I think every teacher is familiar with the moment when a learner “gets it”, the moment where everything falls into place and what seemed so difficult suddenly becomes much easier. It’s a wonderful moment for the teacher and the learner as both of their efforts have paid off.

It is in these moments that we can see the potential for how quick humans can really learn. Imagine if teaching was so effective that they could reproduce the feeling of “getting it” for every student they are teaching for every skill they are teaching.

Children would learn to swim in weeks or less, degree courses could take less than a year, children could learn twice as much or more in every school day.

In this article I will attempt to lay out a framework for how accelerated learning can be achieved - how to consistently reproduce the feeling of “getting it” in every learner.

Concepts

Lets take a moment to understand what “getting it” really means when learning in some of the areas of life:

  • In physical activities, most of the learning involves finding the correct “feeling” that corresponds with doing the movement correctly. A more fancy word for sensory “feeling” is kinaesthetics.

  • In music, you must once again use kinaesthetics to play the instrument, but you also have to learn what auditory sounds are correct.

  • In gymnastics, you must again learn what kinaesthetics to do, but also you must use the sense of balance (vestibular sense) to know whether you are doing it correctly.

  • In cooking, the senses of smell and taste are extremely important.

  • And finally, studies show that mathematics is best taught via assigning spatial cues to abstract topics, hence why graphs and other visuals are so commonly used to teach maths. Vision obviously also plays a huge part in most other skills.

It is clear that all learning requires our senses. The moment you “get it” is better described as the moment you know exactly what senses to stimulate to perform the skill.

Most people intuitively understand that performing a skill means to simulate and feel the correct combination of sensory information, but it is useful to assign a word to this so it can be more easily talked about. We will call the “correct combination of sensory information” the “concept”. Understanding the concept means understanding what sensory information you need to simulate and feel to perform the skill.

Problems with learning

If it were a simple task to quickly learn concepts, everybody would be an athlete, genius and never fail at anything. However it is not simple as there are usually one or more barriers in the way. That being said, these barriers are easy to overcome when you know exactly what to do. But don’t take my word for it, instead take a look at Summer Mcintosh, Terence Tao or Yiheng Wang. These people broke world records and led their field at 18 years old or younger. That means they learned in 18 years or less what most experts learn in 30+, and even more than most people learn in their entire lives.

So what are the barriers and how can we overcome them?

Firstly , before we even start to learn a new concept, we must obviously have the physical ability to do it. This is why 6 year olds are not world class athletes. You cannot learn physically demanding things if you do not have the body to do it. If you want to learn to do something physically (and perhaps even psychologically) challenging, you must first train to have the physical ability (or perhaps even neural connections) to do it.

Once you have the physical ability, you can now attempt to learn the concept. You need to know exactly what sensory information to stimulate and pay attention too, which can only be done through either trial and error or through somebody else communicating the concept to you (teaching you). Trial and error is inefficient by nature, and it is so hard to communicate concepts accurately that teaching is sometimes even less effective than trial and error.

Hence, we have now located the core reason why we are not reaching the potential that undoubtedly exists in teaching - the inefficiency of communication.

Methods of improving communication

Unfortunately, increasing the effectiveness of communication is not an easy task. Language is complex, body language is complex, writing is complex and creating visuals is complex. That being said, there are several extremely promising opportunities by which conceptual communication could be significantly improved:

  1. Articulation - Most people (myself included) are not good at articulating themselves. If we just used more specific vocabulary when describing concepts, we could use language so much more effectively. For example, just take have a listen to Jordan Peterson for a minute or two and notice how he can impart several abstract concepts to the listener in only this amount of time.
  2. Visuals - Since most concepts heavily rely on visuals, why are images and videos so few and far between in learning texts and lessons? Take a look at your average Wikipedia article which has at most a few images, and look at high level maths books - you will be lucky to even get a graph. Instead, we should be using images, video and interactive graphics to communicate the concepts much quicker and clearer.
  3. Communicate the correct concepts - Sometimes (even most or all the time) the teachers themselves do not fully understand what they are trying to teach because they understand the concept unconsciously. Sometimes the concepts need to be learned again consciously before they can be communicated effectively to a learner.
  4. Direct stimulation - This is perhaps the ultimate form of communication. Lets say we directly stimulated the senses of the learner in the exact right ways to represent the concept. There would be no information lost or misunderstood from teacher to learner. Currently, this is only ever done in scientific studies to identify what parts of the brain being activated represent what concepts. Imagine if this could be used as a tool for learning.

Using these methods, the potential is through the roof.