How well are you utilising the power of the subconscious mind? How thoroughly do you learn a topic or skill? Have you ever considered how you choose what to pay more attention to? Are you wasting time and effort by trying to learn too many things badly, and not enough well?

In this article I'm going to answer three questions:

1. Why is it important to learn until you know something automatically?
2. How do we choose what to spend more time learning thoroughly?
3. Why should we take this process to a more extreme level?

Why is it important to learn until you know something automatically?

Look at this IQ test question:

What number follows this sequence?
4, 6, 10, 14, 22, 26, ?

The great thing about patterns is they are movable. You can work out the pattern from one scenario and then use it in a similar scenario to gain new insights and solve different problems.

In fact your pattern recognition ability is not only at the core of improving your intelligence – it is the core. It is literally the function of the brain. It is what we do everyday in order to survive and, hopefully, prosper. To improve IQ, we simply must improve our ability to discover patterns.

Patterns are everywhere. They are in our language, they are in our movements, they are in the ground that we walk upon.

But what do I mean by a pattern?

A pattern is simply something that repeats.

For example there is a pattern to how each person walks: they lift up a leg, they place it in front of them; then they pick up the other leg and place it in front of the first. This process repeats over and over again.