How To Learn Very Faster : Using these 11 proven ways to learn faster

Neuroscience has taught us a lot about how our brains process and store information.

Learning New things are an integral part of life. We should always strive to learn and grow. But it takes time and time is precious. So how do you make the most of your time by accelerating the learning process? Thanks to neuroscience, we now have a better understanding of how we learn and the most effective ways our brains can process and store information.

If you have less time to study and wondering how to learn faster, then here are 11 best way to learn fast that will help you achieve your goals. Read each one very carefully and apply all tips to learn faster. Please do not avoid or ignore any of these.

1. Take notes with pen and paper.

While it may seem that entering your notes on a laptop during a conference or lecture will be more complete, allowing you to learn faster, it doesn’t work that way. To boost the speed of your learning process, take notes the old-fashioned way, with pen/pencil and paper. Research has shown that those who type their lecture notes process and store information at a lower level. Those who take notes by hand learn more

Although taking notes by hand is slower and heavier than typing, writing down information promotes understanding and preservation. Re-framing the information in your own words allows you to keep it longer, which means you will have a better memory and better test scores.

Have good note-taking skills: The better your grades, the faster you’ll learn. Knowing how to take complete and accurate notes will help you remember concepts, gain insight and develop meaningful learning skills. So, before you learn a new topic, make sure you know different note-taking strategies, such as the Cornell Method, which helps you organize your course notes into easy-to-digest summaries.

• Take your notes in your own words.
• Leave spaces and lines between the main ideas so that you can review them later and add information.
• Develop your system of abbreviations and symbols.
• Learn how to extract important information and ignore trivial information.

2. Distribute your study sessions

This method involves the distribution of multiple practices (or study sessions) on a subject over a given period of time. The use of short, spaced study sessions will encourage meaningful learning, as opposed to long “intensive sessions”, which encourage rote learning. The first step is to take in-depth notes during the discussion of the topic. Then take a few minutes to go through your notes and make changes or additions to add detail and ensure accuracy.

Do it quickly, once or twice after each course or period of instruction. Over time, you can begin to spread out the sessions, starting once a day and eventually increasing to three times a week. Spreading out the practice over a longer period of time is very effective because it is easier to do small study sessions and you will stay motivated to continue learning.

One mistake many people make is to overload their brain. You felt bad after eating too much, huh? When you want to put too much stuff in your brain, it’s the same thing.

When you want to do too much all at once, it creates two problems:

• We “close” our brain to learning. Right from the start, we subconsciously prepare ourselves to have to ingest a large amount of information. This will immediately put us in a tenser, less fun state of mind. The areas of our brain responsible for memorization will then function less well.
• We saturate, and our brain becomes like a bucket with a hole in it: no matter how much we fill up on top, it leaks from underneath.

In fact, the best time to learn is when you’re having fun and you’re interested in the subject . By limiting the time you spend learning, you will better memorize things and your learning will be more fun.

What you can do : When you want to learn something new, especially in the beginning, don’t force yourself to spend hours. Half an hour or even an hour maximum is more than enough.

3. Learn information in multiple ways.

When you use multiple ways to learn something, you will use more areas of the brain to store information about it. This makes this information more interconnected and integrated in your brain. This fundamentally creates a redundancy of knowledge in your mind, actually helping you to learn the information and not just memorize it.

You can do this by using different media to stimulate different parts of the brain, such as reading notes or reading a textbook. You can also watch a video and listen to a podcast or audio file on the topic.

If you are learning a skill, don’t do the same thing over and over again. By making small changes over repeated training sessions, you will be able to master a skill faster than doing it the same way each time. This only works if the modifications are small – it will not help to make large changes in the way the skill is performed. So, for example, if you are practicing a new golf swing or perfecting your tennis game, try adjusting the size or weight of your club or racket.

4. Try a mnemonic device.

One of the best ways to quickly memorize a large amount of information is to use a mnemonic device: a set of letters, sounds or other associations that make it easier to learn something. One of the most popular mnemonic is the one we learned when we were kids in kindergarten – the alphabet song. This song helps children remember their “ABCs” and remains deeply embedded in our memory as adults.

Mnemonics help you simplify, summarize and compress information to make learning easier. This can be very useful for medical or law students, or for those studying a new language. So, if you need to memorize and store large amounts of new information, try a mnemonic code and you will remember this information long after your test.

5. Stay hydrated.

This is very important one. We know we should drink water because it’s good for us – it’s good for our skin and immune system, and it allows our body to function optimally. Drinking water is also great for our cognitive abilities. Drinking water can actually make us smarter. According to one study, students who took water with them to an exam room performed better than those who did not.

