The Feynman Technique
Have you ever thought you knew something well, but when you tried to explain it to someone else you realized that you really didn’t understand it?
That happens to me all the time. it occurred to me that I engage in two types of learning - shallow learning and deep learning.
Shallow learning is reading for entertainment. I can skim a book quickly and pick up the main idea of the book. At the entertainment level, I enjoy the book and even get good feelings from it. But, feeling isn’t thinking. When I try to write an explanation or a review of the book, I realize that I’m unable to put it into words. That’s either an insufficient vocabulary or an insufficient understanding. I think it’s the latter.
Maybe there’s another type of learning we could call ego learning. I read a book so I can say smugly, “Oh yeah, I’ve read that book.”
I’m learning about deep learning as I prepare a book review of Richard Rohr’s beautiful book, Falling Upward. I’ve read the book several times and always get a warm feeling from it. As I write my review and prepare for an in-person presentation in a couple of weeks, I’m realizing that I don’t understand it at a deep level. I enjoy the feeling that I get from the book, but I haven’t done the hard work yet to get into deep learning.
This has led me to the Feynman Technique. Richard Feynman was a world-renowned and widely successful theoretical physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965. He was a brilliant guy.
Feynman developed his own personal method for deep learning and internalizing topics. Now known as the Feynman technique, it’s a simple process, containing 4 repeatable steps:
Choose a topic and start studying.
Teach it to someone else. It’s best to teach it to a real person rather than an imaginary one because you can get feedback on what’s not clear. Questions from your audience are a great aid to deep learning. Welcome the questions and regard them as teachers.
Fill in the gaps. Step two will uncover some holes in your understanding of the subject. Go back to the source and go deeper.
Simplify. Cut away the verbal clutter and impressive words. Explain it so that even a young child with a limited vocabulary can understand it. Explaining something to a child is a great aid to deep learning because children don’t hesitate to ask why.
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” – Albert Einstein
One of the ways I apply the Feynman Technique in my presentation preparation is to imagine that person in the audience who asks a question to show off their knowledge of the topic. They usually preface their question with a speech. Their question is a cleverly disguised rebuttal to my ideas. I become my own antagonist in my imagination. This imaginary person becomes my teacher and prepares me for when the real person shows up.
Deep learning is a term associated with artificial intelligence. Learning, like many other aspects of our life, is being delegated to technology. That might be efficient, but not effective in improving the quality of our lives. We can end up snorkeling through life instead going into the unexplored depths.
We come into the world on a ten-lane super highway with no speed limits. We’re filled with curiosity, wonder, and questions. We race down that highway ignoring the off-ramps that lead us to exploration and new learning experiences. As we grow old, too many of us end up at a rest stop filled with answers and opinions, most of them wrong.
We create our lives with the questions we ask. Take more off-ramps. Ask more questions.