What metacognition/metacognitive knowledge and skills can you share?

To help remember something, write it on the roof of your mouth with your tongue. My mother had me do this when I had to memorize states and capitols in fifth grade. I aced the test.

There are techniques to expand your working memory, such as chunking and spaced repetition.

This might sound a bit simplistic, but try different things. Different people process info in different ways, and you'll never figure out what you don't know that you don't know if you don't consider different perspectives and techniques.

I have several teammates at work that process information better by having meetings and talking through various projects and concepts whereas I need to throw on headphones, become dead to the world, and focus to achieve my best state for thinking through things. I retain information better by typing or writing it out by hand, which I attribute to growing up with video games.

Your thinking is only as good as your writing

You can think without language, or senses. It's hard to perceive it, but when you talk inside your head, you are kinda "transcribing" that language-less thought.

A few things come to mind.

1. "Neurons that fire together wire together."
2. Stimulating neurons will enhance its connectivity. The more it gets stimulated, the more readily available it will be. This goes for conscious actions and non-conscious actions (Example: focusing on mathematics and reacting to violence). Imagination can be used to simulate reality, hence stimulate target neurons.
3. The most difficult neurons to target are those that expand your limits as it requires you to think about things you never knew you could think of, do things you never knew you could do, feel things you never knew you could feel, experience things that you never knew you could experience.

Source: My journey in attempts to recover from a brain injury.

Your brain is inconsistent, use external tools to stay focused on your core thoughts better. Pick some thoughts that you want to stick with long term, I choose metacognition as my primary default thought topic, then if I need to redirect from something unpleasant I switch to that thought track.

Metacognition is a marathon, there isn't one clear better methodology to improve everything about your thinking process, stay open and curious!

When during your life where you at peak learning rate?

Was it as school? Uni? If so, what did you do differently then? Can you still do it now?

I'll give few examples that honestly in retrospect are absolutely obvious and yet, few people seem to still do it :

• have a trusted teacher/mentor who can pinpoint your flaw
• do exercises that test your knowledge rather than read and assume you know
• repeat said exercises in with varying context and in increasing difficulty
• take notes (IMHO the biggest) that you gradually structure and index
• use said notes when exercises (which are safe spaces to challenge your understanding) gets tough
• have structured goals, namely you don't learn about a topic, move on randomly, but rather have 6 months over a topic
• learn regularly, e.g. weekly occurrence on a very specific topic, again and again for months on end
• last but not least, do it as a group, build, grow and sustain a network of helpful peers whom you are learning from but also helping

So... yeah, none of that is secret nor even complex yet most adults seems to leave THE place to learn and somehow forget EVERYTHING they actually learned. It's nuts.

Also most of that is free. Getting a notepad or a wiki or using documents in a directory on your computer is practically cheaper than a coffee in most places. There is no excuse to note take notes then organize them. Same for regularity and exercises, get a calendar then drill, again.

FWIW that works for pretty much everything, from an abstract field of knowledge, e.g. math, to a physical skill, e.g. welding or ice skating.

Thinking is attention directed at a thought, then at another thought, and so on. Thus a "train of thought".

This movement of attention is usually guided by habit, sometimes by reason, sometimes other ways.

Getting a better handle on your attention would naturally lead to getting a better handle on your thinking.

Watching HealthyGamerGG on yt

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn't help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it's good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn't have happened this way?

I find it's impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based "meditation"/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word "apple" or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

It can be useful to get worked up about things. Rather than dwell on something it can be cathartic to play into your emotions in the moment and let them release themselves, and practicing this allows you to do it internally with a straight face.

If you forgot something you were just thinking about a few minutes ago try thinking about what you were thinking about before that, it might activate the same train of thought. It's like thinking about what you were doing before you set your keys down rather than where you put your keys.

Throw it away and start again

Perhaps an obvious one, but reading books and other types of long form content does wonders for your ability to concentrate and stimulates your reasoning ability.

For me spaced repetition and writing things down help. When I had to take exams I would most my time making flash cards then only about an hour reviewing them in ready for anything.

Most things aren't very complex, if you divide them into small enough chunks. My niches are IT/audio/music. Many things in those can be initially offputting to newbies, but like 99% of what I know is not very hard in and of itself, it's just hard because you lack the context of other things that are related but separate from that thing of itself, and those things are not that hard either. Most of the time all attempts to explain it to you have been just bad and convoluted, trying to explain several things at once.

When learned some music theory, I was almost angry at how hard my previous teachers had made some simple things made them out to be Like you could had explained that in like two or three sentences and elaborated on that, I would had understood immediately.

And many things even in seemingly unrelated categories share a lot of concepts, or at least similarities. Once you are knowledgeable about few subjects, it is really easy to build upon that, and learn other things quick, if they have any common ground with it.

Especially when you learn to make useful oversimplifications/heuristic thinking that are good tool to get a grasp before you dive into properly understanding the nitty gritty. This is dangerous if you don't keep it in check, my manager seems to be only able to think this way, and doesn't properly understand anything. But it can act as a filtering layer when presented with too much information, or incomplete, low quality information. I have done technical support and most problems are fixed like this, hence the classic " have you tried turning it off and on" default scenario. If it doesn't work I actually engage my brain with it.

Thinking you are very smart, even if you are, is usually bad feature to build your personality around. Ofc it is good metacognitive skill to understand your strong features, and if intelligence seems to be one, more power to you. But smartness is just one thing, and you can't objectively evaluate it. Plenty of "smart" but not wise people fucking shit up as it is, and you will likely have better luck with people if you don't overindulge in this type of thinking.

I certainly have that, but have always also though thinking you are a fucking genious is counterproductive for ones learning and possibly social relationships, so I have tried to limit its hold of me, although not always successfully.

That being said, one last advice, most people are not very smart, and even if they are, they might be doing things out of external reasons, not internal. If you have at least modicum of intellect and lots of passion, it's not that hard to be better than the most with just the power of genuine interest and longetivity.

Getting hired based on that skill is another thing, but if you truly care about getting good at something, you will soon realize many people aren't even trying, at least on the standard for "trying" you have for yourself, and you will slowly but surely get better than them at that skill even if they are initially better. Not that it even matters as much to you as it does to them because you care about the thing itself more than their opinion.

While some things might need some natural ablities or benefit from them, most things can be learned with enough reps and continuous evaluation of your learning skills while at it.