The Secret Expert’s Know that You Don’t

Have you ever wondered what makes experts better than novices?

As you read this article, you’ll learn about one major difference that you can immediately steal for yourself so that you can master subjects in less time.

Here’s the interesting thing about learning at the neurological level.

• When you learn something it changes the physical structure of the brain.

• These structural changes then alter the functional organization of the brain.

In other words.

Learning organizes and reorganizes the brain.

But…

Here is the curious bit.

In one well-known study, researchers studied the differences between how novices and experts solved physics problems.

The one conclusion they came away with wasn’t just that experts had more organized knowledge than novices but that they organized their knowledge differently!

Novices tended to organize problem cases based on superficial features- like whether or not they contained an inclined plane or not. While experts organized problems based on fundamental principles that could be applied to solve them- Conservation of Energy, Newton’s law.

More concretely.

The difference was that experts organized their knowledge around when they were going to use the information as opposed to superficial features. This way when they encounter a similar scenario (when) it’s organized in such a way that they can easily retrieve the information they need.

Their knowledge becomes ‘conditionalized’ and it allows them to solve more problems, more quickly.

This is a principle the next time you learn something.

Instead of organizing your knowledge around superficial features, get to the root of it. Figure out when you're going to use the information, and group related concepts together under the set of problem cases- So that when the problem case pops up, you can easily retrieve it.

That’s it for today.

Until next time,

Diego “organize your learning” Vera