1

Ten Mental Models

for Learning Anything

by Scott Young

© 2023
Contents
What is a mental model? 4

Mental Model 1: Problem solving is search 5

Mental Model 2: Memory strengthens by retrieval 7

Mental Model 3: Knowledge grows exponentially 8

Mental Model 4: Creativity is mostly copying 9

Mental Model 5: Skills are specific 10

Mental Model 6: Mental bandwidth is extremely limited 12

Mental Model 7: Success is the best teacher 14

Mental Model 8: We reason through examples 15

Mental Model 9: Knowledge becomes invisible

with experience 17

Mental Model 10: Relearning is relatively fast 19

3
What is a mental model?
A mental model is a general idea that can be used to explain
many different phenomena. Supply and demand in economics,
natural selection in biology, recursion in computer science, or
proof by induction in mathematics—these models are every-
where once you know to look for them.

Just as understanding supply and demand helps you reason

about economics problems, understanding mental models of
learning will make it easier to think about learning problems.

Unfortunately, learning is rarely taught as a class on its own—

meaning most of these mental models are known only to spe-
cialists. In this essay, I’d like to share the ten that have influ-
enced me the most, along with references to dig deeper in case
you’d like to know more.

4
Mental Model 1: Problem solving is
search
Herbert Simon and Allen Newell launched the study of problem
solving with their landmark book, Human Problem Solving. In it,
they argued that people solve problems by searching through a
problem space.

A problem space is like a maze: you know where you are now,
you’d know if you’ve reached the exit, but you don’t know how to
get there. Along the way, you’re constrained in your movements
by the maze’s walls.

Problem spaces can also be abstract. Solving a Rubik’s cube, for

instance, means moving through a large problem space of con-
figurations—the scrambled cube is your start, the cube with each
color segregated to a single side is the exit, and the twists and
turns define the “walls” of the problem space.

Real-life problems are typically more expansive than mazes or

Rubik’s cubes—the start state, end state and exact moves are

5
often not clear-cut. But searching through the space of possi-
bilities is still a good characterization of what people do when
solving unfamiliar problems—meaning when they don’t yet have
a method or memory that guides them directly to the answer.

One implication of this model is that, without prior knowledge,

most problems are really difficult to solve. A Rubik’s cube has
over forty-three quintillion configurations—a big space to search
in if you aren’t clever about it. Learning is the process of acquir-
ing patterns and methods to cut down on brute-force searching.

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Mental Model 2: Memory
strengthens by retrieval
Retrieving knowledge strengthens memory more than seeing
something for a second time does. Testing knowledge isn’t just a
way of measuring what you know—it actively improves your
memory. In fact, testing is one of the best study techniques re-
searchers have discovered.

Why is retrieval so helpful? One way to think of it is that the

brain economizes effort by remembering only those things that
are likely to prove useful. If you always have an answer at hand,
there’s no need to encode it in memory. In contrast, the difficulty
associated with retrieval is a strong signal that you need to re-
member.

Retrieval only works if there is something to retrieve. This is why

we need books, teachers and classes. When memory fails, we
fall back on problem-solving search which, depending on the
size of the problem space, may fail utterly to give us a correct
answer. However, once we’ve seen the answer, we’ll learn more
by retrieving it than by repeatedly viewing it.

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Mental Model 3: Knowledge grows
exponentially
How much you’re able to learn depends on what you already
know. Research finds that the amount of knowledge retained
from a text depends on prior knowledge of the topic. This effect
can even outweigh general intelligence in some situations.

As you learn new things, you integrate them into what you al-
ready know. This integration provides more hooks for you to re-
call that information later. However, when you know little about
a topic, you have fewer hooks to put new information on. This
makes the information easier to forget. Like a crystal growing
from a seed, future learning is much easier once a foundation is
established.

This process has limits, of course, or knowledge would acceler-

ate indefinitely. Still, it’s good to keep in mind because the early
phases of learning are often the hardest and can give a mislead-
ing impression of future difficulty within a field.

8
Mental Model 4: Creativity is mostly
copying
Few subjects are so misunderstood as creativity. We tend to im-
bue creative individuals with a near-magical aura, but creativity
is much more mundane in practice.

