Our working memory is limited. Our eye movement is limited. Our multitasking ability is very limited. Even the ability to generate associations is limited. We invest a lot of effort into improving our performance in each skill, but we often forget to improve our capabilities when using all of these skills together.
Anna has many names for this cycle. Here I call it: Prepare-Read-Analyze. It is important that the steps follow each other always in the same order and are never performed at the same time.
- Prepare. During the preparation stage the superlearner ask himself: what will I learn right now? This enables the brain to encode only the difference between the expected result and the actual text.
- Read. During the reading stage the superlearner tries to get passively as much information as possible, limited by the eyes’ viewing angle.
- Analyze. During the eye saccade motion or after the paragraph the brain tries to encode the new information. During the encoding process the brain automatically generates expectations, which in turn starts the next brain cycle.
The students are taught to repeat the cycle at many levels: the whole book/article, each section, each paragraph, each sentence. The smaller the granularity, the less time goes into preparation and analysis, until they become as fast as eye motion.
Many of our students, even the students who read fast, cannot fully separate between the stages. The content gets mixed between various saccades, expectations fully contaminate the new data, analysis is skipped… We urge our students do be diligent and pedantic with their prepare-read-analyze cycle, or they may never reach their superlearning potential!
