Here’s a situation…
I watch a informative video relating to my second mates competency exam preparation .
Its creator synthesizes all kinds of ideas and comes to an interesting conclusion.I think, “Wow! I know all about that now.” Then, a few hours later,I can sort of recall its main points. But if someone asked me to explain it in depth,I’d fumble for words.
For example working of an UTI (Ullage-Temperature-Interface Detector) You can find a simplified explanation here –
This happens to me all the time. It happens when I finish chapters of books,concepts of navigation,specifications of bridge equipments ,solas’s important regulations… you name it.
The story I tell myself is,that upon completing, any reading, I feel like I know what it’s all about but the truth is I don’t.
On the contrary if you have participated in an operation, say gas-freeing, you’d be able to recall the procedure at least in bits, as you’ve been a part of that operation in practical. Our esteemed examiners are more keen on us knowing the full contents of publications when they all know it carries no point. Because the publication is provided in the first place, so that the seafarer can refer to it without the need to remember it all.
This article focuses more on remembering the theory aspects and concepts of the exam, where a candidate is left with no choice but to REMEMBER THINGS!
Most of the time, we trick ourselves into a position where we think we know about a concept, where in reality we don’t. In her course Learning How to Learn, UC San Diego professor Barbara Oakley, points out many of these,
illusions of competence:
One: Seeing information in front of you,such as reading a book,doesn’t mean you know it.
Two: Seeing or hearing someone come,to a conclusion doesn’t mean you know,how to get to that conclusion or explain their argument.
Three: Searching for something,on Google gives you the illusion,that the information is in your brain.
And four: Spending lots of time with material doesn’t mean you know it.
Philosopher Mortimer Adler once said,”The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
This is the fundamental difference between feeling informed and truly understanding something. I am as informed as ever. I can more or less parrot opinions I read,cite random facts,but when tasked with explaining,what something is all about,, with other facts and theories, and putting it in context,I fall flat on my face. What an… idiot!Oh… What a loser!
It’s dangerous when I let these illusions of competence slip into my opinions. I so often feel strongly about a position,but if pressed, I could hardly argue for it.
To continue with Adler,“To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man.”
Remembering Things and forming opinions
The thing about facts and concepts is, if you understand them well enough, you are also at the liberty to form opinions about them!
Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner of legendary investor Warren Buffett, is famously disciplined when it comes to this idea.“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
So, like any conclusion on getting better at something, there’s a lot of work involved. I have to do a lot of active reading. Participate in as many group discussions I can, argue with people smarter than me, think about as many variables as possible. It’s not the easiest thing to do! And there’s also my problem at the beginning of the blog.
How am I supposed to form an opinion or understand something when I keep forgetting all the information I digest. One of the many reasons why people have trouble explaining topics they just learnt is because they simply don’t remember what was said.
Working of our memory
It’s worth then to understand how the memory works. There’s two main parts:short-term and long-term. In recent years, we’ve discovered that long-term memory is the seat of understanding. It stores not just facts but complex concepts or schemas.
“By organizing scattered bits of information into patterns of knowledge,”writes Nicholas Carr,“schemas give depth and richness to our thinking. Understanding and intelligence is derived largely from the schemas we have acquired over long periods of time.”
Think of the long-term memory like an investment portfolio. As you gather more and more schemas, you gain intellectual compound interest over time.
They all begin to connect to each other, increasing your understanding of the world exponentially over time,but… and here’s the key… for information, to get to your long-term memory in the first place,it has to go through a part of the short-term memory called working memory. Working memory has about two to four slots where we process information.
How I wish it had 2250 slots as the AIS STDMA protocol does!!
It acts as a funnel for the infinite amount of information around us. The problem is what we hold there can quickly vanishes if we don’t keep thinking about them or rehearse them in our heads. In other words, if we don’t grapple with the ideas in our working memory for an extended period of time, they never get sent to the long-term memory. They just disappear.
Information Overload
Our current study culture makes the process of grappling with the ideas in our working memory for an extended period of time challenging. We’re blasted with new stimuli and information at the rate of a firehose. This couldn’t be worse for our memories.
Once we surpass these two to four slots in our working memory, once we overload with information, we begin to get distracted.Our ability to process and retain information begins to plummet. This is in part why I feel, like, I know so much, but understand so little, why I can scroll down my notes and barely remember any of it.
Info jumps in to my working memory only to be replaced by the next thing and the next thing. Very little of it, if any, makes it into my long-term memory.
As Nicholas Carr writes,“As we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information,signal from noise.We become mindless consumers of data.”
Multitasking
But it’s not just information overload that affects our ability to remember things, multitasking is just as bad. I know it is easier said than done, we seafarers barely have a choice when it comes to multitasking.
But our brains are designed to focus on one thing at a time. When we multitask, all we’re really doing is quickly switching from one task to another and our brain struggles to commit anything to long-term memory when we’re constantly task switching, solving stability numericals while also checking Instagram . Every switch is like hitting the reset button.
