Often when learning new material, I find it takes significantly longer than I would like to produce an adequate conceptual map of an idea within my mind. I can almost always do it, given enough time and effort, but this seems to be suboptimal, especially when there is a large amount of information that I want to learn. Memorisation, the second part of overall "learning", seems to have many efficient methods documented for how to achieve this, however the process of understanding, required to effectively memorise in the first place, seems to be without any immediate "best practices" to achieving it. Are there any relatively universal principles one can use to increase the rate at which one can effectively understand things?
