The Secret to True Understanding Isn't Just Memorization

Ever feel like you've spent hours studying, only to realize you can't explain the topic in your own words? You're not alone. The difference between memorizing facts and truly understanding a concept is huge. This is where one of the most powerful learning strategies comes in: the Feynman Technique.

Developed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, this mental model is a simple yet profound method for deconstructing complex ideas until you grasp them at their core. The goal? To explain a topic in such simple terms that a child could understand it.

But in today's digital world, we can elevate this classic technique. By pairing its timeless principles with modern AI, you can create an accelerated learning workflow that is more effective than ever. Let's explore how to supercharge the Feynman Technique with AI to learn anything, faster and deeper.

A Quick Refresher: The 4 Steps of the Feynman Technique

Before we bring in the AI, here’s the original, powerful four-step process:

  1. Choose Your Concept: Pick a topic you want to understand and write its name at the top of a blank page.

  2. Teach It to a Beginner: Write out an explanation of the concept as if you were teaching it to someone with no prior knowledge. Use simple language and analogies.

  3. Identify Gaps and Go Back to the Source: When you get stuck, find yourself using jargon, or realize your explanation is shaky, you’ve found a gap in your understanding. Return to your source material (textbooks, notes, articles) to fill it.

  4. Review, Organize, and Simplify: Read your explanation aloud. If it sounds confusing or wordy, simplify the language further. Organize it into a clear, flowing narrative.

This process forces you into a state of active recall and helps you build strong neural connections. Now, let's add the AI-powered upgrade.

Supercharging Each Step with AI Study Tools

Modern AI can act as your personal tutor, curious student, and brilliant assistant all at once. Here’s how to integrate it into each step of the Feynman Technique.

Step 1: Choose and Study with an AI Research Assistant

Instead of just grabbing a textbook, you can start with a broad, AI-powered overview. This helps you grasp the key pillars of the concept before diving deep.

  • How to do it: Use an AI tool to get a high-level summary of your chosen topic. Ask it to “Explain [your topic] like I’m 15” or “What are the five most important things to know about [your topic]?”

  • AI Tool for the Job: ChatGPT

  • Purpose: A versatile conversational AI that can generate summaries, explain complex topics at different levels, and answer clarifying questions.

  • Implementation: Start a conversation with a prompt like, “I'm learning about the Krebs cycle for my biology class. Can you explain its main purpose and key stages in a simple way?”

  • Official Source: https://openai.com/chatgpt

Step 2: Teach It to Your AI “Student”

This is where the magic happens. Instead of just writing on a blank page, you can “teach” your topic to a conversational AI and get immediate feedback.

  • How to do it: Instruct your AI to act as a specific persona—a curious high school student, a complete novice, or even a skeptical colleague. Then, type out your explanation and see how it responds.

  • AI Tool for the Job: ChatGPT (or similar conversational AI)

  • Purpose: Its ability to adopt a persona makes it the perfect digital student. It will ask questions, get confused by jargon, and force you to simplify your language.

  • Implementation: Use a prompt like: “Act as a 12-year-old who knows nothing about economics. I'm going to explain the concept of supply and demand to you. Ask me questions whenever you don't understand something.” Then, start explaining.

Step 3: Identify Gaps with an AI Tutor

When your AI student asks a question you can't answer, you’ve found a knowledge gap. But AI can also proactively help you find weaknesses you didn't even know you had.

  • How to do it: After you provide your explanation, ask the AI to critique it. Have it identify weak points, confusing analogies, or areas where you relied too heavily on technical terms.

  • AI Tool for the Job: Notion AI

  • Purpose: Integrated directly into your notes, Notion AI can analyze your written text and provide suggestions for improvement, simplification, or clarification.

  • Implementation: Paste your explanation into a Notion page. Highlight the text and use the “Ask AI” feature with a prompt like, “Review this explanation. What parts are confusing? What questions would a beginner ask? Suggest simpler analogies.”

  • Official Source: https://www.notion.so/product/ai

Step 4: Organize and Visualize with AI-Powered Tools

The final step is about creating a polished, simple, and memorable summary. AI can help you structure your thoughts and even turn them into visual aids like concept maps.

  • How to do it: Use AI to automatically generate a concise summary of your final, refined explanation. Then, use that summary to build a visual concept map connecting the main ideas, which further solidifies your understanding.

  • AI Tools for the Job: Notion AI and Miro

  • Notion AI (for summarizing):

  • Purpose: Quickly condenses your detailed notes into key takeaways or a clean summary.

  • Implementation: After refining your explanation in Notion, use the “Summarize” AI command to create a final, clean version.

  • Miro (for visualizing):

  • Purpose: An online collaborative whiteboard that's perfect for creating diagrams and concept maps. Many have AI features to help generate ideas and structure diagrams.

  • Implementation: Take the key points from your AI-generated summary and arrange them in a Miro board. Draw connections, add keywords, and create a visual representation of the concept. This bridges linguistic and visual understanding.

  • Official Source: https://miro.com/

Putting It All Together: An Example

Let’s say you’re learning about Machine Learning. Here’s the AI-supercharged workflow:

  1. Research (ChatGPT): “Explain the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning in simple terms.”

  2. Teach (ChatGPT): “Okay, now act like you’re a curious 10th grader. I’m going to explain it. Here goes…” You type out your explanation. The AI asks, “So, is a spam filter supervised because it’s ‘taught’ with labeled emails?”

  3. Identify Gaps (Notion AI): That’s a great question! You realize you weren’t clear on the importance of “labeled data.” You go back to your sources, refine your explanation in Notion, then ask Notion AI: “Make this explanation clearer and fix my confusing sentences.”

  4. Organize & Visualize (Miro): You now have a solid, simple explanation. You paste it into Miro and use its mind map tool to create a diagram showing “Machine Learning” at the center, with branches for “Supervised” (e.g., spam filters, image recognition) and “Unsupervised” (e.g., customer segmentation, anomaly detection).

You haven't just memorized definitions. You've interacted with the material, answered questions, simplified your language, and visualized the connections. That knowledge is now truly yours.