数字时代的学习挑战：为何学习需要更多的努力

原文：https://giansegato.com/essays/edutainment-is-not-learning

这篇文章讨论了作者从过度消费数字内容到意识到学习必须是有意识、付出努力的过程的心路历程。最初，作者沉浸在各种数字内容中，包括TED演讲、专业播客、Hacker News上的博客文章和Twitter上分享的电子书。然而，作者逐渐发现，虽然他花了大量时间吸收信息，但他却无法保留大部分内容，记忆就像一个漏斗。他认识到问题在于他对学习的看法以及他的学习方式。他意识到学习是将信息消化成持久知识的过程，而这两者是不同的。他发现学习必须付出努力，而 passively 累积信息并不能实现学习。

作者深入探讨了学习的神经科学基础，指出了大脑中的神经元和髓鞘之间的关系，以及髓鞘对信息传输的重要性。他解释了如何通过使用新的大脑区域来生成更多的髓鞘，从而改善学习能力。然后，他强调了学习必须与身体活动相结合，因为它能够提供与知识相关的额外线索，例如通过手写笔记来加强记忆。

文章还讨论了数字时代的学习和信息过剩，提出了一种名为“学习收件箱”的实用工具，用于区分学习和娱乐内容。作者认为，我们需要积极参与我们遇到的内容，以实现长期吸收和学习。最后，文章强调了积极参与各种内容和创造的重要性，以实现有意义的成长。

总的来说，这篇文章强调了学习必须是有意识和付出努力的过程，而 passively 消费数字内容并不等同于真正的学习。它提醒我们在数字时代如何更有效地学习，并强调了积极参与和创造的重要性。

Before I got into productivity and performance, I used to spend many hours online ingesting vast troves of digital content. My information diet ranged from inspirational TED talks to specialized podcasts, from blog posts found on Hacker News to ebooks shared on Twitter.

I’m deeply curious, and I gave in to new content as much as I could. What could be the harm?—I thought. I loved spending my time this way. It felt useful, it was fun, and it nurtured my self-image as a “smart guy” — all at the same time. Truly, a learning hack.

在我开始关注生产力和表现之前，我过去花了很多时间在线消费大量的数字内容。我的信息饮食范围从鼓舞人心的TED演讲到专业的播客，从在Hacker News上找到的博客文章到在Twitter上分享的电子书。

我充满好奇心，尽量吸收新的内容。我想，这会有什么害处呢？—我曾这样想过。我喜欢用这种方式度过我的时间。它感觉很有用，很有趣，也滋养了我作为“聪明人”的自我形象——同时兼而有之。实际上，这是一种学习技巧。

Turns out I wasn’t hacking anything: The learning wasn’t real.

这样的学习是自欺欺人。

A few months ago, doubts began to creep into my mind about the effectiveness of my habits.

几个月前，我开始对我的（学习）习惯的有效性产生怀疑.

While I’d amped up my information consumption, I wasn’t retaining most of it. My memory was behaving like a leaky bucket. Sure, I was spending tens of hours listening to politics on the radio. But when I tried to use any of those points in a conversation, I found that I didn’t actually know enough to make a coherent argument. I knew the surrounding context, but the moment I needed to get specific my argument would crumble. Same for many other topics: the more technical they were, the less retention I had.

虽然我增加了信息消费，但我并没有保留大部分信息。我的记忆就像一个漏水的桶一样。当我试图在对话中使用其中的任何观点时，我发现我实际上不知道足够多，无法进行连贯的论证。我知道信息的上下文，但当我需要具体说明时，我的论点就会崩溃。对于许多其他主题也是如此：技术性越强，我保留的越少。

Where did all that information go?

The problem lied in how I was seeing learning, and therefore how I was approaching it.

所有那些信息都去哪了？

问题在于我如何看待学习，以及因此我如何对待学习。

Learning is what turns information consumption into long-lasting knowledge. The two things are different: while information is ephemeral, true knowledge is foundational. If knowledge were a person, information would be its picture.

学习是将信息消耗转化为持久知识的过程。这两者是不同的：

信息是短暂的，而真正的知识是基础的。如果知识是一个人，信息就是他的图片。

It’s easy to think of learning in accretive, cumulative terms: if I stack up enough information, it will eventually turn into knowledge. We tend to judge the world in material terms, and if data were tangible, an indefinitely growing memory might be reasonable to assume. The more information I consume, the more information I store, the information data I can later retrieve. The more business newsletters I’ll read, the more I’ll know business.

However, this line of thinking wasn’t really applicable to my case: I was undoubtedly consuming many business newsletters each week, but that wasn’t translating into long-term business knowledge.

然而，这种思维方式并不适用于我的情况：毫无疑问，我每周确实消耗了许多商业新闻通讯，但这并没有转化为长期的商业知识。

I spent the last eight months trying to find an answer to this riddle. It took me deep into the topic of meta-learning: How do humans learn? And how can we learn better in the digital information age?

