Focusing Your Unconscious Mind: Learn Hard Concepts Intuitively (And Forever)

what does "intuitively" mean?

Intuitive understanding - you're able to accept that concept as a fundamental truth

Now let’s start with what it means to understand some concepts intuitively. Basically, it means that you’re able to accept that concept as a fundamental truth without needing to justify it. So, basically, your brain is hardwired to process that concept as a fact. It’s like second nature.

For example, let me test your intuitive understanding of addition. Try adding two plus two. Bam! Didn’t even have to think about it, right? The answer is obviously five. So, your intuition probably carried you there. The answer was so obvious that you didn’t even have to question it; it’s just embedded in your thinking. And that’s very nice because you don’t have to second-guess yourself. Your brain understands it completely and is capable of reasoning with it. And for something like more complicated addition, it’s still pretty intuitive how to get to the answer.

You may not be able to compute it instantly, but the steps are clear and make sense to you because it’s also embedded in your thinking. But if something is unintuitive, that means your brain disagrees with it or goes against what you’ve learned previously, and you need to fix that. So, what if you don’t have that hard wiring? Then you need to rewire your brain to accept the concept as an absolute truth, and that’s the learning process. And it’s worth noting that there’s no actual magic here; ultimately, it’s up to your brain to do this rewiring. The best you can do is set your brain up for success by optimizing the information it receives and works with. So, let’s get into how you do that.

core principles

So, first, we’ll briefly touch on some core principles. These are overarching ideas that can help to understand the reasoning behind certain things in this method. So, first, you want to generate as many insights as possible. And insights are random thoughts to help you understand it more, like knowledge of the purpose of a particular step or a particular example that helps illustrate the concept. And mostly, you only gain insights from experience. So, this method will give you a lot of experience with the concept in different ways. Ultimately, you want to put your brain to work generating insights like an insight machine.

Another thing, you want to treat learning like problem-solving, and I’ll get more into this later. But your brain has an insane problem-solving capacity both in thinking and remembering, and you want to be able to take full advantage of that. Another thing, of course, you want to care about what you’re doing because caring helps for a lot of reasons. Overall, it’ll just make your life easier. If you don’t know how to, I’ll talk more about that later too. Another thing, understand small pieces at a time because if you try and take on too much at once, you’ll overwhelm yourself. So, break the concept down into small pieces if possible and then tackle those pieces one by one, also if possible.

Final thing: forget memorisation. And I feel like this is important to mention: this method is not memorisation, far from it. This is rewiring your brain to accept this concept as an absolute truth. Memorisation is short term, but this is forever. So if you’re used to just memorising, get ready for a whole new level of understanding.