Once you have the basic idea of the technique down during your study session,
sort of like learning to ride a bike with training wheels,
start interleaving your practice with problems of different types or
different types of approaches, concepts, procedures.
Sometimes this can be a little tough to do.
A given section in a book, for
example, is often devoted to a specific technique, so when you flip
to that section you already know which technique you're going to be using.
Still, do what you can to mix up your learning.
In science and math in particular it can help to look ahead at the more
varied problem sets that are sometimes found at the end of chapters.
Or you can deliberately try to make yourself occasionally
pick out why some problems call for one technique as opposed to another.
You want your brain to become used to the idea that just knowing how to use
a particular concept, approach, or problem-solving technique isn't enough.
You also need to know when to use it.
Interleaving your studies, making it a point to review for a test,
for example, by skipping around through problems in the different chapters and
materials can sometimes seem to make your learning a little more difficult, but
in reality, it helps you learn more deeply.
Interleaving is extraordinarily important.
Although practice and
repetition is important in helping build solid neural patterns to draw on,
it's interleaving that starts building flexibility and creativity.
It's where you leave the world of practice and repetition, and
begin thinking more independently.
When you interleave within one subject or one discipline,
you begin to develop your creative power within that discipline.
When you interleave between several subjects or disciplines,
you can more easily make interesting new connections between
chunks in the different fields, which can enhance your creativity even further.
Of course it takes time to develop solid chunks of knowledge in different fields,
so sometimes there's a trade off.
Developing expertise in several fields
means you can bring very new ideas from one field to the other, but
it can also mean that your expertise in one field or the other
isn't quite as deep as that of the person who specializes in only one discipline.
On the other hand, if you develop expertise in only one discipline,
you may know it very deeply but you may become more deeply entrenched
in your familiar way of thinking and not be able to handle new ideas.