

that upon completing

any reading, watching or listening,

I feel like I know what it's all about

but the truth is I don't.

I just felt like I knew something

without actually knowing it.

I tricked myself into thinking

I was competent.

In her course Learning How to Learn,

UC San Diego professor Barbara Oakley

points out

many of these illusions of competence:

One: Seeing information in front of you

such as reading a book

doesn't mean you know it.

Two: Seeing or hearing someone come

to a conclusion doesn't mean you know

how to get to that conclusion

or explain their argument.

Three: Searching for something

on Google gives you the illusion
that the information is in your brain.

And four: Spending lots of time

with material doesn't mean you know it.

Philosopher Mortimer Adler once said,

“The person who says he knows what he thinks

but cannot express it

usually does not know what he thinks.”

This is the fundamental difference

between feeling informed

and truly understanding something.

I am as informed as ever.

I can more or less parrot opinions I read,

cite random facts,

but when tasked with explaining

what something is all about,

why it is the case,

what its connections are

with other facts and theories,

and putting it in context,

I fall flat on my face.

What an... idiot!

Oh... What a loser!

It's dangerous when I let these illusions

of competence slip into my opinions.

I so often feel strongly about a position,

but if pressed, I could hardly argue for it.

So much of media now is designed

to make understanding things

for ourselves obsolete.

The packaging of intellectual positions

and views is a booming business.

Viewers and listeners get hit

with persuasive audiovisuals,

professional rhetoric,
and carefully selected data.

It all amounts to a nice little package

for the viewer to make up their own mind
with little difficulty,

except the packaging is

often done so effectively

that the viewer, listener,

or reader doesn't make up

their own mind at all.

Instead, people become no better

than a human Spotify playlist

that spits out

other people's neatly wrapped opinions

without actually understanding any of it.

To continue with Adler,

“To regard anyone except yourself

as responsible for your judgment is

to be a slave, not a free man.”

It is from this fact

that the liberal arts acquire their name.

Not being able to explain my position

or parroting someone else's means

I'm never thinking for myself.

Now, you, me, anyone is

entitled to their opinion

no matter what it is.

That's the hallmark of democracy,

but I know that my life would be fuller

if I actually understood everything

my emotional brain
so adamantly believes I do.

Charlie Munger,
the longtime business partner

of legendary investor Warren Buffett, is

famously disciplined
when it comes to this idea.

“I never allow myself to have

an opinion on anything

that I don't know

the other side's argument
better than they do.”

So, like any conclusion

on getting better at something,

there's a lot of work involved.

I have to do a lot of active reading,

listen to as many arguments as I can,

argue with people smarter than me,

fight against my own emotional bias,

think about as many variables as possible.

It's not the easiest thing to do!

And there's also my problem

at the beginning of the video.

How am I supposed to form an opinion

or understand something

when I keep forgetting

all the information I digest.

One of the many reasons

why people have trouble explaining

videos or books or articles

is because they simply don't remember

what was said.

It's worth then to understand

how the memory works.

There's two main parts:

short-term and long-term.

In recent years, we've discovered

that long-term memory is

the seat of understanding.

It stores not just facts

but complex concepts or schemas.

“By organizing scattered bits of information

into patterns of knowledge,”

writes Nicholas Carr,

“schemas give depth and richness

to our thinking...
Understanding and intelligence is
derived largely

from the schemas we have acquired

over long periods of time.”

Think of the long-term memory

like an investment portfolio.

As you gather more and more schemas,

you gain intellectual compound interest

over time.

They all begin to connect to each other,

increasing your understanding

of the world exponentially over time,

but... and here's the key...

for information, to get

to your long-term memory in the first place,

it has to go through a part

of the short-term memory

called working memory.

Working memory has about two to four slots

where we process information.

It acts as a bottleneck
for the infinite amount

of information around us.

The problem is
what we hold there can quickly vanish

if we don't keep thinking

about them or rehearse them in our heads.

In other words,
if we don't grapple with the ideas

in our working memory

for an extended period of time,

they never get sent to the long-term memory.

They just disappear.

Our current culture makes this process

challenging.

We're blasted with new stimuli

and information at the rate of a firehose.
This couldn't be worse for our memories.

Once we surpass these two to four slots

in our working memory,

once we overload with information,

we begin to get distracted.

Our ability to process

and retain information begins to plummet.

This is in part why I feel,

like, I know so much,

but understand so little,

why I can scroll down my Twitter feed

and barely remember any of it.

Info jumps in to my working memory

only to be replaced

by the next thing and the next thing.

Very little of it, if any, makes it

into my long-term memory.

As Nicholas Carr writes,

“As we reach the limits

of our working memory,

it becomes harder
to distinguish relevant information

from irrelevant information,

signal from noise.

We become mindless consumers of data.”

But it's not just information overload

that affects our ability to remember things,

multitasking is just as bad.

Our brains are designed

to focus on one thing at a time.

When we multitask,

all we're really doing is

quickly switching from one task to another

and our brain struggles to commit anything

to long-term memory when we're constantly

task switching, tab shifting,

and notification checking.
Every switch is like hitting
the reset button.

It gives no time for deeper processing.

So, what's the fix.

The first is to eliminate

multitasking, distractions,

and information streams

that cause overload.

Easier said than done.

I know.

We're all well aware at this point

that these services exploit our psychology

and it's hard to resist

the addicting dopamine surge

that comes from checking them.

But, once you have

that one source of information,

a book for example,

and it's the only thing

you're paying attention to,

how do you remember that?

