The Feynman Technique: 4 Steps to Learn Anything by Explaining It

The Feynman technique is a way to learn something by explaining it in plain words, without your notes, as if you were teaching it to someone new. Wherever you get stuck or fall back on jargon is a gap in your understanding. You go back to the source, fix it and explain it again, simpler.

Where the name comes from

Richard Feynman was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 and was known for explaining hard ideas in everyday language. He never published a four-step method. The technique is a modern summary of his approach that carries his name.

The 4 steps

1. Pick a concept and write it at the top of a page

Be specific. "Biology" is too big. "How the heart moves blood around the body" is the right size for one page.

2. Explain it as if teaching someone new

Write or say the explanation without looking at your notes, for someone who has never studied the subject. Use short sentences and everyday words. If you need a technical term, define it.

3. Mark the gaps and go back to the source

Underline every spot where you got stuck, skipped a step, waved your hands or used a word you couldn't define. Those are your gaps. Go back to the textbook or your notes for those parts only, then close them again.

4. Simplify and add an example

Rewrite the explanation shorter and clearer. Add one concrete example or analogy. If you can explain it in a few sentences and answer "why?" after each one, you understand it.

A worked example

Example topic: why we have seasons.

• First attempt: "In summer, Earth is closer to the sun, so it's hotter."
• Gap found: if that were true, both hemispheres would have summer at the same time. They don't. The explanation breaks on the first "why?".
• Back to the source: the cause is the tilt of Earth's axis. The hemisphere tilted toward the sun gets more direct sunlight and longer days. Earth is in fact closest to the sun during the northern winter.
• Simpler version: "Earth spins on a tilted axis. For part of the year your half leans toward the sun, so sunlight hits more directly and days are longer. That's summer. Six months later your half leans away. That's winter."

The first version sounded fine until you tried to explain it. That's what the technique is for.

Why it works

You find out what you don't know

People rate their understanding of everyday devices like a zipper or a flush toilet as high, then rate it much lower after trying to write a step-by-step explanation. Researchers call this the illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). Trying to explain is what broke the illusion in those studies.

Explaining to yourself helps understanding

In a classic study, eighth graders who were prompted to explain each line of a text about the circulatory system understood it better than students who read it twice (Chi et al., 1994). The sample was small, but a major review of study techniques later rated self-explanation as moderately useful (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

Preparing to teach changes how you study

Students told they would teach a passage recalled more of it, better organized, than students told they would take a test, even though nobody ended up teaching (Nestojko et al., 2014).

Doing it without notes is the key part

In one experiment, students who taught without notes did better on a test a week later than those who taught with notes. Students who only practiced recalling the material did about as well as the teachers without notes (Koh et al., 2018). The benefit seems to come from pulling the information out of memory.

Limits

• It takes time. One concept can take a full page and a couple of rounds. Save it for the ideas you don't understand, not every line of the syllabus.
• It isn't for memorizing. Vocabulary, dates and formulas stick better with flashcards and spaced review. Our guide on how to study for a test covers that part.
• You can explain something wrong with confidence. Always check your final version against the source.
• Simple isn't vague. "Explain it to a child" means everyday words, not leaving out the steps that matter.

Put it into a study session

A simple routine: learn a section, close the book, explain it on a blank page, check the gaps, then turn the explained version into three or four questions for your next quiz round. Repeat the explanation a few days later without notes. If it holds, move on.

Do it with the phone out of reach. In one set of experiments, people scored worse on memory and reasoning tasks with their phone on the desk than with it in another room (Ward et al., 2017), although a later replication didn't find the effect. Either way, an explanation half-written when a notification arrives is an explanation you'll restart. Our guide on how to stop phone addiction has the setup changes that help.

Study first, scroll later

LockTy locks the apps you choose while you study and can keep them locked until you hit a daily goal, like time spent reading. It lives on your lock screen, so you see the goal before you reach for an app.

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