Learning How To Learn Notes Week 2

Chunking

When you learn something new, they are messy. Chunking is the mental leap that helps you unite bits of information through meaning.

• Focusing your attention to connect parts of the brain to tie together ideas is an important part of the focused mode of learning. It is also often what helps get you started in creating a chunk.
• However, when you are stressed your attentional octopus begins to lose the ability to make connections. (or when you are angry, stressed, or afraid)
• the first steps towards gaining expertise in academic topics are to create conceptual chunks, mental leaps that unite scattered bits of information through meaning
• Focused practice and repetition, the creation of strong memory traces, helps you to create chunks. The path to expertise is built little by little, small chunks can become larger, and all of the expertise serves to underpin more creative interpretations as you gradually become a master of the material. In other words, practice and repetition in building chunks aren’t all you need to become a truly creative master of the material you’re learning. Chunking helps your brain run more efficiently. Once you chunk an idea, a concept, or an action, you don’t know need to remember all the little underlying details. You’ve got the main idea, the chunk, and that’s enough.

How to Form a Chunk

• When you learn Math & Science, you are given examples. It’s like listening to songs before playing it.
• One concern about the worked-out sample is to focus on why on an individual step instead of the overall connections between the steps.
• Step 1: focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk. Otherwise, it will be hard to form a chunk.
• When you first begin to learn something, you’re making new neural patterns and connecting them with preexisting patterns that are spread through many areas of the brain. Your octopus tentacles, so to speak, can’t reach very well if some of them are off on other thoughts using up some of the limited slots in your working memory.
• Step 2: Understand the basic idea you are trying to chunk
• just understanding how a problem was solved, for example, does not necessarily create a chunk that you can easily call to mind later. if you don’t review it fairly soon after you first learned it, it can seem incomprehensible when it comes time to prepare for a test.
• In math and science-related subjects, closing the book and testing yourself on whether you yourself can solve the problem you think you understand will speed up your learning at this stage.
• The first time you *actually understands* something is when you *actually do it yourself*.
• Step 3: Gaining context. Try practice with both related and unrelated problems so you know when to use it and when not to. Also, see how it fits into the bigger picture.
• practice helps you broaden the networks of neurons that are connected to your chunk, ensuring it’s not the only firm but also accessible from many different paths.
• Practice & Repetition: strength the bottom-up learning so that you can gain access to it whenever you need it; top-down learning: big picture, know where your learning will fit in. For example, chunking may involve your learning on how to use a certain problem-solving technique. Context means learning when to use that technique instead of some other technique.

• Glancing at a book before you actually read in detail helps to remember it in terms of getting the big picture. These kinds of activities can help you know where to put the chunks you’re constructing, how the chunks relate to one another

Illusions of Competence

Recall; Illusions of competence; mini-testing; value of making mistakes

• Reread is much less productive than recall. Recall is the best method to learn.
• By simply practiceing and recalling, student learned far more and at a much deeper level. When we retrieve information, the retrieval process itself enhances deep learning and help us to form chunks.
• Concept Mapping will not work before forming a basic chunk (by recalling).
• Once a concept is chuncked, it only takes one slot in our working memory.
• If you look at the solution and “understand” why they do that, then the solution is not really yours. A solution in book or Google is not in your brain.
• If you highlight, make it miniminal. Like one stence per paragraph or less. Otherwise, it can be even misleading.
• words or notes in a margin that synthesize key concepts are a very good idea.
• recalling material when you are outside your usual place of study can also help you strengthen your grasp of the material. By recalling and thinking about the material when you are in various physical environment, you become independent of the cues from any one given location.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

What Motivates you?

• Acetylcholine 与专注学习的大脑皮层间形成了神经递质性的联系
• 多巴胺控制reward learning。当拿到unexpected reward的时候多巴胺会分泌。Dopamine is in the business of predicting future rewards and not just the immediate reward. This can motivate you to do something that may not be rewarding right now, but will lead to a much better reward in the future.
• Addictive drugs (and sugar too) artificially increase dopamine activity and fool your brain into thinking that something wonderful has just happened. In fact, just the opposite has just happened. This leads to craving and dependence which can hijack your free will and can motivate actions that are harmful too.
• Serotonin血清素 In monkey troops, the Alpha male has the highest level of serotonin activity, and the lowest ranking male has the lowest levels. Prozac, which is prescribed for clinical depression, raises the level of serotonin activity. monkeys with lower serotonin take high risk behaviors.
• Emotions are important in learning too.

The Value of a Library of Chuncks

• Chunks can also help you understand new concepts. This is because when you grasp one chunk, you’ll find that that chunk can be related in surprising ways to similar chunks, not only in that field but also in very different fields. this is called transfer.

Your diffuse mode can help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve novel problems.

• as you build each chunk it is filling in a part of your larger knowledge picture, but if you don’t practice with your growing chunks, they can remain faint and it’s harder to put together the big picture of what you’re trying to learn.
• 2 ways of solving a problem: sequential or holistic

• Most difficult problems and concepts are grasped through intuition, because these new ideas make a leap away from what you’re familiar with.
• When you think there are too much to learn, Just focus on whatever section you’re studying. You’ll find that once you put that first problem or concept in your mental library, whatever it is, then the second concept will go in a little more easily and the third more easily still. Not that all of this is a snap, but it does get easier
• Law of Serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries.

Overlearning, Chunking, Einstellung, and Interleaving

• 如果你已经了解一个concept了，在同一个session里面不停重复算作是overlearning,并不难加强长期记忆。and again, illusion of competence. You thought you master the whole range when actually you only mastered the easy stuff.
• Deliberate Practice means you deliberately focus on learning more difficult stuff.
• Einstellung(mindset): your initial simple thought, an idea you already have in mind or a neural pattern you’ve already developed and strengthened, may prevent a better idea or solution from being found.
• One significant mistake students sometimes make in learning is jumping into the water before they learn to swim. In other words, they blindly start working on homework without reading the text book, attending lectures, viewing online lessons, or even speaking with someone knowledgeable. This is a recipe for sinking. It’s like randomly allowing a thought to, kind of pop off in the focus mode pinball machine, without paying any real attention to where the solution truly lies.
• Mastering a subject does not only main forming the chunk, but also selecting and using different chunks. The best way to learn that is by practicing jumping back and forth between problems or situations that require different techniques or strategies. This is called interleaving. 这一点深有体会，原来以前学习都错了。在学习discrete math的时候每一章后面的题目会，但是全部放到一起的时候就不会了。因为不知道哪一个要对应哪个technique。所以这就是interleaving的重要性。
• Interleaving your studies — making 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 more difficult. But in reality, it helps you learn more deeply.
• 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.
• Learning several different expertises and focusing on one area both have benefits and disadvantages. You might be “Einstellung” if you only focus on one field. That is why breakthrough STEM are discovered either by young people or people who previously were in a different field.
• Learning things that are outside classrooms are very helpful too.