How do you get the books arguments

into your long-term memory

to the point where you could explain

them back to someone.

There are a lot of methods that help commit

things to long-term memory

and I'm going to go through

the three big ones:

recall,
the Feynman Technique,

and spaced repetition.

Recall.

After you've read or watched

any material,

simply look away and see

what you can recall
from the material
you've just taken in.

In one experiment,

students who studied a text

and then practiced it

by recalling as much information

as they could

and repeated that process

learn far more than their peers

who either went on to something else

or reread the text over and over again.

Practicing recall is counterintuitive

to most consumers of content.

You finish a chapter

and you go to the next one

or you finish a video and move on

to something else,

but spending as little as 30 seconds

after finishing a chapter or video

and recalling its key points vastly improves

your understanding of a topic

and commitment of it
to long-term memory.

Then, there's the Feynman technique.

World-renowned physicist and teacher

Richard Feynman codified

this method of learning.

It's probably the best

if you want to understand something

but it's also the most work-intensive.

One: Take something you wanna understand.

Two: Write out an explanation

as if you were teaching it to someone

who didn't understand the subject.

Three: Whenever you get stuck,

go back to the material and relearn.

Eventually, you'll fill in the gaps

in your knowledge
until you can write an explanation
without needing the source material.

Four: Finally, attempt to simplify

your explanation,

getting rid of technical terms

and convoluted language.

Simplify it to the point

that a kid could get what you're saying.

To do this, Feynman recommended

the use of analogies.

Analogies connect complex ideas

to something more relatable,

making it easier to understand.

I used two earlier.

Understanding and intelligence is like

an investment portfolio;

it gains compound interest

as complex schemas connect with each other,

and the other, working memory acts like

a bottleneck to long-term memory.

And finally, there's spaced repetition.

LeBron James has undoubtedly put in

tens of thousands of hours

shooting hoops over many years.

The Beatles practiced music for years

before they became masters of the craft.

Why don't we do that

with information and arguments?

There are a lot of reasons,

but one of the big ones is

that people assume the brain is a computer.

Once you get the information,

it's there forever,

but the brain functions

much more like a muscle

and like any muscle,

it needs to be exercised;
its neural connection strengthened.

There's the famous saying:

“Neurons that fire together wire together.”

In other words, the more often you use

the neurons grappling with

the information you want

to commit to memory,

the stronger those connections will get

and the stronger your memory

and understanding
of that information will get.

Spaced repetition does this by firing

the neurons over a long period of time.

If you read, recall,

or do the Feynman technique

on the key concepts

from say... Kant's Philosophy

and spaced them out by three days

over the course of a couple weeks,

it results
in the highest amount of memory retention.

Much better than

if you were to do it all at once.

You may be thinking,

“Read the same thing again?

Recall the same thing again?

Do the Feynman technique again?

Over a long period of time?”

Unfortunately, that's the reality

if you wanna understand something long-term.

We are strapped for time

most days of our lives.

Doing all this work outside of our jobs

or other responsibilities
of daily life sounds like an awful task,

so we turn to others to do it for us.

It makes plenty of sense.

And I'll also add

that life isn't the book report.

You don't need

to be memorizing and understanding

everything that comes your way.

That's absurd.

What I wish I did more often, however,

is spend more time thinking

about one important thing at a time

instead of trying to absorb

as much information as possible

only to forget most of it.

As Charlie Munger has said,

“Our job is to find a few intelligent things

to do,

not keep up
with every damn thing in the world.”

It's a call to increase

the quality of the information you receive

rather than the quantity

and to spend more time with it.

Union College Psychologist

and Nobel Prize winner

Christopher Chabris says,

“The internet plays to our natural tendency

to vastly overvalue
what happens to us right now.”

Our bias towards novelty is strong

and forces us towards the trivial

rather than the essential.

No matter what amount of work anyone does

people will continue to hold

different opinions

and that's when intellectual humility

becomes important.

To recognize the limits of your knowledge

and to appreciate others’

intellectual strengths is

one of the best things a person can do.

It's not only where learning happens

but it's also where disagreements become

more constructive.

I think Kal Turnbull,

founder of the Change My View Subreddit

sums it up well.

“It seems to be in our nature

to focus on how we were wrong

over the fact that we're now smarter

as if we can't be works in progress

and we often attach our egos

to what we believe.

A view is just how you see something.

It doesn't have to define you

and trying to detach from it

to gain understanding

can be a very good thing.”

“Real knowledge,” as Confucius once said,

“is to know the extent of one's ignorance.”

The trick is not to be fooled

by illusions of superiority

and to learn to accurately reevaluate

our competence each day

because in Adler's words,

“True freedom is impossible

without a mind made free by discipline.”

What's on trial is not just

the weight of our opinions

but our entire understanding of the world.

This video has been brought to you

by Audible

and if you're as interested as I am

in how our brains interface

with the internet,

how prone we are to know

a large breadth of information

but understand very little of it,

then I highly recommend

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

He goes into philosophy,

neuroscience history, and media theory.

Mm! I love this book.

Go to audible.com/will
or if you live in the U.S.,

text “will” to 500-500

for a free 30-day trial.

Your first audio book is free.

I've had Audible for two years

and it's been my companion

on countless road trips

and runs and days when I just do this.

You get a free audiobook every month,

which, in my opinion,
makes the subscription worth it on its own

as well as 30% off

all regularly priced audiobooks.

I encourage you to join me

by going to audible.com/will,

or if you live in the U.S.,

text “will” to 500-500.

Happy listening, everyone.

I'll see you in the comments.