Why Understanding Your Brain Matters More Than Ever
How to use AI to uncover your ideal learning style and accelerate everything you want to learn next.
I’m studying for an AWS exam at the moment and it’s bringing back memories of university.
I haven’t studied for an exam in 13 years.
The process of studying now is bizarre. It’s incredible. It’s amazing. It’s a bunch of things. It’s so much better than it used to be. It’s a whole new world as Aladdin would say.
Because I haven’t had to study, I hadn’t reflected on how much things have changed. But now I feel like I’ve been teleported 100 years into the future.
Let’s run through some of the key things that stand out.
#1 - I don’t have a textbook, I have a code repo in Cursor
That is strange. I would have never done that at uni.
#2 - I don’t need to go to lectures or watch videos
There is a Udemy course that I could do, but it’s so inefficient relative to prompting and getting absorbed in the knowledge. I always found listening like this not the best way for brain to learn and now I have an ever better way!
#3 - I can build a custom website just for studying this specific course
I can do this in a couple of hours. Imagine if you were at uni now, you could just plug in your whole course syllabus on the first week and have a tailored website for each course.
This gives your knowledge a mental home. That becomes really powerful.
#4 - If I’m confused about anything, I can get a tailored explanation
The way I study is that I always jump to the exams and then work backwards.
The problem with that method is that I usually don’t know anything at the start.
But now with AI, I can just start at the exams and get tailored deep dives, where I am stuck.
#5 - If I need a visual overview, I can get an image for it
I am a big fan of memory pegs and so I used to manually draw things like this and now I can get them straight away.
If you build up a few of these, it becomes so much easier to recall knowledge.
#6 - I can sit an exam at any stage I like and benchmark my progress
Thanks to my website, I can just test my knowledge at any time. This makes it so much easier to get a real sense of your progress.
You can even adjust the difficulty which is something I always wished that I had.
What I want to do is dive deeper than the surface level reactions to this.
Those in my head are:
Oh if everyone has ChatGPT then there is no point of uni.
There is no need to learn anything when ChatGPT can just do it for you.
Everything should just be an oral exam.
Those reactions don’t really probe the wonderful transformation that has happened and consider the profound implications for your own life. They also ignore what I think is the most profound shift that has just occurred.
You see, now I think it is the most important time in history to understand your own brain and how you work.
The reason why is simple….
You probably don’t know enough about yourself
I was reading this book, “The End of Average”
It talks about the invention of concepts like “the average” and “the median”, and how before these ideas existed, people simply didn’t think in those terms.
Today, average is everywhere.
The average house price.
The average income.
The average life expectancy.
The average student.
The average worker.
The average person.
We use averages so often that they feel like features of reality rather than inventions.
But one of the book’s central arguments is that averages can be surprisingly misleading when applied to individuals.
If you design a cockpit for the average pilot, you end up designing a cockpit that fits nobody. The military discovered this the hard way. When researchers measured thousands of pilots, they found that almost nobody matched the average across all dimensions simultaneously. The “average pilot” didn’t really exist.
Now apply this to learning and everything is defined around “the average learner” and it’s not designed around you.
The school system hammers the individual out of you. You can’t have the teacher explain everything to you in your personal style as that would be incredibly inefficient for the teacher, even though it would great for you. I did so much better when I shifted to a school with smaller classrooms because the teachers basically did just that and then I found uni harder as there were 600 students in my class and there was no one on one interactions with the lecturers.
What you end up with though is this system that just promotes a median way of learning. It’s the best outcome for the most people, not the best system for you.
You have been conditioned to not challenge this or even to expect that things should be tailored to you!
But the breakthrough is that just like with my study, if you learn more about yourself, then you can tailor everything that AI generates through that lens. You can bring previously boring things to life! You can now finally study the history of the Roman Empire.
Here is a prompt that takes a while to complete but will help get you started learning about your own brain.
I want you to become my Personal Learning and Cognitive Profile Analyst.
Your goal is not to flatter me, label me, or put me into a personality box.
Your goal is to understand how my brain actually works.
I want you to interview me as if you are a researcher studying a unique individual. Assume that many of my beliefs about myself are incomplete, inaccurate, or based on limited evidence.
Your job is to discover:
* How I learn best
* How I think
* How I make decisions
* What motivates me
* What drains me
* What I am naturally curious about
* What environments I thrive in
* What environments make me disengage
* How I communicate
* How I solve problems
* What causes me to procrastinate
* What causes me to enter flow states
* What kinds of work feel effortless
* What kinds of work feel exhausting
* What themes repeatedly appear throughout my life
* What strengths I underutilise
* What blind spots I have
* What learning methods suit me
* What learning methods are likely wasting my time
I do not want generic advice.
I want personalised observations based on evidence gathered during our conversation.
Interview Process
Do not ask all questions at once.
Ask one question at a time.
After every answer:
1. Analyse my response.
2. Form hypotheses.
3. Look for contradictions.
4. Look for patterns.
5. Ask the next most valuable question.
Act like a detective building a psychological model.
If something is unclear, dig deeper.
If I make broad statements, ask for specific examples.
If I describe an event, ask why it mattered.
If I mention something repeatedly, investigate it.
If I avoid a topic, note it.
Do not rush.
The goal is depth, not speed.
Areas To Explore
Over time investigate:
Childhood interests
What I obsessed over as a child.
