More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 15 - October 4, 2020
You’ll be surprised at how spending a minute or two glancing ahead before you read in depth will help you organize your thoughts. You’re creating little neural hooks to hang your thinking on, making it easier to grasp the concepts.
We’ll call the thinking processes related to these two different types of networks the focused mode and diffuse mode, respectively—these modes are highly important for learning.
Focused-mode thinking is essential for studying math and science.
The focused mode is associated with the concentrating abilities of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, located right behind your forehead.4 Turn your attention to something and bam—the focused mode is on, like the tight, penetrating beam of a flashlight.
Diffuse-mode thinking is also essential for learning math and science.
Diffuse-mode thinking is what happens when you relax your attention and just let your mind wander.
Basically, the focused mode is used to concentrate on something that’s already tightly connected in your mind, often because you are familiar and comfortable with the underlying concepts.
That broader path shows how the focused-mode thought is following along a route you’ve already practiced or experienced.
This is why dealing with procrastination, while important in studying any discipline, is particularly important in math and science.
the Einstellung effect (pronounced EYE-nshtellung). In this phenomenon, an idea you already have in mind, or your simple initial thought, prevents a better idea or solution from being found.
This is precisely why one significant mistake students sometimes make in learning math and science is jumping into the water before they learn to swim.
If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode, long enough to be able to latch on to a new, more fruitful approach.
To learn about and be creative in math and science, we need to strengthen and use both the focused and diffuse modes.
But as long as we are consciously focusing on a problem, we are blocking the diffuse mode.
The bottom line is that problem solving in any discipline often involves an exchange between the two fundamentally different modes.
For now, keep in mind that when you procrastinate, you are leaving yourself only enough time to do superficial focused-mode learning.
If you cram for a test at the last minute or quickly breeze through your homework, you won’t have time for either learning mode to help you tackle the tougher concepts and problems or to help you synthesize the connections in what you are learning.
For most people, shifting from focused to diffuse mode happens naturally if you distract yourself and then allow a little time to pass. You can go for a walk, take a nap, or go to the gym.
The key is to do something else until your brain is consciously free of any thought of the problem.
one of the three B’s usually seems to do the trick: the bed, the bath, or the bus.
Once you are distracted from the problem at hand, the diffuse mode has access and can begin pinging about in its big-picture way to settle on a solution.
math and science
are deeply creative forms of thinking even when you are just learning them in school.
(Dalí called this “sleeping without sleeping.”6) Enlisting the diffuse mode helps you learn
at a deep and creative level.
As we will soon learn, technical problems and their solutions may be considered a form of poetry.
Mistakes are inevitable. To work past them, start early on your assignments and, unless you are really enjoying what you are doing, keep your working sessions short.
Sleep is probably the most effective and important factor in allowing your diffuse mode to tackle a difficult problem.
In other words, just using your diffuse mode doesn’t mean you can lollygag around and expect to get anywhere.
As the days and weeks pass, it’s the distributed practice—the back and forth between focused-mode attention and diffuse-mode relaxation—that does the trick.
Taking time off between weight sessions helps build strong muscles in the long run. Consistency over time is key!
Then they don’t give themselves the extra time they need to truly master the material, and they fall still further behind.
Not only their eyes, but their mind itself can’t move away enough to see a new approach to the problem.
Figuring out a difficult problem or learning a new concept almost always requires one or more periods when you aren’t consciously working on the problem.
Trying to learn everything in a few cram sessions doesn’t allow time for neural structures to become consolidated in your long-term memory—the result is a jumbled pile of bricks like those on the right.
A good rule of thumb, when you are first learning new concepts, is not to let things go untouched for longer than a day.
This idea of looking from fresh perspectives also gives us insight on why “sleeping on it” before making major decisions is generally a good idea,18 and why taking vacations is important.
Learning often means making sense of what we’ve ingested, and for that, we need to have ingested something.
Working memory is the part of memory that has to do with what you are immediately and consciously processing in your mind.
long-term memory might be thought of as a storage warehouse.
Long-term memory is important for learning math and science because it is where you store the fundamental concepts and techniques that you need to use in problem solving.
To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition. As you may have guessed, this technique involves repeating what you are trying to retain, like a new vocabulary word or a new problem-solving technique, but spacing this repetition out over a number of days.
You may be surprised to learn that simply being awake creates toxic products in your brain. During sleep, your cells shrink, causing a striking increase in the space between your cells.
(Too little sleep is affiliated with conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s to depression—prolonged sleeplessness is lethal.)
It seems that if you go over the material right before taking a nap or going to sleep for the evening, you have an increased chance of dreaming about it. If you go even further and set it in mind that you want to dream about the material, it seems to improve your chances of dreaming about it still further.27 Dreaming about what you are studying can substantially enhance your ability to understand—it somehow consolidates your memories into easier-to-grasp chunks.
how focus links to both understanding and memory.
Focusing your attention to connect parts of the brain is an important part of the focused mode of learning.
incorporate structured practice that includes plenty of repetition and rote, focused-mode learning of the language, along with more diffuse-like free speech with native speakers.
Focused practice and repetition—the creation of memory traces—are also at the heart of an impeccably played golf stroke, a master chef’s practiced flip of an omelet, or a basketball free throw. In dance, it’s a long way from a toddler’s clumsy pirouette to the choreographed grace of a professional dancer.
But that path to expertise is built bit by bit. Small memorized free spins, heel turns, and kicks become incorporated into larger, more creative interpretations.
