Do highly gifted geniuses have the need for repetition in order to grasp a topic, or do they already understand it by reading once?

Home - Quora Link

People who make it a hobby to learn a lot of things tend to go one or two ways with it. The first is exactly the way you describe. Techniques like spaced repetition, memory palaces, speed reading, are designed to improve speed of intake and duration of retention. There are advantages to doing it this way. The techniques are easily described and relatively simple to develop. It’s more into nerd than hobby territory though because information is easy to search for online and is getting easier and easier as more information makes its way there. But pre-Internet, if you wanted to be any kind of knowledge worker, then you needed to develop these skills.

The second way to go about it is to focus on integration. You start with your understanding of the world, and use every piece of information you receive affect that understanding as a whole. For an example, consider the field of history. First you learn the things you learn in school. For this American that was Columbus and the Indians, the Civil War and slavery, WW2 and Hitler. After I got out of school, I started reading books from the library, and eventually start filling in my knowledge gaps. I particularly remember picking up issues of Foreign Policy. I couldn’t really understand anything I was reading, but since I’ve been reading since I was a kid and never shied away from hard stuff, I persevered. Over the course of several years I developed a broad understanding of many topics from random books I’d pick up at the bookstore and read for a few hours.

In this way, you build up an elaborate, broad conception of the world as a whole, focused on a topic of interest that you happen to be considering right now. Foreign Policy made me aware of a community of people whose job it is to manage and influence the various governing bodies of the world and what that looks like, what those people think about.

And eventually, you start learning about how everything you learned in school is wrong, wrong to the point of being dangerous to repeat. Columbus wasn’t a nice guy and doesn’t deserve his place in the history books. Slavery loomed way bigger in the political consciousness of early America than we were taught. America played a much smaller role in the beating of Germany than we like to believe.

Once you’ve learned how to unlearn as easily as you have learned, your basic skill set is complete. You can forage for information, have discussions about virtually anything with anybody, and come away intellectually enriched by all of it.

And the advantage of this is that it requires no memorization at all if you’re doing it right. Once you read enough stuff, the whole web just ‘sticks’. You just know when something doesn’t ‘gel’ with the way the world really works, and because you actually did the work to understand the world at a broad level, you can use the discrepancies in anything you hear that didn’t gel to dig in.

One Quora answer I read recently talked about how the Ethiopian governing bodies lived in mobile camps that would travel all over the country, it was a fascinating window, not just into that part of the world, but it reminded me of how pre-modern societies used to work. Being in charge wasn’t fun. It was hard, it was interesting, and it was usually the most interesting thing anybody could be doing there, but the consequences of screwing up were severe. And your lifestyle was sorely limited by modern understanding. Only the king was allowed to have sex inside the main camp. And social totem poles ossified over thousands of years. You had a marginal chance to climb just one rung in your whole life. These camps held thousands of people and they governed over hundreds of thousands, each year they’d be in a different tribe’s land.

I provided the explication in the above paragraph from memory, some of the details will likely be wrong, like how often they rotated. What matters isn’t really the detail, but rather the significance. Read every new piece of information to teach you about a part of the world or history or an abstract topic in a reverse fashion. Not just adding, but correcting what you believed before.

Some rare people, like the wonderful Thierry Etienne Joseph Rotty, are phenomenal users of both methods. His job requires him to use the old skills of information processing that predominated before the Internet, as much of the information is still locked on paper, in libraries, in various languages. Quora is blessed to have him.

But to answer the question, if you need to keep something in mind, long term, without loss in accuracy or speed of recall, you need the tools of the former. If you want instant understanding of the things you learn, learn how to treat your understanding of the world as a fluid, flexible thing, constantly shifting according to everything you read. Then read a lot.