@@tufailahmed7596 There're several sources. I'm thinking about which concepts are standing out. Which are the ones that are mentioned again and again, which ones are specifically emphasised? Or maybe the concpet is not specifically emphasised here, but I recognise that other texts also talk about it and so I want to make note of it. Or alternatively, I'm trying to think about words that seem to summarise what is being said. If you hear "COVID-19, economy, lockdown, downturn" you probably can reconstruct what I'm talking about. So, I look out for these words (they don't necessarily need to be mentioned in the text itself, as long as I think they help me with the reconstruction).
Your videos are excellent and valuable. I will go back and look at all of them. They are like nothing that I've seen on TH-cam, so you have really made my day.
Hello Mr Martin, I thank you for this thought provoking video that you have created. I surf loads of videos on TH-cam which are about learning and note taking but your video is a novelty for me. I wish you all the best in your future endeavours. Cheers 🙏
Found really helpful content in your channel.. this new approach appears to be working way better than the conventional methods to understand the core concepts of a topic/subject.. Thank you!!
Yes, once you start using these methods you'll soon find that you're drawn to one method or another. That's partially due to your personality and partially the field you're working in. It does make sense to occasionally revisit some of the methods you're not using very frequently, though. As you grow and your knowledge / skills change you might find that some of these now provide more benefit than before.
I've just stumbled upon your channel, I'm in my mid-semester break while studying psychology, and I'm planning to understand your method and implement it into the rest of my semester.
I have a large knowledge web that I can access, but apart from that I'm not smarter than most other people. And playing with knowledge can be very fun and entertaining.
Thank you so much for sharing, i´m just getting close to this world and find very useful to now about your techniques! They are so nice, and a reminder to keep the pad to constructing playful! :)
Memorization and repetition are not always bad. For instance, if you learn how to drive a car, being able to embed those actions in your muscle memory frees up your mind to focus your attention on other things and on your present environment. Of course, this is assuming the driver is even trying to be present in the moment, that's not always the case.
You make several important points. Careful when you use "memorisation", though. People use "memorisation" with slightly different meaning in different context. It can just mean "integrating into your memory" And in that case it's not only not bad, but it's absolutely essential to anything we're doing. Often it is used to mean rote memorisation. And yes, occasionally that can also be useful. But even for something like learning a poem you should not rely on rote memorisation alone (if you do, you get souless recitals). I would again say that "repetition" is not only not bad, but absolutely essential. But it depends on how you do the repetitions. Repetitions reduce cognitive load, that's correct, but mindless repetitions are no good. Mindless repetitions lead to you only being able to perceive one way of doing things, to not noticing when the situation change , or not being able to change your behaviour when you ought to (some accidents happen because of this). Mindful repetition on the other hand opens up new possibilities, because you can use the capacity you freed up to intentionally modulate the way you're doing things (like a violin virtuoso who can put a lot of emotion into how they play a melody). What count's as a repetition? Since you opened with memorisation, let's stick with knowledge for now, because skills are processed slightly differently by our brain. - You can take a statement and just repeat that statement from memory (that's, I think, how most students try to "get information into their head"). - You can have a statement and delete certain keywords which you then need to remember (this what you and some others are doing with spaced repetition). That's a much more intelligent way to do repetitions! - When you summarise what you're reading to a friend (or to yourself, e.g. as a Feynman summary), that's also a repetition. - Taking a concept and speaking out or writing down anything and everything that comes to your mind (e.g. in the form of an ABC list, CaWa, journaling etc) is yet another way of repeating (a much more open ended way of repeating). - You can also take the opposite route: take a list of words that belong to a concepts and try to remember which one (at first you might choose words that are to general and could fit several concepts, so this is also a great exercise to find out what's essential to the concept). - A more subtle way of repeating is when you take a list of concepts and you categorise them or rank them. I say subtle, because most people would probably not think of this as repetition. But in order to decide whether a concept belongs into one group or another or is higher or lower in the hierarchy than another one, you need to take the characteristics of one concept and compare them to those of another one. And to do that, you need to retrieve these characteristics from memory. There are more ways, but already on this small list some types of repetion are more mindful than others. Just repeating a statement, is easily the most mindless of the lot. Using sentences or paragraphs with gaps, is much better already as your mind can try several possibilities and see which one fits best. Same goes for reconstructing concepts from word lists, but here you can learn a bit more in the process. Summarising gives you the opportunity to put emphasis on certain aspects which requires an additional judgement component. And you can make connections to other texts if you summarise multiple texts. Using associations for repetion gives you the opportunities to see connections to other parts of your knowledge, but what comes up at any one time might not be very relevant. Categorisation and ranking force you to make connections to other concepts you might have not seen before, but can take some time to complete (if you construct them over several sittings you get extra repetions "for free"). From summaries, categorisations and rankings it's also very easy to transition into some forms of research - literature research, for instance, or market research. In fact some break throughs in science, like the period table of the elements or Linée's taxonomy, are only novel ways of categorising old information. So, yes... repetition is certainly important, if done right. I'm afraid that many people limit themselves to only reconstruct what they've read or heard in a lecture. But if you see repeption as a repeated active thinking process, you'll not only be able to repeat that information, but you will gain so much more out of the repetitions.