Dehydration, on the other hand, can seriously affect our mental functioning. When you don’t drink water, your brain has to work harder than usual.

6. Create associations

The brain functions by association. When you remember someone, you remember their character, their job, the way they talk, etc…

For example, remembering the order of the 52 cards in a deck can be extremely difficult. But champions of memorization have a relatively simple technique for doing so. Instead of trying to memorize cards like you memorized a poem in school, they create associations.

You probably remember the layout of the furniture in your home, and the order in which you would see it, if you took a virtual tour of your home in your head? To memorize an entire pack of cards, these memory champions imagine themselves entering their home, and with each card they associate an element of their home, such as a piece of furniture or a decorative object. Thus, when they have to recite the cards in order, they simply go through their house in their head to remember all the cards.

What you can do : When you want to remember something important, mentally associate it with something else. It is one of the easiest way to learn faster. For example, when you are learning from a musical instrument, and you are learning a new song, associate it with someone you know, a good memory, or another song you like. You’ll remember things much more easily.

7. Use flash cards

Flash cards are a fun and very effective way to learn. It’s all about transforming what you have to learn into a quiz, by creating cards with a question on one side and its answer on the other. You turn your learning sessions into a Question for a Champion, so to speak.

What you can do : take a sheet of paper, fold it into 8, cut it out according to the folds, mark what you want to learn on one side, then write the corresponding question on the other. Repeat this process once or twice. Take a break and come back later. Shuffle your cards, and start “playing”.

You can also use Anki, an excellent software to create Flash cards. Moreover, it is free on Mac/Windows/Linux. It will allow you to avoid cutting sessions. Icing on the cake, it is even available on Android and iOS (but not free). You’ll be able to learn wherever you go!

8. Practice of a sport activity

Several scientific studies have been conducted on this subject, at various times and places around the world. All of them have demonstrated a link between the practice of a sport activity and the learning capacity of human beings.

All these studies have more or less taken the following test: ask two groups to memorize a series of words or numbers and then recite them the next day.

In the study, one of the two groups was also given a sports activity shortly after the learning phase. The result was indisputable: the group that did sport between the learning and the restitution phase had much better results than those who did nothing .

The reason for this result is not yet fully understood. But roughly speaking, doing sports will challenge your brain in a way that will help it consolidate what you have learned shortly before.

What you can do : Instead of stuffing your head, go stretch your legs and do some sports after you learn something new.

9. Sleep

Ah, that’s advice that makes you happy, isn’t it? 🙂

Very seriously, even more studies than for sports have confirmed that sleep plays a key role in memorization and learning.

Sleep consolidates what you learned while you were awake.

When you are awake, your brain is in constant activity. Even if you don’t realize it, you are bombarded with thoughts, information and signals, which your brain has to process along with what you are trying to learn.

However, during sleep, your brain has a free field to solidify your knowledge without being disturbed by all the external stimuli.

It’s a bit like the muscles: your muscles regained and grow after the workout, at rest, not while you’re working out. The brain works the same way.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s part of the reason why babies and children learn so quickly: they sleep for a long time.

What you can do : After you’ve learned something, take a nap. Better yet, do some sports and then go to sleep.

Or make sure you learn things not long before you go to bed. While you’re sleeping, your brain will “better print” all the new things you’ve learned during the day. You’ll find that the next day (or even after a nap), you’ll remember what you’ve learned better.

10. Use a dedicated mobile application

“Smartphones are making us dumb”.

“Look at them, glued to their smartphones.

Lately, smartphones are sometimes seen as a counterproductive technology. Yet, they can be very useful for other things than sending pictures. One of those things is learning.

Smartphones allow the installation and use of an incredible number of applications. And among these applications, there are some that allow you to learn all sorts of things: how to play chess, a new language and even a new profession.

What you can do : Use your smartphone productively.

11. Teach someone

Known as the Feynman method (a renowned physicist to whom this technique is attributed), this method allows you to better understand and consolidate the things you have recently learned.

For example, if you’ve just learned how to play chess, by explaining the rules to someone else, you’ll remember them much better than if you just reread the rules once in a while.

This is true for everything: a student who has just learned new concepts will be able to understand and integrate them much more easily and quickly by giving a short lecture to another student. Re-explaining the things we have just learned reinforces their learning by our brain.

What you can do : When you learn something new, explain it to a friend or family member to learn faster and better.

Conclusion

Now you’ll know that when it comes to learning something new, you can be much more effective. Instead of being passive, learn actively by applying the above techniques and learn very fast. Initially, start by testing one at a time. Then, when you see the positive effects and master a technique, use more than one at a time for maximum effect.