How To Do Cognitive Weightlifting

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Chunks are cognitive musculature.

Thinking amounts to activating and manipulating chunks of information.

Better thinkers have bigger chunks.

(And those chunks are better organized and more readily retrievable.)

So how do you build big chunks?

It’s just cognitive weightlifting.

You practice retrieving chunks of information from memory, unassisted.

You lift them up off the ground of long-term memory and raise them into working memory.

And as it gets easier, you make the chunks bigger and the retrieval conditions harder (longer spacing, less priming, time constraints).

That’s the cognitive equivalent of adding weight to the bar.

If you want to learn more, you might like this article and the books listed in the “Further Reading” section at the end: The Physics of Learning (And Why Almost No One Uses It)

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