A CaWa looks somewhat similar to a mindmap (but works differently). You take a central word and then either try to either find associations for this word using only the letters available. Or you try to fit some words which you already know are important for the concept and connect them to the word using again the letter available (that's what I'm doing here). You can find an introduction here: th-cam.com/video/MVi44-FHAIQ/w-d-xo.html
What is your opinion on Anti-Essentialism? I don´t understand why empirical quantitative psychology is strictly anti-essentialist but then when it comes to making a literature review all of the sudden there are essences of texts. Please correct if I am wrong here or a piece is missing and I just construct a seeming paradox/inconsistency.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with essentialism and anti-essentialism in psychology (while I'm doing my PhD in Neuroscience, I started out as an engineer, not as a psychologist). So, I can't really say anything about that. The only idea that springs to mind is that maybe the word essence is defined differently in the two different contexts (for of like stress means something different in engineering and psychology). Could that be a solution?
Could you further explain how you go about positioning those key words with the (-)next to them? And also what should we do with the remaining words from the ABC Active that we don’t incorporate into the Cawa. Thanks
Is (-) referring to the bullet points like "-Space", "-Time" etc? In that case I tried to capture several key words under an more general term. E.g. space, time, time, confidence and joy are the five factors that, acc. to Cleese, can help us to get into open mode thinking. Open mode thinking, closed mode thinking and evaluation are three thinking styles he mentions that need to be interleaved (or interwoven, if you like) to yield the most creative results. And so on. I could have also connected them directly to CREATIVITY instead. But at the time when I created the CaWa, it felt better to group them together. Actually, if I were to construct the CaWa several times at different days, I might sometimes decide one way and sometimes another (and the grouping might also vary). The important part is that you need to think about how you want to do it today. And by doing that, you have to think actively about what you heard. Which is the whole point of the exercise. I only incorporated the words into my CaWa which I thought were most essential. So that the CaWa acts as a knowledge repository of sorts that allows me to quickly see the main points of the talk. In addition, I could create more CaWas that focus on specific aspects of the talk (rather than the talk as a whole). Each of them could include some of the words I didn't use. Or I could explore any or all words further by writing a "normal" ABC or CaWa with one of these words as the topic (I like to call them ABC/CaWa-inventory, because you make an inventory of what you're thinking about a specific topic at the moment). But it's just as possible to categories the words, rank them, try to construct CaGas for each of them and so on. The deeper you want to think about a given text, the more tools you can use (and you can also use the same tools repeatedly).
@@bf-thinking I am super appreciative of your reply! So it sounds like the primary words are the most important thing, and you want to connect them both directly to the big word in the middle, and when necessary group them together in a coherent fashion in order to communicate back what you just heard or read. And from what you shared it sounds like the best way to practice recalling the information is to re-draw the CaWa several times. I imagine after about 3 months of committing to working with techniques, as I’m communicating with others I’ll likely form the habit of seeing these CaWas in my mind lol? That’s really the main reason I’m doing this, to speak more intelligently with others about all areas on the subject of business.
