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00:02:34 The Feynman technique

00:04:44 Step 1: Identify Your Subject

00:06:00 Step 2: Teach What You Know to a Child

00:08:45 Step 3: Locate Your Knowledge Gaps

00:10:46 Step 4: Tell a Story

00:13:06 Can You Use this Technique for Everything?

00:18:25 How to Visualize Your Data

00:21:34 The Feynman-Tufte Principle

00:25:31 Understanding the Hierarchy of Ideas

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• The more you teach an idea, the deeper your understanding of it. The more deeply you understand it, the better you are at teaching it to others. The Feynman technique for teaching, learning, and communicating is essentially a breakdown of the scientist’s personal thought processes and mental models.

• First, identify your subject and write down what you know. Then teach what you know to a child in your own words using clean language and simplified conceptions—be brief and anticipate questions. This will allow you to identify gaps in your learning. Address these, and as you learn, “tell a story” and construct a linear narrative using analogies, metaphor, and vivid, unusual language. This approach applies to any area of inquiry, not just science.

• Finally, be cognizant of the different levels of understanding in the hierarchy of ideas. All the intellectual efforts man makes proceed at different levels of explanation and understanding. Know which level you’re on and become curious about the connections between levels. This will increase your insight and problem-solving ability. The appropriate level of inquiry is usually the one that helps you solve the problem you currently have.

#EdwardRTufte #Feynman #FeynmanTuftePrinciple #FrankWilczek #Gautama #Heisenberg #JohnBrooke #LocateYourKnowledgeGaps #PaulDavies #RichardFeynmansMentalModels #Tufte #UHA #Wilczek #RussellNewton #NewtonMG #PeterHollins #TheScienceofSelf #RichardFeynman’sMentalModels

It's National Oatmeal Muffin Day chocolate Cupcake Day, and we mentioned National Nut Day. So get out there and enjoy some of that delicious food. Now on to the main event. Today's episode is about the feynman technique. It's a powerful learning method developed by Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman. It's a four step process choose a topic to learn, teach the topic to a child, identify the gaps in your own understanding, and then go back and fill in the gaps.

It's incredibly effective because it forces you. To think deeply about the topic and. To explain it in a clear and concise way. This episode is taken from Peter Holland's book Richard Feynman's Mental Models. Available on Amazon, Audible and itunes. Thanks for joining us today. Beginning with curious and high-quality observation, knowing how and why to think about those observations, building your own internal mental models that bring that data together, and learning how to communicate your findings with others—all of these are aspects to a broader approach to gaining knowledge.

The more you teach an idea, the deeper your understanding of it. The more deeply you understand it, the better you are at teaching it to others. Feynman was known as a proponent of this type of thinking, and as a science educator, he was never simply teaching about the world, but about that set of intellectual tools that would best allow you to learn about the world yourself. The “Feynman technique” is often praised as a comprehensive way to study because it allows for deep learning. The principles were first created by Feynman himself for his own use, and to simplify and organize his own endeavors. The Feynman technique for teaching, learning, and communicating is essentially a breakdown of the scientist’s personal thought processes and mental models.

It rests on concise language and clean, organized thoughts, and is heavily inspired by Feynman’s own time as a student at Princeton. But it speaks to the quality of this tool that anyone can use it, whether they intend to win a Nobel Prize or are simply trying to solve a snag in their everyday life. What’s more, the approach can theoretically be used to understand anything, whether that’s physics and math or something like history, language learning, or philosophy. The mindset and attitude we’ve outlined in the preceding chapters set the groundwork for the spirit in which we undertake our learning endeavors, but if our goal is to master some more formal line of study, then Feynman’s method is particularly helpful. All of us arrive at any new learning opportunity with heaps of baggage from previous educational experiences. We all have our default assumptions about how best to go about learning something new. But if you really want to level up in this area, it’s worth being willing to experiment a little and change things up—not just superficially but in a deeper way.

