What the Great Minds Had in Common

There's a flattering lie we tell about genius, which is that it's essentially a bigger hard drive. More facts in there, faster recall, better memory than the rest of us were issued with. Look closely at the actual lives, though, and that story doesn't hold up, because the pattern running through them isn't accumulation. It's connection.

Four people, one habit

Leonardo da Vinci dissected human corpses, and not as a physician. As a painter. His studies of muscle and tendon are the reason his figures move in a way nothing painted before them does, and The Vitruvian Man exists because he flatly refused to keep anatomy and art in separate boxes. The connection between the two wasn't a by-product of the genius, it was the genius.

Isaac Newton didn't only describe gravity, he built the mathematics it needed to be described with. Calculus didn't exist yet, so he invented it, because the physics he was chasing demanded it. Then he connected a falling apple to the orbit of the Moon, two things it had occurred to nobody to relate, and rewrote the picture of the universe in the process.

Richard Feynman, one of the great physicists of the century, was also a drummer, an artist, and a fairly accomplished safe-cracker. He explained the hardest ideas in physics through rubber bands and spinning plates, and that habit of translating between worlds wasn't a party trick he did on the side. It was where the insight was coming from.

Einstein's breakthrough on relativity didn't come out of knowing more physics than his peers knew. It came from a thought experiment: imagining himself riding along beside a beam of light and asking what he would actually see. He connected physics to pure imagination, and everything changed.

Two different activities hiding under one word

There are two quite different things going on underneath the single word "studying", and we mostly don't separate them.

There's collecting dots, which is absorbing facts, definitions, formulas. And there's connecting dots, which is understanding an idea well enough to extend it, apply it somewhere new, and defend it when someone pushes.

Almost every study tool ever built does the first one and then quietly assumes it adds up to the second. But recall is the ability to repeat something and understanding is the ability to use it, and those two come apart constantly, usually at the worst possible moment.

Why this is the argument for learning differently

If genius is mostly connection, then the way we teach, and the way nearly every tool tries to help, is aimed at the wrong target. Drilling isolated facts builds a bigger pile of dots and does precisely nothing for the bridges between them.

So the way forward isn't more memorisation, it's testing for understanding directly. Only treating something as learned once you can explain it simply, apply it to a case you haven't seen before, and hold it up while somebody questions it. That's harder to build and considerably harder to sit through than a flashcard, and it's the only thing that produces the sort of mind we say we admire.

The students sitting in a classroom feeling stupid usually aren't memorising too little. They're being asked to collect dots and never once shown how to connect them, and the moment you give somebody that second skill the ceiling moves a very long way.

Read more

• Why most study apps test recall instead of the understanding that matters: Why Modern Study Tools Are Failing Learners
• Why Norudit refuses to just hand you the finished answer: Why Norudit Won't Just Give You the Answer