Mental Shortcuts

Notes

Mental shortcuts are ways for us to remember, learn and understand ideas quicker. Usually, this refers to analogies, that allows us to use what we've already learned to learn a new thing, to transfer it from one field to another, and thus reduce Friction while learning. Mental Representations

Therefore, mental shortcuts reduce the Upfront costs when learning something new because we leverage existing knowledge in our favor. It weakens the idea that learning should be hard, because if we had to relearn everything from scratch every time we would know very little because each learning session would be very taxing.

Analogies relay somewhat on a type of Systematical Thinking. We expose the similarities between two supposably unrelated fields by uncovering the similar mechanisms that drives them.

Some would say that the meaning of Mastery is to have good mental shortcuts, that they are the explicit expression of our Intuition. After all, to be competent in a field means that we are able to distill it's essence into an idea that could be easily understood and used in different situations.

The more we expose ourselves to a Range of different fields, the easier it would be for us to create useful mental shortcuts.

Visual

Overview

🔼Topic:: Memory, Attention and cognitive load (MOC) 🔼Topic:: Learning (MOC) ◀Origin:: 🔗Link::