Chances are, you’ve been taught certain habits by teachers and lecturers, some of which may help you learn effectively, and others less so. That’s why you attempt to apply Feynman’s methods to studying. Some of it may feel obvious and familiar, and some of it very counterintuitive. Before you make assumptions about any of it, adopt the scientist’s creed here: Try it yourself and see what happens! Let’s pull everything we’ve explored in the previous chapters together. The technique broadly consists of just four steps: study, teach, identify gaps, an simplify (and, well, repeat!).

Step 1: Identify Your Subject Seems obvious, but you need to actually have some idea of what you’re trying to learn or the problem you’re trying to shine light on. Start by putting down everything you know into words. Use a notebook and pen or a laptop and write down every detail—even if it seems insignificant. In fact, be quite literal and clear—the most interesting areas are where we assume we know something but don’t, or vice versa. Writing things down in black and white is so important because it can help you discern between the two! What you’re doing is carving out the limits and boundaries of your current knowledge and giving it a shape.

Depending on your topic, this can be quite an intuitive and dynamic process. Trust yourself but be open-minded and take nothing for granted. You are not merely remembering and putting down static facts—you are really trying to answer the question what do I know? It can help to consult your “twelve problems” journal if you have been keeping one. Step 2: Teach What You Know to a Child The ultimate test in intellectual humility, clean language, and simplified conceptions comes in confirming whether you can convey what you know to someone with zero pre-existing knowledge about it. There’s often less use in sharing information with experts who already “know”—their expertise will give an artificial sense of the depth of their understanding, and yours.

If you cannot teach what you know to a child, conclude that you do not yet have a proper grasp on the idea. That’s great! You have identified an area of work and moved an item from “I know” to “I need to find out." This is progress. The sooner you can admit you have a shakier understanding than you previously believed, the sooner you can get down to the work of really understanding, so don’t let ego get in the way. Explaining to an actual child would be great, but obviously this isn’t always possible.

Still, you can complete this step by compiling a lesson you might give a child, anticipating their questions and confusions, and clearly working through the steps and core concepts you’d offer if you were teaching for real. Be on the lookout for big, cumbersome jargon and unclear language—remember that your standard should be to explain a certain term without referring to that term itself. Constantly seek to simplify and be as direct, concise, and “clean” in your language as possible. A few things to remember: •Children don’t understand jargon, nor will they be impressed with fancy-sounding “ten-dollar words." Look beneath your technical jargon and see if you are able to convey the concept within them, without becoming distracted by the words or else fooled into thinking you understand the concept just because you know the word. •Be brief. This is a little like making an “elevator pitch” for the concept.

You don’t have to dumb things down, but being forced to get to the point quickly will help you identify what is central to the idea and what is just fluff. •Anticipate questions or even objections. Imagine the stubbornest child you can and that they are asking “Why?” about the trickiest part of what you’re trying to explain. Step 3: Locate Your Knowledge Gaps If you do the previous two steps correctly, you cannot help but highlight precisely those areas that you are a little unclear about. You are not looking for problems or flaws, however; rather, this is where the real learning and growth happens. Most people work the other way around: They focus with undue reverence on what they know already (or think they know), and when they encounter an area of inconsistency or difficulty, they retreat, either pretending they already understand it or just ignoring that aspect altogether.

That is nothing more than a recipe for creating more ignorance! Instead, become very, very curious about what is missing. Look at the bigger picture and see if you can find the weak points in the explanation, the gaps in the understanding, or the places where you’re making assumptions. It’s as though knowledge is a scaffold, and there are some areas in your construction that are only temporarily held up with tape or pins. Put a spotlight on these areas and see what you can do to strengthen them. It's obvious what to do when you identify a knowledge gap: Fill it!

See if you can turn your confusion into a targeted question. If you notice that you cannot really pinpoint the cause of a particular step in a process, that becomes a research question: What is causing this particular step? Why does this step happen? Hit the books, do some research and data gathering, ask for help, set up an experiment, or even check if the answer is lurking in the materials you already have. The information might genuinely be missing, or it might be that you have uncovered your own faulty understanding or organization of that information. Keep working at it to fill in those gaps, whatever they are.