Learning must be effortful 学习必须是费力的

Unfortunately for us, human memory does not resemble storage, and “passive accumulation” isn’t how learning happens.

The truth is that we retain information only when we put serious effort into the process of learning. The intrinsic effortfulness of learning is not just a byproduct of the core activity, like shortness of breath during running. On the contrary: it’s what actually enablesit. The relationship is causal.

I didn’t find a learning hack to avoid effort because there’s no such thing as easy learning: learning *must* be effortful in order for it to happen.

我并没有找到一种避免努力的学习技巧，因为根本不存在容易的学习：学习必须是费力的，才能发生。

What surprised me the most is that learning is far more grounded in the physical world than I was comfortable admitting.

学习深入地扎根于物质世界。

The most literal meaning of effort is physical effort (think of weight lifting at the gym). The same holds true with information retention: it works best when the process of assimilating it is physically effortful. Our memory shines when our learning is physical, visceral, and obvious, like the aching in your hands after a morning spent hand-writing.

Since they’re passive, easy, and exclusively digital, after this realization all my podcasts, e-books, audiobooks, newsletters, blog posts, videos, live webinars were suddenly deprived of their “learning status”. Instead, they assumed their proper place in my schedule as pure entertainment activities.

The fact of the matter is that digital products make it uniquely easy to trick yourself into thinking that you’re learning when you are actually being entertained.

事实是，数字产品独特地使您能够欺骗自己，认为您正在学习，而实际上您正在娱乐自己。

What I still didn’t know was why our mind works like this. Is this just the current state of digital learning and teaching, or there’s actually a margin for easy learning to be found somewhere?

The neurology of learning 学习的神经学

I’m no expert in medicine, let alone neurology, but I did want to roughly understand what happens when we — as humans — create knowledge. Luckily I didn’t need profound medical expertise to get the gist of the matter.

Our brain is made of a web of interconnected neurons. The links between these neurons are called axons: long, slender projections of nerve fibers that transmit electrical impulses.

Around these axons, there’s an insulating membrane called myelin. It covers many neuronal axons and facilitates the propagation of electrical signals along neuronal circuits. The more myelin around an axon, the stronger and more connected the signal transmission will be.

Myelin is to neural transmissions as oxygen is to fire. It allows rapid information transfer over long distances, and it greatly increases the speed of propagation of electric signals in our brain.

See it as water flowing through a pipe with dynamic, changing capacity. Pipes with greater capacity can move more water, more quickly than a small pipe or a slow drip. The more myelin supporting a neural connection, the easier it is to use that connection — and thus to use the skill or remember the topic associated with that connection

A key aspect of myelin is that it’s highly dynamic. It’s an integral component of our brain plasticity. So the question becomes: how is myelin generated, and why?

When we come across a new topic, new regions of the brain start activating. The more we use those new regions, the more myelin is synthesized, the easier that topic (or activity) gets.

We all know the old saying practice makes perfect. The more we use a certain region of our brain, the more our brain “prioritizes” and “hones” it. That is what leads to myelin: activity induces myelination, which leads to increased strength of connectivity and efficiency along those very neurons. It’s a self-reinforcing process.

我们都知道那句老话，熟能生巧。我们越多地使用大脑的某个区域，我们的大脑就会“优先考虑”和“磨练”它。这就是髓鞘的形成：活动引发髓化，髓化增加了与那些神经元沿着那些神经元的连接的强度和效率。这是一个自我强化的过程。

In other words, it compounds.

换句话说，它是复利的。

See now why it’s so hard to learn? To learn anything we must make active use of unexplored regions of our brain before they’re ready. It’s, quite literally, getting out of the comfort zone. The more we use them, the more they get better. Learning is *structurally* hard.

学习是一项具有挑战性和困难的任务。这意味着学习不是一件轻松的事情，而是需要认真思考、努力付出和深入理解的过程。学习涉及到大脑的复杂结构和机制，需要克服困难、挑战自己，才能真正地获取新知识和技能。

The truly mesmerizing thing about myelination is that it is correlated with active use of motor neurons. It looks like human cognition is fundamentally grounded in sensory-motor processes: we retain information better when we associate some physical activity to it. The general intuition is that movement provides additional cues we can use to retrieve knowledge.

一般的直觉是，运动提供了额外的线索，我们可以用来检索知识。

We can see this effect happening when we take notes. A larger corpus of research is suggesting that taking notes physically — that is, by hand-writing them — is far more effective than using a laptop. Keyboarding does not provide tactile feedback to the brain that the contact between pencil and paper does: this contact, this raw feedback, is the key to creating the neurocircuitry in the hand-brain complex, that evidence shows supports memory and retention.

All of this means we need to radically reassess digital learning. We haven’t evolved to store information by passively watching Masterclass videos: that’s just not how our minds work.