In an impressive review of significant inventions, Matt Ridley ar-

gues that innovation results from an evolutionary process. Rath-
er than springing into the world fully-formed, new invention is
essentially the random mutation of old ideas. When those ideas
prove useful, they expand to fill a new niche.

Evidence for this view comes from the phenomenon of near-si-

multaneous innovations. Numerous times in history, multiple,
unconnected people have developed the same innovation,
which suggests that these inventions were somehow “nearby” in
the space of possibilities right before their discovery.

Even in fine art, the importance of copying has been neglect-

ed. Yes, many revolutions in art were explicit rejections of past
trends. But the revolutionaries themselves were, almost without
exception, steeped in the tradition they rebelled against. Rebel-
ling against any convention requires awareness of that conven-
tion.

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Mental Model 5: Skills are specific
Transfer refers to enhanced abilities in one task after practice or
training in a different task. In research on transfer, a typical pat-
tern shows up:

• Practice at a task makes you better at it.

• Practice at a task helps with similar tasks (usually ones that

overlap in procedures or knowledge).

• Practice at one task helps little with unrelated tasks, even if

they seem to require the same broad abilities like “memory,”
“critical thinking” or “intelligence.”

It’s hard to make exact predictions about transfer because they

depend on knowing both exactly how the human mind works
and the structure of all knowledge. However, in more restricted
domains, John Anderson has found that productions—IF-THEN
rules that operate on knowledge—form a fairly good match for
the amount of transfer observed in intellectual skills.

10
While skills may be specific, breadth creates generality. For in-
stance, learning a word in a foreign language is only helpful
when using or hearing that word. But if you know many words,
you can say a lot of different things.

Similarly, knowing one idea may matter little, but mastering

many can give enormous power. Every extra year of education
improves IQ by 1-5 points, in part because the breadth of knowl-
edge taught in school overlaps with that needed in real life (and
on intelligence tests).

If you want to be smarter, there are no shortcuts—you’ll have to

learn a lot. But the converse is also true. Learning a lot makes
you more intelligent than you might predict.

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Mental Model 6: Mental bandwidth
is extremely limited
We can only keep a few things in mind at any one time. George
Miller initially pegged the number at seven, plus or minus two
items. But more recent work has suggested the number is closer
to four things.

This incredibly narrow space is the bottleneck through which all

learning, every idea, memory and experience must flow if it is
going to become a part of our long-term experience. Subliminal
learning doesn’t work. If you aren’t paying attention, you’re not
learning.

The primary way we can be more efficient with learning is to en-

sure the things that flow through the bottleneck are useful. De-
voting bandwidth to irrelevant elements may slow us down.

Since the 1980s, cognitive load theory has been used to explain
how interventions optimize (or limit) learning based on our limit-
ed mental bandwidth. This research finds:

12
• Problem solving may be counterproductive for beginners.
Novices do better when shown worked examples (solutions)
instead.

• Materials should be designed to avoid needing to flip be-

tween pages or parts of a diagram to understand the material.

• Redundant information impedes learning.

• Complex ideas can be learned more easily when presented

first in parts.

13
Mental Model 7: Success is the best
teacher
We learn more from success than failure. The reason is that prob-
lem spaces are typically large, and most solutions are wrong.
Knowing what works cuts down the possibilities dramatically,
whereas experiencing failure only tells you one specific strategy
doesn’t work.

A good rule is to aim for a roughly 85% success rate when learn-
ing. You can do this by calibrating the difficulty of your practice
(open vs. closed book, with vs. without a tutor, simple vs. com-
plex problems) or by seeking extra training and assistance when
falling below this threshold. If you succeed above this threshold,
you’re probably not seeking hard enough problems—and are
practicing routines instead of learning new skills.

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Mental Model 8: We reason
through examples
How people can think logically is an age-old puzzle. Since Kant,
we’ve known that logic can’t be acquired from experience.
Somehow, we must already know the rules of logic, or an illogi-
cal mind could never have invented them. But if that is so, why
do we so often fail at the kinds of problems logicians invent?

