Learning is all about simplification

Learning is all about simplification.

Fiona McPherson

The meaning of the quote

A student highlights every third line of a textbook chapter in yellow. Two weeks later, she opens the book to study for the test and finds a wall of yellow. Nothing stands out, because she never chose what mattered. She just copied the whole page in a different color.

That’s what happens when you skip the step this quote is pointing at. Fiona McPherson, a cognitive psychologist, wrote this line in her book Effective Notetaking. Her argument is that a page of notes that just repeats the textbook, word for word, hasn’t taught you anything. You’ve moved information from one page to another without touching it. Real learning starts the moment you take a messy, complicated idea and boil it down into something smaller and clearer than what you started with.

Her books focus on study skills, and this one is aimed squarely at students who take notes but don’t remember what they wrote. Her research-backed point is that notetaking only works when you paraphrase, organize and make sense of information as you go, rather than transcribing it. Copying is easy because it asks nothing of your brain. Simplifying is hard because it forces you to understand something well enough to say it in fewer words.

Here’s the test that separates the two. If someone hands you a paragraph and asks you to shorten it, you have two options. You can delete random sentences and hope the meaning survives. Or you can read the whole thing, work out what it’s actually saying, and rebuild it from scratch in your own words. Only the second one is simplification. The first is just cutting.

Richard Feynman, the physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, built an entire study method around this idea. It’s now called the Feynman Technique, and it works in 4 steps. Pick a concept. Write out an explanation of it in plain language, as if you’re teaching it to a kid who has never heard of it. Find the spots where you get stuck, or where you slip into jargon because you can’t find a simple word. Go back to your source material, fix the gap, and simplify your explanation again.

Those stuck spots are the whole point. They show you exactly where your understanding runs out, not where the topic is hard.

Try it with something you learned in school last week. Photosynthesis. The French Revolution. Supply and demand. Set a timer for two minutes and explain it out loud, as if you’re talking to your little cousin who’s nine years old. No jargon allowed. If you catch yourself saying “it’s basically a process where,” stop. That word “basically” is often hiding the fact that you don’t actually know what happens next. That’s not a failure. That’s the exercise working. Go look up the part you got stuck on, and try again.

This is also why the best teachers can explain their subject in a dozen different ways, at a dozen different levels, and the worst ones can only recite the textbook. A teacher who has genuinely simplified an idea can rebuild it in any shape you need. A teacher who has only memorized the idea can only hand it back exactly as they received it. If you ask a follow-up question, they repeat themselves louder.

The habit works past school too. When you can explain your job to your grandmother in two sentences, you understand your job. When you can explain your argument to someone who disagrees with you, in language they’d actually accept, you understand your own position. When you can’t, that’s not because they’re not smart enough to get it. It’s because you’re still carrying around someone else’s version of the idea instead of your own.

Exercise:

Turn one page of notes into 5 sentences

1. Grab a page of notes, a textbook chapter, or an article you’ve already read
   Cover it up. Write down everything you remember, in your own words, without looking. Don’t worry about getting it perfect.
2. Now uncover the source and compare
   Circle whatever you missed, and circle any spot where you used a word from the text instead of your own word. Those circles are your gaps. That’s what actual studying looks like, not re-reading the same page for the fourth time.
3. Take your rewrite and cut it down again, to five sentences that capture the core of it
   If you can’t get it to five sentences, you haven’t finished simplifying yet.

Do this with one subject this week. Not all of them. One. Notice how much longer it takes than highlighting, and notice how much of it is still in your head a month from now.

About the author

Fiona McPherson earned her PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Otago in New Zealand, where her doctoral thesis examined memory for concepts and categories. Since finishing her doctorate, she has spent decades turning cognitive research into plain, usable advice through her books and her two long-running websites, mempowered.com and memory-key.com.

Her first book, The Memory Key, came out in New Zealand in 1999 and was later published in the United States and Germany, then republished in the UK as Perfect Memory Training. Effective Notetaking, where this quote comes from, is one of several study-skills workbooks she has written for students and teachers.

Her guiding idea, stated plainly on her own site, is that people stick with a study strategy when they understand why it works, not just what to do.

That belief shows up directly in this quote. McPherson isn’t handing readers a trick to memorize. She’s explaining the mechanism underneath every good study habit, so they know why paraphrasing beats copying and understand when to reach for it.

Resources

• Effective Notetaking by Fiona McPherson (Book)
• The Feynman Learning Technique (Article, Farnam Street)
• Mempowered — Fiona McPherson’s website on memory and learning