How I spent time when nobody told me what to do.
What subjects fascinated me.
What subjects bored me.
Learning history
My best teachers.
My worst teachers.
Times I learned something extremely quickly.
Times I struggled.
How I studied.
What methods worked.
What methods failed.
Flow states
Moments where I lost track of time.
Projects I became obsessed with.
Activities that energise me.
Activities that leave me wanting more.
Career patterns
Jobs I enjoyed.
Jobs I hated.
Projects I loved.
Projects I abandoned.
What specifically made the difference.
Motivation
What makes me excited to wake up.
What makes me avoid tasks.
What kinds of goals motivate me.
Whether I am driven by mastery, competition, curiosity, status, creativity, autonomy, impact, money, recognition, or something else.
Decision making
How I make major decisions.
How I evaluate risk.
How I think through uncertainty.
Whether I rely on intuition, logic, experimentation, emotion, or a combination.
Communication
How I explain ideas.
How I prefer information presented.
Whether I prefer stories, frameworks, visuals, examples, conversations, data, or first principles.
Learning preferences
Determine whether I learn best through:
Visual explanations
Written explanations
Conversation
Projects
Teaching others
Simulations
Games
Stories
Analogies
Experiments
Examples
Mental models
Debate
Research
Building things
Memory and retention
Investigate:
How I remember information.
What I forget.
How I organise knowledge.
How I connect ideas together.
What makes concepts stick.
Personality patterns
Do not use personality frameworks initially.
First build your own observations.
Only later compare findings against frameworks such as:
Big Five
StrengthsFinder
MBTI
Enneagram
Kolbe
DISC
Learning style theories
If you use them, explain their limitations.
Output Requirements
As the interview progresses, maintain a hidden working model.
Every 10 questions provide:
* Key observations
* Emerging strengths
* Emerging weaknesses
* Learning style hypotheses
* Motivation hypotheses
* Confidence level for each observation
After approximately 50 questions, generate:
1. A Cognitive Operating Manual
2. A Learning Playbook
3. An Ideal Career Environment
4. A List Of Likely Blind Spots
5. A Communication Guide For Working With Me
6. A Motivation Map
7. A List Of Activities Most Likely To Produce Flow
8. Recommendations For How AI Should Teach Me
9. Recommendations For How AI Should Communicate With Me
10. A Personalised Prompt I Can Use In Future AI Conversations
Most importantly:
Do not tell me who I am too early.
Earn your conclusions through evidence.
Start by asking the single most revealing first question you can think of.
In the past this stuff was a little wishy washy because you couldn’t really do much about it, apart from tell your mates what enneagram number you were or that you were a Libra, but now it has changed. Now the AI can actually adjust to you!
Try out that prompt, it’s quite revealing and it will change how you approach topics. But don’t just stop with that prompt, be really curious with your own brain!
Do the strength finder quiz, do other quizzes, spend time experimenting, try as much as you can to become an expert on yourself.
I found the strengths finder quiz was the one that taught me the most about myself.
Maybe you aren’t actually bad at maths
If nothing was tailored then maybe those things you thought you sucked at, you actually don’t.
Maybe it was just the wrong format in which it was delivered. And because there was only one format, you never found out a better one?
Most commentary focuses on AI’s ability to answer questions and the impact that has on essays. But I think the deeper change is that the interface between knowledge and your brain can now be customised at zero marginal cost.
Which sounds intense but just means, ChatGPT can say whatever you want in whatever style you want,
If you’re a visual learner, you get diagrams. If you learn by analogy, you get analogies drawn from whatever you already understand. If you’re obsessed with cats and studying the Roman Empire, you can get the entire history of Rome explained through cat metaphors. That sounds ridiculous, and it is, and it works.
The implications go well beyond personal study
If you manage people, you should know how each of them processes information. I’ll admit that I haven’t been the best at this, but I should get better. That’s going to be my own takeaway from this essay, I’m going to try to learn more about our team and their learning styles.
The more you can learn about anyone, the more you can tailor things and then the more you can get out of them and work better as a team. I might do a follow up essay on this to show a system of how to actually do it for a business. Let me know if you would like that.
You can probably take on more learning than you think
I had an anchoring problem. I assumed this AWS course would take a certain amount of time because that’s how long courses used to take. I was calibrated to the old friction: finding the right resource, sitting through explanations that didn’t match my brain, getting stuck with no one to ask, having to restart from the beginning when I only needed one specific concept explained.
Most of that annoying stuff is gone now.
The time cost of learning something new has dropped dramatically. Which means the decision of whether to learn something has changed too. A masters degree. A new programming language. A deep understanding of an adjacent field. Things that previously seemed too expensive in time and effort might be worth revisiting?
These are all the questions that I am considering. Should I be now learning more because I can now process a much higher amount of information as a superhighway has just been built and there is way less junk in the way?
The thing I love about what I am writing is that it was actually inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi over 2,000 years ago.
That quote:
Know Thyself.
Clearly the Greeks are a few steps ahead of us.
If you do that learning prompt above and it reveals something interesting about your own brain can you email me chris@cubdigital.co.nz, I’d love to hear the implications for you.
Book Club
The End of Average - View it on Amazon here. I’m an Amazon affiliate, if you make a purchase I get a small commission.
Other Essays I wrote this week
How to Use AI to Fix the Website You Built and No One Visits
