Make learning permanent (50+ years without forgetting)

How much do you remember from your high-school classes? If you're like most people, you've probably forgotten a lot of what you've learned. But interestingly, researchers found that one group of people took classes they never forgot---even as much as fifty years after studying it.

All learning requires effort, but not all effort is helpful for learning. In this video, I'll explain the research that changed my mind about the value of hard problem solving for learning.

I’ve spent the last twenty years teaching myself new things and documenting the results. That includes projects from learning languages to programming, quantum mechanics and portrait drawing. So in this video, I want to share how I break down the process of learning new skills. I’ll share the three most-common mistakes people make that hold them back and, by the end, you’ll know how to create a thirty-day plan to start learning anything from scratch.

What's the best way to take notes? Should you even bother taking notes when you can take a photo of every slide or use AI to effortlessly summarize what was said? In this video, I'll explain why note-taking by hand still matters and why the best approach, surprisingly, uses the least technology.

In this video, I'll share one of the most effective techniques for learning. I'll also explain why it remains underused, because of a pervasive cognitive illusion.

We don't generally improve our thinking from specific mental exercises on puzzles, solving problems or intellectual subjects like chess, programming or art.But there is a kind of specific training that can lead to general cognitive benefits: physical exercise. In this video, I explain the science behind why exercise is the only kind of brain training that actually works.

Why do we stop improving, even when we keep getting more experience? In this video, I explain why we stagnate, why it isn't inevitable, and how you can be one of the few that stays on the path to mastery.

Learning has no short cuts. But there are plenty of dead-ends. In this video, I'll show why five widely-used strategies for learning don't actually work, and what you should do instead.

Ever read a non-fiction book, love it, and then completely forget what it was about three months later? In this video, I explain the key factor that drives how much you're able to remember from books you read.

(EP 316) - The real reason you procrastinate by Scott H Young