It gives no time for deeper processing.So, what’s the fix???
Solution to the problem
The first is to eliminate multitasking, distractions, and information streams that cause overload. Easier said than done.
I know. We’re all well aware at this point that these services exploit our psychology and it’s hard to resist the addicting dopamine surge that comes from checking them.
But, once you have that one source of information, a book for example, and it’s the only thing you’re paying attention to, How do you remember that? How do you get the books arguments into your long-term memory to the point where you could explain them back to someone.
There are a lot of methods that help commit things to long-term memory and I’m going to go through the three big ones:
Recall, The Feynman Technique, and spaced repetition.
Recall
After you’ve read or watched any material, simply look away and see what you can recall from the material you’ve just taken in. In one experiment, students who studied a text and then practiced it by recalling as much information as they could and repeated that process learn far more than their peers who either went on to something else or reread the text over and over again.
Practicing recall is counterintuitive to most consumers of content. You finish a chapter and you go to the next one or you finish a video and move on to something else, but spending as little as 30 seconds after finishing a chapter or video and recalling its key points vastly improves your understanding of a topic and commitment of it to long-term memory.
Then, there’s
The Feynman technique
World-renowned physicist and teacher Richard Feynman codified this method of learning.It’s probably the best if you want to understand something but it’s also the most work-intensive, which is the case for us seafarers.
One: Take something you wanna understand.
Two: Write out an explanation as if you were teaching it to someone who didn’t understand the subject.
Three: Whenever you get stuck, go back to the material and relearn. Eventually, you’ll fill in the gaps in your knowledge until you can write an explanation without needing the source material.
Four: Finally, attempt to simplify your explanation, getting rid of technical terms and convoluted language. Simplify it to the point that a kid could get what you’re saying.
For the sake of repetition and recall I am going to mention this again,Simplify it to the point that a kid could get what you’re saying.To do this, Feynman recommended the use of analogies.
Analogies connect complex ideas to something more relatable, making it easier to understand.I used two earlier. Understanding and intelligence is like an investment portfolio; it gains compound interest as complex schemas connect with each other, and the other, working memory acts like a bottleneck to long-term memory.
And finally, there’s
Spaced repetition ( Familiarity Builds Confidence)
A captain of a ship has undoubtedly put in hundreds of hours maneuvering ships over many years. The Chief officer practiced cargowork for years before they became masters of the craft. Then Why don’t we do that with information and arguments? There are a lot of reasons,but one of the big ones is that people assume the brain is a computer.
Once you get the information, it’s there forever, but the brain functions much more like a muscle and like any muscle, it needs to be exercised; its neural connection strengthened.There’s the famous saying:“Neurons that fire together wire together.”
In other words, the more often you use the neurons grappling with the information you want to commit to memory, the stronger those connections will get and the stronger your memory and understanding of that information will get.
Spaced repetition does this by firing the neurons over a long period of time. If you read, recall, or do the Feynman technique on the key concepts from say… Rules of the road and spaced them out by three days over the course of a couple weeks, it results in the highest amount of memory retention.
This is much better than if you were to do it all at once.You may be thinking,“Read the same thing again? Recall the same thing again? Do the Feynman technique again?Over a long period of time?”
Unfortunately, that’s the reality if you wanna understand something long-term. All of us don’t get to sail on all kinds of ships, with similar experiences, some are exposed to a lot of bridge activities. While some of us barely get to spend time on ships.
Repetition is required so that you develop so much confidence with a concept or task that there are no areas that will surprise you. Of course repetition and developing familiarity doesn’t give you a license to be complacent.
Conclusion
Finally I’ll like to add that life isn’t the book report. You don’t need to be memorizing and understanding everything that comes your way.That’s absurd.
What I wish I did more often, however, is spend more time thinking about one important thing, that matters the most, at a time, instead of trying to absorb as much information as possible only to forget most of it.
As Charlie Munger has said,“Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not keep up with every damn thing in the world.”
It’s a call to increase the quality of the information you receive rather than the quantity and to spend more time with it. The Surveyor asking you the formula of calculating the thickness of a mooring rope stopper is just showing off his information. You both know the information is easily available in “Ocimf mooring equipment guidelines”.
You’d notice the education system’s bias towards unnecessary things is strong and forces us towards the trivial rather than the essential. No matter what amount of work anyone does people will continue to hold different opinions and that’s when intellectual humility becomes important.
To recognize the limits of your knowledge and to appreciate others’ intellectual strengths is one of the best things a person can do.It’s not only where learning happens but it’s also where disagreements become more constructive.
“Real knowledge,” as Confucius once said,“is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
The trick is not to be fooled by illusions of superiority and to learn to accurately reevaluate our competence each day because in Adler’s words,
(I know I have already put too many words from great people)
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