Let’s start with a scene every student knows too well. It’s 11:45 PM. You’ve been sitting in the same ergonomically questionable chair for three hours. In front of you is a 40-page chapter on the “Mechanisms of Global Trade” or “The Krebs Cycle.” You have a neon yellow highlighter in your hand, and by now, the pages look like they’ve been soaked in radioactive sludge. You’ve read the same paragraph four times. You recognize the words, you know what they mean individually, but they aren’t sticking. They’re just sliding off your brain like water off a Teflon pan.
This is what educators call the “Illusion of Competence.” You feel like you’re working because your eyes are moving and your hand is tired, but you’re actually just performing a ritual. You are essentially trying to “brute force” your memory.
The problem isn’t that you’re “not a book person” or that the subject is too hard. The problem is that you are trying to run high-definition software on a brain that was never designed to process text alone. For about 99% of human history, we didn’t have books. We had landscapes, faces, tracks in the dirt, and stars. Our brains are visual-spatial engines, yet we insist on feeding them nothing but lines of black-and-white text.
If you want to stop the 11:45 PM meltdown, you have to stop “studying” and start Dual Coding.
The Two-Channel Architecture: Why Your Brain is Like a Backup Generator
In the early 1970s, a cognitive psychologist named Allan Paivio proposed a theory that should have fundamentally rewritten every curriculum in the world. He called it Dual Coding Theory. The gist of it is surprisingly simple: our brains have two distinct “channels” for processing information. One channel handles verbal information—anything involving language. This includes the words you read in a book, the podcast you’re listening to, and that internal monologue in your head. The other channel handles non-verbal or visual information—images, diagrams, spatial layouts, and symbols.
Here is the kicker: these two channels are independent but interconnected.
Think of it like a redundant power grid. If a city relies on one single power line (the verbal channel), and that line gets overloaded or snaps, the whole city goes dark. That’s you in an exam, staring at a question and realizing the “verbal” memory has failed you. But if the city has a second, independent backup line (the visual channel), the lights stay on.
When you study using only text, you’re building one single, fragile bridge to the information. When you use Dual Coding—pairing that text with a specific, related visual—you’re building two bridges. You are “double-encoding” the data. If you can’t remember the exact sentence the professor said during the test, your brain can often “see” the diagram you drew in the margin of your notes. And once you “see” that diagram, the verbal information usually comes flooding back with it.
The “Art School” Phobia: Stop Worrying About Being Good
Before we go any further, we need to address the elephant in the room. Whenever I tell someone they should “draw” their notes, they immediately recoil. “I can’t draw,” they say. “My stick figures look like they’ve been in a car accident.”
Listen to me: Dual coding is not art. In fact, being “good” at art can sometimes be a disadvantage when studying. If you spend forty-five minutes drawing a perfectly shaded, anatomically correct heart for biology, you aren’t dual coding—you’re procrastinating. You’re focusing on the aesthetics, not the information.
The best dual-coded notes are often “ugly.” They are functional. They are what I call “informational architecture.” If you are trying to understand the relationship between three different historical figures, a simple triangle with their names and three arrows showing who hated whom is infinitely more valuable than a beautiful portrait of King Louis XIV.
The goal isn’t to create something you’d hang on a fridge. The goal is to force your brain to translate.
Translation is the “secret sauce” of learning. When you read a sentence and then force yourself to represent that sentence as a sketch, a flowchart, or a map, you are doing the hardest mental work possible. You have to understand the material deeply enough to change its format. You can’t “fudge” a diagram. If you don’t understand how the parts of a cell work together, you won’t know where to put the arrows. The act of drawing is actually a diagnostic tool—it shows you exactly where your understanding is crumbling.
The Strategy Guide: How to Actually Do This
So, how do you move this from a “nice idea” to something you actually do on a Tuesday afternoon? It comes down to a few specific techniques that you can start using today.