@Ray Hylton Jr. Yes, I think we're on the same page. Just a small thing. When you "re-draw" your CaWas make sure to really, actively create a new CaWa. Don't just copy the old one. Active "recreation" is probably what you meant by "redraw", I just want to make sure. We're so used to mindless cramming from school that it's easy to fall back into that habit. But to be more intelligent, we need to think actively. Using these techniques can certainly make you more intelligent. If you read more or listen more to talks, podcasts, experts in the field where you want to become more intelligent and then use these techniques to actively work through the input, you'll be able to understand other people better and to think quicker of more appropriate answers. How long it will take depends on your personal circumstances, but if you use the techniques frequently, you'll be able to see the first results within 3 months. Good luck with that!
@@bf-thinking Wow yes... that advice about the mindless cramming habit from school vs. thinking actively is spot on. Huge thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about this. Always look forward to your content!
It's extremely hard to find any sources how this programme is actually implemented (and since it's been around since 1948, the way it's been handled has probably changed over the decades). If you have source, it would be great if you could share it. But even if it's overwork, the fact remains that it's still paid work time and that the ideas that come out of it are valued by the management. And there're few companies who that do that.
@@bf-thinking It may be difficult to find specifics because I think it was more a philosophy than a specific program. I was in 3M Engineering and IT mid-management for 15 years. Some research lab managers may have encouraged the 10% rule, while other creative researchers gave themselves permission to spend time on special projects because of it. 3M benefited from serendiptious discoveries (Scotchguard) and special personal projects (Post-Its).
Have already used brain-friendly tools when reading or listening to talks? How did it go?
Sir ,how to slect words to make ABC list ?
@@tufailahmed7596 There're several sources. I'm thinking about which concepts are standing out. Which are the ones that are mentioned again and again, which ones are specifically emphasised? Or maybe the concpet is not specifically emphasised here, but I recognise that other texts also talk about it and so I want to make note of it.
Or alternatively, I'm trying to think about words that seem to summarise what is being said. If you hear "COVID-19, economy, lockdown, downturn" you probably can reconstruct what I'm talking about. So, I look out for these words (they don't necessarily need to be mentioned in the text itself, as long as I think they help me with the reconstruction).
Your videos are excellent and valuable. I will go back and look at all of them. They are like nothing that I've seen on TH-cam, so you have really made my day.
Wow, thanks! It's really great that you find them useful.
Vielen Dank! Sie stellen alles strukturiert und ansprechend dar, es hat mir echt geholfen!
You should consider making a video about using this technique to study non-fiction books :)
Yes, that's a good idea! Thanks.
@@bf-thinking could need this now haha
@@derfotografiertmisch have a look here: th-cam.com/video/cwxRqmTpffY/w-d-xo.html
Very interesting!
I just watched the first two minutes of the video and I can't stop thinking about that Rosalia's song about the alphabet.
Hello Mr Martin, I thank you for this thought provoking video that you have created. I surf loads of videos on TH-cam which are about learning and note taking but your video is a novelty for me. I wish you all the best in your future endeavours. Cheers 🙏
Glad it was helpful!
Found really helpful content in your channel.. this new approach appears to be working way better than the conventional methods to understand the core concepts of a topic/subject.. Thank you!!
Great that you like it! Let me know how it's going.
This a nice method. I guess you come to realize the way you work when you get to work. That’s ultimately when one realizes ‘their’ method.
Yes, once you start using these methods you'll soon find that you're drawn to one method or another. That's partially due to your personality and partially the field you're working in.
It does make sense to occasionally revisit some of the methods you're not using very frequently, though. As you grow and your knowledge / skills change you might find that some of these now provide more benefit than before.
I've just stumbled upon your channel, I'm in my mid-semester break while studying psychology, and I'm planning to understand your method and implement it into the rest of my semester.
I hope it'll b helpful.
It's clear that you're very smart. You should allow yourself to be more playful so you won't develop anxiety issues.
I have a large knowledge web that I can access, but apart from that I'm not smarter than most other people. And playing with knowledge can be very fun and entertaining.
Thank you so much for sharing, i´m just getting close to this world and find very useful to now about your techniques! They are so nice, and a reminder to keep the pad to constructing playful! :)
Wonderful! Yes, staying playful helps to keep an open mind and to see challenges as opportunities and not as threats.
Great great great, vielen Dank! I ll definitely try out
Great! Let me know how it goes.
Memorization and repetition are not always bad. For instance, if you learn how to drive a car, being able to embed those actions in your muscle memory frees up your mind to focus your attention on other things and on your present environment. Of course, this is assuming the driver is even trying to be present in the moment, that's not always the case.
