Hey thanks. Glad to be out here. I personally find listening less effective than reading, especially for new material, mainly because with books you get a table of contents and headings, chapter titles, all right there to show you the shape and direction of the material, then you start reading and you have a rough idea of where you are and where you’re going. Plus, with a book you can stop, start, flip back, make notes in the margins, highlight. Even if you never look back at the highlights, the act of highlighting means you’re reading twice, same for margin notes, or even little pictures.

For studying and review, listening to recorded lectures while writing an outline, including my own reflections and examples, was most effective. Like for the rule that an assault can be a touching of an object intimate to a person, rather than the actual person, the classic case involves slapping a dinner plate out of the plaintiff’s hand at a dinner buffet, and the lecturer would usually toss in an example or two, or the reading might have a couple extra in the footnotes, and I would throw those in and add my own like, you could assault someone by slapping the hat off their head, pausing the lecture to create and reflect.

There was a journalist who went to write an article about those memory champions who memorize the order of a deck of playing cards, things such as that, and he asked them how they did it, and then the journalist ended up becoming the champion, because he realized there was nothing special about it: memory is a product of focus and attention. This is the basis of an ancient memorization technique called the memory palace, this and the fact that spatial relationships are naturally easy to remember, even if you just imagine two totally unrelated things having an arbitrary location to one another, just imagining it once will help you remember the two things. Even recall is a product of focus and attention. Like before an exam it’s way more effective to clear your head and separate from the subject entirely for fifteen minutes than it is to try and cram a few more items from your notes. Like, you already know the shit, you made the notes, it’s in there.