1. The “Margin Icon” Method
This is the easiest way to start. As you’re reading a textbook, don’t just use your highlighter. Instead, for every major concept or paragraph, challenge yourself to draw a tiny, 2-second icon in the margin.
Studying a war? Draw a tiny shield for a defensive move or a flame for an invasion. Studying a legal principle? Draw a tiny set of scales. Studying the concept of “supply and demand”? Draw a simple upward arrow meeting a downward arrow.
These aren’t just decorations. When you flip back through those pages later to review, your eyes will skip the walls of text and hit those icons. Each icon acts as a “hook” that pulls the memory of the paragraph back into your conscious mind. It’s like a visual table of contents for your brain.
2. The Concept Map (The “Anti-Outline”)
Most of us were taught to take notes in an outline format:
- Topic A
- Subtopic 1
- Subtopic 2
The problem with outlines is that they are linear. They suggest that information exists in a straight line. But information is almost never a straight line; it’s a web.
A concept map is a visual representation of that web. You put the “Big Idea” in a circle in the center of your page. Then, you draw branches out to related ideas. But here is the dual coding part: on those branches, you write a verb. “Idea A causes Idea B.” “Idea C contradicts Idea A.”
By using circles, branches, and verbs, you are using the visual channel (spatial layout) and the verbal channel (the words) simultaneously. You are creating a map of the “territory” of the subject.
3. The Graphic Organizer (The Comparison King)
If you’re studying two things that are similar but different—like the ideologies of the US and the USSR during the Cold War, or two different types of chemical bonds—don’t write a list of facts for each.
Create a Venn Diagram or a Comparison Matrix.
The moment you place two ideas physically next to each other on a piece of paper, your brain starts doing something called “Spontaneous Integration.” You start noticing patterns that weren’t visible when the facts were buried in separate paragraphs. You “see” the gap in the middle where they overlap. That “seeing” is the non-verbal channel doing the work for you.
Subject-Specific Hacks: Dual Coding Across the Curriculum
It’s easy to see how this works for biology (draw the cell) or geography (draw the map). But what about the “hard” subjects? The ones that feel purely abstract?
Mathematics
Math is often seen as the ultimate “verbal/symbolic” subject, but it’s actually incredibly visual. If you’re struggling with a formula, stop trying to memorize the sequence of letters and numbers. Try to visualize the behavior. If it’s a quadratic equation, what does that curve feel like? If you’re doing calculus, don’t just find the derivative; draw the slope. When you link the abstract symbol ($x^2$) to the visual shape (a parabola), you stop memorizing and start understanding. This is why tools like Desmos are so powerful—they provide the visual “half” of the dual code that traditional textbooks often ignore.
Literature and Language
How do you dual-code a Shakespearean play?
Don’t just write a character list. Draw a Character Web. Use different colors for different types of relationships (red for “enemies,” blue for “family”). Draw a small icon next to each name (a dagger for Macbeth, a crown for Duncan).
When you’re learning a new language, the worst thing you can do is write the English translation next to the foreign word. That’s just “Verbal to Verbal.” It’s weak. Instead, write the foreign word and draw a picture of the object. Don’t write “Apple = Manzana.” Write “Manzana” and draw a red fruit. You want to bypass the English “filter” entirely and link the new word directly to the “visual concept” in your brain.
History
History is just a story about people and places, yet we teach it as a list of dates.
If you want to remember the French Revolution, draw a Timeline of Causal Chains. Don’t just list the dates; draw a “domino effect.” Event A (famine) knocks into Event B (taxation), which knocks into Event C (the Bastille). Use symbols to represent the “energy” of each event.
The “Pinterest Trap”: When Dual Coding Goes Wrong
There is a dark side to this. If you spend five minutes on Instagram or Pinterest, you’ll see “Study-gram” influencers with incredible notes. They use ten different colors of brush pens, perfect calligraphy, and beautiful illustrations.