Step 4: Tell a Story On the surface, nature is all at once, a little chaotic, and enormous. The scientist works always to pick out a linear narrative through this seeming chaos, in other words, to tell a story. When you tease out a causal explanation for a phenomenon, when you spin a tale that has a beginning and end, you are actually organizing your observations into a coherent whole and making a mental model. Piecing together your notes and ideas is not just a way to keep tidy and organized—it is literally the beginning of a deeper process of mastery and understanding. Make your own notes and diagrams, collect relevant ideas together, make a theory or model, paint a picture of the phenomena you’re describing, and tell the story. You can do this by imagining that you’re again teaching a young child what you know, but this time, you’re taking inspiration from Feynman and presenting a coherent story that will engage and enchant someone who does not yet have a reason to find your idea fascinating.

When you truly understand what you’re looking at, passion and enthusiasm seem to be the natural result. Use analogies, metaphor, and vivid, unusual language to quickly convey your idea. Inject emotion—it is, after all, the only reason people want to understand something, and care enough to pay attention to it. Put things in context, be lively. Read your own explanation out loud and imagine that you are exactly the kind of teacher you wish you had when first learning about this topic yourself. Look at things from the student’s perspective and ask what knowledge they need first and foremost.

What follows from that understanding? What rules do they need to understand? Understanding the “curriculum” you would offer a student helps you quickly identify and focus on the fundamentals and ensure that you’re not getting distracted. Can You Use this Technique for Everything? You’re probably wondering if Feynman’s approach really applies to things like the humanities, art, ethics, or even religion. While science is an endeavor to understanding what is, art is more about what could be, and what is beautiful, unique, and interesting.

Ethics is about what should be. And religion ... well, that’s a realm all its own. Even though Feynman was a physicist and that was his passion, however, it doesn’t mean that his method is only applicable to science. In fact, Feynman himself was drawn to the arts and brought the same spirit of wonder and impassioned inquiry to this field as he did to physics. When you are curious and want to know who, what, and why, then there really are no limits. Einstein played the violin and Heisenberg the piano.

Feynman was attracted to drawing and art throughout his life, saying, “I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion ... It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe—which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe." This is a completely different realm of knowledge than trying to learn about, say, particle physics, but deep down they speak to the same wellspring of curiosity for the essence of what nature is, what life means, and the yearning to dig deeper and deeper in order to know and experience it. Continue on with this path of inquiry and it’s not hard to imagine that you come to spiritual and metaphysical questions. Einstein would sometimes speak of a “cosmic religious feeling” that permeated and sustained his scientific work, and near the end of his life, he said he wished to “experience the universe as a single cosmic whole."

Leading expert John Brooke at Oxford University says, “Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him. It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions ... but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion." Brooke said that, despite rejecting conventional religion, Einstein resented his views being appropriated by militant atheists and was offended by their lack of humility, saying, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." Feynman once wrote of religion: “It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe beyond man, to think of what it means without man—as it was for the great part of its long history, and as it is in the great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of the universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is rarely described. It usually ends in laughter, delight in the futility of trying to understand.

These diagrams are simplified illustrations of the complex and unintuitive world of quantum electrodynamics (QED). Wavy lines denote the behavior or particles of light (photons), and straight or curved lines represent electrons. Line junctions indicate electron transfer. Time is often represented from bottom to top so that the diagram is “read” and the behavior of these particles in relation to one another is explained simply and concisely. Simple mathematical formulas could be attached to the diagrams—in a way, the diagrams are just pictographic formulas. Thus, Feynman’s diagrams were a simplified diagrammatic representation of certain mathematical expressions that described particle behavior without needing long, difficult, and unintelligible descriptions.

