The things on the previous page are a big part of the solution, and they’re all things that have been proven to help your brain work in your favor. The faster way is to do anything that increases brain activity, especially different types of brain activity. With enough repetition, your brain says, “This doesn’t feel important, but they keep looking at the same thing over and over and over, so I suppose it must be.”
You obviously know that you are able to learn and remember even the dullest of topics if you keep pounding the same thing into your brain. There’s the slow, tedious way, or the faster, more effective way. So just how DO you get your brain to treat Git like it’s a hungry tiger? We’re talking emotions like surprise, curiosity, fun, “what the.?” and the feeling of “I rule!” that comes when you solve a puzzle, learn something everybody else thinks is hard, or realize you know something that “I’m more technical than thou” Bob from engineering doesn’t. No, we’re not talking heart-wrenching stories about a kid and a dog. We now know that your ability to remember something is largely dependent on its emotional content. Your brain will learn much more quickly if it’s not. Learning a new, tough, technical topic doesn’t have to be boring. Your brain pays attention to things that are out of the ordinary, interesting, strange, eye-catching, unexpected. We’ve all had the “I really want to learn this but I can’t stay awake past page one” experience. And for that, you need challenges, exercises, and thought-provoking questions, and activities that involve both sides of the brain and multiple senses. A reader has to be motivated, engaged, curious, and inspired to solve problems, draw conclusions, and generate new knowledge. Unless you actively flex your neurons, nothing much happens in your head. Which would you pay more attention to: a stimulating dinner party companion, or a lecture? In recent studies, students performed up to 40% better on post-learning tests if the content spoke directly to the reader, using a first-person, conversational style rather than taking a formal tone. Use a conversational and personalized style. Put the words within or near the graphics they relate to, rather than on the bottom or on another page, and learners will be up to twice as likely to be able to solve problems related to the content. They also make things more understandable. Images are far more memorable than words alone, and make learning much more effective (up to 89% improvement in recall and transfer studies). Some of the Head First learning principles: Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. It’s not about pushing facts into your head. So what does it take to learn something? First you have to get it, then make sure you don’t forget it. We think of a “Head First” reader as a learner.
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