Multi-Modal Learning

By Leo Gura - October 2, 2024

Here’s a simple trick for learning better and deeper. Whenever you study a subject, especially if you’re reading a book, make a habit of supplementing your learning process with multiple modes of media, especially visual. Incorporate images, video, maps, photographs of important people, cultural elements, geography, etc. If you do this, your learning will become so much richer, more enjoyable, and you will retain the information for a lifetime rather than having it fly out of your head. Never just read a dry book.

Here’s an example of how I apply this:

When listening to an audio book about the history of the CIA, whenever an important person, event, or part of the world is mentioned, I pause and google for stuff like: photographs of the key historical people mentioned, maps of the country being talked about, major city locations, photographs of the geography of that country, photographs of the city, Wikipedia pages about important people, places, or events, and YouTube videos on any of the above. So when I’m reading about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan I pull up a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with all their major cities. I pull up photographs of Al Qaeda terrorists. I read their Wikipedia pages. I look at geography videos about Afghanistan. I read about Afghanistan culture. I watch videos about the Taliban. I pull of photographs of opium fields. I search for statistics like population size.

Of course this is time-consuming and you cannot do this for everything in a book, but it’s important to do it for the most important few items. This is what true learning involves. The old days of only learning by reading a dry book or consuming a single source or a single sensory mode are OVER. Now that we have YouTube, Wikipedia, Google images, Google maps, and AI, all of those tools must be used together when you’re learning anything new. You combine all those modalities and sources to gain a rich, comprehensive, multi-sensory, multi-perspectival grasp of any situation. This makes comprehension so much better and it makes you emotionally invested in what you’re learning, so that it’s beyond trivial facts. This sears images and meaning into your mind. If you learn to learn like this, it’s a game-changer. You will go from hating learning to loving learning. I think many people, as kids, never learned to love learning because they were not shown this process, and also because this process was impossible to do before the Internet and AI Age. But now nobody has that excuse.

AI is a huge new mode that must be added to any learning process. The function of AI is that you get to ask custom, highly specific questions about any aspect of the subject which you’re confused about. This effectively gives you access to a free private tutor. As you’re read, use AI to ask questions and clear up confusions. Just the process of asking AI will ingrain concepts and ideas into your long-term memory.

The key to life-long memory of things is making them relevant, meaningful, visual, emotional, and tying them into a larger purpose. Stop trying to memorize stuff, instead focus on making stuff relevant and meaningful to you. And one of the best ways to do that is by making it visual.

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