When you encounter new information from sources that you’re unfamiliar with, some of it will undoubtedly be complex and inaccessible. This can often serve as an incentive for people to abandon their quest for polymathy. However, analogies are an extremely powerful tool that makes breaking down complicated information easy and efficient.

Analogies are essentially comparisons between two seemingly unrelated concepts or skills. To maximize your learning, you’ll need to learn how to use what you already know and draw connections to what you’re learning in innovative ways. This forces you to transfer your learning, ensuring you retain more information in the long-term. 

To start using analogies for learning, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with academic analogies. These consists of four parts divided into two groups. On the left side, you make a certain type of connection between things you know about, like code in video games. Code is the main building block upon which video games are built. If you’re learning law, you’ll know that law is to constitution what code is to video games. To use the standard analogy format, we’d state this as: “code : video games :: law : constitution.”

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Aside from using different types of analogies to improve your retention of learning materials, there are some science-backed tips you can employ to further enhance how productive these analogies can be for your studies. These are:

1) Use multiple analogies for the same topic

This one goes without saying, but using different types of analogies in your learning will ensure that you’ve grasped your content beyond just a superficial understanding. Since analogies force you to make transfers mentally, they challenge your comprehension of key concepts in different ways depending on the type you use. Generally, it’s a good idea to use as many as you can that seem relevant to your topic.

For example, let’s say you’re learning about the theory of liberalism. The first type of analogy you can use is Antonym. If we think of hot and cold as opposites, what would be a similar antonym for liberalism? This could be either communism or conservatism. Next, we can utilize Example/Type Of analogies. Liberalism is a type of political ideology, in the same way that iPhones are a type of smartphone.

A third type of analogy we can attempt is Thing/Characteristic. What is a characteristic of liberalism similar to auditory volume as a characteristic of speakers? One answer is human rights. Likewise, you can utilize multiple analogies for your own concepts and topics.

2) Use examples to reaffirm your learning constantly

This insight has been derived from the studies of Daniel Schwartz and John Bransford. The usage of examples is important because it helps novices and beginners learn through their own knowledge of the content of those examples. Experts can skip examples because they are already intimately aware of the subject matter. But in most instances, examples help you make sense of complex ideas and provide yourself with tools to remember them more efficiently.

If you’re studying ethical systems, make a note of different situations in which they apply. Should you lie to your friend when you don’t want to talk to them by saying you’re busy? Why or why not? If you have to divide a pie between three people, what would be the most fair way to cut it? Examples like these liven up your studying, as they make dry content much more realistic and relevant to the world around you.

3) Remember the purpose of the analogy

Oftentimes it is easy to use analogies for understanding particular concepts mechanically, yet forget why the analogy is appropriate in the first place. For example, if a student is asked what mitochondria is, they say “it is the powerhouse of the cell” since that is a standard analogy across biology textbooks. However, many remember the comparison without understanding or having forgotten what it means for mitochondria to be the powerhouse of a cell.

One way to avoid this issue is to frame your analogies in ways that clearly indicate the purpose or role of the comparison. In the case of mitochondria, consider what function it would have to fulfill to be a “powerhouse” for the cell. It would have to provide the cell with power, which is more accurately referred to as energy.

Another thing you can do is to list a few drawbacks of the analogy. “Powerhouse” can imply that it merely stores energy, but in fact mitochondria is responsible for the extracting, processing, and releasing of energy to cells. It isn’t enough to simply remember the analogy; you must know why it is an appropriate one to use as well, and these are a few ways to do just that.

4) Reserve analogies for more difficult concepts

While it may be tempting to use analogies throughout your studies, it is advisable to reserve their usage for more complex ideas. Students often find that utilizing analogies for easier concepts and information can cause confusion and clutter.

When something is easily understandable, you don’t need to break it down further for better retention. Focus your energy on more difficult concepts, especially since you’ll be using multiple analogies for the same concept.

Make a list of all the ones you use, list some drawbacks for each, and use visual cues if possible. Using both visual and text-based cues is a good way to improve retention and understanding according to multimedia learning theory. Also use appropriate comparisons for your analogy on the left-hand side of the academic analogy format. This will make the relation between the main components of your analogy clearer without requiring too much re-reading.

