How to learn fastest: 10 ways to soak up all information in a short time

Imagine this: finals week is around the corner, and all your study sessions have ended up being doomscrolling sessions instead.

Now you’re staring at your notes, panicking as time ticks away. But don’t worry — miracles can happen, and we’re not talking about your exams getting cancelled.

We’re here with tips on how to learn fastest to soak up all the information you need to pass, or maybe even ace, your exams.

The amount of information the brain can store is not infinite, but it is large enough that its storage capacity won’t limit you. The average person processes as much as 74 gigabytes of information per day, which does not sound like much but is more than enough for you to learn new things and store them in your brain.

Learning is not only about gaining knowledge but also about the development of societies, the success of organisations, and our pursuit of happiness. Source: AFP

However, a 2019 study claims that faster is not necessarily better when it comes to learning in an educational sense.

Parisa Rouhani, vice president and co-founder of the think tank Populace, found no meaningful relationship between time and performance. Instead, what matters during a learning process is mastery.

When students are allowed to take their time to master a subject, they perform better. However, with most universities limiting a semester to three to four months, everything needs to be done quickly, especially if there is an exam or project due.

This leads to cramming, a practice that most students implement when studying.

The Indiana University of Pennsylvania found that 99% of their students cram for tests or assignments; nearly half of them even plan to cram everything they’ve studied last minute for their spring-semester finals.

However, cramming is not the answer. Dr. Robert Bjork, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, states that cramming does not provide long-term learning.

“Cramming can have pretty dramatic effects on the exam,” says Dr. Bjork. “Students get an impression that it really works, but it just works in the short term. It’s accompanied by a dramatic forgetting rate after that.”

Although we would argue that learning is more about the process than the destination, learning something faster can be beneficial on certain occasions.

For example, in a working environment, professionals who learn quickly tend to be more productive. This is because they can adapt to new situations faster and more efficiently. Soaking up information hastily also lets your subconscious make quick decisions which is especially useful during emergencies.

If that is the case, here are some methods on how to learn fastest that you can follow in our list below.

10 ways as to how to learn fastest and most efficiently

There are many methods of note-taking, such as the Cornell Method or making mind maps. Source: AFP

Get enough sleep

The most basic step on how to learn fastest is also the most important.

The less sleep you’re getting, the less information your brain retains. Your brain churns information into memory while you sleep and then stores it.

Statistics show that approximately 70% of college students get under eight hours of sleep per night, and students who sleep less than six hours a night have a lower GPA. If you find yourself falling into these categories, then it’s time to fix your sleep schedule — check out our handy guide here.

Effective note-taking

Nothing will transfer to memory if you passively take notes: copying the text in reading material, transcribing your lecturer word for word, or pasting what’s precisely on the slide down to paper. 

Engaging with your material actively, such as going back to what you have written and reviewing the materials frequently, is the most important step to absorbing the information quickly.

There are many note-taking methods, but the one you should use is simply what works for you.

Think about what is most efficient, what you find helps retain the information best, and what makes you want to go back and review. Notes can be doused in colour or plain as you like, so long as it’s effective.

Some commonly used styles are the Cornell method, the outline method, or the mind mapping method.

Whenever you’re feeling stuck, a mentor is someone you can consult with to overcome academic challenges, as well as personal. Source: AFP

Getting a mentor

Mentorships may not centre tutoring itself, but your personal mentor can help you build a foundation of academic guidance that sets you up for success. 

This Reddit user shared his experience of having a mentor who helped him overcome a case of poor grades and difficulty studying. The mentor had made the user take a memory test, found no issues, and instead pointed out a case of low self-esteem.

“Then he gave me an idea on how to organise my time and a few rules to follow in order to stay focused. It has been eight years since then and sometimes I re-use his advice,” they wrote.

