About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory. It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.
One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material. He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.
That phrase stuck with me ever since. It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks. It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy. That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines. There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.
That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school. If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful. An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore. In law school, the teachers often required us to read long cases (some of these were 30 to 50 pages long) in order to learn a individual legal principles. The cases were oftentimes superfluous factual illustrations of those simple principals. Unfortunately, much of the material contained in many of the judicial opinions did not concern the principle being studied. Rather, judicial opinions often spend a lot of time setting forth a tangentially relevant complex fact situation and, oftentimes, an equally complex and tangentially relevant procedural history. Many of the times we did this (though, admittedly, not every time), it was for the purpose of learning a single legal principle that could be articulated effectively in less than a minute.
Once I learned what to ignore, I could skim the parts of the case that didn’t concern the important legal principle. Instead, I could focus my time on the relevant facts and procedure.
In my experience, many disciplines of study are very much like the study of law in this respect. Most of the time, I approach the learning of new fields through reading. Authors are not equally gifted, however. There are authors who spend a lot of time getting to the point and there are others who get right to it. The first point in learning a new field through reading, then, is learning what authors to ignore.
My second strategy is one that I employ once I identify the quality authors. The trick is to never read a book without studying the table of contents. It only takes a minute or two to review the table of contents and the payoff is terrific. The table of contents constitutes a frame that highlights the relevant material from each chapter. When I ignore the table of contents, I often find myself falling adrift while reading a book. When I don’t first review the table of contents, I find that I’m trying to pay attention to everything, which causes memory overload-I drown in an unrelenting river of facts.
When I do take a few minutes to first study the table of contents, certain aspects of the text “light up.” Reading a book without studying the table of contents is like driving somewhere without first studying a map. You’ll eventually get there, but you’ll waste valuable minutes of your life doing so.
Now that I am a practicing attorney, I still find it important to know what to ignore. I also keep this in mind when I am trying to persuade others. When I am presenting a case to a judge or a jury, I always start out by presenting my argument in the form of a story. Stories are like all other types of models. They highlight certain aspects of reality at the expense of others. In other words, they help the listener know what to ignore (and what to notice).
I’m not suggesting that it’s easy to come up with an effective story to highlight the important parts of one’s arguments. When we are preparing for oral argument, my co-workers and I often spend many hours honing our story. To do it right, there is no substitute for spending lots of time at it. Once you lock into an effective story though (a process involving lots of trial and error, combined with serendipity), the story does much of the work for us. Our audience will be much more attentive to the parts of our argument that we find important. Equally, our audience (when we’re successful) will ignore the parts of our opponents arguments that are inconsistent with our story. All of this is yet another way of commenting on the power of the confirmation bias. [1]
So ignore this story at your peril.
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