超有效学习方法：多睡眠多重复

　　I still remember the boy who, on his first day of school, had to be carried bodily into class by a phalanx of teachers and parents. As the other six-year-olds sat brightly at their desks, he sobbed: “I don"t want to go to school!”

　　至今我仍记得一个小男孩第一天上学的情景——在一群老师和家长连拖带拽下，他被弄进了教室。其他六岁的孩子都高高兴兴地坐在桌前，他一边哭，一边喊：“我不想上学!”

　　Looking back decades later, he was quite right. My 12 years at school were boring and mostly pointless. I barely remember a thing I was taught after learning to read and count.

　　几十年后再想一下，他说得太对了。从小学到中学，我上了12年学，那段生活无聊透顶，而且没什么意义。除了识字和数数，我几乎不记得学校还教会了我什么。

　　I learnt more about how to write from George Orwell's 14-page essay “Politics and the English Language” than in all my school years. Nor was I taught much by way of reasoning (which may, of course, be why I've ended up a columnist).

　　我从乔治 奥威尔(George Orwell)那篇14页的文章《政治和英语》(Politics and the English Language)里学到的写作技巧，比我在学校里学到的都要多。我也没有学到多少推理的方法(当然，这可能正是我最终成了一名专栏作家的原因)。

　　I wasted the years when my brain was still fairly porous. This experience is probably common but it might all have been different if only someone had taught me one crucial skill: how to learn. Now that my daughter is seven, and setting off on the long slog, I'm planning to issue her with the crucial information beforehand.

　　我把大脑吸收能力还比较强的那些年都荒废掉了。其他人或许也有相似的经历，如果那时谁要是教会我如何学习就好了，现在的我很可能就完全不同了。我女儿今年7岁，就要开始多年求学的苦旅，我打算提前把这项至关重要的技能传授给她。

　　Schools, like offices, are structured around the notion of facetime. The easiest thing to measure is that you are there, and so they measure that. In my day, 30 kids of different abilities and concentration spans were crammed into a room with sealed windows, while a teacher wrote things on a blackboard. We were taught stuff every day - but never how to absorb it. And yet the basics of how to learn are so simple that they can be transmitted in an 800-word column.

　　学校就像公司一样，考勤是重心。最容易衡量的就是你是否在场，所以学校就衡量这个。我上学的时候，30个天资与注意力各不相同的孩子都挤在一个房间里，窗户是封死的，老师则在黑板上写写画画。老师整天都在向我们传授知识，但从没教给我们如何吸收知识。然而，关于如何学习的基本原理其实非常简单，用一篇800字的专栏文章就可以说清楚。

　　The main study tool I learnt as an adult is: nap. Scholars of sleep agree that a brief nap can recharge the brain. “A nap as short as 10 minutes can significantly improve alertness,” says Maurice Ohayon, director of Stanford University's sleep epidemiology research centre. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Albert Einstein all knew this.

　　我成年后掌握的主要学习技巧就是小睡片刻。睡眠研究方面的学者一致认为，小睡一会儿能给大脑“充电”。斯坦福大学(Stanford University)睡眠流行病学研究中心主任莫里斯 瓦永(Maurice Ohayon)表示：“只要睡上10分钟，就会精神很多。”温斯顿 邱吉尔(Winston Churchill)、玛格丽特 撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)和阿尔伯特 爱因斯坦(Albert Einstein)都明白这一点。

　　Unfortunately, I didn't find out until I was grown up. As a teenager you need oodles of sleep, and many school mornings I was too tired to learn (especially aged 16, when I decided I could train myself to cope on four hours' sleep). The lesson I never had was, “Instead of trying to do two hours of homework now, sleep for 15 minutes and then do it all in an hour.”

　　遗憾的是，我长大之后才明白这个道理。人在十几岁的时候，需要多睡觉，好多个早上，我到了学校已经累得学不进东西了(尤其是在16岁的时候，我以为自己能做到每天只睡4个小时)。我从来也不知道的是，“现在不要马上做作业，那得花上两个小时，你先睡上15分钟，然后只消1小时就能全部写完。”

　　In my work flat in Paris today, my key pieces of office furniture are my sofa and blanket. But I grew up in countries where naps were considered proof of laziness instead of productivity boosters. The ignorance persists: according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management in 2010, only 5 per cent of American employers had an on-site “nap room” (often probably just a couple of sticky mattresses lying side by side).