我们需要彻底重新评估数字学习。我们并没有进化成通过被动观看大师课程视频来存储信息：这不是我们的大脑运作方式。

However, the other side of this coin is that we’re living in times of unprecedented information surplus. This is an opportunity that we should learn to seize.

然而，这个问题的另一面是，我们生活在信息过剩的时代。这是一个我们应该学会抓住的机会。

Creative learning in a digital world 数字世界中的创造性学习

The best way to describe my information diet before discovering that effort is instrumental to learning would be edutainment.

在发现努力对学习至关重要之前，我对信息饮食的最佳描述是“edutainment”。

Edutainment mixes education topics with entertainment methodologies. Even if edutainment optimizes for passive attention instead of effortful engagement (the opposite of learning), it’s not just “mere fun.” Deleting Twitter and unsubscribing from newsletters, as suggested by Deep Work advocates like Cal Newport, can actually end up preventing learning.

I see edutainment as preparation for learning: it’s a powerful explorative tool that can provide ideas and motivation to learn. And yet, it’s also not learning itself, in the same way as buying running shoes is not running.

我认为edutainment是学习的准备：它是一种强大的探索工具，可以提供学习的想法和动力。然而，它本身也不是学习，就像购买跑鞋不等于跑步一样。

Within this framework, “mindless” browsing online can be transformed into scouting for learning opportunities. It’s yet another searching problem where it’s key to balance the exploration of new opportunities with the commitment to the existing ones — a topic I wrote about at length in another essay. It’s about balancing the time spent “scouting” for interesting topics online with the offline effort needed for long-term retention and integration.

Pragmatically, I solved this trade-off with a powerful tool: a learning inbox.

A learning inbox is a to-do list for stuff I’d like to actually learn. I picked up the idea from Andy Matuschak — legendary ed-tech expert —, who used a similar concept as a tool for capturing possibly-useful references. The learning inbox is a system that forces me to be mindful about what content is learning, and what is at the end of the day just entertainment.

Everything interesting I find on my way is sent to my learning inbox and from there gets triaged, be it a paper, an online essay, a blog post, a YouTube video, or a podcast. When an item ends up in there, there are three things that can happen: I either decide to actively engage with it, to file for future interest, or just trash it. Active engagement is exactly what it sounds like: I need to take effortful action to consume the content in the list, otherwise I automatically bucket it as entertainment.

In other words, I need to do something with it. To create something. Write a blog post about it, use it in a new project, test it on the field, teach it at a meetup. That’s why I speak at many conferences: it’s a learning tool.

换句话说，我需要做点什么。创造点东西。写一篇博客文章，用在新项目中，实地测试它，在聚会上教授它。这就是为什么我在很多会议上发言：这是一种学习工具。

In GTD fashion, permanence in this list is temporary. It’s a release valve, not a procrastination tool.

For example, I recently came across a tweet during the last Election day mentioning a video about computational democracy. I’m extremely interested in the intersection between politics and data, so I sent the link to my learning inbox (a task on Things 3) – and then promptly forgot about it.

A few days later, during one of my ritual learning sprints, I took out my notepad and watched the whole video while taking handwritten notes. I then reviewed and transcribed what I had jotted down to an evergreen digital note in my personal knowledge base. The whole process took twice as long as watching the video, and it’s not even a done deal: I would still need some kind of experimentation, tinkering, iteration, application in different contexts, and generally something more hands-on than just note-taking to significantly solidify my knowledge on the topic. That’s what learning takes.

The process takes a lot of time and effort, which means it’s not something I can afford to do with every piece of content I find online. Most of the time I trash the links I find, upon further review. Sometimes they end up in my learning wish list.

这个过程需要大量的时间和努力，这意味着我不能承担对我在网上找到的每一篇内容都这样做的负担。大多数时候，我会在进一步审查后删除我找到的链接。有时它们最终会出现在我的学习愿望清单上。

The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I *learn*. When I consume I just *relax*.

核心思想是我尽力不要欺骗自己：当我与某个内容的互动是积极和费力的时候，那就是学习，当它是被动的时候，那就是娱乐。当我创造时，我学习。当我消费时，我只是放松。

Bottom line: we need to engage with what we encounter if we wish to absorb it long term. In a smartphone-driven society, real engagement, beyond the share or like or retweet, got fundamentally difficult – or, put another way, not engaging got fundamentally easier. Passive browsing is addictive: the whole information supply chain is optimized for time spent in-app, not for retention and proactivity.

Luckily, the other side of the coin is that finding new topics and new reasons to learn got dramatically easier, with such an abundance of content and stimuli.

We just need to be proactive with how we engage with all of the streams of content available to us. To go out and build, write, talk, teach, explain, create — effortful actions, that lead to meaningful growth.

我们只需要积极主动地处理我们可以获得的所有内容流。去创造、写作、交流、教授、解释、创造——这些都是费力的行动，可以带来有意义的成长。

That’s for sure what I’m going to do.