Learning How To Learn Notes Week 1

Course Objectives

• Explain the difference between focused and diffuse modes of thinking.
• Explain what a chunk is, and how and why you can and should enhance your chunking skills.
• Explain how working memory and long term memory differ from one another.
• Describe key techniques to help students learn most efficiently such as: the Pomodoro, metaphor, story, visualization, deliberate practice, and interleaving.
• Describe actions that hinder students from learning most effectively, such as procrastination, over-learning, Einstellung, choking, multi-tasking, illusions of learning, and lack of sleep.
• Describe the most important aspects of proper test preparation.
• Explain the importance of “mindset” in learning.

Week 1

Focused vs Diffuse Thinking

• Focused Mode & Diffuse Mode are different.
• Diffuse Mode sparks creativity, Focused Mode is good for tracing the old materials or way of thinking that you are already familiar with.
• In the diffuse mode, the brain makes random connections in a relaxed fashion which sparks creativity.
• To learn new things, you need to switch back and forth between focused and diffuse mode.
• Learning something difficult takes time. It is just like training for weight lifting, it is impossible to train in one day.

What is Learning?

• There are millions of billions of synapses in our brain
• Sleep helps to build these new synapses

Procrastination, Memory, and Sleep

• When you look at something that you really rather not do, it seems that you activate the areas of your brain associated with pain. Your brain, naturally enough, looks for a way to stop that negative stimulation by switching your attention to something else.
• Researchers discovered that not long after people might start actually working out what they didn’t like, that neurodiscomfort disappeared.
• When Pomodoro session ends, reward yourself!
• Why STEM is a bit more challenging? Because they are abstract. However, The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you. Even if the ideas you’re dealing with are abstract, the neural thought patterns you are creating are real and concrete. Practicing and repeating are particularly important for learning abstract things.
• When you first begin to understand something, for example, how to solve a problem, the neural pattern from is there, but very weak. When you solve the problem again fresh from the start, without looking at the solution, the neuron pattern becomes darker and stronger. And when you have the problem down cold, so you can go over each step completely and concisely in your mind without even looking at the solution, you’ve even had practice on related problems, then, the pattern is like this dark firm pattern you can see towards the bottom of the pinball frame.

• Practice makes permanent.
• Then take a break or at least change your focus to something different for awhile. During this time of seeming relaxation, your brain’s diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding.
• your neural mortar in some sense has a chance to dry. If you don’t do this, if instead you learn by cramming, your knowledge base will look more like a jumble with everything confused, a poor foundation.

Long Term Memory & Working Memory

• Working Memory only holds 4 chuncks of information and often needs repeating.
• Long term memory is more like a storage while short term memory is like a bad neural blackboard that is very unclear.
• When you put something in your memory you need to revisit it at least a few times in order to increase the chance to think of it when you need it.
• Long term memory is huge.
• When you encounter something new, you often use your working memory. If you hope to move it into your long term memory, you will need to practice and time. You can do spaced repetition, but you must do it with a few days in between.

• Extending your practice over several days does make a difference.
• Research has shown that if you try to glue things into your memory by repeating something 20 times in one evening for example, it won’t stick nearly as well as if you practice it the same number of times over several days. Spaced repetition builds stronger neural structures by repeating them over a number of days.
• If you don’t leave time for the mortar to dry, that is time for the synoptic connections to form and strengthen, you won’t have a very good structure that can last)

The Importance of Sleeping in Learning

• Just plain being awake creates toxic products in your brain
• When we sleep, there will be fluid that can flow past these cells and wash the toxins out. We want to avoid taking tests or doing anything difficult with little sleep the night before cause its like trying to think with poison on the brain.
• Too little sleep over too long of a time can also be associated with all sorts of nasty conditions including headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes and just plain dying earlier.
• During sleep, your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you’re thinking about and learning. It erases the less important parts of memories and simultaneously strengthens areas that you need or want to remember.
• During sleep, your brain also rehearses some of the tougher parts of whatever you’re trying to learn, going over and over neural patterns to deepen and strengthen them. Studying what you want to learn before sleep increase the chance of dreaming about it which strength the memory.
• Sleep has also been shown to make a remarkable difference in your ability to figure out difficult problems and to understand what you’re trying to learn. It’s as if the complete deactivation of the conscious you in the prefrontal cortex at the forefront of your brain helps other areas of your brain start talking more easily to one another allowing them to put together the neural solution to your learning task while you’re sleeping.
• If you’re going over what you’re learning right before you take a nap or going to sleep for the evening, you have an increased chance of dreaming about it.

Interview with Dr. Terrence Sejnowski interesting points

• He likes to learning by doing (instead of reading)
• When dealing with boring lectures, ask a question. Active learning is better than passive learning.
• Jogging and exercising to help with diffuse mode, which help with new ideas. But very often these new ideas vanish, that's why he brings a little notepad with him so that he can write it down before he forgets them.
• You have same number of neurons since you were born, some may even die. However, you will have new neurons in your Hippocampus even as an adult.
• Experiment number of neurons in rats’ Hippocampus will be increased after talking to other rats. If that is not an option, exercise will also increase neurons in Hippocampus.
• Being surrounded by creative people help yourself to become creative.
• Test tip: test is like a skill and can be learned. For example when you are stuck in one question, go to the next one and then go back.
• Even Nobel prize winner will ignore ordinary things like the fact that the brain model in his room is much bigger than a real brain. There are so many to be discovered in our ordinary life and all you need is to see things with a new perspective.