Through academic mentorships, you can have someone guide you on time management, goal-setting, optimising study techniques, and figuring out how to learn the fastest and most effectively for you. Everyone learns differently, so having a personal mentor will give you the support you need to figure out what method is best for you.

Active recall

As opposed to being fed constant information, “active recall” speeds up your learning by challenging you to remember the information on your own. Instead of just reading for hours, the method of active recall helps your brain retrieve the information and distinguishes it from others.

One classic way of doing this is through flashcards. Other methods include teaching the information to someone, generating your own exam questions while taking notes for review later, or attempting a past paper.

Spaced repetition 

“Learning in short bursts over time and repeatedly testing yourself on what you’ve learned is much more effective for long-term recall than cramming,” writes NEJM Knowledge+ on spaced repetition. 

This method works by reviewing chunks of your material over time, as opposed to cramming it all in one day.

Often used in tandem with active recall, you can start by testing yourself on what you’ve learned a week after the first session, then increase the period in between reviews as time goes on.

Testing yourself is more effective in transferring information to long-term memory. Source: AFP

Reading out loud

Another method of active engagement is reading your text out loud. This helps enhance your focus since you’re trained on what you’re vocalising, as opposed to getting distracted by external surroundings.

“Speaking text aloud helps to get words into long-term memory, which is called the ‘production effect,'” writes the Alzheimer’s Research & Prevention Foundation. “The study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory.”

Case studies

Learning truly begins with understanding. You won’t understand much if you simply scan the textbook and flip the page, and that’s where case studies come in.

It’s an experiential form of learning where you’re using hypothetical or real-life scenarios to better grasp a theoretical concept and how it works. It’s similar to project-based learning, a teaching method whereby students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.

Case studies are effective because they get you to actively engage with a new concept, not just by applying it to a real-world problem, but later reviewing, reflecting on, and discussing it with your peers, going back and forth with ideas on possible outcomes. It helps you develop your ability to think critically about a particular concept.

Many business schools, like the Harvard Business School, heavily utilise case studies. It’s used in their MBA programmes as it allows students to digest management fundamentals through the lens of a real-world issue as opposed to a blurt of a lecture.

Field trips incorporate learning, fun, and exercise in one experience. Source: AFP

Field trips

Learning comes best when it’s also fun (or just physically intensive, over long periods). Academic field trips are effective for learning because concepts are delivered in real-time and real life.

By association, those concepts can stick to your memory better.

Many colleges offer study field trips within the country and abroad. Not only do you get to experience new concepts first-hand, but it also takes you out of the comfort zone of using textbooks, videos, and lectures to absorb information.

The University of Malaya — the number one university in Malaysia — offers study field trips to its students as a form of hands-on learning. The location you’re visiting relates to the class material, and it’s a method they use to immerse students in a particular culture.

Linking information

The linking method is a well-known technique for memorisation, where you take the information you’ve learnt in class and apply it to something you already know and understand.

This includes translating the information into your own words — which is why it’s important not to transcribe your note-taking word-for-word — or applying it to real-world imagery or scenarios so that it’s easy to visualise the concept in your head. 

“Say you are trying to memorise the fact that water at sea level boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and 212 happens to be the first three digits of your best friend’s phone number. Link these two by imagining throwing your phone into a boiling ocean,” the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill writes. “It’s a crazy link but it can help that fact to stick.”

The best college curriculums practice learning by doing, which includes taking on lots of hands-on projects. Source: AFP

Project-based learning

Project-based learning helps you confront the depth of theoretical knowledge and utilise it through hands-on practice. That process of actively learning is what helps the information stick — because you understand it better.

Universities like the Worcester Polytechnic Institute incorporate this method into their curriculums because it develops a wide set of skills besides knowledge: collaboration, communication, leadership, and more.

“The educational value of project-based learning is that it aims to build students’ creative capacity to work through ill-structured problems, commonly in small teams,” writes Boston University. This process involves identifying a problem, deriving a solution, designing a prototype, and testing for results.