This is a trap.
Often, these students are doing what I call “Passive Beautification.” They are taking information they already understand and “dressing it up.” That isn’t dual coding. Dual coding is a discovery process. It should be a little messy.
If your notes look like a professional graphic designer made them, you probably spent too much time on the wrong thing. The “Dual” in Dual Coding means the image and the word are working together. If the image is just a pretty border, it’s not doing any cognitive work. It’s just “cognitive load”—it’s actually distracting your brain from the material.
The rule of thumb is: If the visual doesn’t add meaning, get rid of it. A drawing of a cute panda at the bottom of your physics notes is useless. A drawing of a “free-body diagram” showing the forces acting on that panda? That’s 10/10 study material.
The Tools of the Trade: Digital vs. Analog
A lot of people ask if they should use an iPad and an Apple Pencil or a traditional notebook.
The “human” answer is: Whatever has the least friction.
There is some research that suggests the tactile “heavier” feel of a pen on paper creates a stronger motor-memory trace in the brain. There’s something about the physical resistance of the paper that makes the “encoding” feel more permanent.
However, digital tools like Miro, Freeform, or even just Procreate on an iPad offer something paper doesn’t: the ability to move things. In the middle of a concept map, you might realize that “Idea G” actually belongs next to “Idea B.” On paper, you’re stuck. On a tablet, you can just drag it.
That “dragging and rearranging” is a form of spatial thinking. You are literally moving ideas around in space to see where they fit. That is a high-level cognitive act. So, if you like tech, use it—just don’t get caught up in the 5,000 different brush settings. Pick one pen, one highlighter color, and get to work.
Why This Matters in the Long Run (The “Career” Side)
We talk about dual coding as a way to pass a midterm, but the reality is that the “Verbal-Only” people are the ones who struggle in the professional world.
If you go into a business meeting and you just read 50 slides of bullet points to your colleagues, they will forget 90% of what you said by the time they hit the parking lot. But if you can walk up to a whiteboard and sketch out the “ecosystem” of your company’s problem—if you can show the flow of customers with arrows and circles—you will be the most influential person in the room.
Dual coding is more than a study hack; it’s a communication superpower. It’s the ability to take the invisible (thoughts and words) and make them visible.
The Mental Shift: From Consumer to Creator
The reason most people don’t use dual coding, despite the science being rock-solid, is that it’s hard.
It is much easier to sit on a couch and “read” a book. It feels low-effort. It feels safe. Dual coding requires you to be a creator. It requires you to sit with a blank piece of paper and wrestle with the material until you can figure out how to “draw” it.
There will be moments where you stare at a page of notes and think, “I have no idea how to represent this visually.” That is the moment the learning starts. That frustration is the sound of your brain’s “gears” finally engaging. It means you’ve identified a gap in your knowledge.
Don’t run away from that gap. Don’t go back to your highlighter. Stay there. Try a few different sketches. Draw a flowchart, hate it, crumble it up, and try a Venn diagram instead.
Final Thoughts: The 20% Advantage
The research is pretty consistent: students who use dual coding tend to outperform those who use text-only methods by about 20% to 40% on long-term retention tests.
Think about what that means. That’s the difference between a C and an A. That’s the difference between remembering the material for the final exam and actually “owning” the knowledge for the rest of your life.
But more importantly, it makes studying interesting. When you start looking for the “visual” side of every subject, the world starts to look different. You start seeing patterns in history, shapes in math, and structures in literature. You stop being a passive recipient of information and start being an architect of your own mind.
So, the next time you find yourself at 11:45 PM with a highlighter in your hand, do yourself a favor. Put the highlighter down. Grab a plain sheet of paper. Look at that paragraph you’ve read four times, and ask yourself one simple question:
“What does this look like?”
Then, start drawing. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to be true.
Thus is insightful 👌 👏 Thank you
This is insightful 👌👏 Thank you 😊