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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

Lectures isn't just about feeding the information into your brain. Half the battle of learning what the professor has to say is to process the material in your head, to let it bob around in your head a while. I often find that I can get a lot of that work done while still in my seat, as long as I allow those thoughts to bubble up.

In other words, allow creative thoughts about the things the lecturer is saying to form – wander around in idea-space a bit – and think about them, while simultaneously keeping up with the thread of the speech. You'll gain a lot more from your time in the lecture hall, and it'll also be a lot more fun. A lecture shouldn't just be (and doesn't have to be) dry information stuffing.

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Genuinely, good for you. I’m glad that works for you. But it’s a strange reply. I’ve described an attention disorder and a method for coping with it and your suggestion is that maybe I shouldn’t have the disorder in the first place. Which I agree with, but it’s not particularly helpful. I suppose that’s not fair. Let me try again: I’d love it if I could mindwander a bit while still paying attention to the lecture, the entire problem is that I cannot do this. That inability is called an attention disorder. If I have time to mindwander at all then I immediately get lost in my thoughts and am unable to pay any attention to the lecture.

Well, it's ambiguous from my perspective, with no more information, whether or not the behaviour was a genuine disorder or just caused by bad habits (akin to causes mentioned in the currently highest voted post[1]). It sounds like it was the former, in which case I'm sorry. I guess I was also not really thinking about it as a reply to you specifically, but rather to the entire audience of readers here on HN who I wanted to give a heads up on, in the context of your comment, that it's possible to experience lectures in more ways than one.

[1] http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-att...

I don't think it's a disorder or a bad habit. People process information at different speeds, if you're out of your comfort zone, that processing will be inefficient.

I agree that the idea of mindwandering while paying attention is foreign. I think I had a slightly different response than the grandparent, which is to drag the rest of the people in the seats along with me. I am sure there were many people who were bothered by my questions and hand-raising (in 200 person lectures), but sometimes my questions were real questions silently shared by others in the class. I think it isn't uncommon that students treat lectures as very inconvenient 3D video explanations, and many professors are so bored and detached that to veer slightly off course is to disgruntle them significantly. I think of it this way: as the student, paying tuition, your instructor is effectively working for you. If you left, they would not be able to do this part of their job (which some would prefer). If your professor isn't facilitating your task at hand (conveying a holistic understanding of the topic under discussion), then they aren't being effective at what you are paying for them to do, and it might behoove one in such a position to take active corrective action (drag a better explanation of the topic at hand out of the professor). This is all somewhat cavalier as I haven't been in school for a long time, but I feel like it was an approach that helped me, given it is hard for me to multitask as described, and would have helped others whom I have known.

To be fair, your original comment did not mention a disorder, and a reasonable person could assume a lack of a disorder from the comment alone.

It's true that I did not use the word 'disorder' and I understand that not everyone has given much thought to attention disorders. But being unable to choose where to focus attention or to sustain that focus is what an attention disorder is.

Have you tried mindfulness? I have had the same experience as you have (it sounds like) in that I am able to speed listen more effectively at 2-2.5x than at 1x. Since I've started trying to be more mindful and meditate regularly, the improvement in focus I've experienced is incredible.

Thank you for bringing this up. Throughout college I have had this issue and one of my favorite things was when a professor would publish the audio recordings of lectures so that I could listen at 1.75x-2.5x and rewind in case I wanted to rethink something. I also really enjoyed that app where you have words changing at the same location at 600 wpm. I tried speed reading a normal book but I would always get way more tired than with this approach. I really wish they had multiple choices for learning instead of the same technique for past 10 000 years which is known not to work for everyone

I like this idea, but I have found it to not work very well in practice. I would constantly get lost in lectures because the interesting new bits would kick off questions in my mind that needed to be resolved before it made sense for me to continue with more information. So I'd sit there exploring the new ideas—which was typically pretty beneficial—but then when I tuned back in I wouldn't know what they were talking about. When I get into that 'exploring mode' it tends to shut everything else out, so the 'simultaneously keeping up with the thread of the speech' isn't very doable, at least in my case.

Books are an intrinsically better format for this since the amount of time required to 'process' the new information will vary a lot from person to person, and you get complete control with books. I can't see any benefit to the lecture format aside from mass consumption—aside from question-asking, which I do think is vital, but it is typically under-used. Books + lots of questions to an expert seems ideal.

I rather replay the interesting section (for complicated stuff even on normal speed) and speed-listen to what I know and what is easily understandable or booring.

With video tutorials I have the same problem. On normal speed I will work ahead, take a wrong turn because I didn't know where the lecture would go or drift off in to something slightly creative and than notice that I missed a section where finally something new was explained. So I have to skip back and find where I started missing something (Something really really annoying with audio material; No thumbnails, no search, no skimming backwards, mostly no identification possible from a single frame or word (the easiest way to find a part again, to which I listened before, is to remember where on my journey I was when I listened to that part and where that was in relation to where I heard what is currently playing)).

I suppose if you don't experience it, it can be hard to relate. For me it's something like a buffer underrun. I get bored and frustrated in between words if they come too slowly.

Another analogy might be trying to ride a bike too slowly. It's very difficult not to wobble extremely and fall off. It takes more effort to ride slowly. My mind can't wander with slow speech because it takes great effort and attention to maintain ideas in active memory long enough to make it through sentences. I am better able to have branching thoughts while keeping up with the thread of speech when the speech is faster.

I frequently drive with audiobooks on and it is usually not possible for me to follow along without a speed boost of at least about 25% or so.

I use headphones with a play/pause button on them so I can pause/rewind from time to time to re-digest things.

This was the main reason I switched back to 1x. I want to listen, not just be blasted with data.

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