How to Increase Our Learning Metabolism

[Adam Mayer]

As the world moves faster and faster, it becomes increasingly important to increase the rate at which we absorb, assimilate, retain, and apply new information. Catherine Austin Fitts often talks about the importance of increasing your learning metabolism, and apparently Bill Gates can read 120 pages in an hour. If knowledge is power, then the more rapidly you can build your knowledge base, the more rapidly you can increase your personal power.

So I wanted to start a thread for people to share any useful bits of information on how to increase our “learning metabolism” as Fitts calls it. Whether it’s speed reading (with high comprehension and understanding), memory enhancement, strategies, values, beliefs, etc, let’s apply modeling to this topic and start to assemble the best tools for being highly effective learning learners, so that we can each grow and evolve even faster and achieve bigger and better goals with higher levels of ecology. And we can!

So what is learning?

We’re taking external representations of some kind (text, audio, video), turning those into internal representations (VAKAd primarily), and connecting those IRs into a model of the world that includes beliefs, values, and attitudes. The learning process could involve destruction of old beliefs and values and construction of new ones. How can we update our model of the world as efficiently and effectively as possible?

One consideration is behavioral flexibility: information is not always presented to us in 4mat from big picture to details 😉 So how can we increase our behavioral flexibility to easily assimilate information presented in a variety of representational systems and chunk sizes?

For me, for example, I typically think big picture to details, so if I don’t know the context it’s often hard for me to absorb details… I just delete a lot of info until I know how it connects to the big picture… i.e. “Why do I care about this info?” So perhaps some of the details folks can share what’s important to them about the details, and their beliefs about details. Likewise, big picture people can share values and beliefs about the big picture. We each may be missing a lot of info that’s not presented in our favored format… info that we could instead be utilizing.

Whoa I just realized I wrote this post in sort of 4mat by accident… I’ve been programmed!!! LOL! So what questions do you have, what did you learn, what do I need to know?

[Author]

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