You make several important points.
Careful when you use "memorisation", though. People use "memorisation" with slightly different meaning in different context. It can just mean "integrating into your memory" And in that case it's not only not bad, but it's absolutely essential to anything we're doing. Often it is used to mean rote memorisation. And yes, occasionally that can also be useful. But even for something like learning a poem you should not rely on rote memorisation alone (if you do, you get souless recitals).
I would again say that "repetition" is not only not bad, but absolutely essential. But it depends on how you do the repetitions. Repetitions reduce cognitive load, that's correct, but mindless repetitions are no good. Mindless repetitions lead to you only being able to perceive one way of doing things, to not noticing when the situation change , or not being able to change your behaviour when you ought to (some accidents happen because of this). Mindful repetition on the other hand opens up new possibilities, because you can use the capacity you freed up to intentionally modulate the way you're doing things (like a violin virtuoso who can put a lot of emotion into how they play a melody).
What count's as a repetition? Since you opened with memorisation, let's stick with knowledge for now, because skills are processed slightly differently by our brain.
- You can take a statement and just repeat that statement from memory (that's, I think, how most students try to "get information into their head").
- You can have a statement and delete certain keywords which you then need to remember (this what you and some others are doing with spaced repetition). That's a much more intelligent way to do repetitions!
- When you summarise what you're reading to a friend (or to yourself, e.g. as a Feynman summary), that's also a repetition.
- Taking a concept and speaking out or writing down anything and everything that comes to your mind (e.g. in the form of an ABC list, CaWa, journaling etc) is yet another way of repeating (a much more open ended way of repeating).
- You can also take the opposite route: take a list of words that belong to a concepts and try to remember which one (at first you might choose words that are to general and could fit several concepts, so this is also a great exercise to find out what's essential to the concept).
- A more subtle way of repeating is when you take a list of concepts and you categorise them or rank them. I say subtle, because most people would probably not think of this as repetition. But in order to decide whether a concept belongs into one group or another or is higher or lower in the hierarchy than another one, you need to take the characteristics of one concept and compare them to those of another one. And to do that, you need to retrieve these characteristics from memory.
There are more ways, but already on this small list some types of repetion are more mindful than others. Just repeating a statement, is easily the most mindless of the lot. Using sentences or paragraphs with gaps, is much better already as your mind can try several possibilities and see which one fits best. Same goes for reconstructing concepts from word lists, but here you can learn a bit more in the process. Summarising gives you the opportunity to put emphasis on certain aspects which requires an additional judgement component. And you can make connections to other texts if you summarise multiple texts. Using associations for repetion gives you the opportunities to see connections to other parts of your knowledge, but what comes up at any one time might not be very relevant. Categorisation and ranking force you to make connections to other concepts you might have not seen before, but can take some time to complete (if you construct them over several sittings you get extra repetions "for free").
From summaries, categorisations and rankings it's also very easy to transition into some forms of research - literature research, for instance, or market research. In fact some break throughs in science, like the period table of the elements or Linée's taxonomy, are only novel ways of categorising old information.
So, yes... repetition is certainly important, if done right. I'm afraid that many people limit themselves to only reconstruct what they've read or heard in a lecture. But if you see repeption as a repeated active thinking process, you'll not only be able to repeat that information, but you will gain so much more out of the repetitions.
@@bf-thinking This was as helpful as the video.. thanks.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Glad you find it useful.
what is CaWa?
A CaWa looks somewhat similar to a mindmap (but works differently). You take a central word and then either try to either find associations for this word using only the letters available. Or you try to fit some words which you already know are important for the concept and connect them to the word using again the letter available (that's what I'm doing here).
You can find an introduction here: th-cam.com/video/MVi44-FHAIQ/w-d-xo.html
What is your opinion on Anti-Essentialism? I don´t understand why empirical quantitative psychology is strictly anti-essentialist but then when it comes to making a literature review all of the sudden there are essences of texts. Please correct if I am wrong here or a piece is missing and I just construct a seeming paradox/inconsistency.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with essentialism and anti-essentialism in psychology (while I'm doing my PhD in Neuroscience, I started out as an engineer, not as a psychologist). So, I can't really say anything about that.
