Learning how to learn

This year you will spend hundreds of hours studying. Most students spend those hours the way they always have — re-reading, highlighting, staying up late. This page is about a different question: not what to study, but how.

Everything here comes from Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski — a book and one of the most popular online courses in the world. None of it needs talent. All of it can start tonight.

1. How do you study?

Before any theory, let’s be honest about what we do now.

Have you ever studied hard, felt ready — and then gone blank in the exam room? Let’s find out why with a small experiment.

Keep your result in mind. We will come back to it.

2. Your brain has two modes

Your brain works in two very different ways, and good learners switch between them on purpose.

• Focused mode — you concentrate hard on one thing. Your thoughts travel along paths you already know, like a pinball bouncing between tightly packed bumpers.
• Diffuse mode — your mind relaxes and wanders. Thoughts travel far and make unexpected connections, like a pinball on a board where the bumpers are spread wide apart.

One warning: diffuse mode only helps after you have focused first. And scrolling your phone is not diffuse mode — your attention is still being pulled somewhere.

Every programmer knows this one too: you stare at a bug for an hour, give up, go make a coffee — and the answer arrives on the way back to your desk.

Learning how to learn — Barbara Oakley (TEDx)

3. Familiar is not the same as known

Re-reading and highlighting feel productive, because the page looks familiar. But recognising something when you see it is much easier than recalling it from nothing in an exam. Oakley calls this the illusion of competence.

Remember the 60-second experiment? That gap between “I read it” and “I can write it down” is exactly this illusion.

The fix is active recall: close the book, pull the idea out of your own head, then check. The struggle to remember is what makes memory stronger.

Ways to practise active recall:

• Flashcards — question on the front, answer on the back.
• Practice tests — every multiple-choice paper you do for the THPT exam is active recall.
• Teach someone — a friend, a sibling, or a teddy bear.
• Blank-page summary — after each lesson, write everything you remember on an empty page.

Try it right now, on what you have read so far:

4. Build a wall, not a pile of bricks

Without review, we forget most new information within days. Every time you review, the memory lasts longer before it fades. That is spaced repetition: review after 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks.

Ten minutes a day beats three hours the night before. Same total time — very different result.

Two more ideas that make spaced practice even stronger:

• Chunking. A chunk is a bundle of ideas your brain can use as one piece — like a song you know by heart. You build a chunk by understanding the main idea, practising it until it flows, and seeing where it fits in the bigger picture.
• Interleaving. Mix different problem types in one session, so you learn which method to use — not just how to use it.

Plan your reviews now. Pick something you learned this week:

5. Beat the procrastination zombie

Here is something surprising: just thinking about a task you don’t like activates the part of the brain that feels pain. Opening your phone makes that feeling go away — for now. That is why we procrastinate. Oakley calls these automatic habits zombies.

The good news: the pain fades about 20 minutes after you start. Starting is the hardest part.

So don’t aim for the product (“finish chapter 3”). Aim for the process (“study for 25 focused minutes”). That is the Pomodoro technique:

1. Put your phone in another room.
2. Set a timer for 25 minutes. Work on one task only.
3. When it rings, reward yourself with a 5-minute break.
4. After four rounds, take a longer break.

You can always come back to this timer at Tools → Pomodoro timer.

6. Your brain needs a body

• Sleep is when your brain cleans out waste and strengthens what you learned that day. Staying up all night before a test backfires.
• Exercise helps new neurons grow in the part of the brain used for memory. Even a 20-minute walk counts.

And three tips for the exam room itself:

7. Myth or fact?

Time to test yourself — which is, of course, active recall.

8. Your challenge this month

Knowing these ideas changes nothing. Using them does. Pick one or two to try for the next 30 days — small is fine. Next month, bring one story: what worked, and what didn’t.

Want to go deeper?

• Book: Learning How to Learn: A Guide for Kids and Teens — Barbara Oakley, Terrence Sejnowski & Alistair McConville (2018). Short, friendly, full of pictures.
• Course: Learning How to Learn on Coursera — free to audit.
• Video: Barbara Oakley’s TEDx talk.
• Fun fact: Barbara Oakley visited VinUni in Hanoi in November 2022 to talk about exactly this topic.
• Apps: Anki and Quizlet do spaced-repetition flashcards for you.

See you next month.