Mitchell Suter

You’re not alone. The Feynman technique for teaching and communication is a mental model (a breakdown of his personal thought process) to convey information using concise thoughts and simple language. This technique is derived from Feynman’s studying methods when he was a student at Princeton.

“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official mathematicians could handle,” he continues. “But then once Arabic numerals came around, you could actually do arithmetic on paper, and we found that 7-year-olds can understand multiplication. It’s not that multiplication itself was difficult. It was just that the representation of numbers — the interface — was wrong.”

…omputers today is certainly the physical interface, but this isn’t a technology problem,” he says. “The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before.