Remember that models, theories, and visualizations are only tools and approximations of reality, and if Feynman’s diagrams have been instrumental in helping us uncover a better way, then they were useful. In fact, many physicists can and do continue to use them. The principle behind the tool’s invention remains as prized as ever. The Feynman-Tufte Principle New York Times once called Edward R. Tufte “the da Vinci of data." Tufte is famous for his skillfully—even artistically—created books on the visualization of data.

Tufte’s main goal in life is to find tools that enable people to see into information and remove obfuscation and needlessly complicated language (you can see why he might admire Feynman!). In fact, Feynman diagrams are the perfect exemplar of what Tufte believes marks out good design from noise and nonsense. According to Tufte, "Good displays of data help to reveal knowledge relevant to understanding mechanism, process and dynamics, cause and effect." Good data, for Tufte, is something that allows us to better see what we couldn’t otherwise see. Recall how Frank Wilczek said his work was “unthinkable” before Feynman’s diagrams. Good visualizations, according to Tufte, are ones that allow this exact kind of insight.

Bad visualizations do the opposite. “Clear and precise seeing,” says Tufte, “becomes as one with clear and precise thinking." When it comes to language, we should strive to be simple, clear, direct, and easily comprehensible to non-experts. When it comes to visual representations, the same rules apply, and we can use what’s sometimes called the Feynman-Tufte principle of design: A visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van. Now, Feynman was known for driving a dusty, clapped-out old van onto which he had scribbled Feynman diagrams. The idea is that if one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century can fit one of the most complex ideas onto the side of a van, then so can you!

If you need nineteen separate PowerPoint slides to explain your big idea, chances are you need to simplify. One of Tufte’s mottos was: simple design, intense content. Are you saying the same thing over and over in different ways? Find a single statement or representation that expresses a rule to encapsulate all of them. Always try to condense: Instead of three paragraphs describing a process, have a simple flowchart that captures the ideas succinctly. Where possible, use quantified data and numbers to represent relationships (the right mathematical formula can capture pages’ worth of exposition).

Tufte’s six principles were: 1. document the sources and characteristics of the data 2. insistently enforce appropriate comparisons 3. demonstrate mechanisms of cause and effect 4. express those mechanisms quantitatively 5. recognize the inherently multivariate nature of analytic problems 6. inspect and evaluate alternative explanations In short, "information displays should be documentary, comparative, causal and explanatory, quantified, multivariate, exploratory, skeptical." Understanding the Hierarchy of Ideas What exactly is the hierarchy of ideas? Feynman described it like this in a lecture at Cornell, titled "The Character of Physical Law: The Distinction of Past and Future" (edited for clarity): “We have a way of discussing the world ... at various hierarchies, or levels. Now I do not mean to be very precise, dividing the world into definite levels, but I will indicate, by describing a set of ideas, what I mean by hierarchies of ideas. For example, at one end we have the fundamental laws of physics. Then we invent other terms for concepts which are approximate, which have, we believe, their ultimate explanation in terms of the fundamental laws.

For instance, "heat." Heat is supposed to be jiggling, and the word for a hot thing is just the word for a mass of atoms which are jiggling. But for a while, if we are talking about heat, we sometimes forget about the atoms jiggling, just as when we talk about the glacier we do not always think of the hexagonal ice and the snowflakes which originally fell. Another example of the same thing is a salt crystal. Looked at fundamentally it is a lot of protons, neutrons, and electrons; but we have this concept "salt crystal," which carries a whole pattern already of fundamental interactions. An idea like pressure is the same.

Now if we go higher up from this, in another level we have properties of substances, like "refractive index," how light is bent when it goes through something; or "surface tension," the fact that water tends to pull itself together, both of which are described by numbers. I remind you that we have got to go through several laws down to find out that it is the pull of the atoms, and so on. But we still say, "surface tension," and do not always worry, when discussing surface tension, about the inner workings. On, up in the hierarchy. With the water we have waves, and we have a thing like a storm, the word "storm" which represents an enormous mass of phenomena, or a "sunspot," or "star," which is an accumulation of things. And it is not worthwhile always to think of it way back.

