Part of the reason why I love psychology so much is that it’s not just for professors and academics.

Psychological principles can be used by anyone who has a little understanding to great effect.

I once had a psychology tutor who told me that as psychology students, we were at an extreme advantage with regards to studying for classes, assignments and exams.

We already knew what worked and what didn’t work.

We were learning the very techniques and principles that other fields tried to apply to their study patterns and regimes.

Learning new things is one of those concepts that we all wish we could be better at.

We might here new and interesting information, yet struggle to retain it and access it when we need it most.

Psychology and psychological principles can help with this though. There are numerous ways in which psychology can help us learn new things better.

You can find out so much more information on how psychology can help you learn new things better by checking out a video I did on this subject on my YouTube channel GetPsyched. Check out the video by clicking here.

In this article, I am going to give you a number of psychologically backed principles and interventions you can use to learn new things better.

So, let’s get to it.

STATE DEPENDENT RECALL

This basically means you have a place where you learn stuff.

A secluded and quiet location where you do your most profound thinking and learning.

Use this place often and make it your environment to absorb new information.

For me personally, that would be my back bedroom that has a desk in it, I can sit on my office chair and feel comfortable in that environment to give my full attention to what I am learning.

It’s peaceful, has natural light, and is simplistic and minimalistic enough to the point where I won’t get distracted.

What’s more is that when the door is shut, others know that I’m really busy or invested in a task and don’t want to be disturbed.

Put it this way, you’re not going to learn new stuff best if you keep changing the environment, at a bar or watching TV for example.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

This sound fancy but it basically means holding yourself accountable for your own learning.

If you think others learn stuff better because they are just smarter than you, then your suffering from the fundamental attribution error.

Holding yourself accountable for your learning and thinking about what you can do to improve it will always assist in learning new things.

SPACED REPETITION

Now, this is a technique often used in classrooms by teachers.

It basically means extending the amount of time before trying to recall something you have learned.

By increased the time between recall, you improve our ability to learn the new information

You can try this out yourself pretty easily actually. Learn something new and give yourself 5 minutes to then recall it by memory. If you get it then extend that 5 minutes to 30 minutes, then an hour, 6 hours, a day, 3 days and so on.

To the point where you can recall the information over a large amount of time.

By extending the period of time between recalling new information, we stretch our brain and memory continually to the point where it is forced to keep responding to new and challenging circumstances.

As a result, we not only learn new things better, but we also retain them at an improved rate.

MULTI-MODEL LEARNING

This basically means you should try and learn new things via more than one method.

If you simply read something new and leave it at that, then your limiting yourself and your ability to learn and retain new information.

You could try some of the following examples as learning tools that could be used together. Draw a picture of what you are trying to learn, create a mind map, or speak it out to yourself.

By increasing the number of learning tools and format’s, you learn much faster.

THE METHOD OF LOCI

This sounds a bit weird but it’s a form of mnemonics that help you remember new information better.

Used by the ancient Greeks, you remember new information by the location that you place them in in your mind.

In the modern day, people have been able to memorise thousands of pieces of new information via this method.

They didn’t start out like this, but what they do is actually construct full cities in their head and place each piece of new information in different areas, locations and buildings around this city in order to memorise this new and vastly complex information very quickly and effectively.

There are ways that you can use this tool for yourself. For example, remembering items or pieces of information by storing them in different rooms in a house you have created in your mind has been shown to have incredible effects for learning new things.

This is a technique that you really need to try out for yourself!

UNDERSTAND YOUR WORKING MEMORIES CAPACITY

Your working memory, which is your ability to retain different pieces of useful information, has a limit.

This limit usually is capped at around 7 pieces of new information in most circumstances.

By understanding this better, you can schedule your breaks better that we spoke about earlier and retain more accurate new information more effectively and over longer and more sustained periods of time.

UNDERSTAND YOUR METACOGNITION

Firstly, what is metacognition?

Its fundamentally our ability to assess and understand our own skills and learning capabilities.

By understanding your own metacognition you’ll begin to see that you perhaps aren’t taking enough time to learn new information.

Cognitive psychologists have time and time again found that a lack of understanding of metacognition has led to poor retention of new information.

Basically, you need a level of self-awareness for what your needs are when learning new information and how you learn new information best. That way, things should start to make more sense.

So, those are my top tips on how to learn new information better. These tips are really effective but they don’t come overnight. What I suggest is that you give them all a try, see what ones, and what combination, works best for you and practice them a lot!

Al the best with learning all that new info brainiac!!!