A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

by Barbara Oakley

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,

The key is to do something else until your brain is consciously free of any thought of the problem.

Enterimg diffused mode

three B’s usually seems to do the trick: the bed, the bath, or the bus.

Walking spurs creativity in many fields;

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.

Edison, according to legend, took a nap. But he did so while sitting in a lounge chair, holding a ball bearing in his hand above a plate on the floor.

So tbe balld wake him up

accepting the first idea that comes to mind when you are working on an assignment or test problem can prevent you from finding a better solution.

It takes time to move information from working memory to long-term memory. To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition.

Creativity is a numbers game: The best predictor of how many creative works we produce in our lifetime is . . . the number of works we produce.

Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn—retrieval practice—is far more effective than simply rereading the material.

This is why many professors recommend that, if at all possible, you rewrite your notes during the evening after a lecture.

Bill Gates and other industry leaders, Johnson notes, set aside extended, weeklong reading periods so that they can hold many and varied ideas in mind during one time.

If you don’t understand a method presented in a course you are taking, stop and work backward. Go to the Internet and discover who first figured out the method or some of the earliest people to use it. Try

to understand how the creative inventor arrived at the idea and why the idea is used—you can often find a simple explanation that gives a basic sense of why a method is being taught and why you would want to use it.

Even getting the right answer can occasionally mislead you if you get it by using an incorrect procedure.

Beware—a common illusion of competence is to continue practicing a technique you know, simply because it’s easy and it feels good to successfully solve problems.

1. Read (but don’t yet solve) assigned homework and practice exams/quizzes.

“The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”

We suffer more in imagination than we do in reality

You will probably not be surprised to learn that chunking, that automatically connected neural pattern that arises from frequent practice, is intimately related to habit.

Do the most important and most disliked jobs first, as soon as you wake up.

Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality.

Memory tricks allow people to expand their working memory with easy access to long term memory.

Researchers on recall have found that doing exercises to repeat longer and longer strings of digits backward seems to improve working memory.