Interleaving
Do you want to learn more effectively?
A lot of people think the key to learning is about pounding relentlessly on your mind’s door until it opens. You’ve got the kids who cram before their exams and then there are the people who’ll devote ten hours a day to studying something. (I’ve been there; there’s a maximum and it’s probably around four hours before you’re wasting time.)
Don’t get me started on the “life hack” crowd who claim to learn Icelandic in a week or advanced physics by reading the contents of the cliff notes books or whatever.
Assuming you’re not part of that crowd, the reason you’re not learning as quickly as you might want to probably isn’t that you’re not putting in enough hours. (Assuming you are putting in hours.) It’s probably that your learning time isn’t as effective as it could be.
In this article, I’ll talk about a little known theory that’ll help make your learning schedule more efficient.
Bear in mind this is anecdotal and probably filled to the brim with pseudo-scientific explanations. I only learn about this stuff because my brain is naturally pretty small and so I have to make up for that.
What Is Interleaving?
If you Google interleaving, you’ll probably find a lot of stuff about computer memory systems. Whilst that’s not what we’re talking about, there are some parallels.
Half of “learning something” is storing it in your memory efficiently. (The other half is understanding it enough that it goes into your memory correctly in the first place.)
Just like a computer, we have information stored within us and it’s entirely useless if we can’t access it. So when you’re learning how to learn, it’s important that you concentrate a lot of your efforts on improving memory recall.
Interleaving is a good practice to get into because it improves your recall as well as giving you opportunities to learn more about different subjects and improve the other aspect of learning as a result (you’ll be increasing your understanding with this system.)
Essentially, when you’re learning one thing – let’s say, a language (and some grammar rule within it) – you shouldn’t make that the only thing you’re learning at a time. Language is a good example because you can learn:
- Vocabulary & Grammar (i.e. the language)
- Cultural stuff (how X natives live as regards language)
- Subject specific stuff (history, extensions of culture etc. as regards language)
Interleaving involves splitting your learning to cover those sessions. So in one day’s practice, you might learn about those things in this order: 1, 2, 3.
Tomorrow, you’ll do a session where you learn in this order: 2, 3, 1.
So on and so forth.
Why Does It Work?
Our brains aren’t that good at learning random pieces of trivia in isolation. There are all kinds of methods, tricks and hacks that people who are into trivia train for. From complicated mnemonics systems through loading their brains up with numerous and slightly sketchy nootropics… people go to all kinds of lengths in order to increase their memory for random information.
In reality though… there’s not much point. No ancient human evolved the capacity to remember unrelated trivia because it offers no real benefit. On the other hand, humans are fantastic at learning related stuff.
If you can convince your brain that using one piece of information will be useful, you’ve got a high chance of retaining it. To go back to the language example; if you use the language, you’ll be able to retain and access that memory better than if you spend hours a day on flashcards.
Interleaving extrapolates this because you’re using your new knowledge from one field in order to immediately use it to learn something else.
It’s also somewhat analogous to supersets at the gym; you’re giving your brain a rest from one particular subject but not letting it rest completely.
How To Incorporate Interleaving?
This will depend on what your schedule looks like, what subject you’re learning and what your goals are. Essentially though, and keeping with the language example, you might have a current 3 hour schedule daily:
1: Grammar
2: Vocabulary
3: Whatever you’re learning the language for (let’s say it’s Japanese because you want to learn Judo)
Now, you probably think, “I’ll do one hour of 1, one hour of 2 and one hour of 3.”
You could do this, and your learning would look like a simple: 1, 2, 3.
Instead, break it up into twenty minute blocks and use the interleaving system, and you’ll get this:
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3
To take it a step further, you could randomise the sections a little:
1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2, 1
You can do this over multiple sessions in different ways and see what works, but ultimately you’re making your brain work harder at recognising context and randomising the memory recall.
Final Thoughts
Like the article I wrote on overlearning, this technique isn’t the be-all and end-all of learning. It’s simply a little system that’ll help you get more out of the studying time you’re already taking.
90% of learning anything is turning up, opening a high quality book and putting the hours in. But if you’re going 90% of the way, you might as well get the extra ten percent while you’re there.
Hopefully, this’ll help.