　　现在，我在巴黎的工作室里主要的家俱就是沙发和毯子。可我从小到大呆过的每个国家，人们都认为小睡是懒惰的证据，而不是效率提升手段。这种无知的观点到现在仍很流行：美国人力资源管理学会(SHRM)2010年完成的一项调查显示，只有5%的美国雇主在工作场所提供“小憩室”(通常可能不过是并排放置了几条黏腻的床垫)。

　　Years after leaving school, I made my second belated discovery about learning: how to remember. (Memorising is another skill that becomes almost pointless after school but, again, it's easy to measure, so schools measure it.) My breakthrough came at a picnic in Central Park, New York. My then girlfriend was complaining to a friend that whenever she mentioned a past quarrel to me, I couldn't remember it. She always had to tell me what we'd quarrelled about, before explaining why I'd been wrong. The friend, who was a brain surgeon, asked the girlfriend: “Do you keep a diary?” “Yes,” said the girlfriend. “That's why you remember,” said the brain surgeon. The girlfriend engraved the experience on her memory by repeating it.

　　毕业多年以后，我才发现了另一项迟来的学习技巧，那就是记忆方法。(记忆也是一项毕业后就没什么用的技能，但是这也是一项容易衡量的指标，所以也被学校采用)。让我茅塞顿开的是在纽约中央公园(Central Park)里的一次野餐会。我当时的女朋友向一位朋友抱怨道，每次她向我提及两人过去某次吵架的事，我总是一点都没有印象。每一次，她都告诉我之前两人吵架的原因，然后再解释我错在哪里。这位身为脑外科医生的朋友问她：“你是不是记日记?”她回答：“是的。”脑外科医生说道：“这就是你能记住的原因。”我那位前女友把过去的事情写进日记里，经过这么一重复，事情也就印入了脑海。

　　It turns out you remember things through periodic repetition - and not through one night's frantic cramming just before the test. For instance, if you want to remember that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, revise the fact for one minute every evening for a week, instead of for 10 minutes on the last evening. Periodic repetitions imprint it on your brain. This is the “spacing effect”, which the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in 1885. I discovered it too late.

　　事实证明，人是通过周期性重复来记住东西的，而不是像在考试前一晚那样，通宵达旦地死记硬背。比如说，你想记住黑斯廷斯战役(the Battle of Hastings)爆发于1066年，那就每天晚上花1分钟复习一下这个知识点，而不要在最后一晚上强记10分钟。周期性重复会加深大脑的记忆。这被称为“间隔效应”，德国心理学家赫尔曼 埃宾豪斯(Hermann Ebbinghaus)早在1885年就发现这条原理。我发现得就太晚了。

　　Tej Samani, founder of Performance Learning, a British company that helps students to learn, has a favourite technique that uses the spacing effect. To remember the date 1066, for instance, write it on a Post-it note on your bedroom window. You will see it every day - and through repetition you will come to associate “1066” with “window”. If you think “window”, you remember 1066. Samani's students have facts and formulas stuck up around their bedrooms. “I'm a huge believer in learning without putting too much effort in,” he says. “People judge success based on, 'I did 15 hours of revision this week.' Brilliant. How much of it do you remember? Maybe an hour.”

　　Performance Learning是英国一家旨在帮助学生学习的公司，其创始人Tej Samani最喜欢一种利用间隔效应的记忆技巧。比如说，要想记住1066年这个时间，把它写在一张便利贴上，粘到卧室的窗子上。你每天都会看到那张便利贴，经过不断的重复，你就逐渐把“1066年”与“窗子”联系到一起。一想到“窗子”时，自然就会联想到“1066年”。Samani的学生们把知识点和公式贴满了卧室。他说：“我特别推崇轻松地学习。人们认为考出好成绩取决于‘我这周复习了15个小时’。太棒了。你记住了其中的多少内容?也许只有1小时的内容。”

　　You often make the best discoveries in one sudden cognitive leap. I still remember the moment, aged 14, when I finally grasped, after months of exhausted incomprehension, that the third line on the graph represented the third dimension. Perhaps my daughter will have that same “Eureka” feeling when I make her read this column.

　　人们经常在突然的认知飞跃中获得最好的发现。我仍旧记得一件事：14岁那年，在几个月苦苦思索无果之后，我终于明白，图形中的第三条线原来代表第三个维度。当我让女儿读这篇专栏文章时，或许她也将有跟我一样的“恍然大悟”的感觉。