Accelerate Your Learning Process

Here are some effective cognitive skills to accelerate learning that we encourage you to consider for a better and more accomplished learning experience in the coming weeks, months, and years.

1-Processing speed:

Processing speed is a cognitive skill related to your ability to interpret what you learn and have time to apply it to get the results you are looking for. By using this skill, you can improve your productivity in a day, thus freeing you up more time to do other things in your daily schedule. Think of it as having the ability to sit down and within 30 minutes, you've already read and fully understood what a certain aspect of your course is all about. The best part is that you understand the concept so well that you don't find it necessary to go back and re-read it and try to figure out what it means and the whole process.

Some believe that processing speed is an ability given to a few, when in fact anyone can learn it if they start practising it. You can speed up your information processing by making sure you regularly engage in aerobic exercise, continue to challenge yourself intellectually and push your brain to make sense of things faster by reading and interpreting information faster than you normally would, and eating healthy foods. Processing speed is divided into two main types:

a- Visual processing:

Visual processing is a cognitive skill related to how quickly we process information from visual objects, such as pictures, tables, and graphs. The more you use visually represented data, the more you will be able to identify the patterns used in it, and the easier it will be to decode new data presented in this way in the future.

b- Auditory processing:

We are now in an era where advanced technology is being used in almost all industries including education. Instead of having to spend two days or weeks reading a course book, you can just listen to an audio-book of it and learn more intensively. So we urgently need to increase our ability to quickly process the information we hear.

If you are good at analysing and understanding audio and relating it to what you learn about, you will have higher chances of progressing in your studies. Again, repetition is the best way to improve auditory processing, the more you listen to audio recordings, the better your sound processing skills will be.

2-Logic and inference

Logic and reasoning are cognitive skills that pave the way for problem-solving and brainstorming skills that help make the learning process useful in the real world. For example, during exams the professor expects you to use what you've learned to solve the problems given in the exam, and since the questions are somehow convoluted to measure your understanding of the topic being tested, that's where logic comes to the rescue.

You can try different techniques to improve your logic and reasoning, including making inferences for different scenarios and then watching how they are solved to see if you got them right, playing mind games like chess, and discovering the different patterns of activities you are involved in.

3- Multitasking

You might think that multitasking is a different skill than the previous two, but while focusing your attention on one thing is good, the opposite is also beneficial. Multitasking is getting your attention to more than one project or task at the same time. Think about having different subjects you take at your educational institution, as you move from one lesson to the next. Finalising one thing while getting ready and planning something else is also common. So division of attention in such cases is useful so that even while taking an exam on two different units, you can still retain the information of each.

You can increase your multitasking abilities by being aware of what you are supposed to learn and how you are learning it. Multitasking requires effective use of short-term memory. But it is important that you work to store the information in the long-term memory through constant repetition.

4-Short-term memory

Short-term memory is where we store recently acquired information. If you've read a manual for a device that you're going to use right away, you've finished reading and then you've gone out and started using it without having to go back to the manual every now and then, your short-term memory is great.

But if that's not the case and you want to improve your short-term memory, a good way is to pick up words, numbers or even dots for a few seconds, then try to get back what you saw after a few seconds, then check if you're right.

5- Selective Attention

Choosing selective attention as the first skill you should develop is not random, we live in noisy environments today, and many things can catch our attention. Therefore, selective attention is a cognitive skill that allows you to direct your attention to a particular task at a particular time and avoid other distractions that might tempt you to engage in it. But how does selective attention work?

Let me explain it to you with an example, assuming that you were with your friend in a restaurant located in the middle of the city where you are surrounded by the sounds of cars, people around you, pedestrians on the street, others in the shops next to the restaurant, and more. You must now hear most of those sounds. However, the main reason you are in this place is to have a conversation with your friend while eating. So selective attention helps you focus on that task and keep your attention until you're done.

To improve your selective attention, it would be a good idea to make some effort to do focused attention meditation, go to fairly noisy places, and try to focus on certain chosen objects or sounds for a long time. Repeat and try to make it more difficult each time. Over time, you will find yourself accustomed to selective attention, which can speed up the learning process.