In 1983, Philip Johnson-Laird proposed a solution: we reason by

constructing a mental model of the situation.

To test a syllogism like “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal,” we imagine a collection of men,
all of whom are mortal, and imagine that Socrates is one of
them. We deduce the syllogism is true through this examination.

Johnson-Laird suggested that this mental-model based reason-

ing also explains our logical deficits. We struggle most with log-
ical statements that require us to examine multiple models. The
more models that need constructing and reviewing, the more
likely we will make mistakes.

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Related research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky shows
that this example-based reasoning can lead us to mistake our
fluency in recalling examples for the actual probability of an
event or pattern. For instance, we might think more words fit the
pattern K _ _ _ than _ _ K _ because it is easier to think of exam-
ples in the first category (e.g., KITE, KALE, KILL) than the second
(e.g., TAKE, BIKE, NUKE).

Reasoning through examples has several implications:

1. Learning is often faster through examples than abstract de-

scriptions.

2. To learn a general pattern, we need many examples.

3. We must watch out when making broad inferences based on a

few examples. (Are you sure you’ve considered all the possi-
ble cases?)

16
Mental Model 9: Knowledge
becomes invisible with experience
Skills become increasingly automated through practice. This
reduces our conscious awareness of the skill, making it require
less of our precious working memory capacity to perform. Think
of driving a car: at first, using the blinkers and the brakes was
painfully deliberate. After years of driving, you barely think about
it.

The increased automation of skills has drawbacks, however. One

is that it becomes much harder to teach a skill to someone else.
When knowledge becomes tacit, it becomes harder to make
explicit how you make a decision. Experts frequently underesti-
mate the importance of “basic” skills because, having long been
automated, they don’t seem to factor much into their daily deci-
sion-making.

Another drawback is that automated skills are less open to con-

scious control. This can lead to plateaus in progress when you
keep doing something the way you’ve always done it, even when
that is no longer appropriate. Seeking more difficult challenges

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becomes vital because these bump you out of automaticity and
force you to try better solutions.

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Mental Model 10: Relearning is
relatively fast
After years spent in school, how many of us could still pass the
final exams we needed to graduate? Faced with classroom ques-
tions, many adults sheepishly admit they recall little.

Forgetting is the unavoidable fate of any skill we don’t use reg-

ularly. Hermann Ebbinghaus found that knowledge tapers off
at an exponential rate—most quickly at the beginning, slowing
down as time elapses.

Yet there is a silver lining. Relearning is usually much faster than

initial learning. Some of this can be understood as a threshold
problem. Imagine memory strength ranges between 0 and 100.
Under some threshold, say 35, a memory is inaccessible. Thus
if a memory dropped from 36 to 34 in strength, you would for-
get what you had known. But even a little boost from relearning
would repair the memory enough to recall it. In contrast a new
memory (starting at zero) would require much more work.

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Connectionist models, inspired by human neural networks, offer
another argument for the potency of relearning. In these models,
a computational neural network may take hundreds of iterations
to reach the optimal point. And if you “jiggle” the connections in
this network, it forgets the right answer and responds no better
than if by chance. However, as with the threshold explanation
above, the network relearns the optimal response much faster
the second time.1

Relearning is a nuisance, especially since struggling with previ-

ously easy problems can be discouraging. Yet it’s no reason not
to learn deeply and broadly—even forgotten knowledge can be
revived much faster than starting from scratch.

What are the learning challenges you’re facing? Can you apply
one of these mental models to see it in a new light? What would
the implications be for tackling a skill or subject you find diffi-
cult? Share your thoughts in the comments!

1 These networks are trained via gradient descent. Gradient descent works by essential-
ly rolling downhill. Correct knowledge is like the gently-sloping bottom of a steep canyon—
the correct direction is down the canyon, but the sides are quite high. Unlike a three-di-
mensional space, as would describe a physical canyon, most networks are in an extremely
high-dimensional space. That means any imprecision in the direction results in running up
the side of the canyon. The result is that networks typically slosh around a lot before get-
ting to the bottom of the long canyon. However, when you add any noise to the system, the
“downhill” direction usually goes straight back to the optimal point.

20
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