The only idea that springs to mind is that maybe the word essence is defined differently in the two different contexts (for of like stress means something different in engineering and psychology). Could that be a solution?
Could you further explain how you go about positioning those key words with the (-)next to them? And also what should we do with the remaining words from the ABC Active that we don’t incorporate into the Cawa. Thanks
Is (-) referring to the bullet points like "-Space", "-Time" etc? In that case I tried to capture several key words under an more general term. E.g. space, time, time, confidence and joy are the five factors that, acc. to Cleese, can help us to get into open mode thinking. Open mode thinking, closed mode thinking and evaluation are three thinking styles he mentions that need to be interleaved (or interwoven, if you like) to yield the most creative results. And so on. I could have also connected them directly to CREATIVITY instead. But at the time when I created the CaWa, it felt better to group them together. Actually, if I were to construct the CaWa several times at different days, I might sometimes decide one way and sometimes another (and the grouping might also vary). The important part is that you need to think about how you want to do it today. And by doing that, you have to think actively about what you heard. Which is the whole point of the exercise.
I only incorporated the words into my CaWa which I thought were most essential. So that the CaWa acts as a knowledge repository of sorts that allows me to quickly see the main points of the talk. In addition, I could create more CaWas that focus on specific aspects of the talk (rather than the talk as a whole). Each of them could include some of the words I didn't use. Or I could explore any or all words further by writing a "normal" ABC or CaWa with one of these words as the topic (I like to call them ABC/CaWa-inventory, because you make an inventory of what you're thinking about a specific topic at the moment). But it's just as possible to categories the words, rank them, try to construct CaGas for each of them and so on. The deeper you want to think about a given text, the more tools you can use (and you can also use the same tools repeatedly).
@@bf-thinking
I am super appreciative of your reply! So it sounds like the primary words are the most important thing, and you want to connect them both directly to the big word in the middle, and when necessary group them together in a coherent fashion in order to communicate back what you just heard or read.
And from what you shared it sounds like the best way to practice recalling the information is to re-draw the CaWa several times.
I imagine after about 3 months of committing to working with techniques, as I’m communicating with others I’ll likely form the habit of seeing these CaWas in my mind lol? That’s really the main reason I’m doing this, to speak more intelligently with others about all areas on the subject of business.
@Ray Hylton Jr. Yes, I think we're on the same page. Just a small thing. When you "re-draw" your CaWas make sure to really, actively create a new CaWa. Don't just copy the old one. Active "recreation" is probably what you meant by "redraw", I just want to make sure. We're so used to mindless cramming from school that it's easy to fall back into that habit. But to be more intelligent, we need to think actively.
Using these techniques can certainly make you more intelligent. If you read more or listen more to talks, podcasts, experts in the field where you want to become more intelligent and then use these techniques to actively work through the input, you'll be able to understand other people better and to think quicker of more appropriate answers.
How long it will take depends on your personal circumstances, but if you use the techniques frequently, you'll be able to see the first results within 3 months. Good luck with that!
@@bf-thinking Wow yes... that advice about the mindless cramming habit from school vs. thinking actively is spot on. Huge thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts about this. Always look forward to your content!
@Ray Hylton Jr. Thanks, man! It really means a lot to me that what I'm doing is helpful.
For me it was very useful. Combining different mental models and working thru them was insightful
Great to hear that! You're spot on, all these techniques are, at the end of the day just a way to help you work through the material.
Thanks for sharing
Great that you find it useful!
3M said you can use about 10% of your time for any interesting project, but usually it was the 10% that came after the 100% :)
It's extremely hard to find any sources how this programme is actually implemented (and since it's been around since 1948, the way it's been handled has probably changed over the decades). If you have source, it would be great if you could share it.
But even if it's overwork, the fact remains that it's still paid work time and that the ideas that come out of it are valued by the management. And there're few companies who that do that.
@@bf-thinking It may be difficult to find specifics because I think it was more a philosophy than a specific program. I was in 3M Engineering and IT mid-management for 15 years. Some research lab managers may have encouraged the 10% rule, while other creative researchers gave themselves permission to spend time on special projects because of it. 3M benefited from serendiptious discoveries (Scotchguard) and special personal projects (Post-Its).
@@angstrom1058 Thanks for the info, that's very useful.