In fact we cannot, because the higher up we go the more steps we have in between, each one of which is a little weak. We have not thought them all through yet. As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch, or nerve impulse, which is an enormously complicated thing in the physical world, involving an organization of matter in a very elaborate complexity. Then come things like "frog." And then we go on, and we come to words and concepts like "man" and "history," or "political expediency," and so forth, a series of concepts which we use to understand things at an ever higher level. And going on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope ...

Which end is nearer to the ultimate creator, to God, if I may use a religious metaphor? Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing." All the intellectual efforts man makes, according to Feynman, proceed at different levels of explanation and understanding. What he in particular finds fascinating is to see the connections between levels in the hierarchy—for example, how beauty connects to history, and how history connects to man’s psychology, and how man’s psychology connects to the workings of the brain, and how that connects to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the electrochemistry of the neuron, that electrochemistry to the movement and behavior of molecules, which connects to the expression of subatomic particles, and so on down to the strangest levels of quarks and gluons, or perhaps strings ... and of course the connection goes “both ways." We can examine the world at any level, to any depth, and also extend the breadth of our inquiry in any direction.

We might like to study the brains of all kinds of animals (remaining on the biological level, but expanding the breadth of that view to encompass many kinds of brains), or we can find one phenomena, like the flash of electrochemical energy in the brain, and follow that upward (to things like consciousness) or downward (to things like the behavior of sodium-gated channels in neuron cells). Feynman didn’t claim that either end was “closer to God." He said that continuing right off the edge in either direction is actually a mistake, if one hoped to find all the big answers that way. That means that dwelling solely in concepts like “beauty, hope and evil” or solely in “the fundamental physical laws” is not sensible. It’s especially not sensible for those who specialize at either end of the pole to argue with one another! Instead, he thought we ought to focus on the amazing connections that could be made—in fact, to discover the connections that already exist—in and between these levels.

The main thrust of western scientific thinking over the last three centuries has been reductionist. Indeed the use of the word "analysis" in the broadest context nicely illustrates the scientist's almost unquestioning habit of taking a problem apart to solve it. But of course some problems (such as jigsaw puzzles) are only solved by putting them together—they are synthetic or "holistic" in nature. The picture on a jigsaw puzzle, like the speckled newspaper image of a face, can only be perceived at a higher level of structure than the individual pieces." Einstein famously said that “one cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created the problem." In other words, you cannot continue to think of individual puzzle pieces and how they fit into one another and expect to have any insight into where those pieces should go.

To answer the question “Where should this piece go?” you need to look up from one level to the next and, literally, see the bigger picture. If you examine the subatomic world and don’t find evil or beauty or God there, it doesn’t mean you have proven they don’t exist any more than examining the nonsensical marks on a single puzzle piece proves there is no bigger picture that is or could be formed. Davies’ universal hierarchy of abstraction (or UHA) is simple: All conceptual structures can be seen as organized through a single hierarchical framework that defines the relationships between parts and wholes, and is defined across several levels of abstraction, from microcosm to macrocosm, from universal to minutely particular. As you learn and develop in your own inquiries and use the Feynman method to uncover understanding and insight, you will eventually start to wonder how your knowledge connects up, and how it might be embedded into the world at large, or at least into other people’s meta-models. There are so many metaphysical theories and frameworks out there, which approach enormously complex topics from different perspectives. If theories, language, and models are maps, think of the universal hierarchy of abstraction as an ultimate map that itself contains levels of less complex maps.