Analogy Thinking

Let’s dive a bit deeper into a specific type of analogy thinking.

How might you explain a new business to someone who is clueless in the space? “It’s like the Uber of X, except A, B, and C.”

When we seek to make ourselves understand, we often default to analogies. They provide instant understanding and context, because our thoughts are able to focus on a singular concept and then slowly start to differentiate to the point of comprehension.

And of course, linking new concepts and information through analogy is another great method to cement learning into the knowledge pool. Despite our natural tendencies, analogies are underrated and overlooked as important parts of human cognition. In contrast to this presumption, some neuroscientists, such as Indiana University Professor Douglas Hofstadter, assert that analogies are the foundation of all human thought.

His reasoning is that analogies allow us to understand categories, and categories are how we discern information and concepts from each other. It’s our ability to discern likenesses—a form of analogy-making—that allows us to discern similarities and thus categorize objects in different ways.

This is easy to see if you consider how we categorize animals. To an untrained eye, a dog and a cat might seem distinctly similar. They both have fur, four legs, and a tail, but their different faces, diets, behavior, and evolutionary heritage allow us to differentiate between the two of them. They are comparable animals, analogous to each other, but they are more closely analogous to their own species, and that is what allows us to place them in their respective categories of dog or cat. But all that means is that we would never use dogs to describe cats, or vice versa.

Even more complex, higher-order ideas are formed by making analogies. Consider the more abstract group of mammal. This group compares dogs to cats while counting them as similar, but also includes animals as diverse as the platypus, dolphin, and opossum. No one would look at a dolphin and believe it was similar to a housecat, but the science is very clear. Lactating, having hair or fur, and being warm-blooded are the only criteria that must be met to put creatures into the group of mammal. If they share those characteristics, they are mammals.

Grouping those criteria together allows us to form the higher-order idea of mammal, which enables us to discern which creatures fit the bill. This group of criteria that we simplify into the word mammal is what allows us to see dolphins and platypuses as analogous to each other.

Our understanding, and thus the analogies we use to describe the world, evolve as we age and are exposed to ideas in our lives and our cultures. But no matter what we learn, it must be filtered through a brain that categorizes, and thus understands, the world by forming analogies and discerning differences between objects and ideas. When we consciously distinguish different elements and create analogies while learning new information, we speed up the process of integrating our new knowledge into our minds.

Now that we’ve covered the overall cognitive role and importance of analogy, how can we use it to self-learn and understand more effectively? As we mentioned, analogies provide instant context—a mental model for the information you are looking at—and then you are left to slowly differentiate and flesh out the details.

For instance, earlier we mentioned that new businesses are frequently described as “the Uber of X.” Uber is a rideshare company that functions by calling non-taxi drivers to help transport you using their own personal cars. Thus, anything described as “the Uber of X” would be implied to involve people with their own cars, delivering or driving people or things. Okay, we’ve got a mental image now—a good idea of what’s involved, what the purpose is, and how it functions.

Now the important bit of learning comes—how do you differentiate this new business from Uber itself? What nuanced factors make it simply not a clone of Uber? Well, this element, as well as what you are comparing the new business to, is up to you to articulate. When you take a new piece of information and intentionally find a way to create an analogy with it, you are (1) finding a similar model of information that requires understanding enough to compare and contrast two concepts, and (2) further understanding the two models well enough to state how they differ. That’s where the deeper learning synthesis occurs.

For instance, what if you wanted to create an analogy around learning the steps involved in creating a new piece of legislation? Abide by the two steps above. You would first find an existing, familiar piece of information that the process for new legislation reminds you of. Search your memory banks for something similar; this type of analysis of major and minor factors is helpful to your learning.

Next, how do they differ? This is where you can clearly demonstrate the difference between concepts, based on a deep understanding. Pick out small details and note how they appear similar but come from totally different motivations. Document what this all means for new legislation.

This is far more than a thought exercise of comparing two different concepts—it’s combining old information with new and forcing them to interact toward greater comprehension and memorization.