Justin Sung — Watch This For 18 Minutes, and You’ll Outlearn 99.9% Of People
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= About Dr Justin Sung = Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
Key Insights
So, today I want to talk about probably one of the most important things that you need [music] to learn if you ever want to get better at learning. And this is called metacognition. The reality is that the technique [music] and the method you use, your studying strategy, doesn’t really matter that much. What matters is how you think inside your brain when you use that strategy. And metacognition is about understanding how you think. If you have really good metacognition, you don’t need fancy new learning strategies. You don’t need to watch a never-ending amount of YouTube videos to figure out how to learn better. You can simply reflect, understand what you’re doing, and make the changes you need to get you your result. So, we’re going to cover three things in this video. The first one is what metacognition is a little bit more deeply. Number two is what metacognition actually does for you and how you are meant to use metacognition in your daily learning to help you improve. And then how you can actually start training your metacognition to be better. So, the first one to start with is what metacognition really is. So, if this here is your brain, and your brain is having thoughts, cognition Th- This will just be called cognition. The fact that your brain is having thoughts is called cognition. Now, if you are aware of the thoughts that your brain is having, you would have a level of meta- cognition. And there’s a spectrum to this. So, a low level of metacognition means that you are just very generally aware of the thoughts that you’re having. So, you might be learning something really complicated, and you’re generally aware that you’re struggling. You’re generally aware that you’re trying to solve this problem by thinking about it in a different way. Another level beyond that would be to say, “Okay, not only are you aware that you’re struggling, you’re also aware of why you’re struggling.” So, I’m trying to think about this topic in this particular way. I’m applying my brain, I’m using certain methods, and they’re not doing well for me. So, let me actively try to switch to a different strategy to unlock a new perspective. How is that working for me? And so, we can actually adjust our strategies depending on our metacognition of where the difficulties and issues are. The main challenge with metacognition, and this is a key aspect about what it means to train it, is that metacognition is trying to gain awareness on something that is invisible, completely invisible. If I sit here thinking deeply, what am I thinking? You don’t know, cuz it’s invisible. There’s no way for you to be able to point or anyone else to be able to point at your thoughts and say, “Hey, this is the thought that’s going wrong.” When it comes to something like learning, where not only do you have thoughts, but then these thoughts have to output into actual knowledge, that is not talking about one or two pathways. This is talking about hundreds of thousands of millions of potentially billions potentially trillions of connections firing in a certain pattern to create a very very specific function, which is consolidating information into your memory. And so, there are uncountable amount of micro decisions that your brain is making and uncountable number of thoughts. And so, you have to have awareness on what your brain is actually doing when there is no real feedback or way to see it directly. And this is the biggest reason why it is so hard to learn to learn. So, this lack of visibility is the biggest reason why learning to learn is so difficult. It is harder to learn to learn than it is to play golf. It’s harder than to build a rocket ship. Because for all of those things, there are something tangible when you make an error that you can actually point to, trace back to your process, and then remedy. And so, the only way that we can build metacognition and improve our metacognition, and therefore train our metacognition, the first step is we need to get visibili
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