So, if you’re in your house one day and you’re looking for a needle, you might like to have a thorough understanding of where all your furniture is, how to operate a drawer, and a detailed list of the contents of those drawers, so you can locate this tiny object. But if you wanted to travel to outer Mongolia, you would need a much bigger map to help you coordinate movements and actions at a larger magnitude. Your house and the tiny needle inside the drawer would still be as real as they ever were, but for the purposes of traveling to outer Mongolia, they are omitted from your map. Likewise, when at home and looking for a needle, you do not need to start by locating yourself in your universe, then in your galaxy, then on your planet, continent, country, and so on. It’s okay to forget that all that even exists and use a “map” that only contains your house. There is a Buddhist parable in which Gautama “preaches” to a crowd by simply holding up a single flower and not saying a word.

Because he was silent and pointed directly at reality, one of his disciples is said to have attained enlightenment at once. Jesus, too, had a similar sermon in Matthew 5:29, saying: “Behold the lilies of the field: they neither labor nor spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these." Gautama was “saying” something profound about saying: He chose a clever way to indicate reality without indicating it at all, like pointing to the moon without needing to use a finger. Wordlessly, without gesture or symbol, he conveyed the mystical and astonishingly profound idea that “it is." We can imagine that this is the extreme far end of the universal hierarchy of ideas—so abstract it is beyond abstraction.

And yet, the Buddha could access this level of comprehension via the mundane, i.e., the level of a simple flower growing in a field. Jesus, likewise, was not really talking about botany or the historical king Solomon. He wasn’t even talking about money or the nature of work or what the self really is underneath the socially constructed artifice of clothing. He, too, was pointing to reality, and used one level of understanding (clothing, flowers) to point to another. Whatever it is you are interested in learning more about, try to always be cognizant of the fact that this inquiry exists nested within a larger hierarchy of ideas. Being aware of its position in this hierarchy means you are able to more clearly see connections—and then you stop being a narrow specialist in this or that limited discipline and start becoming merely a thinker. You start to ask genuinely astonishing questions ... and give yourself the chance of answering them.

Think about depth but also breadth. Make connections. Become curious about what your problem looks like on different levels. This way of thinking, incidentally, will help you see that every item on your “twelve favorite problems”—yes, every single item—connects to every other item. You may not be able to see the connections, but they’re there. The universe out of which your seemingly disparate questions arose is just one thing, so why shouldn’t that be the case?

(Perhaps you want to really have fun and question whether the previous statement is in fact true.) If you want to know more about the way things are, then the hierarchy of ideas can help you navigate your way through and keep your inquiry organized. If you are attempting to learn to solve some particular problem, the hierarchy can help, too. It reminds you that the appropriate level of inquiry is the one that helps you solve the problem you currently have. For example, if you walk into a psychiatrist’s office and ask them why you’re anxious all the time, they wouldn’t start by saying, “Well, in the very beginning was the big bang ... ” Rather, the right level of abstraction is a bit like the setting on a magnifying glass—the best one is the one which allows you to see the object you’re interested in most clearly. Finally, being aware of the hierarchy of ideas is an excellent way of problem-solving.

If you’re stuck and can’t find a way out, try to zoom in or out one level of abstraction. If your perspective itself is a tool, then realize that some points of view are like scalpels, some are like enormous industrial cranes, and some are like supercolliders. Sometimes you feel like you’re encountering a problem when really you are just using the wrong tool, i.e., looking at things from the wrong perspective. If trying to find a resolution at your current level on the hierarchy isn’t working, try to find ways to step out of that level. For example, the psychiatrist may tell you that you have repressed anger or unresolved family issues and that’s why you experience anxiety. But if this doesn’t seem to be helping you after a while, maybe you need to zoom out and go a level higher.

Maybe you need to consult a philosopher or sociologist who will ask you why you thought that anxiety was a problem in the first place. Instead of learning yet another breathing exercise or mindfulness technique, the philosopher would advise you to unpick your assumption that being anxious was somehow an undesirable state of affairs in the first place. Maybe once you do this, you realize that you didn’t have an anxiety problem at all, but an expectation (heavy informed by marketing and social media) that discomfort in life is abnormal. When you look at things this way, it’s not that the problem is solved—it’s that it melts away entirely. And that wraps up today's episode of. The Science of Self.