Sonder

Textbook Percolation

I am coining the term. Translate it as “How much of what I studied did I really understand”. Feel free to substitute “Textbook” by its general spirit to mean any educational medium, not limited to coursework.

Measuring what was absorbed is the most important metric for educational content in my book(pun intended). But the education industry frequently falls short in this regard.

Having sit through lectures delivered in classrooms almost all my life, a phenomenon has plagued my learning experience throughout. The one where I “switch off” after a few minutes of almost any class. And if you have been even minutely self-aware when studying, you probably know what I’m talking about - the depth of your understanding is sinking by the minute, till it drops off to sheer incomprehensibility, and you slip into a daydream. Nothing further percolates into your brain.

I recall my first week of classes at IIT Bombay. For context, IITB is India’s most prestigious engineering university and undergraduates who enter the college do so through a difficult physics, chemistry and mathematics competitive exam called JEE Advanced. It takes an aspirant about 2 years of hard work or more to secure a good rank in the exam, which can then help you find a place in one of the IITs.1

Picture this: our first classday, students waddling towards their lecture halls to find seats, at 8 in the morning. The footpaths were flooded and the lecture halls packed to capacity. Freshly minted college graduates were waiting keenly for their class to start. After all, this was the fruition of their hard work over the past n years. As the clock struck 8:30, a professor enters, projects his slide deck, introduces himself and the course and proceeds to teach for about half a lecture.

That’s where the downfall began. The content was covered hastily and the professor was recurrently unclear. There wasn’t a tinge of enthusiasm or excitement in his voice. More professors walked in, repeated this a few times over. It was a tiring day for the learners. This was followed by 4 more days of this replayed. And as the week went on, the young minds that had been waiting so eagerly for this week for as far as they can remember, were shutting down one by one.

Over the month, the footsteps towards the academic area dwindled. At some point during, the dawn of realization had swept over many; students had stopped seeing the point of going to class. By the end of it, some classes had as little as a 10 person attendance and this is out of approximately 250. This made me appreciate how difficult learning is when the conditions aren’t pristine.

What compounds my sorrow is that this isn’t for a lack of trying. Everyone in the system is trying really hard. Many educators want to help their students discover the joy of learning. Many students are begging to be shone the light of knowledge. But the spark dies anyway, slowly and surely, on both sides. For the educators it manifests as a exhaustion of attempts - “I have no willpower left to try again”. For students it shows up as sleeping in class or playing hooky.

And the plague continues to this day. The more I try to learn, the worse I think my problem is. Even when I want to read books out of my own self-interest, I face immense trouble. Let’s talk about the time I picked up the self help book “Deep Work”.2 The book is undoubtedly great. Cal Newport has embedded a few really insightful nuggets in the prose. But the process of reading it was a complete nightmare. It took me greater than 2 months to get through it, and this is when I was reading it with my friends of book club. Throughout the journey, I’d almost never felt motivated to read “just another page”; rather, it was often accompanied by the gnawing pain of hard things.3 The effort could have very easily gone to waste, simply because the process was never entertaining or rewarding. This is the case for a great book, especially one that I wanted to read specifically, while being socially accountable for its’ completion - the problem is huge.

Feeling trapped in the cycle of distractions, there’s a certain shame that accompanies it. I was in a vicious cycle of reading course lecture notes, textbooks and/or course videos, getting distracted 20 minutes after, and doing a quick look-see of my Facebook feed (yes, Facebook was the social media at the time, circa 2016-17), which inevitably turned into an hour long doomscroll.4 The shame was pressing, but the agony of putting the phone back down was worse, unbearable even, especially given the substitute was an intense course in engineering.

What I described was my own battle with learning, but I bet that half of you reading resonated with the experiences. It’s the sign of a poignant megatrend; learning is really hard, and textbook percolation is taking a hit. The enemy we face is no joke; his moves are precise and data-driven. He knows more about us than we would ever, about him. He holds us in a chokehold so tight, the faint of heart have little hope of freedom.

But not all is lost, young Padawan.

Let’s get this straight: attention is the currency we are dealing with.5 And the enemy of our times is the technology diverting our attention. If your phone buzzes and your focus is riveted by the catchy notification bell, you’ve been trained as a regular Pavlovian dog. There’s a lot to unlearn.

Much like Chuckles the Conditioned Canine, we’re fighting to make what we find worth learning also capture our focus. The true underlying battle is alignment of mental rewards with where we aim to direct our attention. You see, we tend to play this algorithm in our heads, where the push of our attention is inversely proportional to the rewards we achieve by doing it, close to the exploration/exploitation tradeoffs of the reinforcement learning world.6 We want the algorithm’s optimal outcome to favour learning.

To align our learning to this pattern, we need a medium that can do it all - teach us what we need to know, create connections with our existing knowledge and keep things entertaining. Reflect upon what media you find inherently rewarding, especially something you like consuming in its intended form; that is the most powerful aligner for you. Now to get the most of what you want to learn, consume the most impactful available content in that medium. I did this reflection exercise, and I am pleased to share the results. My ideal medium and content combination: Video Lectures accompanied by note-taking.

