Justin Sung — Why Deep Thinkers Learn Differently Than Everyone Else
Source: YouTube Channel: Justin Sung (2130000 subs) Duration: 18:04 Views: 87572 · Likes: 3724 Video: Watch on YouTube
Take my Learner Type Quiz (free) to diagnose your deep processing: https://go.icanstudy.com/type-restexhausted In this video, I explain what deep processing tanking is, why naturally smart deep thinkers often peak early and struggle later, and how you can unlock your performance again by learning strategies that match your natural thinking ability.
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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
If you feel like you’re pretty smart, you’ve always done pretty well, like you did well in school, you understand things more easily when other people struggle with it, then it probably means that you are a deep thinker. And when it comes to learning, this is actually quite rare. Based on my own surveys and the data that I’ve collected from tens of thousands of learners, less than 10% of the population is a naturally deep thinker. And these are usually the people that are in that top band of performance. So, if you’re going through school and you were in the sort of top band, you know, maybe not the smartest person, but you know, you’re generally better than your average, and you were able to get through school and uni without really trying that hard, then there’s a decent chance that you are one of these natural deep thinkers. [music] But one of the really common things that happens with deep thinkers, especially when it comes to learning, is that they [music] peak. They peak early, and so over time, like after university, going into life, or or for some people as they are going through university, it’s harder and harder to stay at that top band. And you get to this place where you know that you’re capable, intelligent person, but for some reason, you are not really getting the types of results and the performance that you would have expected yourself [music] to be getting. And it’s not for lack of effort, you’re studying and you’re putting in the hours, but still it’s not really enough. So, what happened? Are you just not that smart? Did you get less intelligent over time? Did you truly just peak too early? Uh the reality is probably you’re facing something that I call deep processing tanking. I see this pretty much universally across all of my natural deep thinkers. And if that is happening, then there’s something that you can do about it that unlocks those bottlenecks and allows you to be that natural top performer all over again. So, first I’m going to tell you what deep processing tanking [music] is, and then how you can figure out if it applies to you, and if it does apply to you, what you can do about it. So, deep processing thinking. I mean, I’ve been using the word deep thinker, [music] but thinking is such a vague term. We should be a bit more specific. When I say deep thinker, I’m talking about someone who takes a piece of information, learns something new, and they don’t just accept it for what it is. They’re not looking at the surface. They’re not just trying to memorize the definition. They’re really thinking about what this means. They’re trying to go beneath the surface. This is the deep part. And really connect it with what they already know and other things that they’re learning and really create what in the learning science space we call a schema of knowledge. So, there’s this mental model of this topic that’s forming. Whether that’s an academic topic or something that you’re learning for work. A deep thinker who uses their deep thinking when they’re learning, we call that a deep processor. The processing is you processing new information. So, there’s new information. This is the stuff that you’re trying to learn. You take this in, you read it, you you you hear it in a video, whatever it is. And inside your brain, you process it. And if you process this in a deep way, you’re doing deep processing. And deep processing is really one of the most influential things that dictates whether someone is a good or bad learner. If you do a lot of surface level processing, then you can spend hours and hours and hours on learning something and still get pretty bad results. A lot of people, if you are a deep processor that you saw around you, like spending all of their time studying, always writing lots and lots of notes, and you sort of wondered to yourself, “Why do you need to do that? Like, why do you need to try so hard just to understand it?” And often, if you observe closely enough, even after doing all of that, the
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