AttentionRead, our plan
At AttentionRead we have a plan: we want your brain to be more agile, and to give you the best strategies and tools to learn better.
Strategies can be improved, and that alone would be enough, but you can go much further by training your mind. To do that you first need to understand how your brain learns. The first step is to improve your working memory; the second, to start reading with attention. Much of what you learn will be forgotten, which is why you have to train your long-term memory. And, finally, to have a more creative mind by connecting everything you have learnt.
We are always learning, in an endless cycle that never stops.
First, we are exposed to a lot of information that our senses pick up.
If you look closely, working memory sits at the centre of everything. Improve your working memory and you improve all of your learning.
Your brain is built by your habits. If you spend the whole day scrolling, you are training something: consuming without pause. And you are neglecting something far more important: retrieving information. This means you experience things but do not retain them; you are in zombie mode and that is damaging your working memory. So how do you improve your working memory?
To improve your working memory, you have to use it. First we expose the brain to a lot of information in a short time (we represented 0s and 1s but it could be any kind of information).
Careful with these exercises: doing more will not make you better, on the contrary, it would make you worse. Between 30 minutes and 1 hour would be ideal. Another way to improve your working memory is meditation. Another great way is to do nothing, to truly rest, not with a screen.
The most important idea is that you can improve your brain if you push it to the limit. With these exercises you will improve your concentration, and you will see it in many aspects of your day to day. At AttentionRead we go one step further and bet on reading with reflection.
Once your mind is trained, reading with attention will be much easier. In this phase we will teach you to take notes with a method that makes you ask questions and reflect, because without reflection there is no learning.
Imagine you want to read a document: a reader like this one will appear.
Reading with attention means asking questions, questioning yourself and discovering ideas. Those ideas will be your notes; you can write them in the margin of a book, or in our interface where you have much more room. The place does not matter, what matters is that you enjoy reading, discovering and learning things you did not know. You are not only consuming information, you also generate your own.
Many of your reflections will end up forgotten. But how could you stop forgetting them so easily?
With an agile mind (phase 1) and attentive reading (phase 2) you will have notes/ideas. Everything will be ready to improve your long-term memory using active recall.
Picture a note you have not internalised yet as a grey box.
In this phase, thanks to the note-taking method, your notes will help you internalise concepts. And why remember information if machines can do it? Because there is information that helps you think better. Think about it: it is very important to tell apart the knowledge that makes you think better from the knowledge you can just look up; that knowledge you do not need to remember.
Another interesting idea is that when you do nothing and stay calm, your brain enters a diffuse state; you could say it plays pinball and starts connecting ideas. That is why it is so important that your ideas live in your brain and not outside it.
But knowledge is not really a stack: knowledge connects. How can we connect ideas?
If you already have an agile mind (phase 1), read with attention (phase 2) and practise active recall (phase 3), you have the ideal conditions to have a more creative mind and connect dots nobody has connected before.
After phase 3, you will have a whole pile of notes.
In this last phase you will be able to navigate your thoughts and, better still, create new ones. You will break free from folders, which kill creative thinking: here everything can be connected.
This is our plan at AttentionRead. If you want to be part of it, you just have to come in.