More than text, my attention is captured by video content. Watching it is like watching a movie - you don’t know what’s coming next so its going to be mildly interesting and hard to guess; this helps me pay attention. Unfortunately, it has not been enough to ensure that I actually understand what I’m studying. My favourite tool for addressing this gap is writing notes.

I’ve written about writing as an idea formulator7, but it is barely a tenth of its power. It is a tool to really absorb what’s written, especially if you rewrite things in your own words. To fully leverage the rewriting technique, try to take a break between the reading and rewriting phases.

Huberman, in his research view of goal setting8, discusses how evolutionarily, we engage our neural circuitry in a significantly distinct manner when writing with a pen or pencil vis-a-vis typing on a phone with our thumbs. This distinction is noteworthy, especially considering that typing on a phone is a relatively recent invention compared to traditional writing.

My thesis here is twofold. First, learning is substaintially curtailed in both kinds of typing(on a laptop as well as a phone) for reasons springing out of neural engagement. Second, writing and typing are done at two VERY different WPMs. Average writing speeds for college students are probably around 15-20 WPM, but for typing is much higher around 50+ WPM(roughly my personal numbers). This gives you time to mull over what you are writing. These extra brain cycles are the magic that map your newly acquired information around and within your existing foundations of knowledge.

Personally, I believe hand written notes from video lectures have been key for my learning, especially since we got video lectures directly from the source during the COVID lockdown.

One might criticize this as essentially emulating the classroom experience, but it couldn’t be further from it. Classroom experience is different - a) you don’t get the desired content at the desired time b) you don’t always get time to write notes c) you don’t get to repeat the parts that you haven’t fully understood. To get the complete benefit of the experience, watch the video lecture, keep pausing and write notes from what you’ve understood. Then re-review the notes watching the video lecture at 1.5x(or more/less, as you please), all the while filling gaps in the notes. This really ingrains what you miss; it’s an important error-correction step. Finally, skim the notes to make sure you can recall the sections. If you can’t, just reread that section - you can be sure that your notes are complete, due to step 2(fix the notes).

Whatever strategy you choose (mine or a self-designed one), be sure to personally evaluate it. Textbook percolation will play a crucial role in this; time spent is futile, if none of the content is grasped. Consider textbook percolation as a downstream measure of how well we align our strategy with our end goal–a continuous integration of alignment over time. While not perfect, it should give an overall sense of our desired outcome: the more I learn, the better it is, and the better I feel. Always aim for this holy grail.

Ideally, using courses to learn is the best, but what if none are available? Unfortunately, its not very straightforward in such a case. Usually, finding content that aligns your dopamine for you with what you want to learn is a good idea. In some situations, you probably need to imbibe a book or a paper. My best bet in this regard is to only pick up books which can 10x your life instantly9. When I wanted to talk to people to figure out their problems, I could instantly pick up Mom Test10 and get through it cover to cover. The motivation was clear and the end goal too. Luckily, I knew a book for it as well, with a coherent structure to round it up. For a paper, usually its more a gradual disovery process rather than a one off step function(before vs after the book). In such a case, try reading the abstract and the conclusion to figure out if this is important to you, only then dive in.

Sometimes, you just have to struggle with it. Do a bit. Take a break. Do a bit more.

Eventually, how do you get out of this struggle? Meditate. Pick up Medito, start meditating everyday11. Start improving your attention span. At the same time build a love for learning(and its constituents i.e. reading or watching courses). Don’t necessarily start at what would be best for you - you could start at what would be entertaining, relatable and easy to watch. It could be a 10xer as well. The key to picking correctly is selecting content you are motivated to start - well begun is half done!

I trust you found value in this. Now, feel free to explore a topic that sparks your curiosity through your preferred medium. It’s time to dive in and enjoy the journey!

PS: If you’re in the process of learning about a new sector/topic or thinking about doing so, do drop me a message. The same goes for feedback on this post. Socials below :point_down:

  1. It is challenging to explain the kind of work required from an aspirant. The Viral Fever’s Kota Factory does a phenomenal job at depicting what the median JEE aspirant’s life looks like. It’s available on Netflix and Season 1 is on YouTube. ↩

  2. Deep Work: Rules for Success in a Distracted World. ↩

  3. Wrote about this gnawing pain in my earlier blog post, “Why I Write”. ↩

  4. Doomscroll: To spend excessive time online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, angry, etc. ↩

  5. I like this characterization of attention - you can boil it down to money concepts. Attention rich and poor, both exist. Improving your attention is akin to increasing your $$/hr. You need to pay attention to the top priority in your life. Have some leeway to spend it on recreation. ↩

  6. Exploration-exploitation dilemma on Wikipedia. ↩

  7. Again a callback to “Why I Write”. ↩

  8. Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals, Huberman Lab Podcast. ↩

  9. This advice is not all encompassing. Please don’t follow if you aren’t seriously ill like me. ↩

  10. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers, Rob Fitzpatrick. ↩

  11. Not personally verifiable, but anecdotally it seems to work. Personally, been procrastinating on this like a fool. Medito is available here. ↩