Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens

If you do a little bit of focused work just before going to sleep, you’re more likely to dream about it. And dreaming about your studies can help you on your tests. It sticks better.5

Each time you take up a subject to study, give it your full attention while you are studying it. Don’t think about the other things you have to do. When you pick up your work for the next subject, give it your

Don’t cram. Space out your learning over several days. That way you’ll have more nights of sleep for more dendritic spines and synapses to grow. Your lessons will sink in.

Diffuse mode is when your mind is relaxed and free. You’re thinking about nothing in particular. You’re in diffuse mode when you’re daydreaming or doodling just for fun. If your teacher tells you to concentrate, you have probably slipped into diffuse mode.

route you take to the grocery store. Here’s the trick. If you convert a fact you are trying to remember into a picture, you can remember it more easily.

When you are trying to learn something new, you must first focus intently on it in order to “turn on” those parts of the brain and get the learning process started.

hear the birds singing, and see the little rabbit trails.

It’s definitely possible to develop a better long-term memory. (We don’t know how to improve short-term memory, at present, anyway.) To improve your long-term memory, you can use Nelson Dellis’s five memory tips (focus, practice, picture, store, and recall). You can also use the memory palace technique, songs, metaphors, note taking, teaching other

Just watching other people, or looking at a solution, or reading a page, can allow you to get started. But it won’t do much to build your own neural structures of learning.

miss. Be more creative. “Slow” thinkers can understand a subject or problem just as well as “fast” thinkers. Slow thinkers may need more time, but they can sometimes actually understand the subject better than fast thinkers.